Thomas E. Schmidt (PhD, Cambridge University) was Professor of
New Testament at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California
until 1996. His book, "Straight and Narrow?" (InterVarsity Press,
1995) was recognized by Booklist as one of the top three books in
religion for 1995, and by Christianity Today as sixth among the
most important books of 1995. Most of the following address is adapted T. E. Schmidt, Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexuality Debate (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1995).
Contending that compassion for individuals should accompany a firm moral stance, Dr. Thomas Schmidt builds a case against homosexual practice.
Jim was a friend of mine in high school. A talented artist, a champion athlete, the best liked person in our class. We stayed friends through college at different schools and then shared our first bachelor apartment together for several months after college graduation. Jim had women friends overnight on several occasions, which concerned me because he seemed at other times to be re-awakening to the Christian faith of his upbringing. We parted ways to pursue further education, which in Jim's case took him to a prestigious New York performing arts school. Within a year he wrote to me, despondent, because a friendship with a male roommate had turned sexual, and he was suddenly very confused about many things, including his faith. He went home for a while and sought counseling, but eventually he returned to New York and the homosexual life. Jim is dead now, one statistic in 250,000, but one I knew well.
Some time later I roomed with another homosexual man, Fred. The product of a very troubled childhood, Fred struggled constantly with various personality quirks, loneliness, and homosexual desires. Fred's Christian convictions suggested to him that it was inappropriate to act on his desires, but occasionally or for periods of time he faltered. Today he continues to struggle with those desires, which for him seem to pit one kind of loneliness against another. But while his resolve has faltered from time to time, his faith has not, and he continues to trust God to offer him the deeper comfort that human companionship never seems to offer.
These are two people I have known. I could begin with quotations from the Bible, or empirical data on modern sexuality, or even other stories with happy endings to illustrate a point I'd like to make later. But I begin this way because the fact is-whether philosophers, theologians, or social scientists like it or not-we cannot separate our search for truth from the lives we live and the lives we touch. That is, we can't make sense out of what so-called experts-or more particularly, experts on morality-tell us if we don't see it work out in real lives; on the other hand, our experience of life is limited to a fairly small circle of acquaintance and short span of time, so we need help to get a bigger picture, to get an idea what might be true generally about life. Where do we go for this kind of truth with a capitol "T"?
Some suggest that we must listen carefully to the stories of practicing homosexual people who are also Christians, to understand how they integrate a non-traditional lifestyle with a traditional belief. One of the most well-known such persons is a man named Mel White. I do not know Mel, but I am familiar with his story from sharing a speaking platform with him and having read his book, Stranger at the Gate. Mel describes his pilgrimage from a monogamous heterosexual marriage to a monogamous homosexual partnership-with his ex-wife's approval, and with his evangelical Christian faith intact. Now a minister in a largely homosexual Dallas church, Mel suggests that his story is representative of the Christian homosexual experience and maintains that only the repression of a homophobic majority within the Church keeps people like him from enjoying full acceptance. His experience of liberation from shame teaches him that certain passages in the Bible traditionally construed as opposed to homosexual practice are in fact open to other interpretations. Rather than playing word games with ancient texts, he pleads, why not love your neighbor who is just a little different? Isn't that what Jesus would have done? Didn't Christians learn this lesson embarrassingly late with respect to minorities and women? And isn't it really all the same issue, down deep, an issue of respect for diversity?
There is so much truth in this that maybe I should stop before I become too convincing! Christians do have a bad track record when it comes to accepting good social change, and they have often been guilty of hiding their prejudices behind Bible verses or peculiar interpretations of Bible verses. But is it all word games or are there truths to be faced honestly, truths which might challenge rather than confirm our lifestyles? And not to deny the liberating experience of Mel White, but is his pilgrimage truly representative of the homosexual experience? And is personal experience the best way to evaluate morality? And if it is, what do we do with those whose experience suggests the possibility of deliverance from homosexual behavior? Aren't those who conclude that these so-called ex-gays are deceivers or deceived being intolerant-half a breath after arguing for their own legitimacy in the name of tolerance? You see how complicated this gets?
I will return to personal stories and experience at the end because, as I said, we cannot separate theory from real lives. But as I also suggested, our limited scope as individuals requires that we rely on other kinds of authority, find the best information we can to guide our lives from sources that add breadth, depth, and power to our convictions.
