In the preceding chapter I introduced same-sex orientation with a handy TULIP acronym to help remember it.  It is It is a T) total inversion of heterosexual attraction: the absence of it, not just the addition of same-sex attraction.  It occurs U) universally in human societies, and so, in all Christian churches.  It consists of L) loving and romantic attraction and bonding, not merely sexual desire.  It is I) involuntary not chosen, and P) permanent not changeable.

In some cases, Evangelicals have trouble acknowledging this.  A range of Christian writing has overlooked same-sex orientation in discussing same-sex issues.  If we jump back fifty years to Tim LaHaye’s The Unhappy Gays we read:

This study of homosexuality should enable you to distinguish between homosexuals and those who have homosexual feelings.  (p.115)

We shall see that their desire is not related to glands, genes, or hormones, but is a learned behaviour that usually starts early in life and, more than any other practice, affects the individuals total life and thinking process.  (p.22)

They were lured gradually, as we will see, from thought to feeling to experience, which increased until the thoughts and feelings led to more experiences until the homosexuality became an established part of their nature.  (p.98)

That’s not to say he doesn’t deal with the phenomena of orientation.  He says same-sex desires can develop so early that they seem to have existed from birth.  He says they become immensely ingrained, and that he knows of little success in treating them among ‘secular’ psychologists.  But he understands ‘homosexuality’ as a proclivity – from causes like bad parenting – that combines with behaviour to create a habit that becomes entrenched.  In the 1970s he could still quote at least some psychologists to support this, so he doesn’t need any alternative explanation.  He’s worried about gay ‘recruitment’ and especially keeping gay teachers out of schools.  Because scripture mainly talks about ‘practices’, it maps right onto these concerns, so he draws parallels with Sodom and Rome.  His cure for homosexuality is that Christ makes you a new person who changes their behaviour because they no longer want to live such clearly evil and depressing lives.

Much other writing, especially by Evangelicals, has simply treated it as a rationalisation of evil desires, an aspect of cultural decline, or a nefarious political agenda.  Large biblical studies have assumed it to be morally irrelevant to the biblical condemnations of – in our preferred terms – same-sex ‘practices’ and ‘relations’.

To be fair, this is how Christian scripture speaks about same-sex relations.  But when it is same-sex orientation that raises the pointiest questions for private and public life, ignoring it seems increasingly disingenuous, and leaves Evangelicals poorly equipped for important moral discussions in public life.

If we ignore orientation, we misunderstand virtually everything about same-sex marriage.  We assume that people wanting same-sex marriages could reasonably undertake heterosexual marriages, and that it would match the biblical ideal of marriage if they did.  When of course, it wouldn’t, because the foundation of sexual and romantic love would be missing.

Similarly, if we’re not thinking about orientation, we don’t notice that our theological problems started with its contemporary discovery.  As a result, we tend to assume either that our problems must have been taken account of in scripture, or that they can’t really be serious.  So we try to blame our problems on social or cultural factors.

Early research into homosexuality considered ‘inversion’, as it was called, to be a developmental disorder.  This view persisted in parts of Christian ministry long after it was generally abandoned in medicine and society.  In western countries, attempts at ‘reparative therapy’ – repairing the assumed developmental disorder – generally collapsed in the early 2000s.  This followed long periods of poor results, increased publicity for bad experiences among participants, and a gradual walking away from discredited theories about what caused same-sex attraction.

The reported successes of conversion therapy were comparatively few, and so seemed explainable by participants’ desperation to report change, or by a small number of participants being somewhere on the bisexual spectrum and so more able to adapt to heterosexual marriages.  Orientation was either not a developmental disorder, or not one amenable to treatment or prevention.  It was an innate quality for all practical purposes.

This left Evangelicals with two alternatives, either heterosexual marriage or lifelong celibacy.  Few think a marriage with no foundation in sexual or romantic attraction is commendable when, for most in modern western life, marriage is no longer the economic necessity that it usually was in the past.  Even those who undertake ‘mixed-orientation’ marriages are hesitant to recommend them as a general expectation, so that celibacy has become our default expectation.  Is mandatory nature is no longer obscured by the hope of changing or the expectation of marrying anyway.

The term ‘mandatory’ is not appreciated by celibate gay Evangelicals, but something like it must be used when it is the only godly option left for those who do not believe they should marry heterosexually.  Same-sex orientation moves a person, through no fault of their own, outside of the biblical ideal of marriage.  It forces a choice between a mixed-orientation marriage, that is, a marriage without the usual foundation in sexual or romantic attraction, and mandatory lifelong celibacy, something scripture considers foolish if not dangerous in the case of heterosexuals.  It’s a choice between not fitting the biblical ideal of marriage and not fitting the biblical ideal of celibacy.

