Why I’m LGBTQIA+ Affirming (as a Christian Theologian)

By Stephen D. Morrison

Today I want to explain why, as a Christian theologian, I am affirming of the LGBTQIA+ community.

What this means to me is that I affirm the rights of such individuals in a social, political, sexual, and theological sense, meaning the right to live, marry, and thrive without repression and exclusion from society or the Church.

Accordingly, I reject the hardline approach to the LGBTQIA+ community that is often the default in conservative evangelical churches, namely, I reject the notion that their sexuality is a sin according to the Scriptures.

Thus, I affirm their dignity and validity as human beings made in the image of God to be celebrated and welcomed rather than excluded or condemned by the Church.

Furthermore, I strongly oppose any exclusion of LGTBQIA+ individuals from membership, baptism, or inclusion into the body of Christ. Thus, I support the acceptance of such individuals in the church, and not the mere acceptance but the celebration of them as children of God deserving of liberty and love and fellowship.

With this entails a re-reading of scripture around a liberating motif, which does not use the texts to suppress the rights of disadvantaged individuals but rather liberates and affirms their common humanity.

So that is my stance, in brief, and it has been for several years now. With what follows I want to explain how I arrived at this conclusion.

I primarily want to approach this from a personal point of view. As such, there will be three parts to this video. First, the theological, where I explain a little bit about liberation theology and how it informs my understanding of the Gospel and the importance of social justice in the political, economic, and even sexual sense.

Second, I discuss the Biblical texts. This was not necessarily as essential for my own journey but I know any video that addresses this must have something to say about the texts that supposedly deem homosexuality sinful.

And finally, I explain a bit of my personal journey and what I think was the most important factor that finally changed my perspective.

Now, the reality is, I did not always think this way. In fact, for most of my life I accepted the classic evangelical approach to this question. Namely, that homosexuality is a sin and against the will of God, that it is forbidden in the Bible, and that such individuals must repent and convert.

But over the past five or six years, as I have read widely, explored, and rediscovered the richness of my Christian faith, these presuppositions gradually receded into the background.

So let’s begin with those theological presuppositions that ground my support for the LGBTQIA+ community.

But quickly, let me just say that for short, I will sometimes refer to the LGBTQIA+ community as simply the queer community. This is not to exclude anyone but simply for conciseness. The phraseology is sometimes debated but queer seems to be a general catch-all term, and so I use it here to mean explicitly those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and all non-binary genders and atypical sexual identities. Essentially, anything that is not heterosexual or gender normative is what I am including here.

So, with that said, let’s get to the first point.

1. A gospel of liberation

For me, the first major reasons why I am affirming is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel of liberation. It is good news to the poor and oppressed, it is a message of liberation.

This was the most fundamental shift for me,
a shift in priorities most of all
but also a rediscovery of the true Gospel,
and it is also what eventually lead me to an affirming position.

The realization that the Gospel is primarily a message of liberation means that the Church and theology should orient itself around the least of these as a priority and not merely as a secondary concern.

I have said in another video that for me, the center of a Christian’s political ethic should be the command to care for the least of these,

and that the proof of any political ideology claiming to be Christian is not found in their nominal claims of Christian values but rather in their concrete actions towards those who might be deemed the least of these in any given society.

In short, a Christian is known not by their words but by their love. And any political ideology that fails to be a force for the liberation of the oppressed is not, in my opinion, worthy of the name of Jesus Christ.

Thus, for me, the Gospel is the good news of liberation.

And liberation here is not merely a spiritual concern, but following Matthew 25, it is material and political just as much as it is spiritual.

Jesus did not instruct us to simply pray for the thirsty, hungry, and imprisoned in his famous parable of the sheep and goats. We are told that our failure to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and visit the prisoner is a direct failure to love Jesus Christ.

This parable is often read as a call for charity, rather than a call to reorient our faith around the material concerns of the poor and needy, and around their political liberation.

And this follows a trend in the west to “spiritualize” and “invidiualize” Christian faith, subjecting everything in the Bible to a strictly evangelical approach that seeks only to “save souls,” while neglecting the bodily and social concerns of the least of these.

But Jesus did not define the Gospel as a purely spiritual escape.

