Homosexuality

After the Desert: A Faithful Catholic’s Reflection on Same-Sex Attraction

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Steve Gershom (a pseudonym), the author of the following essay, is a faithful Catholic who has abandoned the homosexual life-style. Gershom affirms many points made earlier on the AOI Observer: the term gay, or even homosexual describes behavior and should never be construed ontologically, as a constituent of self-identity; homosexual actions are always sinful; the life of celibacy is not to be understood as a life of sexual self-denial, but at as a vocation (just as marriage is a vocation); that chastity is a means of self-integration and even joy; and more.

Where Gersham succeeds very well is putting a human face on the struggle with same-sex attraction. All passions effect some kind of orientation. When the struggle against passion is begun in earnest however, the false self constructed within the orientation loses its grip as the real self starts to emerge. The author has, and is, experiencing the liberation in ways that anyone, even those who do not struggle with same-sex attraction can understand, because we all struggle with passion in one way or another.

Source: Our Sunday Visitor | By Steve Gershom – OSV Newsweekly, 11/13/2011

What would I know about vocation? I’m 28, a faithful Catholic and gay. A little explanation of that last part: It would be more accurate to say that I have same-sex attraction than that I’m gay. My attraction to men is deep and, as far as I can tell, permanent, but I’m celibate. I sometimes use the word “gay” as a convenient shorthand, but it carries a lot of political and even theological baggage, and doesn’t really apply to me, because of my celibacy and for other reasons that I’ll try to make clear below.

The upshot is that I’m unmarried and likely to remain that way. I’m not discerning a vocation to the priesthood or the religious life, either. I’ve been there, done that, and I’ve let the Lord know he can do whatever he wants with me — up to and including sending me to Calcutta or the Bronx — but that if he wants me to be a priest or a monk, he’ll have to do something drastic. I’ve spent a long time checking my internal compasses, and none of them point in that direction.

So what then? I know what not to do: Don’t believe the gay activists, don’t water down the faith, don’t pretend homosexual actions aren’t sinful. Don’t have a boyfriend; don’t get married. Don’t, don’t, don’t. But nobody ever had a vocation that consisted in not doing something. Marriage, the priesthood, the religious life — these involve definite actions, definite commitments.

Parched, despondent

I’d like to give a road map to people like me — I mean not only other men and women with SSA, but everyone called to the single life — but it’s difficult to make a map when you’re still on the ground. At least I’m not lost in the desert any more, parched and exhausted like I was through my teens and early 20s. I’m heading toward civilization now, or better yet toward Zion, but there’s a lot of rugged landscape between here and there. The best I can do is to tell you where I’ve been and what I’ve learned.

It’s good to start on the edge of the desert. I’ll pick age 14, because that’s when I first started thinking of myself as gay. At the time, I understood exactly two things by the word. The first was that I was totally, irrevocably different from other boys. The second was that being gay and Catholic meant a long, dreary life of self-repression. So I believed at the time.

That was the beginning of my vocation as a professional sufferer, a position I held until somewhere in my early 20s. The darkness gathered around me, and I let it in, and was even proud of it. My suffering meant I was deep, sensitive and tragic. I don’t mean to downplay the experience; when I call it a desert, I’m being poetic but I’m not exaggerating. This was Death Valley in July, except when it was Antarctica. But in more literal terms, the darkness consisted of these things: intense self-consciousness; near-constant feelings of isolation; pervasive regret at what I considered a wasted past; an absolute inability to live in the present; and terror at the prospect of the long, lonely future.

The technical name for the condition is despondency. I call it despondency, rather than depression, because depression is a state of the mind, the emotions, and even the body; whereas despondency is a state of the will. It comprises a particular response to depression. Depression doesn’t necessary constitute a roadblock to one’s vocation. Despondency does, because we are judged on the basis of what we do rather than what we feel.

What I was doing was precisely nothing, because that was all I believed I could do. That’s what despondency is. I thought I was doing something, namely living through the suffering that I believed was my vocation, that I even believed God wanted for me. And maybe I was justified in believing these things, given the premises I had accepted. It’s just that my premises were very, very wrong.

Leaving behind self-pity

In the middle of my desert I encountered a different set of premises, from a variety of sources: mostly my spiritual director, Father T, but also from good books (“Growth Into Manhood,” by Alan Medinger), good organizations (People Can Change), good experiences (three months in Peru), and good friends (you know who you are). Up until that point I had believed that the statement “I am gay” is the same sort of statement as “I am male” or “I am human.” Homosexuality was supposed to be an essential, rather than an accidental, part of me, just as deep as gender or species, or deeper.

