The thinking is that it’s the religious right pushing more and more young people into questioning their faith.   But some poisons require much smaller doses…

How Liberal Christians Nixed A Gay Rights Ad

For Mother’s Day, an interfaith social justice group created this ad urging churches to be accepting of gay families. But one Christian website wasn’t so accepting of the ad. According to the Huffington Post, the group Intersections International pitched the ad to the progressive Christian organization Sojourners, hoping to place it on their website and e-mail list. Sojourners turned it down, issuing a statement reading, “I’m afraid we’ll have to decline. Sojourners position is to avoid taking sides on this issue. In that care [sic], the decision to accept advertising may give the appearance of taking sides.”

This prompted some outrage…

I can’t imagine why.   The article goes on to mention Tim King, Sojourners public spokesdroid, blogging the issue…roundaboutly, in a post titled “Love Comes First”….

God worked in my heart. I realized that my primary job as a follower of Christ wasn’t to try and answer the question, “Is it okay to be gay?” and then enforce my answer on others. My job was to love my neighbor as myself. I knew I didn’t want to be a part of those actively hurting or “accidentally” ostracizing anyone who identified as LGBTQ. My time was much better spent hearing the stories, listening to the struggles, and learning from those in that community. My responsibility was to speak out on issues of civil rights for the LGBT community and actively work to make the church a more welcoming place. I learned that “How do I love?” must come before, “Who is okay?”

If you listen carefully you can hear the mantra of the religious right: love the sinner, hate the sin.   What King gives us here an example of the liberal version: Love the sinner, let’s agree to disagree about the sin… It is every bit as indifferent to the humanity of gay people, just more cowardly, less willing even then the outright hater to examine its own evasiveness.   How seriously do you speak out for the civil rights of your gay neighbors when you don’t under any circumstances want to have to answer the question of their being “okay”?   How deep is the love that doesn’t care one whit whether the homosexual is your neighbor or an abomination in the eyes of god?   If homosexuality is the love that dare not speak its name, Sojourners is the Christianity that dared turn love into an empty slogan.

When people ask me these days how I, raised in a pretty strict Baptist household, could have become an atheist, I tell them that it wasn’t because I have a grudge against religion.   Since I am a gay man and gay people are somewhere between human garbage and handy stepping stones to heaven in a lot of churches, you would expect I have some pretty bad feelings about the faith of my childhood, but it isn’t so.   I have some pretty bad feelings towards certain kinds of fundamentalism, but there are still a lot of things I value deeply that I learned sitting in the pews of my childhood, chief among them respect for the soul competency of others.   I came to this place simply because belief in god stopped making sense to me.   But I do not begrudge others who ask that same question honestly and get a different answer from mine.   The better part of both science and religion councils humility when asking the Big Questions.   Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth…?   If we knew what it was we were doing it would not be called research…

But it is also a fact worth reflecting on, that had I lived in a less prejudiced time I might not have felt the need to pursue the big questions so intensely.   It wasn’t just the bottomless hatred of others that pushed me out of church and into the world.   It was seeing the cowardliness of those who knew perfectly well that there is nothing wrong with their gay neighbors, but who could not bring themselves to challenge the hatred of others, lest they themselves became hated too.   It was seeing so many, so horribly many, who could not bring themselves to challenge their own deeply rooted prejudices, lest they come face to face with their part in the persecution so many innocent people, so many couples whose only crime was to fall in love.   We have nothing against homosexuals as fellow human beings…but the Bible Clearly States…

Not the bottomless hatred of bigots, but the seeing with my own two eyes how quickly even good men and women of reason and faith would toss overboard their honor, their good name, and their sense of basic human decency when it came to their gay neighbors. What is truth, asked Pilot. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes, asked Marx. While you’re wash, washing your hands of your gay neighbor’s struggle for a place in this world that doesn’t demean their humanity Messrs. Wallis and King, here is some truth: if love between a man and a woman is “okay” but love between same-sex couples isn’t then what comes first isn’t love.

As Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.   Strangers can gay bash you, but only family can tear your heart out and eat it, simply by not caring.   Likewise, it’s the ones we think of as friends, who we trust, whose indifference cuts deepest.   Hate you can overcome, but betrayal you never forget.