In short, the Gospel is not about going to heaven when you die.

It is about establishing the Kingdom of God here on earth as it is in heaven.

The Gospel Christ proclaimed was not to escape earth but to realize the Kingdom here and now, to preach good news to the poor.

As Jesus declared in his ministry statement in Luke 4, which is a direct quote from Isaiah 58 and 61:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18)

For me, this indicates a theological preference for the poor and needy, or what liberation theology has called God’s preferential option for the poor.

This is the poor and needy in a material and political sense. It is those who lack a voice or power in society and are accordingly disenfranchised and oppressed socially and politically.

Some will say that Jesus’ words here are merely a spiritual declaration, that the poor and blind and oppressed are spiritual categories. But I think this is quickly disproven by studying the actual life of Jesus and what He did.

Ask yourself this: Did Jesus not heal the physically blind? Was he not the preacher who proclaimed good news to the materially poor? Was he not himself materially poor? And did he not harshly critique the rich and send them away?

It is a sign of our flawed thinking that we turn Christ’s words into allegories for spiritual escape rather than grasping the radical nature of His teaching about the Kingdom of God.

Of course there are spiritual parallels here, but it is negligent to overly spiritualize this in an attempt to belittle the material and political concerns of the Gospel.

An apolitical gospel is antithetical to the Gospel Christ proclaimed.

This insight is one of the central aspects of liberation theology. My latest book in the Plain English Series studied the work of James Cone, who was the founder of Black Liberation Theology.

His insights have shaped my perspective drastically.

I think liberation theology is correct to recapture the material dimensions of the Gospel. It asserts that a Gospel that is concerned solely with spiritual

well-being, without also caring for the material conditions of the poor, is not the same Gospel Christ proclaimed.

Thus, the Americanized, individualistic proclamation of a personal savior falls short of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Rather, we must adopt a gospel of liberation.

Now, this is not necessarily the place to examine all of the intricacies of liberation theology. My book on Cone is a good introduction to the subject, and so is Gustavo Gutierrez’s book, A Theology of Liberation.

But my point in bringing this up is to show how liberation theology has informed my affirming perspective.

For me liberation theology is a vital challenge to the Church today because it asks us:
What good is a gospel that is concerned solely with the abstract, spiritual condition of souls without having any concern for the real material and social conditions of actual human beings?

Such a gospel is simply an opium, a fantasy that escapes the world rather than daring to change it. It is not the same Gospel Christ proclaimed.

It is also Gnostic, and the message it proclaims is that queer people do not matter to God. That their bodies and their sexuality do not matter. But the opposite is true: God cares deeply for the queer community. They are celebrated, made holy, and included in the fellowship of God’s love. Their sexual liberation from oppression is just as vital to the gospel as the salvation of souls.

Jesus saves the whole person, not just a compartmentalized section of a person called the soul. And furthermore, the gospel does not merely transform the individual but is a challenge to society and the world.

A great strength of Liberation theology is that it takes seriously Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”

The same should be said of Christian theology.

Theology has often resigned itself to merely interpreting God and the world in various ways; the point however is to change the world, to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

For all the talk of a biblical Gospel, the evangelical focus on saving souls is strangely absent from the Bible itself. Instead, there is a much larger focus on God as the liberator of the oppressed in history, as the God who is more concerned with justice than religion.

God defined Godself to the Israelites as their historical liberator from Egyptian captivity. It was a central element in Israel’s theology and self- understanding as a nation. God was defined as the God who liberated them from captivity. We see this all throughout the Hebrew Bible.

The ten commandments begin with this very declaration of God’s identity:

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2).

It is ironic how often the ten commandments are lifted up in evangelical theology as a central message of the Bible, yet this introductory declaration is so frequently overlooked. God defined Godself as the liberator of the oppressed Israelites. And still today, God is the God who liberates the oppressed.

In the New Testament, Jesus reaffirms this understanding of God’s historical role in the liberation of the oppressed by his public declaration in Luke 4, but also throughout his ministry.

Jesus’ Gospel cannot be divorced from this emphasis on God’s liberating activity on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

With this we arrive at the theological background for my affirming stance.

If God is the liberator of the oppressed, then by default, the Church should be a voice for the downtrodden and outcasted from society. We should side with the underclass, with the poor and disadvantaged.