For breadth, most of us turn to the humanities and social sciences to give us a perspective on what has worked well for people in other times and places. For example, we can read Plato or today's newspaper accounts of trouble in other parts of the world to help us appreciate the good aspects of our political system and our obligation to responsible citizenship.
For depth, many of us turn to great writers and philosophers for new or challenging ideas and profound manners of expression. Seize the day; Here I stand, I can do no other; I think therefore I am; To be or not to-where would we be as a culture, or as individuals, without exploring these and many other phrases that help to distinguish a mature moral character from a character produced by a 30" diagonal and a good set of subwoofers?
So much for breadth and depth, but what of power? Many of us look for something beyond ourselves, beyond even the best experiences and thoughts of others, a kind of still point in a turning world, to give us moral strength when our reason and emotions might pull us in different directions or even deceive us. For some today that might take a form as specific as accountability to a therapist, or as general as loyalty to family or ethnic group or even nation. How many soldiers have at a crucial moment heard a voice of conscience say, "I may not feel like jumping out of this safe trench or understand why I am doing it, but I must do this, because I am an American"? It sounds a little corny to our cynical ears, but how many lives have been saved, how much freedom has been preserved, how many heroes born, because at that moment courage won over feeling and reason?
For Christians, much moral strength may be taken from therapy or loyalty to family, ethnic group, or nation. But ultimately and finally there is another voice that guides our conscience, and that of course is God's voice. Not to say that we hear audible voices-at least I don't, and I'm pretty suspicious of those who say they have-but we believe that God's spirit within us guides our conscience, and we believe that he does so in a manner consistent with the way he has revealed himself in the Bible. That is a crucial statement, and I'll repeat it in even simpler fashion: Christians believe that God provides moral strength in a manner consistent with the Bible.
That belief discourages egocentric claims of private revelations; it discourages self-deception by powerful but often self-serving desires; it discourages the abuse of reason or tradition to justify wrongdoing. And lest you think I'm merely setting you up to talk later about the Bible in relation to homosexuality, you should know that I think the Bible has a lot more to say about materialism, religious pride, and for that matter the heterosexual sins to which I am prone. The point here is that, as a Christian, I am accountable to the Bible as my primary authority for moral direction. Sometimes I don't understand what it says, often I don't like what it says, most of the time I don't feel like doing the good things it tells me to do, but I trust it, because I trust the God who loves me enough to suffer for me, to set me free.
Breadth, depth, strength. And this brings me back to the stories I told to begin. If we are to ask questions about the morality of Jim, who has died of AIDS, Fred, who pays another kind of price for abstinence, and Mel, who enjoys a monogamous gay partnership, what questions do we begin with?
The first question I would ask is a "breadth" question: whether my own observation of these three men's lives gives me a fair representation of the homosexual experience. We are talking about perhaps millions of people here, so I shouldn't rely just on people I have known. My experience is too limited, and I am apt to be prejudiced in a person's favor because I am a friend or relative; or perhaps prejudiced against a person because what he does in the bedroom is so different than what I do that I find it repulsive. Nor should I rely on mass media portrayals, which are notoriously shallow. Nor should I rely-and this may surprise you-on the voice of churches or Christian organizations like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. I respect these people's integrity, but I feel a responsibility in my own case not to compromise the credibility of my investigation by reliance on their work or even by association with them.
What I did instead was to read the relevant studies in professional books and journals in the fields of social and behavioral science and medicine, all of them morally neutral or in some cases sympathetic, just to find out what is going on out there. What would I learn about the experience of my friends Jim and Fred, or about the experience of Mel White, that would help me to understand and evaluate the homosexual experience? Like most of you, I expect, I went into my investigation with very little knowledge apart from the general notion that gay men practiced anal intercourse and often contracted HIV from it.
What I found was surprising to me and very disturbing, especially in light of popular media portrayals-including Mel White's account-of the homosexual experience as essentially the same as that of heterosexuals, where the only real difference is the sex of the partners. Medical specialists and professionals in related fields know how far this is from the truth, but few are willing to speak out, and fewer still are given a wide public hearing if they try. Nevertheless, the data are there in print for anyone who wants to look, and although I will not bog down this lecture with names and titles, you will find what I report here supported in the endnotes to my book by several hundred citations of recent studies, all of which are available in university libraries.
First, I found that the popular number or prevalence figure associated with homosexual practice, 10% of the adult population, is not supported by recent research but only by a 1948 study, the Kinsey report, subsequently discredited because of the flawed data collection methods.