This idea comes from the gay rights movement, but an awful lot of Christians believe it too. It is utter poison. If gay is what I am (or “who I am,” as the saying goes), then Catholicism really does require a mode of existence in direct contradiction to the deepest parts of me. That didn’t make sense to me, because I had always understood the Christian life as the only thing that could fulfill the deepest parts of me. But I was still trying to believe both things. No wonder I was lost.

If, on the other hand, my homosexuality is a part of me, rather than being my nature — something I have, rather than something I am — then things are different. It became apparent that I could change. I don’t mean stop liking men and start liking women. I mean everything else: my self-imposed vocation of suffering, my self-pity, my self-isolation, my chronic fear and regret and loneliness. Next to those things, a little celibacy isn’t too bad.

Ongoing journey

I discovered that I had a lot of work ahead of me. But I also discovered that there was something worth working for.

This space is too small to tell about my journey out of the desert. I only want to say that it is possible, that it didn’t take as long as I thought, and that it’s good to be out. And I want to say a few things about what comes afterward; what a vocation entails, and how the single life can be one.

When I was in the desert, I thought that the journey out of it would only end when I was dead. That’s true, sort of, because no place on earth is final; our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But I didn’t expect ever to be doing this well, and I didn’t expect to have to figure what to do with myself besides feeling bad. Some gay activists build their identity around being gay; I had built mine around melancholy. When the melancholy started to dry up, the temptation was to sit still and tell myself I had arrived.

But just as surely as negative action (not-having-sex, not-getting-married) doesn’t constitute a vocation, inaction doesn’t constitute a vocation, either. The universal vocation is the call to love, and love always involves action — not nice feelings, not happy dreams, but doing real things for real people.

I look at the married people I know, and at the priests and monks and nuns, and what I see is that they constantly spend themselves. Self-donation isn’t something they do on weekends, or when they have the time. It’s the air they breathe. I look at them and I see grains of wheat, falling deep into the ground and bursting open into fruitfulness. Celibacy doesn’t mean not being fertile; it just means bearing a different kind of fruit.

There’s one difference between me and them. For them, there was a moment beyond which they were definitively no longer their own. Vows were made, rings were exchanged, rites were performed; they are different now.

Is something like that necessary for me? I don’t know yet. It might be easier if it were. There’s something to be said for leaps of faith, for making vows and closing off options. I have options. There’s Opus Dei. There’s the Franciscans — third order, of course. Or I could just keep doing what I’m doing: saying my morning offering, uniting my prayers and works and joys and sufferings to those of Jesus, trying to live in the presence of God.

But whatever I do, I can’t live for myself forever. The grain of wheat has to die and be buried if it’s going to bloom. God brought me out of the desert, but he has a destination in mind, and wherever it is, I haven’t arrived. I’m just getting started.

Steve Gershom, a pseudonym, blogs at stevegershom.com.

Fr. Gregory Jenson: Conscience and the Christian Life of Virtue

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If you are not a regular reader of Fr. Gregory Jensen’s blog Koinonia, bookmark, subscribe, or run down to your nearest internet cafe now! Seriously, Fr. Jensen offers some of the most cogent reflections on the Christian life (drawing deep from the Orthodox moral tradition) of any internet commentator that I know. “As iron sharpens iron, so sharpens a man the countenance of his friend” the scriptures tell us and one of the great benefits of internet dialogue (in spite of its raucous and sometimes irresponsible character) is that good people teach us good things that we need to know.

Below Fr. Gregory writes about the necessity of maintaining the distinction between person and sin, person and passion, person and ideology (however a given circumstance might require the distinction to be framed) in order to both protect the integrity of the conscience and ensure its proper formation. It’s the same distinction that I argue is collapsed in my recent article critiquing the Listening group on Facebook (Facebook “Listening” Group Drags Culture Wars into the Orthodox Church).

For the record, Fr. Gregory’s post was written before my essay and is not a response to it. Nevertheless, in clarifying why the distinction is necessary in the Christian life, it supports my point that the activist ideology of the Listening group is not only foreign to Orthodox thinking, but threatens a key anthropological insight that is essential to the Christian life. An excerpt is included below. The complete essay can be read on the Kononia website.