This includes being on the side of the queer community in their struggle for sexual, political, social, and economic liberation.

Because our faith centers around the Gospel of liberation, our default position should be to support the least of these in their liberating struggles for dignity.

What has happened, instead, is the opposite. The Church has often used theological arguments to further repress and exclude the queer community, to spew hatred and hostility rather than love and acceptance.

Wherever a struggle for liberation is taking place, the Church turns its back on Jesus Christ by being a force for repression.

Jesus said that His disciples will be known by their love.

He did not say they will be known by erudite arguments, by expert knowledge of the Bible, by correct thinking or church membership. No, it is by our love for the least of these.

But today, that has not been the case. We have reversed the process. No longer is love the priority but correct teaching.

We will address the Biblical texts in a moment, but for right now I want to stress this point.

If the center of our Gospel is the message of liberation, then how can we call ourselves Christians if we exclude the least of these, if we oppress the oppressed, if we reject the outcasts?

Now, whatever the Biblical texts say about homosexuality, which we will get to in a moment, but whatever they do say, there is nothing that will change the fact that the Gospel is a message of liberation, that the Church is not called to repress and exclude but liberate and include.

What has tended to happen, however, especially in the American evangelical Church, is that a message of repression has taken over the conversation, and the Church is now known not as a force for liberation but of oppression of those who are different.

The reality is that queer individuals are oppressed socially, sexually, and politically, even still today despite many legal victories.

This is not up for debate; it is the real social condition facing this community. Chronic homelessness, poverty, and a high suicide rate plagues the LGBTQIA+ community primarily because of the social exclusion they often face.

And the Church is not blameless in this oppression.

There is a great Youtube channel called “Invisible People,” which simply goes to the streets of America and interviews the homeless. Often we see the homeless as an object, but this channel does an excellent job at humanizing

the homeless. I highly suggest you take the time to watch some of the interviews. They are truly heartbreaking.

What you will notice, if you do watch their videos, is the overwhelming number of them that tell a similar story. The interviewees explain that they are transgender or homosexual and because of their family’s beliefs, they were disowned, essentially rejected as members of their own family and thus as humans. Many of those on the streets share that experience.

In fact, a study was conducted that showed how queer individuals are more than twice as likely to become homeless for life in contrast with a heterosexual individual.

This is a heartbreaking reality and an all-too-common one at that.

And all this is not to mention the more indirect forms of oppression and exclusion, such as various micro-aggressions that subtly reinforce alienation and promote hostility.

A Church that not only refuses to see the oppression of LGBTQIA+ individuals but that refuses to help them is not a Church worthy of the name of Jesus Christ.

Liberation of the oppressed is the center of our Gospel and faith, or at least it should be once again.

That is why, no matter what Biblical arguments are made, the default of a Christian should be to help the oppressed and support them in their struggles, not to add further condemnation onto them.

Doing good works of love are more important than correct theology. Our default must be to liberate the oppressed, and only then should we concern ourselves with correct interpretations of the Bible.

In reality, there are really only about five verses in the Bible that mention homosexuality somewhat directly. I will get to those in the next section.

But For a topic that has been made so central to the evangelical church, it is shocking to see just how few texts seem to discuss the issue.

But compared to the plentiful verses that make justice, liberation of the oppressed, love for the poor, and service to our neighbor central—it is clear that there is an imbalance in our perception.

What takes priority here?

Clearly, the Bible is more concerned with liberating the oppressed than asking whether or not the oppressed are “living in sin.” Even if that is true, the priority is still to help the poor and needy unconditionally.

Thus, for me, the Gospel itself is the first and perhaps central reason why I am affirming.

I am affirming of the LGBTQIA+ community because the Gospel we proclaim is a Gospel of liberation; it is good news to the oppressed, it is the message of God’s liberating activity in history. That God is on the side of the oppressed and struggles with them for liberation.

2. Biblical ambiguity

The greatest hurdle for most evangelicals to becoming affirming is the biblical hurdle. Here I want to discuss a biblical case for an affirming reading of the texts that are often used against this community.