More than a dozen national studies conducted since 1980, using updated data collection techniques to assure random sampling and anonymity, have come up with remarkably consistent results regarding homosexual practice: 1-1.5% male and .50 to .75 female. That is, this is the percentage of adults who report having had same-gender sex during the past year. The percentage who report having had same-gender sex during their lifetime varies from 4-5%, and the percentage who report having recurrent strong desires for same-gender sex is about 4%. It is also interesting to note that the homosexual population is highly concentrated: 95% are urban, 33% live in twelve cities, 25% live in one state.
Taking 1990 population figures, that gives us about 1.5 million practicing homosexuals, perhaps as many as 5 million with at least some homosexual orientation. In terms of the overall population of 250 million, we are talking then about from six-tenths of one percent to eight-tenths of one percent who are practicing. When study after study confirmed these numbers, and major news magazines and television networks reported the findings in the early 1990's, people were surprised, simply because they had heard nothing but the Kinsey number for decades. Now that is still a lot of people, and in any case you might ask what do such numbers have to do with moral questions? Not much, in my opinion. But the problem is that those who practice or defend homosexuality have often cited that 10% number in order to demonstrate normalcy, which in turn might imply acceptability-but that is harder to do when we are talking not about one in ten people you know but one or two in a hundred. In any case, whether we are thinking of ten or three or one, we should still question the moral relevance of numbers. Chances are you know many more people who have cheated on their spouses than people who have had same-gender sex, but you are no more likely to condone adultery because you discover that it happens more often than you once thought.
My research took me from questions of prevalence to questions about homosexual practice itself. Does the experience of this population differ from that of heterosexuals in ways that might have moral implications?
The most respected secular study to date was conducted by Bell & Weinberg with a thousand subjects in late-70's San Fransisco. Their results have been confirmed by dozens of subsequent studies in the 80's and 90's on specific aspects of behavior, including the major study on American sexuality published last year by a University of Chicago research team.
Bell & Weinberg found that only about 10% of gay men are involved in "close-coupled" or longer-term relationships (that is, those involving a single person as the primary-note I did not say exclusive-partner for two years or more). Another 20% are currently involved in more loosely-defined or short-lived partnerships, but the majority experience is a current of constantly changing partners. 83% of gay men report more than fifty partners lifetime, 28% report more than 1000 partners (The highest statistic available for the general male population is more than 10 partners lifetime, reported by 33%). In the late 1980's, after five years of the HIV epidemic, studies showed little if any change: an average of 20+ partners per year per person, with 77% reporting more than ten partners in past five years (a rate ten times that of the general male population).
Even among the small percentage of gay men in close-coupled relationships, the rate of promiscuity is extremely high. A 1990 study, confirming the results of two earlier studies), found that 80% of close-coupled gay men had a non-monogamous experience during the past year (compared to 19% of lesbians, 10% of marrieds, and 23% of cohabiting heterosexuals). If this is extended out for several years-even without defining "close-coupled" in longer terms-the result is that monogamy in the gay male population is almost zero-so rare as to be statistically meaningless. I will not suggest that Mel White's story of monogamy is not true, but the overwhelming evidence is that it is anything but typical.
In the case of lesbian women, 28% are in close-coupled relationships, and the large majority are usually in at least a short-term relationship. Sex in the relationship is relatively infrequent, even compared to heterosexual couples, and promiscuity is less likely: 40% report more than ten partners lifetime (cf. 9% general female population). Studies suggest, however, that the relationships are not much more stable long term than gay male relationships: 90% of both women and men report never having a relationship that lasted more than three years.
When we consider homosexual activity, then, we are looking at a phenomenon centered among young, single males, concentrated in a few urban areas where large numbers translate into low social stigma and high availability of partners. In this population, the long-term monogamy rate is very close to zero. Sadly, the common experience of gay males known as "cruising" (the search for anonymous or one-time partners) is not stereotypical but rather typical, even in the age of HIV, according to recent research. The majority of male homosexuals report that more than half their partners are strangers.
