One thought on “Is God Homophobic? (Spoiler Alert: No, he’s not)”

1. Geoff,

   I am still slightly unsure why my gay flatmate was so offended at your ‘Is God a homophobe’ advertising such that he felt inspired to write that letter. However I myself was totally horrified and angered at the letter to Canta in reply to his, which advocated an anti-gay position on behalf of CU and linked to an anti-gay marriage blog post of yours. When I was on the CU exec ten or so years ago we had the privilege and pleasure of being able to welcome the Civil Unions bill. And although many of us were disappointed at the time that it didn’t give gay people the right to marry, it was still clearly a step forward in helping the oppressed. I recall unanimous support for that bill among my 20 or so close CU friends at that time, and everyone thought the Destiny Church’s march against it was a huge joke. So it came as a massively shocking and horrifying surprise to me to see a position aimed at denying rights to an oppressed minority being publicly advocated as CU’s present view. Needless to say, I in no way would ever want to be part of any so-called ‘Christian’ organisation with such a view.

   I commend you for your conclusion that “changing your sexual behaviour won’t remove your brokenness, and it won’t deal with the real problem”, and also for your emphasis on homosexuality being a sin with a small s like any other rather than the ultimate SIN that Christians sometimes treat is as. I have often made the same observations myself and as a result am left baffled when some Christians get so upset about homosexuality. Obviously people’s theology of sin vary, but a very common teaching is that we are all sinners and that even after accepting Christ into our lives we are still not perfect. I have heard speakers emphasize how from the time they get up on a Sunday morning to the time they get to church they will have already sinned a dozen times, and they use this to hammer home to their audience just how important the blood of Christ is and continues to be for them. Given that, if a loving gay couple has sex a couple of times a week, and if that’s technically a sin, then what importance exactly attaches to those particular two sins compared to the hundreds of sins of other sins that they and everyone else commits in the course of their daily life? I’m sure that if I asked you to list all the different types of sin that there are and gave you time you could write out a list perhaps a hundred long. Yet of those hundred of so different types of sin, you seem to write quite a lot about homosexuality and relatively little about the other hundred, so it seems to me that you’re not actually really treating it on par with the rest.

   It is also worth seriously considering whether something being considered a sin for Christians is sufficient motivation to try and enforce your own morality on the rest of society via law. It is one thing for a religious person to say “my religion forbids me to eat pork, therefore I will not”, but quite another to go out and campaign to legally prohibit atheists and members of every other religion from eating or selling pork. The former is quite reasonably following a religious practice, the second is trying to enforce your own ideas onto everyone else regardless of whether they like it or not.

   With regard to what homophobia “actually means”, I would point out that you’re confusing the meaning of words with their origin. Words in any language or culture mean whatever the group of speakers are using them to mean. Their meanings can, and do, change over time. Dictionaries have to be regularly updated since the ways that people are using words slowly change. This is something that all the major dictionary publishers put quite a lot of effort into doing, and they tend to publish their changes on a yearly basis. As a result, what a word originally meant may have little or nothing in common with what a word currently means. Likewise words that are made from other words joined together may come to have meanings unrelated to what they are comprised of. One example of this in English is the word “understand”. It absolutely does not mean “to stand under”, and has nothing to do with standing anywhere or being under anything. Linguists call this type of mistake an “etymological fallacy” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy ). Incidentally, this is a particularly well-known problem for biblical study, because as late as the 19th century there were relatively few known surviving koine Greek texts – so few in fact that one scholar (in)famously speculated that perhaps koine was a “heavenly dialect” that had come into existence solely for the purposes of biblical revelation. This lack of koine texts meant that biblical scholars who were trying to determine the meanings of words used in the NT could not follow the proper process of studying hundreds of examples of the word being used and conclude its meaning based on usage. Instead they were forced to take a guess at the meanings of numerous words based on presumed origin – eg by breaking down the word into parts like “under stand”, or try to make educated guesses at to what the word might have meant based on what words it was similar to. Linguists today do not give credence to such processes because they produce results that are extremely wrong. Fortunately for the interpretation of the NT, there have subsequently been thousands and thousands of koine Greek texts discovered, and as a result scholars have been able to actually determine the true meanings of many words in the NT that had been misinterpreted previously. (This work is actually ongoing because there was a truly enormous collection of koine discovered in the 1970s that hasn’t yet been fully integrated into the current dictionaries)

