God loves the gays, actually: A Christian defence of homosexuality

Recently, the Christian Union at my university held an events week. A standard thing to do for organised groups looking to increase their membership and further their agenda. I am already a Christian, so their job is perhaps made slightly easier. The event I attended was about finding your identity in God. The keynote speaker was a gay man, how progressive the Church have become. Oh, how wrong I was. To my horror, they played the same card typically used by anti-immigrant parties; finding a minority to validate their continued oppression. He almost had it right. He spoke of how the church should be accepting of homosexual clergymen and welcoming. And then he said that, as a man of God, he has two options: marrying a woman or being single and celibate.

Now, I will tackle that argument later in the essay. For now, I want to break down why this position is against everything I understand as a Christian. Firstly, shunning homosexuals does not reconcile with the idea that God forgives those who accept him as their saviour. From the outset, I wish to say that I am not referring to the secular world here. Christians will never be able to break through to those who don’t wish to accept God therefore there is no point describing their ways of life or why Christians should accept them spiritually. Crucially, however, this point stems from their atheism not their homosexuality. My attention turns to those who identify as homosexual and Christian. Christians call homosexuality a sinful lifestyle and frequently protest them. As we well know, chastising people does not often lead them to change their mind. The speaker even accepted this. However, his acceptance of homosexuals was through the lens of “this is a sin, but we accept you for who you are… but you can’t marry”. Sticking to a strict morality, then. However, let’s imagine that there is a Christian who is also party to a homosexual marriage. They follow Christian teachings, go out on missions, hand out food parcels, help the needy and forgive those who trespass against them. They follow God practically to the letter… besides their romantic partner. Can we honestly believe that a god-accepting homosexual cannot be accepted into the kingdom of heaven?

The CU actually did answer my question about this on their toastie drive. For what it’s worth, they make a good melted mini eggs toastie! We had to haggle over definitions and when he said anybody could come to heaven through God, I asked what made him different from a homosexual. To my surprise, the answer was nothing. Their official position was that anybody could be accepted into the kingdom of heaven if they repent of sin. That can be murderers, rapists and even homosexuals. “Anybody can be saved by god” came the response. No difference between sexualities existed. I was shocked. The events week beforehand did not give that impression, and now suddenly they’ve gone progressive? Then came the caveat. To repent, officially, that meant they needed to turn away from their sins and try to stop engaging with them. Once again, “we accept you, but you can’t marry.”

It had been raining and the haggle took a while, so I let them go at this stage, but it left me with a further thought experiment. It is not uncommon for someone to accept God on their deathbed and repent of their sins. In this case, the person has no opportunity to act on such repentance, but it is widely accepted that these people are saved. So, if someone lives a homosexual lifestyle with a same-sex partner but they repent at the last minute, are they also saved? If the logic is consistent, then that means someone can live a gay lifestyle their entire life and still make it to heaven with absolutely no act of repentance on their part which seems like a substantial loophole. Some might say the intent of such statement matters. Does it matter? That is too deep a question to answer here. Some will, of course, repent on death as a self-serving way of saving their souls. Some, however, will undoubtedly mean it absolutely. So, the question of intent is irrelevant. If it doesn’t matter, mere acceptance of God is enough. If it does matter, this would allow those who truly wish to repent and accept God to enter the kingdom of heaven having lived this sinful life. So, how does being against homosexuality square with the doctrine of acceptance and repentance? If it is truly sinful, it cannot as the above scenarios allows them to slip through the net.