Both in church and in public life, Evangelicals struggle to defend this expectation.  To think about why, put yourself in a same-sex oriented Christian’s shoes for a moment: Consider every time in your life that you’ve been conscious of romantic or sexual attraction.  How many times would that be every day?  For how many thousand days?  Think of all the names of the people who prompted these thoughts and feelings.  And think how this was about more than just sex: it included romance, belonging, hopes of life and family together, and all that this would mean in your family, church, community, and society.  Now imagine that these feelings were always prompted by people of the same sex, never the opposite.  Every time.  And that this meant lifelong celibacy for you.  How would you have handled that, especially in early adolescence?

We cannot reasonably discuss orientation without coming to terms with this experience, and recognising that it could have happened to any one of us, any of our friends or family, any of our church community.

Celibacy is not only difficult to justify as a lived experience.  It also poses the question of whether Evangelicals are defending a traditional position at all.  What orthodox Christians ever believed that celibacy was mandatory for a random 1–2% of the population?  Before today, I mean.  We’ve always believed in voluntary celibacy, but never mandatory.  Neither scripture nor orthodox tradition nor the Catholic priesthood requires that.  Even where holy orders were well-nigh customary, such as in the Middle Ages, the vows emphasised voluntary renunciation.  It may be argued that celibacy has become necessary since the modern discovery of orientation, but that acknowledges that it is not a traditional Christian position.

Among same-sex oriented Christians there is a practical division into ‘Side A’ and ‘Side B’.  Side A Christians argue that the biblical condemnations of same-sex relations do not apply in their situation, and that sexual relationships are in some way possible, usually in committed unions.  Side B Christians argue that the prohibitions do apply, and are typically committed to celibacy or to mixed-orientation marriage.  Only Side B Christians would generally be regarded, or regard themselves, as Evangelical.

This book disagrees with both sides some in important ways.  Against the non-celibates of Side A, I will argue that the biblical condemnations really do mean what they say.  But I will find that understanding them better, and taking them at full force, shows that they do not apply to one specific case, that of same-sex marriages of same-sex oriented partners.  I will argue that this makes same-sex marriage and orientation morally equivalent in God’s eyes to heterosexual marriage and orientation, and subject to the same biblical sexual ethics.  Against the celibates and mixed-orientation marrieds of Side B, I will argue that same-sex marriage is a better and substantially more biblical response to same-sex orientation.

Evangelical responses to same-sex orientation look very much like discrimination in the usual moral and legal sense of that word.  That is, they involve treating some people worse than others because of an innate quality.  Usually society in general thinks how we treat people worse is through opposition to sexual freedom or law reform, which they perhaps attribute to ignorance or bigotry.  But for us, the mandatory lifelong celibacy is the hard sell; that’s the big, obvious difference.

If you will excuse a short digression, it bears stating that Evangelicals should be committed to human equality and so, supportive of anti-discrimination law.  It should not be necessary to explain this, but some prominent groups, prominently but not only in the United States, have undermined this perception through historical racism, and are themselves understood in increasingly racial terms, such as as ‘White Evangelicals’.

For Evangelicals there can be no ethnic or geographical or any comparable limits on our obligations to love others.  One of the major messages of early Genesis is that all human beings – every last one – are God’s visible representation on earth, his image in the world.  God will treat actions for or against any person, but especially the otherwise disadvantaged, as actions for and against himself (Gen 5:3; 9:6).  “Whatever you did to the least of these… you did to me.”  (Matt 25:31–46).  In the Old Testament, Israel understood itself through the Exodus as a nation of escaped slaves, and in its laws set up a distinctively unstratified society in which the same laws applied to rich and poor, and were structured to prevent the exploitation of strangers, foreigners, and those in poverty or debt.  While there was slavery in Israel, and while it greatly reduced a person’s legal rights, it was not hereditary or race-based, and in the absence of central government it mostly filled the functions that in our society are filled in similar ways by welfare and prisons.  Stealing and selling a person, in the style of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, was a capital crime (Ex 21:16; Deut 24:7).  This develops from understanding God as one who does not favour the rich or the poor, but judges all impartially.  Wealth cannot help an unjust person, and riches are a trap.  When religious leaders tried to define who exactly was and wasn’t the ‘neighbour’ they were commanded to love (Lev 19:19), Jesus turned their question around by making their cultural enemy into the hero of a counter-story (‘the Good Samaritan’, Lk 15).  He asked them instead to whom they could be a neighbour.  For the apostle Paul, who lived his whole life with both Jewish and gentile identities, the two are the same.  “There is no longer male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile.”  (Gal 3:28).  There is no Christian argument for discrimination over innate qualities.

