Sitting down on the pew at my church, I remember noticing just how empty it was. There was a group of middle-aged attendants clustered at the front, but aside from them the room was very sparsely populated. I heard the hushed complaint time and time again: “This church used to be a lot more crowded.”
My church isn’t the only one losing members. According to John Shook, former professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University, secularity in America has risen to new heights in recent years. Polls that point evidence to the contrary fail to distinguish between avid churchgoers and those who attend only once or twice a year, claims Shook. For any commercial organization, a loss in public interest means fewer profits. But for us Christians, this loss means that we are failing in our duty to spread God’s love around the world. Something far more important than money is at stake. It is, therefore, imperative that we understand the reason for this decline and attend to it.
Throughout history, the church has been forced to reconsider its views on minorities. The American Society of Church History recognizes that, as early as the 1970s, women were discouraged in pursuing theology. After years of activism, female scholars have now gained respect and equality; the ASCH itself boasts a female majority among its executive officers. Today we fight a new battle amongst ourselves regarding the toleration of a demographic minority, namely the homosexual community. Just as we embrace women today as sisters of the Word, I believe it is God’s will, and in our best interests, to accept gays and lesbians as they are.
Mainstream Christianity’s infamous rejection of homosexuals has hurt our reputation among nonbelievers. LGBT supporters at a University of Nevada Las Vegas rally held up a sign reading, “Bigotry Wrapped in Prayer is Still Bigotry.” Facebook activist page, Gay Marriage USA, sends a similar message. Its posts against “fanatic preachers” garner thousands of likes, shares, and sympathetic comments, stigmatizing our institutions. Activists aren’t the only ones who see the church as a conglomeration of narrow-minded bigots. Survey results from the Public Religion Research Institute reveal that 72% of Americans believe religious homophobia is at least partially to blame for gay teen suicide rates.
But should we denounce our beliefs simply because the world tells us to? Of course not. Our mission is to obey God’s commands, not those of mankind. And God’s command, many preachers argue, is that romantic relationships ought to remain a heterosexual privilege. They believe this because the Bible says so—and indeed, the Bible condemns homosexuality: “Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion” (New International Version, Romans 1:25-27). Our preachers make this argument time and time again—that they are justified in their opinions because they are being faithful to the holy and perfect Scriptures. The truth, while difficult to accept, is that the Scriptures are not perfect and therefore a flawed premise. There are innumerable contradictions in the Bible; for example, in the book of Numbers, the Lord’s sentence for a man caught picking up firewood on the Sabbath (a holy day set aside for rest) ran thus: “The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp” (NIV, Numbers 15:35). However, in the book of Mark, before healing a man with a twisted arm on the Sabbath, Jesus declares, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (NIV, Mark 2:27). Even if such a blatant contradiction could be refuted, the Bible is still impossible to adhere to on a word-for-word basis in modern society. We do not have sheep to sacrifice, as the book of Deuteronomy requires us to do. Paul, the author of the aforementioned passage in Romans, believed that women were inferior to men and commanded them to wear veils to church, stating that, “if a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off; and if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head” (NIV, 1 Corinthians 11: 6). This rule is overlooked by even the most conservative churches in America. Preachers surely know of these bizarre doctrines, but they glance right past them. Instead, they point fervently at the few passages that discriminate against homosexuals, telling dissenters that no word in the Bible can be ignored.
So if the Bible is not a completely reliable guide, what standard can we believers take inspiration from? The answer is simple: as Christians, we are called to follow the life modeled by Jesus Christ, chronicled in the four Gospel books. Unlike other “outdated” biblical doctrines, the teachings of Jesus are timeless and appeal to a wide range of audiences. Rap artist Jefferson Bethke testifies to this in his Youtube video titled, “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus,” which scored over 23 million views. Jesus never condemned homosexuals; in fact, he was criticized by the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day, for dining with the dregs of society. It is not far-fetched to imagine that, were he alive in the flesh today, Jesus would comfort our lonely homosexual teens while the modern-day Pharisees would scoff at him for it. To them he would reply, as he did 2,000 years ago, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to” (NIV, Matthew 23:13). How can we slam the door in homosexuals’ faces, when Jesus commands us to make disciples of all peoples?
On January of 2012, a gay teenager named Eric Borges committed suicide after his extremist religious parents disowned him and kicked him out of the house. Is this truly God’s will—to have young people so distraught and confused that they take their own lives before seeing adulthood? We only imitate the hypocrites when we preach about Jesus’s unconditional love and later brandish “God hates fags” posters. Instead, let us be like Jesus, who came down to the earth to be a doctor for the sick, a comforter for the lonely. As rap artist Bethke puts it, “If grace is water, then the church should be an ocean/It’s not a museum for ‘good’ people, it’s a hospital for the broken.”