Source: Koinonia | By Fr. Gregory Jensen

A friend sent me this from a Russian Orthodox site:

First of all, homosexual acts will be included under the general umbrella of fornication. And note that it is the acts that are the issue. A person may be tempted by all sorts of things but unless he commits them he does not sin and should not be condemned. A man may be inclined towards homosexual acts, just as another man is inclined towards over-indulgence in alcohol or anger, neither of them are sinners unless they commit the act. Theologically speaking the Church does not accept that a person is “a homosexual”. And here there is a challenge for the Orthodox Church because the homosexual culture of today would very much like to re-define human beings not as men and women but with a qualifier: he is a “gay man” or she is a “straight woman”. This fundamentally un-Christian labeling must be resisted.

Homosexuality is not my primary concern here. I want to offer some thoughts on conscience. Specifically, I want to look at why a properly formed conscience is essential for Christian life.

Many American Christians have improperly formed consciences. This isn’t to say that people are wicked—they almost never are—but it is to say that many of us don’t engage in moral reasoning in a way that is consonant with the Christian tradition.

Instead of thinking with the Church, that is with the saints throughout the ages, we think “for ourselves.” We often take great pride in this. But we don’t really think for ourselves do we? What generally happens is that Christians end up thinking pretty much like everybody around us. We don’t hold to Christ’s view about a moral issue, or even come to our own conclusion. Instead we make our own whatever is the popular sentiment (I hesitate to use any term that would suggest more than a mere feeling) about the matter.

For many American Christians, the words quoted sound harsh. And yet the ability to distinguish between the sin and the sinner, or between the act and the actor, is what prevents us from being identified with our failures (or for that matter, our successes). Put another way, the distinction the authors draw reminds us of the primacy of the person, and so of love, in Christian morality.

Unfortunately the primacy of the person—and so of love—is closed to those who reduce personal identity to ideology. Whether that ideology is, as in the quote, sexual, or political or economic doesn’t matter. An adjective—at best—reveals only an aspect of a person. When identity becomes absorbed by a qualifier the person in her uniqueness is lost. Further because we are created in the image of God our unique, personal identity is always a mystery to us known fully only to God. Because of this we are always tempted to short-change ourselves, to ignore the mystery of our own identity.

[…]

Read the entire article on the Koinonia website.

Did Presbyterian Church USA Decline Start With “Dialogue”?

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Does this sound familiar? Quoting Alan F.H. Wisdom, Adjunct Fellow of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD):

“Progressive leaders have expressed their hope that the church could remain united, that people would not leave. They say that they want to have the contributions and involvement of more conservative Presbyterians in the denomination,” he explained. “However, the problem that many of us see is that [progressive Presbyterians’] rationale for deleting fidelity and chastity was justice. They regard it as discrimination that people would affirm marriage, but that they (at the same time) would not affirm people in same-sex relationships.”

“Justice” is also a subtext of the Facebook group “Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality within the Orthodox Church,” the Orthodox wing of homosexual activism that seeks to abolish the prohibition against homosexual behavior in the moral tradition. (If the abolition of the prohibition is not their aim, I welcome dialogue from any member of that group on the topic.)

“Justice,” while a strong and compelling term, is also a bit fuzzy when the group uses it. Most often it is interchanged with “fairness” as in: it is unjust (unfair) that heterosexuals can get marriage and homosexuals cannot. (This overlooks of course that homosexuals can get married but not to members of the same-sex.) Wisdom makes a good point. If injustice (unfairness) is the result of bigotry, intolerance, and ignorance, then how is reconciliation even possible?

Mark Tooley, president of IRD had these words:

Every denomination that has embraced sexual liberation over Christian orthodoxy has similarly faced schism and spiraling membership,” he said. “Sexual liberationists in the churches clearly are choosing their faddish brand of social justice over the church’s health. Love for the church should instead compel us to contend against the secular culture’s baser demands rather than surrendering to them.

We are foolish if we think the Orthodox Church would be immune from schism and spiraling membership if the retooling of the moral tradition advocated by the Listening Group takes hold like it did in the Episcopalian Church and now the Presbyterian Church USA.

Criticism of the Listening group does not mean that a pastoral response to same-sex attraction is not warranted or necessary. Of course it is. But the Listening group advocates not only a pastoral response (which lies outside of their purview anyway) but moral parity for homosexual behavior.

