The Evangelical Church's Gay Agenda, Or: "My Sexual Ethic is More Conservative Than Yours"

As tired as I am of the culture wars (as I'm sure you, gentle reader, are, as well), I believe that many of our current problems were actually caused by the evangelical church's pulling out of the culture wars too soon. Like Onan before us, we evangelicals can't seem to finish what we've started, and now we're left with a mess on our hands.

Evangelicalism has largely capitulated to a number of different wider cultural streams over the past few decades: the embrace of divorce, the separation of procreation from sex, the separation of procreation from marriage, and the notion that marriage is primarily about personal fulfillment. This capitulation has, I submit to you, in large measure been responsible for evangelical acceptance of gay marriage and same-sex sexual activity. Where it has not led to such acceptance is only in the case of special pleading, enforcing natural law arguments against LGBT+ persons but giving straight people a pass on the implications of those same arguments. This double-standard has led to a loss of credibility among the LGBT+ community, in that straight evangelicals are (rightly!) seen as placing a burden on gay, lesbian, and bisexual people that they fail to shoulder themselves.

Take the common argument against same-sex marriage and same-sex sexual activity: marriage has to be between a man and a woman, because marriage has to be oriented toward procreation. I believe this principle to be correct. However, this principle doesn't just cut against same-sex couples, it cuts against heterosexual couples in which one or both are known with certainty to be sterile--including nearly all elderly couples, and it cuts against opposite-sex couples who do not wish to have children. If the above theological principle were applied consistently, evangelical pastors would no more perform weddings of elderly couples than they would perform weddings of same-sex couples. [Perhaps evangelical bakers would refuse to bake cakes for them, too, but I don't think that a necessary entailment.] 

I believe that we evangelicals fail to consistently insist that marriage is oriented toward procreation because we have bought into the lie that marriage is primarily about our own happiness and self-fulfillment, rather than it being oriented toward procreation and the imaging of Christ's relationship to the church. To borrow from Chesterton, we have traded the outward and upward-reaching arms of the cross for the inward-reaching self-containment of the ball. 

Evangelical embrace of divorce further obscures the real nature of marriage by refusing to accept its intended purpose as a visible representation of the spiritual reality of Christ's union with the Church. Every divorce is an act of false witness, in that it publishes to the world the possibility of Christ's abandoning His Church, or vice versa. Evangelical embrace of divorce is often also predicated on the notion that marriage is for one's own self-fulfillment and happiness. If your spouse doesn't fulfill you or make you happy, perhaps the next will! 

Once the above operating assumptions are in place, if marriage is about happiness and personal fulfillment, then what is to prevent one from accepting gay marriage? Increasingly, evangelicals are saying "Nothing." Further, it seems to me that they're simply following the logic of the evangelical sexual ethic to its logical conclusion. When the force of natural law theology and a theological view of marriage are both denied, then there is no principled reason left not to affirm same-sex marriage and same-sex sexual activity. It becomes a matter of special pleading--indeed, of discrimination--against LGBT+ people.

A consistent traditional sexual ethic cannot cherry-pick to whom its principles are to be applied. If to LGBT+ people, then to straight people--of all kinds--also. Does this entail that those whose marriages cannot or will not be oriented toward procreation should remain single? Perhaps it does. But, you might object, is this not too great a burden to place on them? It is indeed a great burden! However, it is no greater a burden--and in some ways is a lesser--than that placed by a traditional Christian sexual ethic on many of our LGBT+ brothers and sisters. If we are to truly finish what we've started, we have to strive together to make the Church the place where all of our brothers and sisters receive the love, support, understanding, and community that they need to pursue the difficult stations in which they have been placed. 

-------------------------------------------------------------

Postscript: I intend this post to be (part of) an argument for the revitalization of a consistent traditional sexual ethic in conservative evangelicalism. As the subtitle suggests, however, I also intend it to prove my bona fides in the context of recent unfounded accusations of my heterodoxy.