If you "love LGBT people but don't affirm their lifestyle," it's time to demonstrate the first part.
Love isn’t just a way to make you feel better about your own theology
[cw: homophobia. I think this post might be particularly frustrating/upsetting/sad to read if you’re a sexual or gender minority and don’t need to be reminded of the ways you’ve been hurt. Please skip it if it would be bad for your mental health!!!]
The most common thing I hear Evangelical Christians say about LGBT people is something along the lines of “I can’t affirm homosexuality or trans identities, but I really do love LGBT people.”
I think the majority of people mean this sincerely. With a few very salient exceptions, most of the conversations I have about LGBT affirmation are with people who are really wrestling with how to love their neighbors without compromising on what they believe the bible to say.
But the sad truth is that sincerity isn’t enough. Loving somebody well isn’t just a matter of intention, or feelings, or general kindness. It’s possible to sincerely want to love a person, and at the same time act in a way that causes great harm (or, even more commonly, stand by silently as others do so in your name.)
Love is something you have to actively do. You have to keep showing up, again and again, to build a life the people you love are a part of. You give and you receive and you understand what’s important to each other and why. When the people you love are hurting, you hurt with them. When they’re under attack, you stand up for them. Love is fun and beautiful and painful and messy and personal and costly and if all you have to offer your LGBT neighbors is a couple of bible verses and a promise to “be nice” from afar it’s really hard for me to call what you’re doing love.
Let me put it a different way. Think of the most homophobic Christian you know — the sort of person who thinks gay marriage means “Christianity is under attack”, who insists on calling people by the wrong pronouns because of “religious liberty”. In what way is the love you show your LGBT neighbors different from this person’s? Would you leave a church this person (or even a milder version thereof) was pastoring? Do you speak up against laws that criminalize your neighbors’ very existence?
Or is your “more compassionate” version of love just kind of the same thing, but quieter?
I don’t expect to change your mind on LGBT affirmation. At least for me, it took a long process of prayer and repentance and an exorbitant amount of patient grace from some of my LGBT friends to reach this point, and I don’t expect a single blog post to change your mind. (Although I’d love to talk to you in person about why I believe what I believe!)
But I don’t think it’s too much to ask you to take your obligation to love seriously. There is a temptation I’ve noticed, especially among people who see themselves as having “compassionate but conservative” views on sexuality to take a “both sides are bad” stance that equivocates “gay sex” with “kicking your gay child out of a house” because “both are sinful.”
But of course they aren’t the same. One is, at the absolute worst, a fairly minor sin. The other is almost unspeakably evil. You may disagree with a church that fully affirms LGBT identities. But attending a church that tells parents they can’t love their gay kids is just unjustifiable.
(This is really, horrifyingly common. Having spent several years helping with a homeless ministry, I can tell you that by far the most common cause of teenage homelessness I’ve come across is gay kids whose parents believed their “Christian duty” was to disown them until they “repented” or who insisted they go to various forms of abusive “counseling” to “fix” them.)
Does your love for LGBT people include standing up to your neighbors and loved ones who take this stance? Does your “compassionate” church that bars “actively” LGBT people from leadership positions have the same policy toward people who behave in actively hateful and unChristian ways towards your gay neighbors? (If you still attend my old church, I can tell you unequivocally that the answer is “no.”)
If not, is your “love” really that different from theirs?
Here are four basic ways your church can start to love:
Show basic respect. Call people by the names and pronouns they ask you to. Bake cakes and bring flowers to gay weddings if asked. If you’ve preached more about homosexuality than excessive wealth as a sin, consider that perhaps your priorities aren’t as biblically rooted as you think they are.
If you “don’t believe in gay relationships”, recognize that your beliefs are essentially condemning a substantial fraction of your neighbors to a life without the sort of partnership you might take for granted. (Even as a single man, I like to assume I’ll eventually get married! This kind of singleness is different from the sort of lifelong, permanent singleness of celibacy.) If your church is non-affirming and has more than, say, 30 teens and young adults, it’s almost certain that you have “Side B”gay members contemplating this kind of life. Do you have systems in place to take care of them, to be there when they’re lonely, to surround them with a church family so they don’t get slip between the cracks in a culture that revolves so strongly around married couples? You can’t get around this problem with a general aura of kindness, it takes individual people setting up a real plan and a real system, and that takes real work. Are you doing it? Is anyone in your church doing it? Are your gay congregants a priority for you beyond making sure they “believe the right stuff” and don’t have sex?
Numerous states are riding a general wave of hatred against LGBT people to pass really cruel laws. Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill prevents young children from learning about gay people at all (which will serve to further isolate and crush young gay students or who have gay parents), creates vague rules against gender and sexuality instruction for older students (which will do the same) and, most wickedly, force schools to report gay and trans students to their parents. This will lead to more child abuse by exactly the sort of rabidly homophobic people you like to pretend don’t attend your church. Texas’s new law, which threatens parents with child abuse investigations for providing medical treatment considered appropriate (and for some children necessary) by an essentially unified medical field. I don’t think you can understand the grief and anxiety and pain these laws cause if you don’t have any close LGBT friends, but it is both severe and permanent. (The kids who kill themselves because Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbit destroyed their lives for political points aren’t going to come back.) If you are a Christian in America, this is happening in your name. Many of your fellow churchgoers support this kind of evil. If you and your church aren’t actively, repeatedly, and publicly denouncing this kind of law, how do you expect your LGBT neighbors to take your declarations of love for them seriously?
Our God is a God of truth. This is fundamental to the Christian faith. If you are recklessly spreading falsehoods, you are not walking in the light. And if you spread lies about specific people, then almost by definition you are not loving them! So if you are going to love LGBT people, you have some level of obligation to tell the truth about them. The gender binary isn’t “a biological fact” (indeed, the opposite!) Gay people are not “grooming” your children any more than straight people are. Trans children who transition very very rarely want to transition back. Gay parents raise their children just as well as straight parents. Gay people are not “more sexual” than straight people. LGBT people don’t “hate God” — many are Christian, including some of the most inspiring Christians I know. It’s not enough for you to know these are lies. If your fellow churchgoers are spreading this kind of falsehood (again, if you attend my old church, they absolutely were) then almost by definition your church is an incredibly hurtful place for many LGBT people to be. What are you going to do about it?
I don’t know. I have reached a point in my walk with God where I am convinced that his perfect plan for creation includes all sexualities and genders. I think even the most loving non-affirming theology can cause great harm. But at the very least I am absolutely begging you to take the love you proclaim for LGBT people seriously. Because, with a handful of exceptions, it feels like it functions more as a way to feel good about yourself than anything to support your LGBT friends and neighbors through the very real pain our churches have given them.
Colin, very well written and a very good challenge on how to really love. Thanks
Well done, and thank you for writing this in a tone that those who need to hear this, can!