Over lunch, an acquaintance of mine muses, “I just don’t see how people reconcile being gay and Christian. Every attempt I’ve heard to explain away the scriptures condemning homosexuality just sounds like so much lame justification.”
To an extent, he’s right. Prooftexting — the practice of isolating scriptures from their textual, cultural, and historical contexts to facilitate their use in building an argument — can be used to build persuasive cases for almost any stance. With each of their points backed by snippets of scripture, prooftexters sound especially authoratative and well-studied.
Once you catch on to the trick, of course, you can never hear these kinds of arguments without grinning. Here’s how it works:
1) Determine your stance on some issue.
2) Having defined your viewpoint, begin a search for scriptures that support your viewpoint. (On line search engines like the Bible Gateway are great for this, because you can search the entire text of the Bible using keywords you select.) List those that do; ignore or explain away those that don’t.
3) Using the scriptures that agree with your conclusions, build a point by point argument for your stance, reinforcing each point with a snippet of scripture.
Note, please, that the goal of prooftexting isn’t to discover what the Bible really says (or doesn’t say) about a particular subject. The goal is to make the Bible support what you have already concluded must be true.
The problem with most books by gay people on this subject? They do they same thing. The author starts with the supposition that “Being gay is just okay.” With that out of the way, finding scripture (or reinterpreting scripture) becomes an exercise in selective vision.
Having an honest dialog about this subject is difficult. Gay people tend to have their hackles up about it. Many Christians — often fundamentalists — are either
a) angry that someone would even suggest there’s a way that a gay person can be accepted by God, or
b) threatened and defensive at the mere suggestion that their reading of scripture on this (or any other) subject might, to some degree, be ill-informed, misguided, or wrong.
And so, the battle continues, with each side posturing and constructing arguments with little or no hope of convincing the other. How is that progress? Indeed, how is that even useful?
My luncheon friend assumes that my apparently contradictory stance — Christian and gay — must be rooted in prooftexting. He waits, listening, expecting me to launch an attack on passages from Levicitus or First Corinthians, countering them with scriptures of my own.
At the very least, I’m expected to repeat an often-heard mantra: “Those scriptures hail from a different time and a different culture. They were written in a different language, and have been translated again and again over time, always by people with their own agendas and their own perspectives. It’s virturally impossible to tell what the intent of the original writer was. What we do know tells us that their concept of homosexuality was tied to idolatry or heathen temple worship or debauchery … it doesn’t parallel the modern development of gay couples, who seek to build lasting relationships based on love and dedication.”
Instead, I simply say, “It’s hard to wrap your head around, isn’t it?”
The response disappoints him. It offers no comfort. It doesn’t make things easier. It doesn’t provide a ready-made argument one can memorize and repeat to others. It doesn’t do his thinking for him; it doesn’t relieve him of the responsiblity to find his own path, to ask his own questions, to find his own answers.
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