   Ironically one of the NT words for which we still do not have enough examples of usage to properly determine its meaning, is the word getting translated as “homosexual” in the passage from 1 Cor 6:9 (and again in 1 Tim 1:10) that you cite in this post. That translation is historically based on breaking up the word into the fragments from which it is composed “man” + “bed”, and assuming a speculative meaning of “man who has sex with men”. There are no surviving pre-pauline occurances of the word in koine, and most of surviving post-Pauline ones are simply quotes of the verse. Of the very very few other surviving usages, a meaning of “rape”, or perhaps specifically “rape of males” seems to fit best, though there is not enough data to determine its range of meaning anything close to conclusively: It is an exceptionally rare word in koine greek. Now given that homosexual activities were a frequent occurrence in Roman and Greek societies, they get discussed extensively in Roman and Greek literature. (Hubbard’s compilation of surviving primary sources discussing the topic is more than 500 pages long: http://www.amazon.com/Homosexuality-Greece-Rome-Sourcebook-Documents/dp/0520234308 ) I take the view that if Paul had intended to refer to homosexual activities then he would have done so using one of the various Greek words that were available to him to use. He didn’t. And instead of using any of those, he used a word that was incredibly rare and obscure, and that wasn’t used by any other Greek or Roman writers who discussed homosexuality. For this reason, quite a lot of modern interpreters, myself included, do not believe that 1 Cor 6:9 / 1 Tim 1:10 contains any reference to homosexuality. So when you say “Homosexual behaviour is clearly prohibited for Christians” and cite 1 Cor 6, I completely disagree: Very little in fact could be less clear.

   What is very clear, however, is what the word “homophobia” means in the present day, because we do have thousands of examples of people using the word to study and see what they are meaning. Breaking it down into “homo” + “phobia” is irrelevant, because at best that suggests a possibility as to what it might originally have meant, but it has no bearing on how people happen to currently be using the word – which is the thing that’s actually relevant to the meanings of words. The word homophobia may well have originally been coined to refer to a fear of gay people, but by the 1970s the common usage of the word had expanded to fill a vacancy in the English language. English uses the word “racism” to describe the whole spectrum of suspicion of, discrimination against, opposition to, bias against, dislike of, and hatred of, people of a different race. English had no parallel word to describe the same spectrum of attitudes targeted towards gay people, and people began to use “homophobia” to fill that void. Since the 70s, “homophobia” has become standardly used as a parallel for “racism” and, as such, covers the whole spectrum for negativity towards homosexual people. It’s common usage is absolutely not restricted to describing ‘fear’ of gay people, as any kind of opposition or negative attitude towards gay rights or gay people gets described as “homophobia”. It’s a synonym for “anti-gay”. You’ve apparently noticed this yourself, as you’ve seen a lot of Christians get called “homophobic”. It looks to me like you’ve simply misunderstood what those who were calling you/others “homophobic” meant because you misunderstood how they were using the word. Again, I emphasize that how the word “homophobia” is used by people generally today has nothing particularly to do with “fear” of gay people, and it simply refers to any form of negative attitude or inclination, just as racism isn’t necessary referring to “fear” of other races but can denote any kind of negative attitude or discriminatory intention. That’s simply what people use it to mean, and what they’ve been using it to mean for decades. The origin of the word is irrelevant, and to think origins of words are relevant to their current meaning, or to claim that people “should” be using words based on their original meanings, are linguistic errors (again see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy ). So I would describe your argument in your post as really arguing that certain kinds of homophobia are okay and others not okay – you are clearly against homosexuality to some degree and you clearly allege that God is (thus you are homophobic and are alleging God is) but you take issue with the extent to which some other Christians have been anti-gay and the ways they have expressed themselves.

