America the…homosexual?
Shane Claiborne talks a lot about the impossibility of dual citizenship: he compares the “real world” with the Kingdom of heaven”, he talks about American nationality vs. Christian “nationality”, and he reminds us that we cannot serve two masters. And when it comes to God v. Nationalism, I agree. But what if we transferred that view into America? What if we talked about church v. state? I think we CAN serve both–more than that, actually, I think we SHOULD.
Case in point: Homosexuality and the Legalization of Same-sex marriage. The majority of people who want to make same-sex marriage in America illegal maintain this stance because of religious reasons. They claim that it is not how God intended or that the Bible states homosexuality is a sin. And you know what? That’s fine! It’s fine to believe that homosexual relationships aren’t how God intended or that the bible calls homosexuality sinful. But don’t confuse what the Bible says with the Constitutional Rights that America gives people.
America’s laws are not one in the same with God’s—and rightly so. The Bible doesn’t condemn jaywalking, nor does America condemn pre-marital sex. Though some of America’s laws and the laws of God are the same, they exist for different reasons.
(Tangent: John Locke is the British theorist who came up with the rights of “Life, Liberty, and Property”, and the framers of the Constitution changed it to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The reason you can’t murder someone in America is because it infringes on that person’s right to life, not because the Bible says murder is wrong.)
So, is it a contradiction to think that homosexuality is a sin but to still think that homosexuals have the right to marry? No, indeed it is not. And it frustrates me to no end that American Christians confuse the two, but mostly with regard to homosexuality.
Outlawing same-sex marriage is NOT going to reduce the number of homosexual people/relationships in America, nor is it going to score America points with God for the effort to maintain “Christian values.” I feel like if we Christian Americans really wanted to make a change, we would start living transformational lives instead of making the government create and enforce non-transformational laws.
Tags: Christian Values, Church and State, Homosexuality, Shane Claiborne
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October 26, 2008 at 11:12 pm
[...] Want more on this subject? An interesting line of logic is used here. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Why I Support and Hate Prop 8 At The Same Time + [...]
October 28, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Wow Andrea, you really made me think of the issue of homosexual marriage in a way that I have heard but hadn’t really clicked with me before I read your blog. We do, as Christians, try to make our Biblical laws try to trump our constitutional laws. In our individual lives I think this is fine but making laws for the rest of the United States based on Biblical viewpoints may not be fair to the rest of Americans that do not share our belief in the Bible’s principles. I just saw a commercial with Ellen DeGeneres on it talking about her wedding and how it was the happiest day of her life and how she didn’t understand why people wanted to take that right away from others. This is something for all of us to think about.
October 29, 2008 at 6:10 am
I agree to a great deal with your post, though I am really struggling which way to vote myself. But, I wanted to address your tangent piece.
First off that phrase, “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” is not from the US Constitution, but from the Declaration of Independence.
Your right that the sentiments are from John Locke, but Locke was a Puritan who was heavily influence by Scripture, he wrote apologies in defense of the Christian faith against his modern deists counterparts [cf. The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) & A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)]. I think that the argument could be made that “Life, Liberty, and Property,” for Locke are based on his own hermeneutics of the Bible read through his own Christian faith. With that said the implication then would be to ground these elements not in a strictly secular understanding but strive to give them meaning in their inherent Christian influence.
This suggests then that this phrase from Locke, which was originally based on Christian thought, has been formulated into a purely pluralistic cultural understanding within American society. This phrase in many ways has become a meta-narrative for life in the States. Shall we then abandon the fact that Christianity and the Bible have influenced the the over-arching narratives of the US, by saying that the Bible has no place in the discussion of moral and ethical laws in society today, when it had influence at the inception of this country?
October 29, 2008 at 8:28 am
Matt–
Declaration of Independence. Sorry.
As for Locke: “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Locke implies here that (paraphrasing Ebenstein) the “law of nature” defines what is right and wrong only through REASON.
I dont know about Locke’s history as a theologian or his apologies of Christianity. It seems to me, though, that if we are going to take the liberty of assuming that all of Locke’s writings reflected his Christianity, then perhaps we should as well assume that he deliberately left this reasoning out of Two Treatises of Government.