Further, as I mentioned in my essay “Facebook ‘Listening’ Group Drags Culture Wars into the Orthodox Church,” if we abolish the prohibition, then we also lose the distinction between a person and his passion. Sexual desire becomes “ontologized;” the object of one’s sexual desire becomes a baseline constituent–a foundational building block–of self-identity. I wrote:

True compassion sees the person struggling with same-sex desire as a person first and not as a “homosexual.” That’s what our tradition teaches. False compassion redefines the person in terms of his passion. That’s what the homosexual lobby teaches. Throw out the prohibitions however, and this distinction is lost. The knowledge that informs them will be lost with it.

The Listening group might have soft hearts, but they also have soft heads. That’s their biggest problem. If the distinction is abolished, then the ground for a pastoral response disappears with it. The scripture says that some who profess wisdom became fools. Maybe we need to revise that: Professing themselves to be compassionate, they became uncaring.

Conservative Presbyterians Looking to Start New Reformed Body?

Source: The Christian Post

Nearly 2,000 conservative members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) began discussing on Thursday how to move forward after a decision in May to allow ordination rights to openly gay and lesbian clergy has some leaders looking to start another denomination.

PC(USA) officials at the two-day conference in Minneapolis ending Friday are leading table discussions about the options churches opposed to the decision might have. The ratifying amendment to the church’s rules on homosexuality and chastity went into effect in July.

“The PC(USA) decision to abandon Christian sexual ethics predictably is fueling accelerated membership decline and schism,” said Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy (IRD), in a statement Wednesday. “Some traditionalists are struggling to stay within the PC(USA) while creating new forms of accountability to compensate for the denomination‘s failure.”

One of the main topics being discussed is the possibility of joining a “new Reformed body” distinct from the PC(USA).

Alan F.H. Wisdom, who is an Adjunct Fellow of the IRD, told The Christian Post that although he had a positive view of the meeting because of so many representatives of congregations coming together, he was not sure about the future of PC(USA) – the largest Presbyterian denomination in the country.

“This meeting is to consider options for people who feel that a line that was crossed by the PC(USA), which took a stand that clearly departed from biblical teaching,” Wisdom said.

In May, the progressive faction of the denomination led a majority of the PC(USA) in voting to delete the so-called “fidelity and chastity standard” which required church officers to be faithful to the marriage of one man and one woman or chaste as single, Wisdom said.

“That being the case, they would not in the long run seem to be able to tolerate those of us who engage in what they see as discrimination and injustice,” Wisdom said.

Tooley also expressed skepticism in his statement. “Every denomination that has embraced sexual liberation over Christian orthodoxy has similarly faced schism and spiraling membership,” he said. “Sexual liberationists in the churches clearly are choosing their faddish brand of social justice over the church’s health. Love for the church should instead compel us to contend against the secular culture’s baser demands rather than surrendering to them.”

There are no ruling actions scheduled to take place at the conference. Although it is still not officially recognized by the PC(USA), the new Reformed body is scheduled to meet in January in Orlando, Wisdom said.

“The PC(USA) structures will need to accept the legitimacy of this new body and the speakers at the podium have indicated that they have gotten less help on that point than some of the other options,” Wisdom said. “The other options have to do more with churches trying to remain in the PC(USA), but cultivate relationships among themselves with those that wish to maintain biblical teaching on sexuality and other issues.”

It appears that in the future, churches will face a choice as to whether they want to remain under the authority of the PC(USA) or go under the authority of “this new Reformed body which would in affect become another denomination,” he said.

“I do hope that wherever people end up in one church structure or another, that they will be united in the same call to an evangelical mission and that we can work together. Denominations are becoming less important and the troubles of the PC(USA) don’t need to stop us from working together for Christ’s mission,” he added.

The PC(USA) has a membership of over 2 million people and became the fourth Protestant denomination in the U.S. to give the ordination rights to openly gay and lesbian clergy.

Facebook “Listening” Group Drags Culture Wars into the Orthodox Church

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By Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

Progressive fads sweep through the culture like clockwork. Remember the impending global ice age in the 1970s that morphed into global warming today? How about the fight about abortion where anyone who dared criticize it was branded as a hater of women? Remember the Equal Rights Amendment and how convinced its supporters were that it was absolutely necessary for a just society?

None of these movements should be taken lightly of course but that doesn’t disqualify them as fads. There is always a strong strain of self-justification among Progressive Culture Warriors; a posturing that creates a facade of virtue and labels the critic as ignorant. Fellow travelers bask in that warm glow of imputed righteousness that they generously confer on each other. The rest of us can return to our caves.

