by Bruce T. Gourley
Published April 2015
(Baptist Studies Bulletin Archives Index)
Although their numbers are rapidly shrinking and include few young persons, many American evangelicals are demanding the right to discriminate against LGBT persons in the name of religious liberty.
As Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (2012 recipient of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s “Distinguished Service Award”) noted in the April 3, 2015 edition of Time Magazine while speaking against gay marriage, “as long as sexual liberty is trying to force religious liberty to embrace that, it is not going to happen.”
American evangelicals by and large have become adept, in recent years, at perverting religious liberty to apply only to themselves. Sadly, many Baptists, having long ago abandoned their faith roots of equal religious liberty for all and church state separation, are among the modern day evangelicals who are demanding that courts and governments privilege their faith over the beliefs of other citizens.
Under girding evangelical Christian demands for special treatment, including the right to discriminate against others, is a widespread belief in the conservative Christian community that America is a Christian nation whose laws should privilege Christians by reflecting biblical morality on matters of sexuality. Although Christianity is the dominant religious faith in the United States, evangelicals too often blithely dismiss the fact that America is not, nor ever has been, a Christian nation. For such purveyors of Christian nationalism, homosexuality is a biblical sin and should be treated as such by society and government. LGBT persons are undeserving of equal rights. Gay marriage, an abomination to God and a violation of the biblical model of marriage as one man and one woman, must be prohibited.
So adamently are many contemporary evangelical Christians opposed to homosexuality and gay marriage that one might suppose that conservative Christians in America have always stood firmly against “sexual liberty.”
Unfortunately, this has not always been the case. Today’s Christian opposition to LGBT persons and gay marriage is the latest installment in a long-running, and starkly inconsistent, American Christian narrative of sexuality.
(Warning: Graphic content and censored historical material ahead. The faint of heart and those content with historical amnesia should stop reading immediately! Seriously.)
Imagine, if you can (not that you would want to), a time in American history when many thousands of socially respectable, church-going, married Christian men raped single, beautiful women (and sometimes young girls) day after day, for years on end, with the knowledge of family and the public, but no reprimand from their Christian communities.
Tragically and disgustingly, it really happened. During the colonial era, early Republic and antebellum era (both North and South) and the Civil War years (South), slaveholders, many, perhaps most, of whom were Christians, commonly unleashed their lust on the most beautiful of the slave women whom they owned (as well as recalcitrant slave women in general) and who could not legally resist, the rapists often sharing their forced concubines with sons, brothers and friends. The Bible, after all, sanctioned both slavery and concubinage. Slaveholders even appropriated a biblical figure—Jezebel—to describe attractive, enslaved black women whom they insisted wanted to be sexually dominated by their owners.
The white wives and daughters—of whom southern newspapers and books of the antebellum and civil war era routinely praised their chastity, while ignoring the sexual liberties of white men with black women—of the perpetrators quietly lived with the shame and disgust of their sex-crazed husbands and fathers, forced (as were enslaved black men) to endure the presence of biracial children in their midst. Rarely able to reform their husbands, many white women did what they could to make life miserable for the slave women with whom their men were infatuated. Yet their options were limited, as they were subservient to their husbands in both law and religion, while culture, society and church quietly accepted the raping of slave women.
Following the war some white southern women talked of the rarely bespoken evil, declaring that no beautiful black slave woman escaped being raped by white men. Yet the sexual brutality continued. During Reconstruction and following many white Christian men as Klansmen (local chapters of the KKK, a self-proclaimed Christian organization, were typically comprised of leading Christians in southern communities) routinely raped black women, with “raids” sometimes being a pretext for group rape.
Whether in the colonial era, early Republic, antebellum era, Civil War years or post-war period well into the mid-20th century, the systematic raping of black women by white southern men served both as an outlet for lust and an expression of terroristic dominance over African Americans.
To mask the sexual evils of their own race, maintain the status quo of white supremacy and justify the lynchings of thousands of black men, white men and women in the South often falsely accused black males of ravishing white women. In reality, black males were already the victims of white Christian terrorism to such a extensive degree that few ever dared to touch a white woman.
In short, for much of the history of America, many white Christian men exerted their rights and liberty to rape black women and girls in order to uphold God’s will of white supremacy and black subservience. All the while, white Christian communities remained largely mute, quietly acquiescing to the sexual liberties and brutality of many of the men sitting in church pews.
It is little surprise that white America has collectively forgotten such a sordid past of sexual liberties and brutality. However, the propensity of Christians to selectively appropriate scripture to oppress the “other” in matters of sexuality remains. Among today’s targets are LGBT persons, of whom many evangelicals, citing scriptural injunctions against homosexuality, insist must remain second-class citizens devoid of equal rights.
Discrimination against LGBT persons falls under a larger framework of a seemingly never-ending, self-serving crusade to force society and government to abide by biblical morality. Conveniently glossed over is the reality of biblical morality: an ancient mosaic of (among other things) human slavery (which America has rejected, no thanks to earlier generations of southern white Christians), polygamy (nineteenth-century Mormons were right), concubinage, arranged marriages (still practiced by some Christians outside of the Western world), child marriages (common in portions of the world), wives as property of their husbands (also common in some parts of today’s world), and execution of adulterers (some Muslim nations retain this practice) and homosexuals (of which some American Christians still advocate).
In the public sphere, opposition to homosexuality is just about the last vestige of biblical sexuality to which (many) evangelicals cling. Rather, evangelical sexuality primarily reflects western sexuality in prohibiting biblical polygamy, concubinage, child marriages, and arranged marriages. And on the two current hot-button sexual issues apart from homosexuality, many evangelicals have also embraced post-biblical views: abortion as murder and artificial birth control as evil.
Jesus—rarely invoked in evangelical crusades against homosexuals—pointed his followers away from self-serving Old Testament biblical morality and, inasmuch as could be done in the first-century world, toward a new world of human rights and equality. While Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, the Apostle Paul (traditionally interpreted) scaled back the Old Testament’s harshness against the practice by lowering its sinfulness (and that of other unapproved sexual acts) to the level of greed, drunkenness and thievery (others argue that English translations listing homosexuality are incorrect). Whether re-contextualizing or altogether avoiding the subject of homosexuality, Paul in another of his writings echoed Jesus’ message of human equality.
Ironically, many self-proclaimed followers of Christ simply reject Jesus’ inclusionary vision, choosing instead to use the Bible as a weapon to dominate the “other,” and especially the sexual “other.” But isn’t it about time to move beyond self-serving agendas and openly admit that the Bible does not contain the last word on human sexuality? After all, even fundamentalist Christians long ago abandoned, without apology, a large swath of biblical morality, sexual and otherwise.
And isn’t it about time for all Christians to have honest and respectful conversations about how expressions of modern western sexuality are compatible or incompatible with the Gospel’s timeless, central message of love? After all, using the Bible as a pretext for evil and hate and domination is rather anti-Christian.
Isn’t it about time?
In the words of many Christian abolitionists of the early and mid-nineteenth-century who turned away from literal biblical interpretations and demanded freedom for blacks:
If not now, when?