   At risk of getting into endless theological arguments I would point out that your claim that “And the Bible is clear that marriage is between one man and one woman” strikes me as very underwhelmingly evidenced. You point to Jesus’s ban on divorce (Mat 19) – a teaching all the main Christians denominations today have decided not to follow – and apparently think it definitely implies a ban on homosexual marriages because Jesus’s OT quotation in his argument about divorce happens to contain the words “man” and “woman”. Not only is that ridiculously tenuous, but I am left wondering why you think gay people should obey Jesus on a subject he isn’t talking about (same-sex marriage) when the vast majority of Christians agree that straight people don’t need to obey him on the subject he is talking about (banning divorce). Likewise your case doesn’t get any better when we look at Genesis 2 at “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh”. The bible doesn’t state this is a universally binding and definitive definition of marriage. Nor can it be, because the depiction of a man moving out of his father and mother’s house and into a new house with his wife is a culturally dependent depiction and is obviously contingent on the man’s parents being alive and based on various assumptions about where people live before and after marriage. Obviously the man’s parents might be dead, or his new wife might move in with his family so he never leaves his father and mother. Christianity has not, as a general rule, required a man’s parents be alive for him to marry, nor has it required that the man live in his parents’ house until his marriage, nor has it required him to then move out into a new house with his wife. All those things depend on circumstances and culture, and may or may not occur in any particular marriage. So the verse is absolutely and definitely not a definitive and universally binding description and definition of what must and must not occur in a marriage, nor are generally viewed by Christians as recommendations of where Christians ought to live before and after marriage. Rather the verse is simply a poetically stated depiction of what commonly occurred at the time of the writer – clearly in his culture the man would usually live with his parents until marriage and then move into a new home with his new wife and often the parents were still alive at that point. You can’t reasonably say “okay, every single other word in the sentence is conditional and contextual, and just a general description of what commonly happens, except for the two words ‘man’ and ‘wife’ in the sentence which are absolute and unchanging universals that absolutely have to apply to every single marriage from that time to the present and cannot ever be altered in any culture” without being totally arbitrary – at that point it’s clear that it’s not the bible saying that, it’s just you reading your own ideas into it.

   More generally, my observation about what the bible says about marriage is that the bible seems to largely just record a history of people getting married at different times and in different ways generally without an overly large amount of reflection about what those marriages ‘meant’, and that insofar as there are certain conceptions of marriage implied at different points of the history, these significantly change over time. In much of the OT, polygamous marriage is exceptionally common. OT law forces marriage of rape victims to their rapists. The existence or allowability of divorce changes throughout the bible. The bible lacks any extensive and lengthy discussion of the meaning, definition, or unchanging norms of marriage, and instead contains only the occasional pithy comment or suggestion or rule on the subject. I have often noticed during wedding services that wedding preachers struggle with the sparsity of pro-marriage material the bible provides – there are a grand total of about half a dozen 1-sentence verses in the entire bible for them to draw on that directly reference the subject. Furthermore when Paul does give his longest discussion of marriage (1 Cor 7) he’s quite negative about it, regarding it only as a “concession” to those with lusts and not as good as Paul’s preferred option of celibacy. I would note that if marriage is a concession to human lust according to Paul, and if divorce is a concession to fallen human nature according to Jesus, then it would seem reasonable to make some sort of concession to gay people to allow them to act according to their ‘fallen’ nature, and rather hypocritical of straight people who were availing themselves of the concessions of marriage and divorce to not to grant such concessions to others. (I also note that some Christians seem to completely fail to apply Paul’s logic to gay people – they try to force gay people to stay celibate – even when the gay people make it clear they haven’t been given the gift of celibacy. I tend to think that if God had wanted to give the gift of celibacy to gay people then he should have actually given them that gift, and if he hasn’t, then the Christians trying to force people who don’t have that gift to follow that lifestyle is preempting God and potentially doing a lot of harm for the people concerned. According to Paul it is the people to whom the gift of celibacy has been given who are the ones who should stay celibate, and to those with lusts he gives the concession of marriage.) Regardless: Far from ever ‘defining’ marriage, the bible simply seems to take the social institution of marriage for granted, and that institution changes significantly over time in the period covered by the bible. So I completely disagree with your statement that “the Bible is clear that marriage is between one man and one woman.” The best that can be said is that all the marriages the bible happens to depict are opposite-sex marriages. But that is not surprising given that, as far as we know, most of the cultures in which it was written did not have any same sex marriages.