That kind of arrogance informs the new Facebook group “Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality with the Orthodox Church.” The tendentious title is the first clue something is seriously skewed. What silence needs to be “broken”? Who are the people breaking it? Is the Orthodox Church really silent on sexuality?

As it turns out, the only sexuality that occupies the “Listening” group is homosexuality. They oppose the prohibitions against homosexual behavior in the Orthodox moral tradition. The prohibitions go back to Apostolic times, but their rejection of them is only whispered — a silence they still don’t want broken apparently.

The Invitation To ‘Dialogue’

We’ve seen these arguments before, particularly in the Episcopalian Church that has been largely decimated by homosexual activism in the last three decades. Liberal activists overtook that once noble communion and forced the traditionalists out the door. The prognosis is dire. (See: When the Lights Go Out: The Death of a Denomination, and What Does The Future Hold For The Church Of England?)

The decline started out innocently enough. Traditionalists were invited to “dialogue” (a favorite term) about lifting the moral prohibitions against homosexuality. Many of the arguments heard on the Listening group were ones first uttered by these Episcopalian activists. Some were even true especially the assertion that we need a better understanding of homosexual pathology, that some homosexuals have suffered, and that some young people don’t know how to deal with homosexual feelings, among others.

Nevertheless, accepting the invitation to dialogue undermined foundations. When the operating assumption is that the moral tradition is wrong in its prohibitions, then the only way dialogue can be meaningful is when the traditionalist detaches himself from the authority of his tradition.

We call this moral relativism where no abiding truth, no moral universals, are believed to exist. Truth becomes relative. The touchstone for truth is not God but man, and every man is free to decide for himself what is true and what is a lie. In the dominant culture moral relativism reigns supreme. In the Orthodox Church however, we guide our lives and decisions according to the tradition we have received.

The traditionalist entered the dialogue with the deck stacked against him. As it turned out, the invitation to dialogue was a ruse, a way to undermine the confidence the traditionalist had in his tradition and ultimately many were driven out. The activists ascended into positions of authority so that when the purge of traditionalists began, they were able to hang onto the buildings, endowments, and key ministries. Today, the traditionalists are exiled in the desert.

My ’Dialogue’ With A Moderator of the Listening Group

No one is arguing that the Facebook activists have motives this sinister, but their thinking is no different than their Episcopalian counterparts. Consider this “dialogue” I had recently with one of the group’s moderators:

The moderator (and founder) wrote:

“We” (Orthodox Christians supportive of and participating in the kinds of dialogue we have in the Listening group) and “you” (Orthodox Christians opposed to this dialogue), have, sadly, become enemies. It seems to me that dialogue between us is not possible right now. This should be a source of grief rather than anger. It is for me. In this situation I want to try to take very seriously our Lord’s admonition to pray for our enemies. That simple teaching contains one of the great, inescapable truths of the Gospels. I think it’s the best thing we can do, and it’s a very good thing. I very sincerely ask you—readers of this site—to pray for us. And I sincerely offer my prayers on your behalf as well. May God bless us all, grant us all a spirit of repentance, and lead us all to Truth.

My response:

Pardon my bluntness, but your argument has the odor of sanctimonious posturing. The language confirms it: “This should be a source of grief rather than anger,” or “In this situation I want to try to take very seriously our Lord’s admonition to pray for our enemies,” for example. You imply that we should join together in feigned concern over a division that you have created. No thanks.

In reality the divisions are clear: One group approaches the prohibitions against homosexual behavior as an open question and the other regards it as closed. And no, the traditionalists don’t see the liberals as “enemies” but as flat out wrong. There’s a world of difference between the two and any prattle about “loving your enemies” blurs this critical distinction. Frankly, using the injunction to “love your enemies” to justify your notion of dialogue abuses the moral vocabulary. Any Christian who has faced the task of forgiving a real enemy knows this.

My response was harsh but necessary. Obscuring real intentions with overwrought language (what I call “Ortho-speak”) is an occupational hazard with us Orthodox and it is fully evident here. If the language of the moral tradition is employed in ways that undermine it (whether or not the moderator is aware of it is irrelevant), then strong reproof is warranted. The moderator must understand that for the Orthodox the question about moral prohibitions is closed. No dialogue is needful or desired.

