The 3 Things and the 5 Things: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality (II)
In my previous post in this series, I sketched out a very cursive outline for what I am calling an “integrative view” of same-sex sexuality and the Bible. By integrative, I mean a view that attempts to take the things we know to be true about the experience of same-sex sexuality, on the one hand, and integrate them with the things we believe the Bible says about same-sex sex, on the other. I intend to suggest in coming posts that Christians intuitively do this kind of “integrative” work on all kinds of other topics and issues—issues that might be as fraught and complicated as the issue of same-sex sexuality, except that we have taken an “integrative view” of them for so long that it has become second nature and we hardly notice anymore that we are doing so.
Before we get to that, though, and as a first step in filling in the contours of an integrative view on same-sex sexuality, I want to begin by discussing what I call “the 3 things and the 5 things.” When I am asked to speak, as a pastor, on the question of the Church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people and their experience, I usually start by laying out “the 3 things and the 5 things,” as a way of honestly and (hopefully) compassionately establishing a shared understanding as a starting point for any discussion of these matters.
Not everybody accepts the 3 things and the 5 things, and a blog post is not an ideal forum for presenting the kinds of rigorous research that would be necessary to convince the unconvinced that they are true. I will say that I have come across plenty of research, both quantitative and qualitative, to convince me that they are, and as a result, they profoundly shape my own thinking on this issue.
The 3 things are:
1. That LGBTQ+ people do not chose to be L, G, B, T, or Q.
By this, I mean that the many, diverse, non-heteronormative sexual identities and orientations that fall under the umbrella term LGBTQ+-- the experience of gender dysphoria, for instance, or same-sex attraction, the experience of being queer, or two-spirit, or asexual, and so on—is not, generally speaking, something that people choose. The unconvinced may want to reach for anecdotal evidence to the contrary of this statement, and no-doubt the reasons why people identify with non-heterosexual identities are complex and varied. I believe, however, that on the whole, research shows that people who persistently experience their sexuality in ways that don’t conform with the heterosexual majority, have not chosen to be this way. Personal experience bears this out. The suffering, sacrifices, turmoil and risks involved with “coming out” as LGBTQ+ is far to great, in most cases, to suggest glibly that those enduring them for the sake of being honest about their sexual identity are doing so as a fad, or on a whim, or as a matter of personal choice.
2. The experience of being LGBTQ+ is not subject to change.
People who are gay, or trans, or queer, in other words, cannot change their identities so that they are no longer gay, or trans, or queer. Although this statement may seem highly controversial in some conservative circles, my impression both of the research and my personal experience with LGBTQ+ people is that, generally speaking, these sexual orientations are as permanent as they are persistent. They are not subject to change, and efforts to “change” LGBTQ+ people into being “straight” are almost universally harmful (psychologically traumatic, emotionally scarring, damaging to relationships, financially burdensome, and a plain waste of time).
Again, the unconvinced may reach for anecdotal evidence that “so-and-so” was gay and he “prayed the gay away.” Besides being extremely rare, however, these stories are also unfinished, and many people who claim to have been delivered from their same-sex attractions find the change is neither total nor permanent, and the attractions return, often painfully and harmfully at later points down the road. Similarly, for every story of “someone who changed,” there are multiple dozens of stories of those who tried “changing” and suffered spiritual, emotional, and psychological trauma as a result. Stories of “gay people who changed” should certainly not be held up as a normative expectation, and the risks associated with so-called conversion therapies are so great that the possibility of change is not something responsible Christians should encourage LGBTQ+ people to pursue. It’s no accident that the vast majority of Christian conversion therapy ministries ignobly closed their doors in the early 2000s, after it became painfully evident that it was not only unrealistic, but inhumane, to try to “change” LGBTQ+ people.
3. LGBTQ+ people experience harm when they are not able in some meaningful way to integrate their experience of being LGBTQ+ with their sense of personhood.
This statement may cause conservative readers to scratch their heads, but what I am trying to say is that it hurts LGBTQ+ people—emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically—to believe that their experience of their sexuality is “abnormal,” “perverse,” “abhorrent,” “shameful,” or any of the other painful messages that LGBTQ+ people so-often come to believe about themselves when they first begin to discover that they are L, G, B, T, or Q. It is no coincidence that rates both of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are higher among LGBTQ+ people than the general population. And, whether the non-affirming church wishes to accept this fact or not, the message that LGBTQ+ people typically hear from non-affirming Christians has been shown to exacerbate the harm (it’s one thing to think there’s something wrong with you for being gay; it’s quite another to think that God hates you because of it). Studies have shown, for instance, that among suicidal young people generally, having faith is a source of help that can mitigate and help manage the suicidal ideations; however, among LGBTQ+ youth, the opposite is true, and having faith tends to intensify and exacerbate their suicidality.
Christians may be tempted to try and sweep this fact away with platitudes about how Jesus never promised us a pain-free life following him, or how the most loving thing is to tell people “the truth” even if it hurts them—but my experience of ministering in conservative Christian circles for more than 2 decades now has been that as a rule, many (maybe most?) non-affirming Christians are irresponsibly unwilling to wrestle deeply with this plain fact: no matter how gently and lovingly we try to present it, the run-of-the-mill, non-affirming Christian message hurts a lot of LGBTQ+ people. A lot.