   The biggest issue I have with your position, however, is that you don’t center your discussion around love, concern, and empathy, for gay people. And since Christianity is supposed to be about loving others, I find that a huge problem. To try to explain how love and concern for gay people is missing from your discussion and why it’s important, let us consider the question that was historically faced by the Americans when they considered whether they ought to abolish slavery. It would be possible to give an extensive rational analysis of slavery, looking at the pros of slavery as an economic practice, noting how the benefits of slave-labour were helping the country’s economy, noting how useful the practice was at dealing with unemployment, and finding all sorts of other incidental benefits that resulted from it. Likewise historically many Christians strongly defended the practice of slavery on biblical grounds, pointing to God allowing the keeping on slaves in the levitical law, and them being convinced that the curse on the descendants of Ham in the bible was rightly interpreted as a curse on black-skinned people. It would therefore be possible to write an extremely lengthy discussion about slavery without ever once mentioning or taking into account the main reason everyone else was wanting slavery to be abolished: The harm being done to the slaves. The harms being suffered by the slaves, and the love for one’s fellow man and concern for the oppressed that motivated people to want to prevent those harms, were the primary motivating factors of those who wanted to abolish slavery. So any analysis of the pros and cons of slavery that never once touched on the suffering of the slaves would be utterly deficient as it would miss the whole point. Unfortunately it is exactly this thing that is a common feature of almost every single argument written by anti-gay Christians that I have ever read: Somehow they manage to discuss almost every issue except the relevant one – the harm being done to gay people. The harms suffered by gay people are the entire motivation of the gay rights movement in the first place, just as the harms suffered by the slaves were the motivation for the anti-slavery movement, so arguments that avoid talking about the issue of the harms being suffered are pretty irrelevant. As a result, nearly all of the anti-gay rights arguments tend to almost entirely miss the point by completely failing to grapple at all with the whole point of the issue: The harms being done to gay people. That is where the discussion ought to start from, because that is what is driving these issues. Or, if you absolutely insist on starting the discussion with God and your questionable biblical interpretations, then the discussion has to get to the point of dealing head on and in detail with the harms being done to gay people. Otherwise your argument reads like “I see slavery in the bible. God is loving. Therefore slavery must be loving even if humans can’t understand how. So everyone ought to accept that slavery is the loving thing! We people who are pro-slavery are doing it out of love!” Because that’s EXACTLY how your argument reads to me on the subject of homosexuality, and it’s about as convincing.

   In my experience, most Christians who are anti-gay are exceptionally ignorant as to the harms suffered by gay people, because they never bother to think about them and make no effort to ask gay people about them or research them. I strongly encourage you to read through these documents, which are official submissions made to the UK government or US supreme court by major professional scientific organisations in the UK and US, and which outline sufferings experienced by gay people as a result of anti-gay prejudices:

   Click to access RCPSYCH%20submission%20to%20Equal%20Civil%20Marriage-a%20consultation.pdf

   http://38.106.4.56/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentID=1234