If we want to think clearly, then we have to deal with what words really mean, not what we want them to mean. And no amount of self-justifying rhetoric about this or that putative virtue lifts this requirement. There is no “grief” or “hatred of one’s enemies” evident here. We see only the muddled thinking and ignorance of the neophyte.

Guideposts Keep Us On The Path

The moral prohibitions serve as guideposts, as warnings or barriers to us. If we cross them, then we enter onto a path that leads to death instead of life. God is merciful and has provided us the way out of the death into which our sins have led us. But what happens when sin is not called sin anymore? What happens when the guidepost is removed or the warning muted and the barrier taken down? Then we walk in darkness. The way to salvation is harder to find.

That’s one of the gravest threats the Listening group presents. If they succeed in removing the guidepost that names homosexual behavior as sin, then they also remove the hope that the person struggling with same-sex desire has for healing from God. In theological terms, the group preaches an incipient antinomianism; they stand against the law of God even though they cover their rebellion with the language of benevolence and compassion. (See: The Challenge of Antinomianism: You Mean the Gospel Isn’t All About Mercy?)

The Listening group needs to unplug their ears and hear this: When the moral prohibitions are discarded, then the anthropology to which they point is jettisoned along with them. The prohibitions do not exist in a theological vacuum. They draw from deep insight and knowledge about the human being that in some cases took centuries to comprehend and develop and serves today as the foundation to better understand homosexual pathology and how to deal with it.

Moreover, when the anthropology is jettisoned, something else has to take its place. If one really believes that the moral tradition has nothing to say about sexuality (the Church is “silent,” remember?), then ideas from popular culture will be solicited to fill the vacuum. But many of these ideas are false.

For example, one dominant assumption of the group is that homosexual identity is fixed. The jury is still out on this. The Center for Disease Control just released a study (.pdf) that only 1.7% of the population is homosexual and 35% of this number is bisexual. The study cites that only approximately 420,000 people in all of the United States are actually committed homosexuals. Many men move into homosexuality for a season and then move out. Homosexual self-identity is not as fixed as the gay lobby or the Listening group would have us believe. (See: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Study Says Only 1.4% of Population Homosexual.)

Another assumption is that if one criticizes the dominant homosexual apologetic, then one lacks the compassion to effectively deal with the person struggling with same-sex desire. This is perhaps the most pernicious misconception of all because it disqualifies the traditionalist a priori and thus excludes the anthropology that needs to be brought forward.

So Who Really Is The ‘Listening’ Group?

The point that must be understood is this: If the Listening group believes that the Church is “silent” on sexuality and that they have been called to “break” that silence, then the source of their thinking has to draw from something other than the moral tradition. Their purpose then is not dialogue. It can’t be. Rather they want to be the gate-keepers, the commissars of acceptable ideas and speech. It simply cannot be anything else.

Unfortunately many in the group display an immaturity and ignorance about the ideas that they champion. They are probably not aware of it, but they function as the religious arm of Gay Inc. – a term familiar to more discerning observers of the culture. (See: The Bad Faith of Michele Bachmann’s Gay Rights Inquisitors.)

They also enjoy berating converts (“American Orthodoxy has a convert problem” is a favorite refrain applied to their critics) but who really are the neophytes here? They collect the ideas of the dominant culture, swash them with a religious patina and call the enterprise Orthodox. But we aren’t interested in repeating the Episcopalian project in our Orthodox Church, thank you. Maybe they would be more comfortable in the new and improved Episcopalian communion.

The Listening group has to stop dragging the culture wars into the Church. The prohibition against homosexual behavior is a closed question. The moral tradition does not need to be retooled and there is no need for “dialogue.”

True compassion sees the person struggling with same-sex desire as a person first and not as a “homosexual.” That’s what our tradition teaches. False compassion redefines the person in terms of his passion. That’s what the homosexual lobby teaches. Throw out the prohibitions however, and this distinction is lost. The knowledge that informs them will be lost with it.

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Albert Mohler: Evangelicals and the Gay Moral Revolution

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R. Albert Mohler Jr.

In the essay below, Dr. Mohler is speaking to an Evangelical Christian readership but many of his observations apply to all Christians. The normalization of homosexual behavior is a moral revolution Mohler writes and not one that Christians can join and remain faithful to their Christian faith. He’s right about that.

There will be pressure to adopt to this new morality as well. We even see it on the edges of the Orthodox Church with the Facebook group Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality within the Orthodox Church for example. Who ever thought that some Orthodox would drag this battle of the culture war into the Church?