So those are the three things we know to be true about LGBTQ+ experience: it’s not chosen, it doesn’t change, and it hurts not to be able to integrate it with your sense of self.
The 5 things are more quickly and succinctly summarized. They are the basic “options” that LGBTQ+ Christians have—people who want to follow Jesus but their experience of their sexuality is described by those previous 3 things, I mean. What are they supposed to do? Especially if they are involved in a non-affirming church, or have been taught all their lives to believe non-affirming theology?
As far as I can tell, they only have 5 basic options:
They can:
1. Stay in the closet, denying that they are LGBTQ+ and suffering in silence
2. “Come out” as LGBTQ+ but resist their “temptations” and seek to live singly and celibately
3. Leave their non-affirming community and try to find an affirming church
4. Abandon their faith and give up on living as a Christian altogether
5. Re-examine and potentially revise their understanding of what the Bible really says about being LGBTQ+
In laying out these five options, I am not meaning, at this point, to suggest which of those 5 is best; though I will say that, in my mind, option 1 is out of the question (see thing #3 above); and as a Christian pastor, I hope that no believer, LGBTQ or not, will ever find themselves in a place where option 4 seems like the only viable way forward. So hopefully we can scratch at least those two off the list from the outset.
Beyond that, however, I am simply asking at this point that we wrestle humbly with these 3 things and these 5 things before we make any pronouncements on “what the Bible says about same-sex sexuality,” and “what LGBTQ+ people should do as a result.” My own wrestling has led me to adopt an integrative view, one that seeks to support and celebrate LGBTQ+ people as cherished children of God even though I remain unconvinced by many of the arguments that support an “affirming” reading of the scripture. As I’ve said, I intend to show how and why I do this in coming posts. In the final analysis, you may find this position—the integrative view—to be unconvincing or unsatisfying, but whatever view we adopt, I believe that it must include an honest and compassionate accounting for the 3 things and the 5 things.
Reading Ecclesiastes Together (VIII): In the Land of the Living
Labels: death, ecclesiastes, sermons
No Mere Hospitality: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality
One of the most persistent and emotionally weighty issues I deal with in my work as a pastor is the question of LGBTQ+ identities: how should the church respond to LGBTQ+ people, how should we understand and apply the teaching of the Bible when it comes to same-sex sexuality, and what is the most Christ like way to show love to our LGBTQ+ friends and neighbours?
I completed a Doctor of Ministry degree at Northeastern Seminary back in 2020, and this was, in fact, the topic of my doctoral thesis: what does meaningful ministry with/to/among LGBTQ+ people look like, and how do we do it well? At that time, I focused on the theme of hospitality, arguing essentially that as Christ’s people we are called to practice radical hospitality towards all, that the bedrock of Christian community is the hospitable welcome that God extends us in the cross, and that the moral imperative of hospitality requires us to practice radical welcome and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the worshiping community.
I have to be honest that oftentimes these days I wish I could disavow my doctoral dissertation. At the time when I wrote it, I felt it was offering a fresh way forward on this issue, and that it would perhaps help shed some light on the path my own denomination (the FMCiC) was journeying in seeking to adopt a biblical posture towards LGBTQ+ people. Looking back over the last four years since I published it, however, my sense is that my “hospitality thesis,” such as it was, did neither. I have some small assurance that it helped some (I certainly received multiple requests from people to read it). Even so, I know I would definitely write a different thesis a second time around, if I had to write it all over again (which, thankfully, I don’t).
In a nutshell, the problem with “hospitality” as way of framing the church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people is that, as loving as it may seem, “hospitality” is a gesture of welcomed offered, especially, to the stranger. As I argued in my thesis: biblically, you cannot offer hospitality to a friend or a family member, because biblically, hospitality (xenophilia) is explicitly about loving and welcoming the stranger. Hospitality is perhaps a helpful starting point, but the obvious problem with it is just this: if our relationship with LGBTQ+ people is framed solely in terms of hospitality, it means that they will always remain, in some real sense, “strangers” in the community—always a guest and never a fully contributing participant.
So I would no longer make “hospitality” the controlling theme for shaping the church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people. Instead, I have come to describe my position as an “integrative approach.” By “integrative,” I mean that I think Christians need to wisely and graciously “integrate” what they believe the Bible teaches about same-sex sexuality with what we have come to know and understand about the realities of having a non-heteronormative sexual identity, of experiencing same-sex sexual attractions or gender dysphoria, the real lived experience of LGBTQ+ people.
I do not know if I am the first to use this term—“integrative”—to describe a Christian view of same-sex sexuality. I have not encountered it in any of the many books on the topic that I’ve read, and I am not aware of any major thinkers on the issue who currently use it. This may be a sign that it is a fresh way forward, or it may be that it has already been considered and found wanting. In either case, over the next few weeks here at terra incognita, I intend to sketch out in broad contours what I mean by the term and how it shapes my own response to this particular issue in church life and ministry. You can judge for yourself whether if it’s a helpful way forward or just a novel take on old ground.