Generally, of course, we don’t think of same-sex issues in terms of innate qualities.  Much Evangelical discussion uses the language of choices: ‘sexual preference’ or ‘lifestyle choice’, a political program (in the 1970s, ‘gay recruitment’, ‘targeting children’), or subjective claims of ‘identity’ based on ‘feelings’.  It’s not that LGBT movements don’t champion sexual liberty, or include in their constituency people committed to wide-ranging sexual freedoms.  They certainly do.  But they also represent people who are same-sex oriented, and it is orientation that poses the key theological problem for Evangelicals.  Confusing these two issues has caused many of our present problems.

As a result, Evangelicals have usually seen ourselves as supporting anti-discrimination laws in saying that people should not be treated differently, to their detriment, on unreasonable grounds.  Not every kind of discrimination is illegal or immoral.  As the United Nations General Comment no. 18 “Discrimination” (1989) noted:

not every differentiation of treatment will constitute discrimination, if the criteria for such differentiation are reasonable and objective and if the aim is to achieve a purpose which is legitimate… (§13)

So, an employer may require a particular professional qualification, such as fitness test for manual work.  A synagogue may wish to hire only Jewish religious professionals; a mosque, Islamic ones.  In both cases they may want quite specific types of each.  These are examples of reasonable discrimination.  While convictions about what is reasonable can change with time and place, what does not change is the necessity that any discrimination must be rationally and morally justified.

Our problem is that discriminating over an innate quality is difficult to justify.  To refute the charge of discrimination we must show one of three things:

• that same-sex orientation is not an innate quality that some people possess,
• that, if it is an innate quality, we do not treat some people worse than others on that basis, or
• that, if we do treat some people worse than others because of an innate quality, there are good moral reasons for doing so.

Moreover, if we want to shape public policy or the legislated rights of citizens in modern pluralist democracies, we must show these things to the satisfaction of the general public.  Which brings us to same-sex marriages…

Evangelicals have struggled to publicly explain what is morally wrong with same-sex marriage in the case of same-sex orientation.  In sharp contrast to scripture’s own conviction that same-sex relations are a straightforward and self-evident moral problem, we have made unconvincing moral claims and resorted to abstract arguments from nature or theology when required to address same-sex marriages.  The comments about nature haven’t stood up well in public to the seemingly natural occurrence of same-sex orientation.

The ostensibly moral claims have been especially weak and unconvincing.  There have been simply silly claims like “everybody knew this was wrong until five minutes ago,” which ignores the fundamental issue, that the modern discovery of orientation has changed the moral judgements of society by creating the moral problem of discrimination.  There have been a range of otherwise important moral concerns that were not applicable to same-sex marriages.  There was gay promiscuity, which is common enough, but hardly unique, and in any case irrelevant to those wanting their faithful and committed unions recognised.  There were principles that we don’t think limit heterosexual parenting beyond being a desirable and good ideal (“a child needs a mother and father”).  Such arguments were poor even ignoring the problem that they didn’t face up to the issue of orientation.

The weakness of these claims suggested that we had other reasons for our position that we couldn’t or wouldn’t use publicly, despite seeking to influence public policy in a democracy.  Religion, backwardness, or bigotry were the conclusions people drew in the absence of sensibly moral or at least plausibly conscientious reasons.  And without convincing moral arguments about orientation, we had no reasonable defence against the charge of discrimination.  These problems have led many Evangelicals to look for alternative ways of understanding same-sex marriage in civil society.  It is contrary to God’s design or plan for human life, to nature expressed in creation and observed in tradition.  It in some way specially exemplifies human rebellion or depravity.  It is an expression of a deeper malaise, whether a conspiratorial gay agenda in politics, modern ideological individualism, or a sweeping delusion suggesting the end of the world.  Most of these claims have been at least implicitly theological and so, have functioned primarily as bulwark against compromise in the church rather than a defense to the charge of discrimination in public life.

Many saw same sex marriage as a continuation of wider social trends.  However, as a response to same-sex orientation, same-sex marriage cannot be equated with liberal or progressive theology, ‘culture war’ concerns about the social changes that followed the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the rise of modern individualism understood as a quest for emotional authenticity, or anything that might be called a gay lifestyle, identity, or agenda.  Both same-sex orientation and the biblical understanding of marriage preceded all these things.  If these things can cohere in God’s mind – that being the question – then they will do so independently of any such ideas or movements.  And if they are to be argued public, they must be argued on the basis of our moral common ground, and with the objective of persuasive, not the power to control others.