Before we look at the texts themselves, I want to stress the need for a liberating hermeneutic. This follows on the back of what I have just said in part one. A liberating hermeneutic seeks to read the Bible as a message of freedom not repression. It is a conscious choice to prioritize liberation.

A quote from James Cone summarizes what I mean:

“To think biblically is to think in the light of the liberating interest of the oppressed. Any other starting point is a contradiction of the social a priori of the Scripture.” God of the Oppressed, 97.

What this means is that there is an unbiblical way to read the Bible. In my mind, it is any reading that divorces individual texts away from the whole scope and context of the Scriptures, especially from the social conditions of their writing.

The Bible is a message of hope for the poor and oppressed. Its message of liberation is central, as we have seen.

It is one of the greatest tragedies of modern Christianity that the Bible has become a message of oppression and exclusion, rather than liberation and inclusion.

But that is precisely what has happened with the evangelical abuse of scripture to deny the full humanity and dignity of queer individuals in the Church.

Because of a few isolated texts, an entire repressive apparatus has been added onto the Church’s witness and teaching. So much so that the church has often been synonymous with bigotry and hatred of the very same people Christ called us to love and accept.

The Bible was written by and for the underclass of history. That is what makes it a revolutionary book.

Yet it has been coopted by the privileged and powerful as a means of control and repression.

Harper Lee’s character Miss Maudie, in her classic book, To Kill a Mockingbird, said this:

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

I love this quote because it highlights at once the danger and power of the Bible.

We can either adopt of liberating hermeneutic that centers around Christ’s Gospel of liberation, or we can adopt a repressive and exclusive reading of the Bible that spews hatred and bigotry to the other.

Now, with that said, let’s look at a few of the texts commonly used to justify this oppressive approach.

I do want to disclose here that I am not a biblical scholar, and for much of this I will default to the work of other scholars in the field. This also means we will not go too deep into the specifics of the questions around these texts, but I will cite resources for those who might want to go further into studying this subject.

What I offer here, then, is simply the summary conclusion of a much more detailed study into these texts. The sourced papers and books on the subject should be consulted for more, and I will link all that in the description.

Now, it is often said that the bible is “clear” on the issue of homosexuality. That it “plainly” condemns homosexuality as such.

But as any good student of the Bible will tell you, it is often not so black and white. A plain reading of the Bible is often a misguided one, because such a reading entails injecting our own presuppositions into the text

rather than performing true exegesis of the text itself according to its own context and time.

Now, as I’ve already mentioned, there are really only five texts that address homosexuality. These are...

Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 Romans 1:27
1 Corinthians 6:9
1 Timothy 1:10

Sometimes a verse or two from Genesis is offered as evidence, together with Jude 1, but the argument is typically less substantial since the texts do not directly mention homosexuality so we won’t worry about those here. Although I will link a few sources on that question below.

Now for each of these five texts, as with all of scripture, context is king.

So we have to pay close attention to what the author might have intended and, most importantly in this case, perhaps what the author did not intend with these verses. But most of all, we must keep in mind a liberating hermeneutic as our general framework.

One important clarification that scholars have made regarding these texts is this:

We can reasonably argue that these verses do not forbid homosexuality as such but merely forbid particular cultural homosexual acts that are defined by the immediate context of each verse.

There is no indication that the authors of these texts mean to condemn homosexuality as a sexual identity within the confines of a loving, consenting relationship, rather the context seems to imply that only some specific culture and time-bond act unique to that era is being condemned.

Thus, what we think of as homosexuality today cannot be easily read back into these texts without doing violence to the texts themselves.

Or in other words, we cannot read our own assumptions into the text by thinking that what is meant in these texts is the same as what we know of today as homosexuality.

So by injecting this image into the texts, and thus using them to ban all such minority sexualities, conservative evangelicals have committed the first sin of biblical interpretation: failing to pay attention to historical context.

Today, homosexuality primarily exists in relationships based on mutual love and respect. But as we will see, that is not the case for most if not all of these texts.

Historically, the authors would have had no knowledge of such relationships and we can make a strong case that these texts are addressing cultural acts that we no longer are familiar with today.

In short, we are not taking about the same thing these texts are talking about.

Thus, the direct question of whether homosexuality itself is sinful is not anywhere addressed in the Bible. Only specific, culturally and historically unique acts are discussed in these verses.