   Click to access hollingsworth-perry.pdf

   I think a lot of anti-gay people make the mistake of ignorantly assuming gay people are only hurt or harmed when they are physically assaulted. But nothing could be further from the truth, as the vast vast majority of suffering experienced by gay people is psychological, arising from either (1) being denied basic human rights such as sex, or marriage, or (2) being subject to psychologically stressful social stigma, prejudice, discrimination, and condemnation. With regard to the former, it astonishes me how some Christian preachers enthusiastically praise the amazingness of marriage and how thankful they feel about their own marriage and what a great blessing it has been to them, only to later attempt to deny the ability to marry to gay people, and yet with apparently little thought as to the level of harm being done to these gay people by denying them the right to marry that the preacher himself so enjoys and thinks is so amazing. Likewise with sex, I have heard many preachers mention the enjoyableness of sex, and yet when these same people are advocating that gay people stay celibate there is little thought at all given to the level of sacrifice that they are truly asking gay people to make – a level of sacrifice I suspect in many cases that the preacher himself would be utterly unwilling to make! But that is the smallest tip of the iceberg, and merely the obvious harm that even the blindest person can see is being inflicted. Far more insidious and harmful are the psychological harms that come from being stigmatized, discriminated against, and given less rights than other people. In a country where some people hold anti-gay attitudes, gay people face daily stress and anxiety about the possibility of a negative response from other people if those people learn they are gay. It is that daily psychological stress and anxiety which is by far the most serious issue. And when people are publicly campaigning to limit the rights of gay people, or spreading malicious lies about gay people being in some way deficient, it is very hard for gay people not to take that personally and it is a major source of stress and anxiety. Obviously those gay people whose parents respect them less when they come out as gay, suffer significantly from the damage inflicted on that relationship by the anti-gay parent. The stress and anxiety of never knowing if the next person you meet will be anti-gay, never knowing if they will want to discriminate against you and dislike you for loving the ‘wrong’ person, takes its toll on gay people. Chronic stress and anxiety are serious medical problems, which reduce the body’s ability to fight disease, and put a person at much higher risk of strokes and heart attacks and also are a causal factor in the development of other more serious mental illnesses. As a result, gay people suffer a large array of negative mental and physical health consequences as result of psychological stress caused by a fear of prejudice and discrimination. A lot of gay people are also driven to alcohol and drugs as a coping mechanism for the stresses that they suffer from the anti-gay parts of our society. Needless to say, alcohol and drugs are harmful in their own ways. Tragically many gay people are driven to suicide as a result of the stress and anxiety they suffer from social prejudice. Gay people are about two to four times more likely than straight people to attempt suicide or have had thoughts of suicide, and when asked what the motivation for their suicidal thoughts are, gay people tend to be very clear that the root cause is anti-gay social prejudice. As a result, a LOT of gay people die by suicide as a result of anti-gay social prejudice. Running the approximate numbers suggests that in the US, the number of (additional) gay people that commit suicide per year (above and beyond the number who would have if they were straight) is approximately similar to the number of people killed in the September 11 attacks to within an order of magnitude. That’s rivers and rivers of blood that can be laid squarely at the feet of anti-gay discrimination in our societies! As upset as Americans get at Muslims for 9/11, they should be far far more upset at the anti-gay Christians in their society for killing at lot more of their own than the Muslims ever did. Let’s be very clear: Being anti-gay and expressing that opinion literally kills people – or worse, it makes their lives so miserable that they kill themselves. This is why all the major professional scientific organisations in the western world that deal with psychology, medicine, or public health, have been advocates for marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws on the obvious health grounds that gay people suffer huge amounts of harm from discrimination. That’s why organisations concerned about the well-being of gay people want hate-speech laws and anti-discrimination laws, because it’s not just about the obvious harms inflicted by denying gay people basic rights like sex and marriage, it’s about the insidious psychological terrorism that is inflicted on gay people when people loudly proclaim publicly how sinful it is to be gay or how gay people should be discriminated against – merely having people saying those things in public kills gay people. So if you think gay sex or gay marriage is sinful, then by all means you are welcome to personally never do it, but please please don’t publicly spread your view that it is “wrong”, because to do so is harmful in and of itself to any gay people that hear it, quite apart from any additional anti-gay responses it might inspire in the hearers of your words.

   I know you think of your position and view as “loving” and being based on love, and yet you seem to be well aware that a lot of people seem to perceive your viewpoint as being based on hate. This is because you are advocating a view that causes obvious and quantifiable harms to gay people. Even in your own analysis, your stated concern for gay people is quite far down your list of priorities. Firstly you start off your analysis by focusing on God. Then you turn to your speculative interpretations of what God’s purposes and plans for humanity are based on your reading of the bible. Then you assert that God is loving and good, and assert that therefore anything and everything he ever wants or commands of humanity must be out of loving or good motives, even if we humans can’t understand why God commands the things he does. (I would point out that torturing humans in hell for eternity is rather hard to claim as something done out of purely loving motives. So I think your implicit premise that ‘if God does something, then it’s the loving thing to do’ requires some rethinking, since presumably God can act out of other motivations.) So you eventually reason your way to the conclusion that you believe that God doesn’t want humans to engage in homosexual behaviour, and you speculate that if God doesn’t want that then it might be for the reason that that is what is best for homosexual people even if we can’t work out why and even if all the scientific evidence tells us the exact opposite, and therefore you speculate that the most loving thing to do to homosexuals is encourage them to follow your interpretation of the bible, which appears to involve restricting and oppressing them quite a bit insofar as it prevents them doing a lot of things they want to do and that other people do. I hope you can see that love and concern for gay people entered your logical argument quite late in the piece, and was quite far down your process of logical steps that was getting you toward your conclusion. Furthermore, it’s your view that God is against homosexual behaviour, so your starting point is really an anti-gay starting point – you’re against gay behaviour prior to any compassionate thought you give to gay people or their well-being – you’re starting off by being anti-gay and then saying “well this is really the loving position to have”. Funnily enough a lot of people don’t tend to think that starting from a position of being anti-gay is in fact a particularly loving position towards gay people. More importantly, at no point in your discussion do you ever really touch on the harms done to gay people. You just handwave in the general direction of the idea that we can’t always understand God’s reasons and assert that whatever he does must be loving even if it looks like it isn’t. Your failure to consider the sufferings of gay people from discrimination and prejudice suggests in itself a lack of empathy, love, and compassion toward them.

   Whew, that was a lot longer than I was intending…

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