Homosexual Marriage and Christianity

Anyone who’s frequented social media has probably encountered memes picturing churchgoers protesting homosexuality. If you haven’t, they are easy to imagine. Just picture the centerpiece being a grid of 4-6 photographs of churchgoers with their mouths wide open, yelling about homosexuality being a sin while holding picket signs that say “Gays repent or go to hell!”, or something to the effect. At the top or bottom margins will be a castigation of Christianity’s requirements that marriage be constituted between a man and a woman for a lifetime, and sex outside of that standard is a sin.

Of course, no one is disputing such protesters exist. There are plenty of Christian groups that picket and rally against homosexuality directly, just like the memes describe. Those groups are not wrong in stating that homosexuality is a sin; and that unrepentant sin will land people into an afterlife apart from God. All of that is true, but as one that understands the big picture, I could never understand why those churchgoers protest homosexuality itself. Any unrepentant sin can lead to hell, and unbelievers have not asked for forgiveness to begin with. This means that even if the protesters convince nonbelievers to not practice homosexuality, the state of things would be no different. In the end, all the protesting of homosexuality does is give ammunition to the enemies of God to use against Christendom. Don’t they see this? Why do they continue if they do?

When some of these groups are queried, we get a glimpse of the real motives behind their protests: The first prominent reason is derived from the belief that if left unchecked, homosexual sin could become so widespread that God would judge the country, city, or county in a similar manner that he did Sodom and Gomorrah. The second is based upon the desire to preserve the Christian definition of marriage as the government’s and culture’s most recognized definition as much as possible.

The first reason is rather silly. Just looking at the story about the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah we see that there was a lot more sin there going on than just homosexuality. In Genesis 18, we hear of a great outcry against the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah. There is a full exchange between Abraham and the Lord where Abraham gets the Lord to commit to not destroying the cities if he could find 10 righteous people living there. The very next chapter, we see a gang of men breaking down Lot’s door so they could gang-rape the angels of the Lord. Contrasting that with today’s America, it is safe to say that there is a vast chasm of difference. There is nothing to worry about.

The second reason has some merit because the culturally accepted definition of marriage directly influences the perceptions of marriages, especially in young people. The fear is, that through widening the definition, the institution of marriage becomes rather irrelevant. There is truth in that. Just recently in the UK, a woman married herself. There are about a dozen instances throughout the modern world where people married their pets. Each of these cases and similar cases like it undermine the seriousness and meaning behind marriage. Likewise, homosexual marriages, being naturally infertile, undermine the purpose of marriage. The argument is: Chink by chink, marriage as an institution is damaged and its appeal tarnished, ultimately leading young people to abandon it entirely.

Ultimately the vast majority of homosexuals are not asking for anything unreasonable: societal recognition and equal treatment under the law of their publicly announced contract to love and cherish each other for the rest of their lives. Within the church, we have grounds to reject such a standard because Jesus has defined what marriage is and God has called homosexuality an abomination. But, is it moral to say that society as a whole has a duty to adopt and enforce the Christian definition of marriage simply on the basis that the Bible affirms it? No. We cannot expect nonbelievers to adopt such a standard without a secular reason behind it. To do so would be to force our beliefs on someone else.

Therein lies the problem. Any attempt to compel a nonbeliever to live by Christian ideals, or deny them any other ideals that run counter to Christian ideals, without any secular reasoning, especially if done with state power, will be observed for what it is: intolerance. That is exactly why we see memes and articles using the protesters’ actions against Christianity. To sum it up, the protesters’ own actions are not only ineffective at convincing people to alter their behaviors (why would they adopt rules that prevent them from doing something they really want to do because a god they do not believe exists told other people that it was wrong thousands of years ago), they harm Christianity by giving atheists the brush to paint it as backwards and immoral. The resulting math is far from good: a lot more souls are driven away than brought to Christ this way.

What should we do about the sin of homosexuality, if we are not going to confront it directly? Simply, do what the Bible has said all along: win souls for Christ. Only when someone has begun to believe and repent of their sinful nature can they be helped to confront it.

What about the sorry state the marriage is currently in? How do we fix that? The biggest attack on marriage was not from the homosexual crowd. It was the state that did that when it laid siege on it 60 years ago by passing no-fault divorce laws. When those hit the rulebooks, the institution of marriage itself was completely and utterly corrupted. Gone were the requirements for lifelong commitment and the penalties for anyone who broke the marriage contract. Now the effects of those laws are nearly fully realized. Marriage has become nearly the reverse of what it was intended to be. Peter Hitchens puts it best:

Marriage has a strange, unique status in the courts. If you break a contract with your building society or a car leasing company, the law will come down against you.

If you break the marriage contract, the law will take your side and will eventually throw the other party out of the marital home if she or he insists on sticking to the original deal. Odd, eh? It’s amazing how many men, the usual victims of this strange arrangement, still get married at all.

Source: Peter Hitchens, The Daily Mail

That last line awakens a lot of memories; memories of warnings from a lot of men from my adolescent life. They were all singing the same song: don’t get married. You’ll get used and then the courts will take you to the cleaners. That song resonated with us then, and it still does with a whole lot of young people today. This is the whole reason people are abandoning marriage and just cohabiting. As long as the state continues to bumble along this course and keeps turning some of the worst horror stories about divorce into not just reality, but the expected outcome of marriage, expect this trend to continue.

In the end, the task before Christians is still the same: continue to follow Christ the best we can; police our own and help keep each other on God’s path; try to be grand examples for the rest of the world to emulate, especially in our marriages; and as always, love, cherish, guide, and be ready to convince others to follow Christ.

Title Photo by Sally Millar on Unsplash