Here’s my dilemma: If the reasoning, upon close historical study, can be assumed to be Christian, but the literature itself never gave tribute to the Bible or Christ as the originator of its treatises, are people ages later supposed to honor it as a religious work? I think not, personally. If Locke had wanted us to ground our society in Christianity, I think he would have said so. Instead, though, he came up with these principals (“based” on Christianity though they may be), and told us instead to ground society in them.
So, in response, I am not suggesting that we are to abandon the ways in which Christianity has influenced the making of society and I am ESPECIALLY not suggesting that the Bible has no place in the discussion of moral and ethical laws. What I am suggesting, however, is that the Bible cannot and should not be our sole basis for determining laws when a) the country/society is not a Christian one, b) not everyone in the country is a Christian, and c) the Constitution and/or Bill of Rights already have something to say about the topic.
In the case of homosexuality, obviously they say nothing, but marriage has long been upheld by the Supreme Court as a fundamental right and, more importantly, privacy in marraige has also been upheld as constitutional given the penumbras in multiple amendments. The cases on marriage that have reached the Supreme Court come down, ultimately, to the fact that people have a right to chose who they want to marry, and they have a right to be left alone in that marriage. Moreover, recognizing the religious sacrament of marriage is not essential to having a state-sanctioned one; marriage has essentially become a wholly secular institution, so religious reasoning alone should not determine the outcome of a secular state practice. The only reason Christians seem to have such a hard time with homosexual marriages is because of the Christian belief that homosexuality is wrong. And my Christian conviction alone is not legitimate enough to be my sole combat against the laws of this country.
October 29, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Locke bases his high standard of reason upon God. In the 2nd Treaty
paragraph 6, he understands God as a starting point of humanity and not
natural law or causes, and it is from this starting point that he
arrives at the natural state of humanity that yield his concepts of
“Life, Liberty and Property.” True, there is no mention of Christ or
Christianity, he has not stated that Christ is the means of
understanding his thoughts but the overall emphasis of his faith on
God can, and should be, understood when dealing with Locke. But, enough
about Locke, I know I am doing a lot of “assuming” about Locke, as I am no authority on Locke, I know Locke well enough to die on this battlefield.
I guess what I want to say is that I don’t understand this issue to be
as black and white as your posts and comments present. Because it
begs the question to what extent, then, are we as a faith tradition to
engage society? If we can understand common ground, such as unalienable
rights, should we not pursue the discussion further as means of
offering a prophetic voice, as the church, to society? Is our only
place to withdraw when society has issued new understandings and
meanings to its practices that deviate from Christian understanding?
Furthermore, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights basically say
nothing about marriage and especially same-sex marriage. Marriage is
upheld and defined by the prospective State constitutions, as based on
the US Constitution. There was the amendment in the case “Loving vs.
Virginia” lifting the ban on interracial marriages, and in 1992 the
federal courts stopped legislature in Colorado that directly effected the
human rights of same sex individuals solely on the basis of sexual
orientation which granted homosexuals not equal status but “special
status” within the state of Colorado.
Please understand I am not staking a position here, I am simply
striving to ask myself these same questions in order to deal with the
tension. And, I simply do not want to vote “no” within the framework
that society wants me vote this way, as my means of justification. To
say that we as Christians have nothing to say about this issue because
it is out of our “jurisdiction” (summing up your the A,B, C points in
your response) seems debilitating. For as Christians what more do we
have then our faith in God, given that we are to constantly
seek “the Kingdom”? Are we to view the world we live in just as a
side-project, or an obstacle for us to ignore as we play church?
October 29, 2008 at 7:27 pm
You know Matt, you do present a very interesting quandry that I have been struggling with for some time now. Let me explain my difficulties to you in the example of how they take place in my own life:
I am apparently one of the not-that-many students at Fuller who thinks that homosexuality is, actually, a sin. I think that God’s original and perfect plan intended for His children to find union together with one man and one woman, and I think homosexuality is a perversion of that plan.
However, for my bachelor’s thesis I researched and wrote a paper about whether or not same-sex marriage should be legalized in the U.S. I researched the past cases (like Loving, which you talked about earlier) having to do with marriage, the history of marriage in the U.S., the arguments for and against homosexual marriage, etc. And I was shocked, after all this research, to discover that the strongest (by far) voice against homosexual marriage was the Christian religious right, and their arguments stemmed not from legal bases but from Biblical and traditional ones. Since church and state are, by all legal/constitutional standards, to remain separate in the U.S., it seemed to me that these biblical reasonings could not hold water against the legal and constitutional foundation that said homosexual marriage WAS justifiable.
