When older church folks down South say that they cannot understand how Christians can approve of gay marriage, because the Bible clearly teaches against it, I get their point. But here’s the thing. Their generation of Southern Christians accepted racism, including apartheid in America, even though the Bible clearly teaches that treating people the way whites treated blacks back then is wrong. It was part of the Southern Way Of Life™, for which Christianity was the religious auxiliary providing a spiritual ideology of comfort, not challenge.
I’m not saying that gay marriage = segregation, so don’t even start with me on that. My point is simply that Christianity often serves not to shape the popular culture, but to baptize whatever the popular culture prefers to believe. This is not exactly news, I’ll grant you, but it’s fascinating to me to see it playing out among fellow Southerners on generations on either side of my own (I’m 48).
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So you want to start a revolution. What Do You Want the New Standard for the Church to Be Regarding Sex and Marriage?
Call for the Church to Change
My blog is filled with links passionate calls for the church (or rather conservative churches) to change their formal and informal positions on sexuality. The most recent, earnest effort is for churches to practice “inclusion” of the LGBTQ community and/or affirm the moral equivalence of same sex marriages to heterosexual marriages.
While there is a lot of passion and energy pushing the message that “the church should change” there is actually very little specificity about exactly how the church should change especially given the broad range and practice of regulating sexuality that churches face regularly. While all of the attention is on sexual minorities most of the sex the church confronts is heterosexual sex, a form of sex that even after the widespread availability of birth control continues to be extremely consequential for the life of the church and its members. It is naive to imagine that all of the attention given to concerns about LGBTQ persons won’t impact the churches traditions regarding regulating heterosexual sex.
My challenge to those who are clamoring for change along the very narrow front of LGBTQ concern I’d like to hear what they propose for changes to how the church regulates sex in general?
Church Mirrors State Continue reading →