Mohler takes the Evangelicals to task for their sloppy handing of the homosexual question. I’m not sure we Orthodox have been sloppy, but we have been complacent. The homosexual moral revolution is at bottom a question of anthropology, what it means to be a man or woman and thus a human being. We Orthodox know some things about human anthropology but we’ve been asleep at the switch.

My conviction is that we may be in a period of social unrest similar to what the Early Church experienced that caused the the forging of the great dogmatic truths like Nicea and others (I touch on this in my essay: Orthodox Leadership in a Brave New World). Great unrest imposes suffering, but it also can unleash creativity.

There’s a lot to be done. We have to resist the attempts to homosexualize the Church from within; teach that the object of one’s sexual desire is not a primary constituent of self-identity; develop our anthropology to answer the homosexual questions with better insight and compassion; learn how to help men and woman properly deal with same-sex desires, and more.

Mohler reproves his Evangelical followers for failing to meet the challenge of homosexuality face to face, and by this I presume he means that some Evangelicals prefer not to have dealings with homosexuals at all. That’s not an Orthodox problem I think because we have an easier time drawing the distinction between people and their behaviors, including their sins. We have a better practical sense that not much more than God’s mercy separates us from the next guy.

Unfortunately, the neo-Episcopalian wing like those on the Facebook group exhibit a deep immaturity about the the human person and same-sex desire. Their immaturity probably derives from moral confusion, particularly defining such concepts as tolerance and compassion in terms of the dominant culture rather than the moral tradition. They craft an apologetic that uses the language of the moral tradition to endorse behaviors that contradict its teaching, yet they refuse to admit that the contradiction even exists.

That’s why when they collapse the distinction between person and behavior they think they fulfill the law of love, and why they believe that insisting on moral parity between opposite-sex and same-sex marriage is pleasing to God.

If their confusion is allowed to prevail, then the dominant culture will trump the moral tradition and the deep anthropological understanding that shaped the language and makes the distinction comprehensible will be lost. So will the important pastoral work that depends on it. The Orthodox will become like the liberal Episcopalians except for our Eastern flair and better looking vestments.

Source: Albert Mohler.com

The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can’t Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, “The Honor Code,” moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we’ve witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than “moral deficiency.”

The liberal churches and denominations have an easy way out of this predicament. They simply accommodate themselves to the new moral reality. By now the pattern is clear: These churches debate the issue, with conservatives arguing to retain the older morality and liberals arguing that the church must adapt to the new one. Eventually, the liberals win and the conservatives lose. Next, the denomination ordains openly gay candidates or decides to bless same-sex unions.

This is a route that evangelical Christians committed to the full authority of the Bible cannot take. Since we believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches that all homosexual acts are sinful, as is all human sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage. We believe that God has revealed a pattern for human sexuality that not only points the way to holiness, but to true happiness.

Thus we cannot accept the seductive arguments that the liberal churches so readily adopt. The fact that same-sex marriage is a now a legal reality in several states means that we must further stipulate that we are bound by scripture to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman—and nothing else.

We do so knowing that most Americans once shared the same moral assumptions, but that a new world is coming fast. We do not have to read the polls and surveys; all we need to do is to talk to our neighbors or listen to the cultural chatter.

In this most awkward cultural predicament, evangelicals must be excruciatingly clear that we do not speak about the sinfulness of homosexuality as if we have no sin. As a matter of fact, it is precisely because we have come to know ourselves as sinners and of our need for a savior that we have come to faith in Jesus Christ. Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and the forgiveness of their sins.

This is not a concern that is easily expressed in sound bites. But it is what we truly believe.

It is now abundantly clear that evangelicals have failed in so many ways to meet this challenge. We have often spoken about homosexuality in ways that are crude and simplistic. We have failed to take account of how tenaciously sexuality comes to define us as human beings. We have failed to see the challenge of homosexuality as a Gospel issue. We are the ones, after all, who are supposed to know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only remedy for sin, starting with our own.

We have demonstrated our own form of homophobia—not in the way that activists have used that word, but in the sense that we have been afraid to face this issue where it is most difficult . . . face to face.

My hope is that evangelicals are ready now to take on this challenge in a new and more faithful way. We really have no choice, for we are talking about our own brothers and sisters, our own friends and neighbors, or maybe the young person in the next pew.

There is no escaping the fact that we are living in the midst of a moral revolution. And yet, it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.

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