So, I felt like a walking contradiction. I thought homosexuality was a sin, but I thought that there was no legitimate basis for the right to marry (which, though not explicity stated in the Constitution, is upheld by the SC to be a fundamental right nonetheless) to be denied because it was a homosexual relationship–and the reasoning behind that stems beyond Loving v. Virginia into other cases of marriage and birth control where the principles espoused by the US Supreme Court provide for the legitimization of Same Sex Marriage.
This was even true in the state SC cases of states like Massachussetts and Vermont who had (at the time of my paper) legalized same-sex marriage. Massachusetts (Goodrigde v. Department of Public Health) said that the only reason same-sex marriage was outlawed was because marriage had traditionally been considered to be for one man and one woman, that tradition came from religious reasoning. The court went on to state that, in Massachussetts, religion and marriage had been separate for a long time–you didn’t have to have a priest sign your marriage certificate or even have a church ceremony. It was a wholly secular, state-sponsored institution. Thus, religious reasoning wasn’t going to cut it.
So, here’s my stance: I think homosexuality is a sin, but I think homosexuals should have the right to marry. Though it sounds contradictory, I don’t think it is.
Here’s the balance that I’ve come to: Given the Governmental and legal reasoning (with the exception of DOMA and state DOMAs, which are a new issue altogether) , think that the “rights” to marriage, as America understand them, cannot legitimately be denied to same-sex couples. That does not mean that I think the powers are corrupt and we should just give up or that we cannot try and affect change in our society for the better. BUT, in this specific case of homosexual marriage, I do not understand what the point in outlawing it will be. It won’t stop people from being homosexual, nor will it stop them from having relationships or gaining status for a civil union, nor does its outlaw make the country more holy or more reminicent of “the kingdom of God.”
Truthfully, I feel like God is about free will, and rather than seeking to NOT allow homosexuals free will in this regard by outlawing same sex marriage, we should instead give them the freedom to marry if they want, and seek to love them like Christ would want us to, build relationships with them, and affect change like Christ did–like a mustard seed or yeast. I indeed think it is our duty as Christians to “constantly seek the Kingdom” like you said, but I think, in THIS case, outlawing same-sex marriage is not really a legitimate way of going about it.
What do you think?
October 29, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I agree with this line of reasoning a whole lot more. I think the same-sex marriage issue, and the abortion issue for that matter, are not battle fields for the Christian church to die upon (to use that analogy twice now), and I think that we are. These battles have left us, as the church, in shambles, we are divided and angry at each other. But, what really speaks to me is the fear that surrounds these issues. What are we so afraid of? Is God removed from the throne because of same-sex marriage?
I am also uncomfortable in saying that their is nothing I can or cannot do because pluralistic society says that my biblical hermeneutic from my faith tradition is not welcome to the conversation table? I am striving to find a balance in the equation when I am only left two
camps in which to stand with, “yes” and “no”.
I agree with your notion of free-will, I think the opening chapters of Romans speak acutely about how God leaves all of humanity to its own devices (as an act of judgment!). So, I too on some level must remove my standard in which I set for myself off of the shoulders of others,especially those who do not hold to my faith tradition. Now, to those inside my faith tradition, I think we both can agree, is a different story.
The concept of boundaries is always tricky when we play church and state. And, on so many levels this issue runs over both and creates a massive cluster of confusion on where one line starts and and other ends. But, I agree with you that outlawing same-sex marriage by means of the government will do nothing to deal with the problems that you have explained in your convictions. I do not want my government to be my moral police, and I sure don’t want my government to tell me how to believe. Nor, should I empower it to do the same to others.
But, where then is my platform to confront the wrongs of society? Second, and way more humbling, why do I even feel that I have this as something that I inherently want to do? What will I strive to accomplish by challenging the norms of society that lay outside of my
faith tradition, when I have free reign to practice however I see fit. Perhaps I need to pass that freedom along, and let God sort it out in the end. And, simply pursue the “Kingdom” with the concrete words I do know from Christ, and cease these gray battles that leave me sore,
broken, and lame, and seek justice for the oppressed and advocate a voice for the marginalized.
I think we both can agree and say that this whole thing is freak’n hard…
And, thank you for this conversation I have found it enlightening.