Some suggest that promiscuity in the homosexual population is a response to societal repression, but that explanation does not seem to account for the difference between male and female homosexuality, or the fact that the problem is the same or worse in cities where tolerance is the norm, or the fact that the risk of death has scarcely if at all affected the problem. Some have suggested that it might have less to do with societal attitudes than with male homosexuality itself, where the libido often drives the person's identity and is unchecked by what may be a more typically female interest in other aspects of relationship. There is also an inherent problem for both male and female homosexuals in their inability to produce children by sexual union. Generally speaking, children introduce a level of responsibility for a couple that does much to encourage stability and longevity in a relationship.
One particularly distorting and dangerous media myth is that the sex act itself, particularly between males, is essentially the same as heterosexual practice. After all, it is suggested, many heterosexuals also use the rectum or mouth as a substitute for the vagina, and the only real problem is disease spread through promiscuity, which is also a heterosexual problem. The evidence suggests quite a different picture.
Although it is true that some heterosexuals practice occasional oral-to-genital sex (almost 50% and rising) and occasional genital-to-anal sex (about 5%), these are in fact the typical, not occasional, practices of homosexual men. Statistically, oral-to-genital sex is regularly practiced by 95% of gay men, genital-to-anal by 40-70%, manual-to-anal by 40-60%, and oral-to-anal by 30-40%. Variations on these techniques include a number of sado-masochistic behaviors which I will not detail, practiced by 25%; and group sex, in which at least 30% of gay males are experienced. Most of these numbers are at least ten times the rate of the heterosexual population; that is, they are not even remotely comparable.
The health risks involved are compounded by a rate of alcohol use during sex 7 times that of the heterosexual population and a rate of drug use during sex 50 times that of the heterosexual population. These are two of many factors that contribute to the relative disaster of safe sex campaigns. Under the safest of circumstances, with two healthy, well-bathed monogamous partners, even occasional oral contact with the genital and anal regions carries a risk of several bacterial diseases. When that kind of contact becomes a commonplace of sexual activity, and then you factor in alcohol or drug use, and then you factor in promiscuity, and then you factor in viruses in addition to bacteria, there is no longer a risk of disease-there is a certainty of disease.
I will talk about HIV in a moment. It is important to understand that AIDS, terrible disease though it is, could be cured tomorrow and the homosexual community would continue to pay a terrible price for its activities. The clinical literature on routine examination of gay men includes a list of more than twenty problems, including bacterial and viral diseases, commonly diagnosed.
Pathology due to repeated force and motion is one obvious problem. The anal sphincter muscle is gradually destroyed by repeated stretching beyond its capability, and the rectal wall is easily damaged by repeated intrusion. It does not produce lubricating fluids like the vagina, and frequent sex tears tissue or produces open sores which invite other infections. It is essentially nerveless, so most of the damage is done without warning. Whereas the vagina is intended to act like skin, protecting the body from fluids and bacterial invasion, the rectum is lined with an absorbing layer of cells which are designed to take in liquids as fecal matter passes out. Start putting wet things in and it absorbs them too-including the bacteria and viruses carried by those liquids. Place one hand in a heavy leather work glove and the other in a silk glove liner, and both hands will feel about the same. But then dip both gloved hands in a bucket of ink, and you will have a doctor's analogy to the difference between the vagina and the rectum in terms of disease risk.
The proof of all this, sadly, is in the current clinical literature on treatment of the most common health. Altogether, at least 75% of gay men carry one or more infectious agents, at least 75% have a history of infection, 40% are sick at least once per year, a third gradually lose normal bowel function. All of this apart from HIV.
As for HIV, most of us know all too well the statistics: 70% of those who have died of AIDS are homosexual men, the HIV rate in this population is 30-50%, and while drugs have slowed down the advancement of the disease for many people, there is at present no cure. What is more disturbing, and not well known, is that after millions of dollars in education efforts and some progress in the late 80's, virtually every study in the early 90's has shown an increase in unsafe sex practices and the percentage rate of new cases in the homosexual population. One major study in Los Angeles found that 64% percent of subjects had engaged at least once in unprotected intercourse in the past two months, including 40% of those who were already HIV-infected.
Whatever statistics are cited, the consensus of secular research in the last few years is that "more education" is not working. The reasons? Men don't like to wear condoms, or they don't work as well as touted, or men don't care who they infect, or they bet that a cure will be found, or they figure that the high risk of early death is just part of the lifestyle. Whatever the true explanation, sadly, the numbers are true. 250,000 men have died since 1981, including Jim and several other people I knew, almost 40,000 per year now, and at least a half million more are infected and facing almost certain death in the next 10 years.