My second argument delves into the argument the speaker made. He claimed that there was a choice given to everyone equally: to marry someone of the opposite sex or stay single and celibate. This was posed as “equal” and therefore we should all stop complaining about how the church treats gay people. This is a weak argument that demonstrates straight Christians’ lack of understanding of humanity’s sexual coding. This “equal choice” is, in fact, not equal. For straight people, like me, this choice is easy. I am coded to like women, that is my authentic self, and to live my authentic life I shall find a female partner. This choice does not force me to repress myself, and it lets me live to my comfort and nature. For gay people however, the choice is not straightforward. In fact, the choice in either direction is to detach themselves from what is natural to them. It is to live without love. How can we ask anyone to do that? Is it not true that everyone seeks to live a comfortable life? Why, then, will someone as all-loving as God choose to tell a subset of humans, they can’t achieve that aim if they wish to follow his otherwise reasonable morality? It is like holding them at gunpoint. Imagine a robber asks you for your money or your life. To the rich man, this choice is easy. Hand over what’s in your wallet and continue to live in freedom. To the poor man, however, this choice is not straightforward. They, of course, want to remain alive but perhaps they have no money to give the robber. Perhaps they are struggling and only have £10 in their wallet, without which would plunge their family into poverty. So, they try pleading. They try refusing. Then they get shot. This is the conundrum of being LGBT within this type of church.

To those who will inevitably scream in outrage “How dare you compare God to a gunman!”, let me break this down simpler. The gunman is God. Strictly speaking, I don’t believe this. Really, the gunman is the priests and clergymen that subscribe to this narrow thinking. Asking for money is saying they can marry the opposite sex. Taking their life is telling them they can remain celibate. The poor man has no option but to have his life taken. The same goes for LGBT people, assuming that God being anti-gay is true. The rich man is a heterosexual, and the poor man is a homosexual.

The speaker’s point had another glaring flaw in it. An even bigger flaw than the idea of this being an “equal choice”. He said that being single and celibate was the golden option. It was an ideal choice, and that marrying someone of the opposite sex was something of an exception. What this tells me, is that there is an exception for those who find love or for those who can find a monogamous outlet for their sexual desires. If this is the case, why is the exception only for straight people? I am willing to hear any answer that cannot be pinned down to bigotry. The only answer that came when I asked friends in the CU about it can be boiled down to “because God said so”. This is not a valid answer for two reasons.

Firstly, the line in Leviticus is mistranslated. Anti-gay Christians always trawl out Leviticus 18:22, “Man shall not lie with man”. It is accepted fact that this is not a perfect Hebrew translation and is inaccurate. Now, what it should read is the source of some discussion. Some say it is “Man shall not lie with boy” to stop paedophilia. The church has, after all, had its fair share of scandal in that department. Others say it is a condemnation of same-sex rape, to try to teach people about consent. I am not going to offer an opinion on which translation is correct other than to say it certainly isn’t “man shall not lie with man”.

Even if you accept “Man shall not lie with man”, there are still flaws with the “because God” logic. Some say that the logic of God is beyond human understanding. The common example of this is the book of Job, where God commits Job to unknown amounts of suffering. To Job, there is seemingly no reason behind this. He has done nothing wrong that warrants the death of his wife and children, desolation of his crops and destruction of his home. It is only when he curses God and turns away from him that God reveals himself and reveals that this was all a test of loyalty to prove Satan wrong. Even if we perceive Job’s suffering as unfair, most readers can understand the logic behind it. He needed to prove that faith in God would continue through dark times as well as light. Therefore, even if we do not immediately see the logic of God, it must be understandable to his followers. Christians, as far as I can see, have no logical understanding for this prejudice against the LGBT community other than “because God”. If that was sound reasoning, many heinous crimes could be committed with God as a justification. In fact, we see that countless times in acts of terror. Yet we do not condone this as a godly act. Therefore, even God must have a justification for why he would hate homosexuality and thus far Christians have not provided a single reason.

I’m going to move on from the speaker at this point to talk about another Christian principle. Even if you won’t accept my first two premises, this one will still apply. One of the ten commandments’ states “Love thy neighbour”. This is not meant to be romantic love and it may not even pass for platonic love, but what it means to say is that you should love your neighbour the way you love yourself. You should also extend the same treatment to them. What I want to note is that the commandment says “Love thy neighbour” and not “Tolerate thy neighbour”. Christians have proven themselves incapable of the latter, let alone the standard they are meant to be setting. I should caveat that when I say Christians I mean those that protest the LGBT community. The ones with banners, the ones who shun people of that persuasion and the ones who think they cannot fit in with God. Even those that claim to love gay people are only showing tolerance at best by being quiet about their views on sexuality, or by just saying nothing at all.