And that clarification is vital to disarming these texts.

So, we have to ask: What are the particular homosexual acts condemned by these verses?

Let’s look at them closely.

In both verses of Leviticus, there are a few things to notice.

First, there is the strange grammar of the text, which literally translates, “and with a male shall not lay lyings of a woman.”

This seems to indicate not general homosexuality but a particular situation, which is why Robert Gnuse makes a strong case that the author is condemning either the act of cultic prostitution or perhaps pedophilia.

The prohibitions listed alongside this verse give context for this, since the grammar of the text is ambiguous. The surrounding verses are prohibiting activities that were common among the Canaanites, particularly some of their religious rituals.

That is why a case can be made that this is a specific prohibition of temple prostitution rituals of the Canaanites, not of homosexuality as such.

Furthermore, the Hebrew word is not male in the sense of an adult man but of a boy, and thus the implication seems to be pedophilia.

And finally, notice how this text does not mention anything about female homosexuality. It only discusses the male. And while some have argued this is simply an oversight, it seems unlikely given the directness of the surrounding verses.

Immediately prior to this prohibition, the text forbids both male and female bestiality.

Why be so specific in that verse but not in the other? Especially if the anti- gay reading is correct that this is a blanket condemnation of all homosexuality, it makes no sense to overlook its female equivalence.

So the conclusion here is that in Leviticus the text is not as cut and dry as we have been lead to believe, it is actually extremely ambiguous when we take seriously its context.

And all of this is without mentioning the argument that because this is a part of the Jewish law, Christians are no longer obligated to follow it—and for this, all we need to do is remember Paul’s argument against circumcision in Galatians. And thus, these verses in Leviticus are not an iron-clad case against homosexuality as such.

So at best, these verses in Leviticus are ambiguous, and at worst they are entirely irrelevant to the debate.

Now, in both 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, there is a serious translation issue.

The word “homosexual” never appeared in the Bible until around the mid 1940s, in 1946 to be exact. Up until that time, there was no tradition of biblical interpretation that saw in these texts a prohibition of homosexuality.

And so there is a strong argument for calling this a mistranslation of these two texts. There is little to no evidence that the Greek word used in these verses was ever used to mean a homosexual identity in the surrounding culture.

The language of the Bible has to be contextualized by its environment, and the fact that there is no evidence of this particular Greek word meaning homosexuality in any writing we know of from the time seems to mean it is simply not what the word would have meant to Paul.

The Greek writings we have from that period used the word to mean many other things such as “weak,” “cowardly,” “soft,” or what we might say as “loose” in the ethical sense. Thus, it is again not a case of having anything

to do with a committed homosexual relationship but rather with a moral looseness or sexual perversion.

And the fact remains that the word translated here as homosexual never actually meant homosexual to the original audience, especially not in the sense we think of it today.

So either Paul “secretly” means homosexuality, although there is no source to confirm this, or the translators were letting a biased cultural opinion affect their translation. And I think the history of this translation proves that it is the latter.

Robert Gnuse thinks prostitution and pedophilia are again the most likely historical context for what Paul has in mind here. Or at least, he makes a strong case that at the time, there is no way a loving and consenting relationship would have been what Paul had in mind because there was no historical evidence of this sort of relationship as the norm.

And David Bentley Hart notes as well the ambiguity of the word in his translation of both passages in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy. He prefers to translate the term as “men who couple with catamites,” which refers to the first century practice of sexual relations between a master and a slave boy, so this reaffirms the pedophilia reading.

But Hart also has this to say more directly about why it is improper to translate the word as simply “homosexual”

“It would not mean ‘homosexual’ in the modern sense of a person of a specific erotic disposition, for the simple reason that the ancient world possessed no comparable concept of a specifically homoerotic sexual identity...” The New Testament, 327-8i.

Thus, honest scholars, such as Hart and Gnuse, are those who admit that we really do not know what the word means or what specifically Paul had in mind in these two texts.

However, what seems clear from the historical context is that it could not mean simply homosexuality as such but at best some kind of sex act specific to the first century. But at most, we are just guessing at what Paul means.