Why is it so fashionable to create ad campaigns against smoking rather than pouring those same resources into cures for lung cancer?
Should the celebrities who affix red ribbons to their lapels be required to affix a surgeon general warning on the other?
If you knew that one out of every fourteen cigarettes would kill you, would you ever open the first pack? If you knew that one in fourteen planes would crash, would you ever get on an airplane? That is the current estimate of HIV transmission per incident of unprotected anal intercourse. And thousands of men are taking that fourteenth flight, smoking that fourteenth cigarette, every day.
Would my friend be alive today if people had been as clear about the danger as they were hopeful about a cure?
The most poignant way to summarize the barrage of available statistics is to translate them into an illustration. Suppose you were to move into a large house in SF with a group of ten randomly selected homosexual men in their mid-thirties. Employing the most recent research from scientific sources, whose authors are without exception either neutral or positive in the assessment of homosexual behavior, and using lower numbers where statistics differ, the relational and physical health of the group would look like this:
Four of the ten men are currently in relationships, but only one of those is faithful to his partner, and he will not be within a year. Four have never had a relationship that lasted more than a year, and only one has had a relationship that lasted more than three years. Six are having sex regularly with strangers or one-night stands, and the group averages almost two partners per person per month, or 240 for the group per year. Three of the men occasionally take part in orgies. Two engage in sadomasochistic practices.
Three of the men are currently alcoholics, five have a history of alcohol abuse, and four have a history of drug abuse. Five regularly use at least one illegal drug while having sex, and three are multiple drug users. Four have a history of acute depression, three have seriously contemplated suicide, and two have attempted suicide. Seven of the ten have a history of STD's, seven currently carry at least one infectious agent, and three currently suffer from digestive or urinary ailments caused by these pathogens. At least three of the ten are HIV-infected, and one has AIDS.
How much of this can be blamed on a repressive society? Maybe a lot. But I am not sure that fixing the blame helps the problem. Tolerance might reduce promiscuity, but it would not change the physical structures of the body that render some kinds of sexual activity dangerous. Medical advances might control some of the diseases, but the prospect of that is so distant-especially for the worst ones-that it isn't much help now. Too many ifs and maybes-leaving as the most sensible course of action: not to engage in behavior that carries with it (or causes) such a high risk of harm. To abstain is of course likely to produce other problems for the individual, most obviously sexual frustration. Nevertheless, in the face of overwhelming evidence that homosexual life is anything but gay, the individual must ask whether more hope, and more integrity, may reside in the difficult choice of self-denial over self-indulgence. It is a choice we all face in important areas of our lives, perhaps nowhere more painfully than in the area of sexuality. The pain we choose may be either redemptive or destructive in the long run; and in making a choice we must take seriously the health and functions of the body.
I have given half of this space to observations and arguments that could be made by someone who is not a Christian. But while I believe these things need to be said, they are not enough. Experience tells us that warning labels are no match for passion. And we live in a culture that tells us that we are not whole people unless we are sexually fulfilled. That is perhaps the great lie of our generation, or at least a subset of the great lie that life is good, or we are good, only when we feel good. Even apart from a Christian perspective that is narrow and shallow, but my Christian perspective tells me that breadth and depth are not enough without strength. So I want to know what the Bible says about this subject and why it says it.
In the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, we are told that "God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth..." In the second chapter the story of human creation is retold, and after the man encounters the woman he says "'This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.' Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh." All of this, we are told in Genesis 1:31, God pronounced "very good."
These few words become the basis for a positive model of sexuality in the Bible, and the standard of comparison for every possible deviation from that model. Let me say that again in slightly different words for emphasis: in the Bible it is not a matter of listing all the fun things you can't do sexually but of affirming something that is very good, something that becomes a moral standard or norm, and then discouraging departures from that norm. Let me suggest, more specifically, three affirmations made by the creation account.
First, Genesis affirms that marriage and reproduction are good and that male and female are appropriate counterparts. There is a sense, in other words, that biology has implications for morality. While same-sex relationships may certainly involve complementary personalities, at a physical level they can provide only a simulation of complementarity, and of course they can never reproduce. The partners may be subjectively quite satisfied, however, and so it will sound cold to apply a standard as objective as biological function. I grant that, but at the same time I think that we are on dangerous ground if we make too much of contentment as a standard for morality.