However, this is not to say that Christians cannot love their neighbour. But how can they love their neighbour if they are not willing to do the same for homosexuals? Somebody retorted to me that God doesn’t want us to love what is wrong. I have never heard a more unchristian thing. You must obviously love people who do wrong, it is an imperative feature of love your neighbour. It is also an imperative feature of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. You are meant to forgive at every turn and love every neighbour. Christians should also be cautious about accepting this line of not loving what is wrong. If you cannot love a homosexual for sinning, you also cannot love a liar, you cannot a cheat, you cannot love someone who has thought bad things and eventually you end up not being able to love anyone at all. We are all sinners, right? Hating sinners does not square with the idea at all. Something must buckle. You must either be able to love homosexuals or love no one. To those who feel that this is not a fair choice because they naturally hate homosexuals, perhaps you are now beginning to understand why the choice you give them is equally unpleasant. So, I challenge Christians, are you willing to accept the “Love thy neighbour” doctrine in full or not? Which of those two options do you choose?

The final argument I wish to tackle is the unnatural argument. One of my friends told me that perhaps God hates it because it is unnatural. The big flaw in his, and I presume most Christians’, logic is that this was entirely based on reproductive ability. He said that two males cannot reproduce and make a child. If that logic is to be taken, we should also be shunning marriages with an infertile couple. After all, they also cannot make children. When I posed this to my friend, it was met with shock, and I was told there was an exception for couples with a fertility problem. Ah! So, it actually has nothing to do with reproduction, then? I wonder what else could cause you to tie yourself in knots to exclude the homosexual community? In any case, basing it on reproductive ability is unnecessary in the modern age. Nowadays, there are many children just waiting to be adopted and for most infertile couples this is their avenue to parenthood. In fact, the laws of the land also allow same-sex couples to adopt so parenthood is not precluded from gay couples either. They have an equal chance at raising a child, and they can do it with equal competence. Childbearing has nothing to do with the situation, or if it does then the church needs to rethink its acceptance of infertile people. One can only conclude bigotry.

I also find it difficult to accept that homosexuality can be unnatural when most Christians can admit that homosexuality was prevalent in Ancient Greek society and amongst the Romans. Whilst it did diminish as these religious laws came in, homosexuality is on the rise again and one could say it is just as prevalent as it was then. Even if it is not, we are certainly living in the highest recorded period of homosexuality since those times. If it were so unnatural, arguably it would not have occurred at all. It would not have been in anyone’s nature to partake in it. I would go so far as to posit, in the other direction, that homosexuality is actually the oldest sexuality! If anything, heterosexuality as its displacement is the unnatural one. It certainly would have started this way. It also exists in nature and is seen amongst lizards.

In conclusion, it goes against every Christian doctrine I understand as a Christian myself to be against homosexuality. I understand that Christianity is filled with contradictions, and these are not easy to navigate, however the principles abandoned for hatred of homosexuality are too important to the core religion to be able to do so. Those that want to turn to God must be able to do so knowing they can enter the kingdom of heaven. Even if they cannot turn away from their lifestyle, accepting God must be enough. If it is not, then we clearly do not understand the doctrine. We must treat people with equality and give them fair choices instead of asking them to turn away from nature. Above all, we must love our neighbour. Even if we believe them to be sinners.

Speaking to Christians at university has not been an easy quest. It has made me question my religion. I’ve questioned its beliefs on homosexuality so much that I’ve even wondered if I can support it anymore. My quest is not over. I cannot yet say whether I think mainstream Christianity includes anti-homosexual bigotry. I cannot even say whether my own sect of Christianity accepts gay people or not. All I can say is, this is what I believe. I, as a Christian, using everything I understand about Christianity myself and all the values I hold, believe we must accept and love our LGBT community. We are not worth our values if we do not.