Now finally, in Romans, there is some evidence that Paul is addressing the Isis Cult in Rome, which used homosexual practices in their rituals. So this is again about the Christian rejection of a cultural ritual and not of homosexuality as such. And while this text seems to be the most direct critique, it is still not definitive.

Furthermore, the text in Paul is bound to his specific cultural conditions.

So there is a case to be made about reading this text in a similar way that we read other cultural texts like it, such as Paul banning men from having long hair and women from having short hair. No one today is seriously going around telling men they cannot have long hair or that women cannot have short hair. But that is in the text, too, and it is presented in a similar manner.

But there also are more substantial reasons for thinking this text indicates a cultural issue and not a blanket condemnation, even if the link to the Isis cult can be proven false. This has to do with the nature of the male- dominated relationships that were the norm at the time.

The implication of Paul’s verse seems to say that the true issue is not homosexuality as such but the act of reversing the hierarchy so that a man becomes subservient rather than dominant.

But in either case, the text is once again not so cut and dry. It is ambiguous when you combine the cultural, historical, and textual context.

So in all five texts, it is not so obvious that homosexuality as such is condemned. It is far more likely, from a close reading, that there is a specific historical or cultural act in mind and thus that these texts have little to no bearing on modern debates.

We are simply talking about something entirely different than what these texts are discussing. Those of us who are LGBTQIA+ affirming are talking about loving, consenting relationships, not prostitution, pedophilia, rape, or whatever else these texts are about.

I will link several source in the description that goes into more detail here, but the scholarship on this is pretty clear about one thing:

these texts are more ambiguous than what has been thought by those who see in them a clear rejection of homosexuality as such.

So while we can say what the verses are condemning is up for debate, what is clear for most scholars is that these verses do not explicitly condemn homosexuality as such in the modern sense but more likely some other issue that was culturally bound to that particular time period.

In fact, on the question of sexual ethics generally, the bible is far more ambiguous than we have been lead to believe.

And this realization actually raises an important point. In spite of the claim that the Bible has a clear blueprint for human sexuality, there is actually no explicitly stated Biblical ethic for human sexuality.

In fact, the Bible is quite ambitious about sexual ethics, even heterosexual ethics. At times the Bible seems to accept polygamy and even prostitution, while at other times it condemns it.

This strange ambiguity makes its way into the New Testament. Remember how the author of the book of Hebrews praised the prostitute Rahab in the famous chapter on faith, chapter 11, placing her alongside great heroes of the faith such as Abraham.

So the idealized image of a perfect Christian sexual ethic is simply a myth of evangelical Christianity.

Does that mean the Bible has no guidance for us today? No, I do believe there is still much to learn from the Bible.

But it has less to do with the form of individual sexuality than with the content. There certainly is a call for fidelity and trust and self-giving love in human relationships. The New Testament especially lifts up Jesus as our example of what it is to love on another, namely, to lay down our lives for the other. But the how is often less defined than the what.

In other words, the Bible is more ambiguous than evangelicals have led many to believe.

I have found that the more closely I study the Bible for myself, the less and less I think evangelical Christianity actually cares about discovering what the Bible has to say than it is in making the Bible conform to its own preconceived ideas.

And so this is where we come back to the importance of a liberating hermeneutic.

Since the Bible is ambiguous about these issues of human sexuality, and because it is not ambiguous about the importance of liberating the oppressed, then the answer regarding the Church’s approach to the LGBTQIA+ community should become clear.

By default, we should affirm and side with all oppressed peoples, including the LGBTQIA+ community in their struggle for social, political, and sexual liberation.

Our God is the God of the oppressed. The Bible is not ambiguous about that. Nor is it ambiguous about the command to love our neighbors, proclaim good news to the poor, and liberate the captives.

So when faced with ambiguity, we should lean on the certainties we do have about the Gospel rather than prop up our biases and bigotry with unsupported claims about some illusive biblical ethic that never really existed in the first place.

These texts that supposedly condemn homosexuality are not so black and white. Even if my particular argument is flawed here, there are a number of other scholars making similar points, even conservatives. The Bible is simply not so black and white regarding human sexuality.

Thus, at best, the argument against homosexuality must ignore all of these cultural and textual challenges to their interpretation or find a way to work around them to turn their biases into God’s law. And then to use that law to beat over the head an already oppressed community.