Second, Genesis affirms sexual activity as over against the notion in some religious traditions that the body and its desires are dirty-or at least, that sexuality may transcend the body. The attempt to split body and soul, derived from ancient Greek and Eastern philosophical notions, carries an historic tendency away from balance, toward either self-denial or self-indulgence. In the biblical view, each person is an embodied soul for whom the good of physical existence, including sexual identity, goes back before the Fall and forward beyond the Resurrection. Thus biblical sexuality is not peripheral or culturally relative; rather, it has to do with our very identity as human beings.
Third, we must understand that neither sex nor anything else is made by God simply for our pleasure. Rather, we are made so that we might love as God loves, and God makes it pleasurable for us to love sexually. That is the meaning of the part about being created in God's image to have dominion over the earth: for us to enjoy being creators and caretakers in the life that has been given to us. Indeed, it is by sexual reproduction that we share in God's generating nature: in and through love, we make more people to love.
In the first few chapters of Genesis, we are told that humanity rebelled against the one God and soon began to worship false gods or idols. As a direct result of this idolatry, people start to do terrible things to each other. The first murder (of Abel by his brother Cain) involved a dispute over the appropriate religious sacrifice. And then later in Genesis one city becomes a byword for both idol worship and wickedness-Sodom. This association between false religion and immorality in Sodom is present in Genesis well before the famous incident in chapter 19 where Abraham's nephew Lot has to protect visitor's to his house from the men of the city who want to rape them. Suspected spies or defeated enemies were sometimes treated this way in the ancient Near East as a way to humiliate them, and it is unlikely that the practice was motivated by sexual desire. But the name of Sodom eventually became associated in Jewish and Christian writings with activity that did involve sexual desire between men or between men and boys. (Incidentally, the English word sodomy is broader still in its application, since it may refer to any to any noncoital copulation, including that between men and women).
Long after the time of Sodom, the ancient Jews, as they settled into their Palestinian homeland, observed the practices of the peoples around them who worshiped other gods, among these the practice of ritual male prostitution. It is probably in this context that two statements are recorded in the biblical book of Leviticus, a compendium of Jewish ceremonial and moral law: Lev 18:22 reads, "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination;" Lev 20:13, similarly, states, "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them."
It might surprise you to learn that there is little if anything else on the subject in the Old Testament; only a few possible inferences here and there. From about 200 B.C. onward, Jews were encountering Greco-Roman civilization, which reluctantly tolerated some adult male same-sex relations and more generously approved relations between men and boys with some qualifications: the practice was understood more or less as a rite of passage which must end for the man in his late twenties and for the boy in his early teens. The name of Sodom was revived in Jewish writings that condemned such practices, but this literature is generally unfamiliar to most of us because it never gained the status of Scripture. Suffice it to say that Jewish tradition was and remains consistently negative toward same-sex practice.
So we move to the New Testament. Some have observed that Jesus had nothing to say about same-sex relations, and others have suggested that since he taught so much about love, we should take his silence as a message of tolerance, if not tacit approval. Well, Jesus said nothing about pornography, pedophilia, prostitution, bestiality, incest, or rape either, so I'm not sure we want to take the logic of silence too far. But what Jesus did do was to affirm marriage in terms stronger than his contemporaries liked, and in doing so, significantly, he quoted Genesis to support the idea that marriage is not just a contract but actually a union of man and wife. I mention this to suggest that it is not just modern theologians who take the creation account as the basis for sexual morality: Jesus did the same.
And so did the apostle Paul, who wrote the longest and most explicit statement on same-sex relations in the Bible. In the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, Paul explains for the sake of his largely non-Jewish audience what I described earlier, the movement of humanity from rebellion against God, to the worship of idols, to immoral behavior. In the midst of this passage, Romans 1:26-27, he writes that:
"God gave them (the pagans) up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and receive in their own persons the due penalty for their error."
Now, those who want to preserve the moral authority of the Bible and at the same time affirm homosexual behavior have difficulty with this statement. The most commonly suggested way around it is to argue that Paul is thinking about pederasty, or sex between men and boys, which was all he knew of in his culture and which all of us today, including the gay community, would condemn, because they do not involve mutuality-a key word by which, some argue, we must now measure the morality of all sexual behavior.
But if we take a closer look at Paul's wording and the context of his argument, we see that it is not possible to limit his concern to pederasty. He does not refer to boys but generally to males. He writes that they were "consumed with passion for one another"-clearly the language of mutuality. Moreover, he mentions in the same context female same-sex relations, which were extremely rare in that culture and virtually never involved children.