The problems that we have with orientation, celibacy, discrimination, and same-sex marriage, have led to disputes over Christian scripture.  Some have supposed that there must be something wrong with the idea that Christian scripture condemned same-sex relations at all, or at least in ways that continue to apply, or at least in ways that apply to committed unions.  Others have supposed that same-sex orientation must not be real, though probably more believe that our existing responses simply must be adequate and reasonable, and that our pressing need is just to take a faithful stand and double down on it.

Those arguing for change, progress, or revision in our ethics have not satisfactorily justified different interpretations of scripture, at least not from Evangelical methods or sources.  Scripture’s prohibitions of same-sex relations are clear and consistent.  On top of which, there is no coherently Christian position that endorses something God considers sexual immorality, or recognises as marriage something God does not.  For these relationships to be Evangelical we have to show both that they are not sexual immorality, and that God recognises them as marriages, and show this biblically.

A range of poor argumentation has been offered in support of revisionist views: Some have simply ignored scripture.  Some have pitted particular parts of faith or scripture against others: the New Testament against the Old, Jesus against Paul, God’s love against God’s justice, sexual ethics against social justice, and so on.  Other arguments have found a kindred spirit in liberal theology, where scriptural or religious authority can be something from which the autonomous individual needs to be freed.  Some forms of queer theology have set out to ‘outwit’ and destabilise biblical theology from within using it’s own terms and methods.  Arguments that try to work around or against scripture, rather than with it, cannot resolve the Evangelical problem of orientation.

Others, including prominent LGBT Evangelicals, have tried to show that scripture’s prohibitions were cultural, not moral, or that scripture only addressed practices that were problematic in certain ancient societies.  While these arguments raised important historical background, they have been rightly unpersuasive to Evangelicals who pointed to the way Jesus both intensified and internalised the sexual morality of the Old Testament, rather than minimising it, and how the church of the New Testament held sexual immorality to be a binding concern on gentiles, and thus a matter of universal morality in God’s eyes.

Others again have pointed to the problems experienced by LGBT Christians, and said that something is clearly wrong: that good and bad trees produce good and bad fruit, respectively.  Some have wished to respect biblical marriage by proposing that churches support or bless unions that are something other than marriages.  But this faces the problem of proposing new relationships structures and expecting God to recognize them.  Wouldn’t they need to be marriages in God’s eyes anyway?

On the other hand, as noted, those who uphold an ostensibly traditional understanding have ended up championing mandatory celibacy – something actively opposed by scripture and all orthodox tradition – while claiming a wholly orthodox and traditional position.  This has been largely overlooked on account of the more egregious problems the traditional view has been responding to, but it requires addressing also.

And of course, it has been the traditional positions problems with orientation and discrimination that have driven the quest for alternative understandings.

All these problems, but especially those in scriptural interpretation, have left us with seemingly intractable disagreements over same-sex marriages, between those who see no moral way that God could deny them and those who see no moral way that God could approve them.

Complicating matters, these are not thought to be issues over which good people can differ in good conscience.  Each side is considered by the other to have moved away from God in their response to this issue, whether through revisionist compromise or callous discrimination.  Either are seen by the other as fundamentally unfaithful to God and neglectful of the best interests of our neighbours.

In many major denominations the disagreements have hardened into simple opposition.  The parties now think it necessary to exclude the other or, as it is usually put, “to recognise that they have by their choices excluded themselves.”

At the same time, same-sex orientation drives a range of other changes in Evangelical life and thought.  In recent major books, it is the black hole that, while invisible in itself, bands all passing light around around it.

These fault lines run, in part, between the first world, where the theological conflict has been running for some time, and the developing or ‘majority’ world, where the issue is comparatively new.  But orientation is in no way specific to the ‘decadent’ west.  It is a global missions issue.

In the developing world, the problem is acknowledging orientation at all, especially in light of the seemingly senseless divisions of the west.  Yet just as many people are same-sex oriented there, so the issues cannot simply be ignored, and the same conflicts will happen there in time unless they are addressed.

In the west the moral problem of discrimination is central to a larger crisis of credibility.  In 2008, a study showed that the single largest objection to Christian faith among young people (17 to 29) in the United States was that it was homophobic (Kinnaman et al).  If that trend has continued, it would now cover everyone under 45, which is a majority of the population.

Evangelical groups in the United States have worked to set up death penalties for same-sex relations in majority-Christian nations in Africa, and the perception, of course, is that they would do the same in the west if they could, giving no consideration to orientation.

It seems most likely that discrimination will continue to marginalise churches in the west, will drive a split between the ‘decadent’ western church and the majority world churches, and will gradually propagate through all other churches globally, replaying the same unresolved conflicts.  It is not going away, and there is no hiding from it.  We need better answers both locally and globally.