The term itself comes from the realm of Christian psychology. Since 2021, I have been completing a degree in Clinical Counseling at Tyndale Seminary, and one of the first things we were asked to do early on in our studies was to write an “integrative paper,” where we articulated how we integrated the findings of contemporary psychology with the teaching of the Bible, to show how we saw the relationship between them, and how we believed that relationship ought to direct Christian counselors in their practice.
It occurred to me then that the “integrative” approach we were being asked to develop when it came to psychology generally could be mapped onto the question of LGBTQ+ identities specifically, and that rather than a simple, one-size-fits all statement on “what does the Bible say about same-sex sex,” what we really need is a gracious way to integrate the biblical witness on this matter with what we now know about what it means to be gay, or lesbian, or queer, or trans.
If you’ve read this far, I expect you’re scratching your head with all sorts of questions: what on earth does “integrative” mean? What does it look like practically? And what do you think the Bible actually teaches on this matter?
I can’t promise to answer all those questions in a format like this—blog posts are not the best venue for presenting deep, thorough, carefully researched material—but over the next series of posts, I hope to at least give readers a sense of how I would develop a full fledged “integrative approach” if I had a whole book-length format to work with.
For starters, let me say that when I talk about an “integrative approach,” I mean something that is both conceptually, and in practice, quite different from the basic options currently on hand. As far as I can tell there are essentially three. One can be “affirming,” which is to say they are supportive of same-sex relationships and/or marriage, and they believe they have a biblical warrant for being so (either because they believe that the Bible passages that apparently prohibit same-sex relationships are talking about something different than modern same-sex marriages, or because they believe there are other biblical principles that “trump” these prohibitive passages). One can be "non-affirming," which is to say they do not support same-sex relationships or marriage, primarily because they are convinced that the Bible teaches that all same-sex sex is a sin. Or one can be “accommodating,” which means that they are willing to welcome gay people into community even though they believe the Bible teaches that same-sex sex is itself sinful. Those with an accommodating posture, you might say, “accept” same-sex relationships but do not “approve” of them.
The “integrative” approach that I will be arguing for in this series is not “affirming” in the technical sense, because, as we’ll see, it does not attempt to argue for a revisionist reading of the Scriptures, but neither is it “non-affirming,” because it does not say that same-sex relationships are intrinsically or inherently sinful. Of the three current postures, my “integrative approach” is probably closest to an “accommodating” view, but it is different in that it is willing to say more than just “we can accept same-sex relationships, even though we think they’re wrong”; rather, an integrative approach takes an honest, wholistic, compassionate view of same-sex relationships, and also engages in rigorous exegesis of the scriptures, and then attempts to integrate what we know to be true about both—the experience of being LGBTQ+ and the biblical witness, together—so that we can hold up what we believe to be the Bible’s teaching on the matter, in good faith, while still sincerely embracing, blessing, and celebrating the LGBTQ+ people who are part of our community.
This may sound like an impossible goal, to some. It may sound like a wishy-washy third-way approach, to others. But after more than a decade of working and reading, study and experience on this issue, I have come to believe that an “integrative approach” holds the most promise for a healthy way forward. I don’t offer it here as a final answer to this question, but I do hope it will help others take a next step in their understanding of same-sex sexuality, and especially in their willingness to embrace and include LGBTQ+ people in authentic ways in the life of the church.
Labels: integrative, LGBTQ, sexuality
A Theory of Everything, a song
About a year ago today, inspiration struck and I started a new songwriting project. A handful of songs grew into an album's worth, and then a double album's worth. After almost 9 months in the studio now, I'm happy to report that my latest musical outing is in the mastering stage and almost ready to head out into the world. It's an album in 2 volumes, an eclectic mix of folk, pop, hard rock, prog-rock, blues, jazz and more, a labor of love that I affectionately call "A Theory of Everything."
The whole album will be released this November, but if you're interested in a taste, here's the title track:
Enjoy!
A Theory of Everything
I never knew that gravity could make you feel so light
I never knew that light could press you down with such a weight
I always thought each action had its equal opposite
I always thought each heartbeat was without its duplicate
When space and time collapse
And reference points collide
And everything is relative to you
When all my reason’s gone
And logic’s crucified
I find the source of everything that’s true
I always thought that two lines parallel can’t intersect
And rainbows shine only when there’s white light to reflect
And I was taught that equal poles would always push apart
And every circle brought you in the end back to the start
When space and time collapse
And reference points collide
And everything is relative to you
When all my reason’s gone
And logic’s crucified
I find the source of everything that’s true
Before we met I never knew
What my whole world was orbiting
Or anything could be so constant
As the speed of light (before we met)
I never guessed
The universe might be unravelling
But now we have and now I find
I’m having to rewrite my theory of everything
Before we met I never knew
What my whole world was orbiting
Or anything could be so constant
As the speed of light (before we met)
I never guessed
The universe might be unravelling
But now we have and now I find
I’m having to rewrite my theory of everything
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