Furthermore, in the two places where Paul includes same-sex relations in lists of prohibited activities (1Cor 6:9-10; 1 Tim 1:10), he uses a compound word lifted directly from the OT texts I mentioned earlier, which speak only of "men lying with men."
Among the many strong words used by Paul in vv. 26-27 to prohibit same-sex practice, perhaps the most significant is para physin ("contrary to nature"), which in Greco-Roman and Jewish Hellenistic literature is commonly employed to contrast same-sex practice with that which is kata physin (according to nature). The phrase is crucial because it reveals the basis of Paul's condemnation of same-sex relations. That is, he had a clear notion of what was natural or according to nature. We may want to disagree with that notion, but first let's give Paul a hearing, understand the source of his ideas.
What was Paul's support for what he might call natural sexuality? What homework did he do to back his idea? First, it is highly unlikely that he was looking in the local university libraries for current literature on sexual practices among the Gentiles. But we do have evidence adult same-sex relations from several contemporary Roman writers, and the most obvious and public example at the time Paul wrote would have been the emperor Nero himself, who numbered among his so-called wives both a castrated boy and an adult male. Paul's readers would know this as well as any modern Londoner would know who Prince Charles has been consorting with lately.
But Paul was trained as a rabbi, a biblical scholar, not as a social observer, and it is evident from the context that he is following the logic of the book of Genesis, which moves from the story of humanity's creation and fall to its practice of idolatry, and the first notable cultural case in point, the story of the sexual sin of Sodom, where only adults are mentioned. Paul, then, is thinking about what has happened to humanity, not just about what is going on around him in Greco-Roman culture.
He is not trying to preserve male power, or Jewish ethnic identity, which were the primary motivating factors behind condemnations of same-sex behavior on the part of his contemporaries, both pagan and Jewish. Rather, Paul is trying to show the relationship historically between false belief and immorality. Same-sex relations are singled out because, as Duke theologian Richard Hays puts it, Paul seeks "a vivid image of humanity's primal rejection of the sovereignty of God the creator." Paul is interested in what we are in light of what we are created to be. In modern terms, it would probably be fair to say that for him, the sexual complementarity of male and female and the procreative potential of their union have moral implications, among them the exclusion of same-sex relations.
What is "natural" sexuality for Paul, then, has nothing to do with the strength of human desire but rather with the way humanity was created from the beginning to function. In other words, there is a necessary connection between the way we are made physically and the way we are made to act sexually. Where that connection has been disrupted by our corporate or individual pasts, God wants to restore our natures to his.
Obviously, then, Paul understands the word "natural" in a very different way than some today who suggest that homosexual behavior is determined by "natural" factors such as genetics or social trends or early childhood development. This is the familiar "nature-nurture" discussion, and it is an interesting one scientifically. I devote an entire chapter of my book to it, and for the record join most non-politicized scientists in promoting a multiple-factor model of causation. But again, however interesting these questions are, they have little bearing on morality. Many many have a genetic or social or environmental disposition to have sex with a half dozen different women per day. We don't respond by saying, "Well, I guess that's okay, if that's the way you are, as long as you have a healthy self-concept, because obviously you don't have a choice about how you act." No, we ask about the morality of the activity, regardless of the strength or source of the desire.
And this points to the weakness of any argument from experience. The experience of the ancient Greeks was that sex with young boys was just fine. Most of us have seen later afternoon talk shows featuring strippers, pornographers, sadomasochists, and prostitutes who make similar claims for their self-affirming, life-enhancing sexual experiences. Who are we to doubt them? And what if we find that their behavior can be linked to genetics, or begins very early in life, or is resistant to therapy? There certainly is such evidence in the case of pedophiles. Are they the next civil rights issue?
Paul set his statement not in the context of experience but in the context of human rebellion against the plan of God for sexuality which was present from creation. It is clear that individual homosexuals do not consciously rebel against anything deeper in their view than societal expectations, and so few if any are troubled by the notion that their behavior might involve a fundamental falsehood. Many, like Mel White, experience homosexual relationships as fully loving, life-enhancing experience. So do many adulterers. So do many pedophiles. What is beyond their comprehension is that the falsehood goes back beyond their experience, and so experience cannot be the measure of truth. How one feels about a behavior, or how ingrained it is, or how unchangeable it is, is not a measure of its morality.