I say all of this to stress that the issue of an affirming or non-affirming position is more complex, from the standpoint of biblical scholarship, than whether or not someone simply denies the bible or agrees with it.

I do not think that one has to deny the Bible to affirm the LGBTQIA+ community. Nor do I think one has to challenge the Bible’s authority as the inspired word of God.

But I do think that we must not make the good news of Jesus Christ into a message of repression and condemnation because we take a few isolated and

ambiguous verses out of context and make them the center of our sexual ethic.

In fact, an argument could be made that those who use such texts to condemn the least of these are the ones who are actually denying the Bible itself.

Because while they may have the distilled out the letter of the law to its perfect minute detail, at least in their minds, nonetheless, they have neglected the weightier matters such as love and justice.

3. Personal story.

Now I want to end this video with a brief personal account of my journey towards an affirming position.

I think, for me, meeting actual members of the LGBTQIA+ community and becoming friends with them has made the most significant impact on my thinking.

Because I learned what it is to actually see God in another human being who shares a completely different background than I do, who does not act like me or think like me but who nonetheless is a child of God worthy of love.

I worked at a fashion company as a salesperson for many years, a job which I only recently quit after the pandemic, and it was there that I found myself in the minority, for the first time in my life.

I was a straight man working in an environment of maybe six or seven gay co-workers. Even while I wasn’t usually the only straight man, I was typically in the minority.

This direct and sustained connection removed any sense I once had of LGBTQIA+ individuals being simply objects of speculation or of biblical debate. These people are not just an idea, but real human people.

And this is important to remember: The debate about LGBTQIA+ acceptance is a debate about the worthiness of real human lives.

Evangelicals sometimes talk as if all this is simply an empty ideological debate, like a game of chess or a math competition. But the reality is, they fail to connect the issue with its real human effects.

The damage that the Church has caused in the LGBTQIA+ community is clear and heartbreaking.

We have not been good witnesses of Jesus Christ. We have rejected and excluded and condemned those whom Christ calls His own.

And this stands against us as a condemnation of our empty services and rituals.

As the prophet Amos records, God does not care about our empty rituals and ideological debates. God is concerned with justice for the poor and oppressed:

“I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them;

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-4).

God is not concerned with splitting hairs over biblical texts that may or may not condemn homosexuality. At most, these texts are ambiguous and have little bearing on the current debate, and certainly should not outweigh the message of liberation and justice found throughout the Bible.

Because what is not ambiguous is that God is concerned with justice.

That is why we must see the LGBTQIA+ community not as objects in an ideological debate but as real human persons made in the image of God and thus worthy of love and acceptance and inclusion.

That is why we must be affirming not merely in word but also in deed. We must struggle for the liberation of the oppressed wherever they may be found.

That is how we will be known as Christians. Not by the complexity of our theology but the by abundance of our love.

To be a Christian is to fight for justice for the least of these. The Gospel we proclaim is a message of liberation, and that is why, I think, we must be affirming.

You may disagree with the position that I have presented here, but I hope you can at least grasp the vital importance of fighting for LGBTQIA+ liberation. Perhaps, not as a religious person, but I hope at least, as a human being, you can see the worth of their common humanity.

Now before I go, let me just say that because this video is potentially a controversial one (not potentially, probably), I reserve my right to delete any hostile or condemning comments.

This is a rule for all my videos, but I want to make it explicit here.

If you would like to make your own video or blog in response to this, you are free to do so, but the comments section under my videos is not the place for your monologue. This is not your platform, it is mine, and so I reserve the right to delete any comments I do not want coopting my work.

As a friend of mine once said, shortly ofter coming out as gay, “I don’t debate my humanity—full stop.”

That is my approach to issues where real human beings are concerned. I do not debate the humanity of persons God has chosen to love.

We can disagree about this or that text, this or that theology, but I draw the line at anything that furthers the oppression of the disadvantaged.

Now, if you have made it this far into the video, I do want to thank you for watching. I hope it has been helpful and informative.

And to those in the LGBTQIA+ community who have felt betrayed and hurt by the Church, I sincerely hope you know that Jesus accepts you and loves you and celebrates you for who you are. And so do I.