Still the attempt is made by Christians like Mel White who are trying to put their experience of faith together with their experience of homosexuality. They want to identify with ancient Israel and its liberation from bondage, its exodus to a promised land of freedom. But is it appropriate to claim identification with Israel's oppression and liberation merely because a person experiences others' disapproval of his or her sexual behavior? Where is accountability in this? I am deeply disturbed by the conclusion of one such writer, Gary Comstock, author of Gay Theology Without Apology: "The basis and source for knowing myself most intimately are the experiences and desires of my body."
Such self-validation prevents any further discussion, but it also removes any accountability to the original intent of the biblical text; and ultimately if can offer no good reason to invalidate any sexual behavior. The Bible is a book of liberation, but not arbitrarily or irresponsibly. When Jesus encountered a woman caught in adultery-surely a member of an oppressed group-he exposed the hypocrisy of the stone-throwers around her, but then he responded to her not by saying "Go and do what your body tells you to do" but by saying "Go and sin no more" (John 8:11). The God of the Bible does not liberate people from moral behavior, he liberates them to moral behavior.
I have another friend whose name is Mario. For years he was deeply involved in the homosexual lifestyle, but he began to see that it was the way of death and not the way of life. The way of life, he came to find, was in the person of Jesus. And the way to change, in Mario's practices and even desires, was found in a process of healing prayer that enabled him to re-process early childhood memories and find a new personal and sexual identity in relation to a perfect father figure: God. Since then Mario has completed master's degrees in both counseling and theology, and last year he published a hope-filled book entitled Setting Love in Order. In Mario's words, "Homosexual activists want to convince not only the public but themselves that change never occurs, because if I exist, each of them must be haunted by the possibility that they, too, might find the power to change."
This is experience talking too. The experience of transforming power. An experience that includes homosexual practice; whereas the experience of practice does not include Mario's experience of deliverance. Does Mario's experience count? No, say the activists, he's lying to himself. These are the champions of tolerance? Who is really intolerant here?
It seems to me that the way of Jesus, the power of the Christian message, is best demonstrated not by self-validation against the disapproval of society but by transformation against the tendency of my own rebellious nature. Experience is a two-way street; but only people like Mario have walked both sides.
Let me summarize.
I have suggested, first, an argument from breadth of observation: that is, the majority or typical homosexual experience carries with it serious physical and perhaps psychological dangers. While some of the medical and other problems may be remediable, at least in theory, others appear to be intrinsic to homosexuality. There appears to be overwhelming evidence that the body is being sacrificed to the heart.
I have suggested, second, an argument from depth, from a notion of human personhood: that is, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures see body and heart or soul as continuous and therefore morally interdependent. We are embodied souls whose sexuality is acted out legitimately only in the context of heterosexual marriage.
I have suggested, third, an argument from the strength of what Christians take to be God's Word: that is, the Bible evaluates same-sex relations, or any other sexual practice, in relation to the norm of marriage established from creation, and it pronounces same-sex relations to be wrong. While the precise nature of such practices may vary within the Bible or between the Bible and our own day, the principle remains constant.
I have suggested, finally, a further argument pertaining to strength: that power to live according to the biblical norm must come not from rational argument but from God himself, who desires that each of us, including Mel White and Mario Bergner and Tom Schmidt, that each of us would allow God to transform our natures more perfectly to His.
I close on a more personal note. It is awkward, at least for me, to construct arguments not to do something, especially when it is something that I don't want to do anyway. And I know full well that attention to this topic should not disguise the truth that most of what I would call sexual sin is committed by heterosexual men like me. That is why I placed myself just now with Mel and Mario-and you perhaps-because ultimately this is not about homosexuality but about sexuality, and the need for each of us, one at a time, to know God's forgiveness and power to make us more truly, deeply loving. I do not want to be enlisted as a general in somebody's Culture War; and conversely, I don't want to be the oppressor in somebody's dialectic of liberation. I am just a man who hopes in God's mercy. I have seen a friend die; I have seen another friend choose loneliness; I have seen others experience deliverance from deeply-ingrained sexual desires; I have seen still others proclaim the way of desire as the way of God-seemingly against all evidence except that of their own heart.
There are no easy answers here, and I am aware that in a small space I cannot do justice even to those I think I may have found. I invite you only to consider what I have written as you engage in your own search for truth. May God's spirit guide you and God's power transform you.
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