Black and White

It feels like every time I post about my faith journey and it gets shared beyond my network, a handful of (presumably) well-meaning people reach out to share their perspective on why my sexuality is incompatible with the Christian faith. And honestly, I cannot blame them; I used to share the same beliefs they have now — that living a life outside one interpretation of scripture risks my eternal soul being tortured in Hell forever. How sadistic does one have to be to hold that knowledge and not share it with others?!

This (way too long) post is an attempt to answer the many questions I receive about how I can possibly reconcile my sexuality with my faith. A few notes: I welcome (respectful) comments, questions, etc. I’m not going to get into a drawn-out public argument over anything I say here, but I’m happy to clarify anything or provide additional details; also, this is not going to address the issue of scriptural interpretation — that argument is very convincing for some, but it wasn’t for me, and there is a truly staggering amount of literature out there on the topic so I would be saying nothing new here.

For better or worse, the vast majority of my theology around gender and sexuality was developed over my first two semesters at OBU taking the required OT and NT courses from a professor I still deeply respect. Because of that respect, I’m not going to share his name as I haven’t spoken with him since leaving OBU, but anyone who attended at the time should know who he is when I say I’ve never seen a faculty member pushed out so quickly because their beliefs — although theologically sound by OBU’s standards — made donors so uncomfortable.

The essence of what he taught was this: Christians, especially Southern Baptists, have been influenced far too much by culture — to the point that much of what they teach and believe is in direct contradiction to the Bible. His primary issue was that sin was being stratified into different levels of acceptability despite there being no basis for this in scripture. The unsaved, unrepentant murderer? Clearly, they deserve hell. But what about the thief or the adulterer or the alcoholic? He would say, and 1 Cor. 6 would agree, that there’s no question these types of people are subject to the same fate. The same goes for the divorced, the unbaptized, and anyone else who violates these more “clear” rules in scripture. But just because a prohibition in scripture isn’t “clear” doesn’t mean you’re excused from obeying it. 1 Tim. 2 disallows women from preaching in church, and 1 Cor. 11 requires women to cover their heads while praying. Just because these are less palatable areas of scripture doesn’t mean they’re any less essential to remaining in obedience to God. Sin and salvation are black and white, it is or it isn’t. Al Mohler’s first-, second-, and third-order doctrines are a nice idea, but nevertheless an attempt to obscure Biblical teaching so it remains acceptable to the majority. Either you believe in a literal 7-day creation or you go to hell. You were born in a remote village and lived your entire life there and never heard the gospel? Hell. We all deserve eternal suffering anyways so it is only by the grace of God a select few are plucked from Satan’s hand; you think this sounds unfair? Fairness would be every single person ending up with the same horrible fate — this is grace!

Do I believe any of this? Absolutely not — but it’s more theologically consistent than 99% of what I heard in Raley Chapel.

So what does any of this have to do with being gay? I promise I’ll get there. At the same time I was taking these courses, a friend came out to me as what I would later understand to be intersex. This is nowhere near a comprehensive introduction, but for those not familiar with the term, it describes those born outside the binary of male or female, XX or XY chromosomes. This term doesn’t have an “agenda”, it’s not up for debate like being born gay, it’s an indisputable scientific fact. Every day, people are born with any combination of male and/or female reproductive organs and sex chromosomes ranging from XXY to XXXX and beyond.

Wanting to ensure my friend’s salvation and trusting this professor a great deal, I asked how they should navigate sex and marriage and preaching and a number of other things where a person’s gender could decide where they spend eternity. His answer was simple: they must do the best they can with the knowledge they have, and God will judge them in the end, but remember that nobody is promised salvation. What if a person is born with XY (male) chromosomes but female anatomy, and the decision is made at birth for them to be raised as a girl? And what about people whose genetics or anatomy fall outside male/female? The Bible gives clear gender roles and prohibitions, but how can my friend be expected to follow scripture when it doesn’t even define what gender is? If God forms us in the womb, he also builds our genetic code, so gender is genetic? But we didn’t even know sex chromosomes existed until the 20th century. My professor again offered an answer that was both comforting in its clarity and wholly unsatisfactory in its content. Some people — maybe even most people — will never have the opportunity to receive salvation; whether because of where you’re born, or when you’re born, or what life circumstances are present that prevent you from following God’s word, it doesn’t matter. Even if in the entirety of human existence God chose to save one single person, he would still be a good, gracious, and merciful God.

Calling this an extremely harsh and unforgiving theological perspective would be an understatement, but in my opinion, it is the only valid conclusion for somebody who believes the Protestant canon is the complete, inerrant, and infallible word of God. And it’s because of that I have to accept that God’s grace extends beyond our attempts to reserve salvation for a select few. By the time I was having this conversation with my professor, I knew I was gay, and I knew I was born gay, and I knew that the hundreds of hours and dozens of books I read trying to “fix” that had changed absolutely nothing about those two facts. I had to recognize that either I was one of the “unsaveable” (and condemned to hell) or that the systematic theology I had been taught every Sunday for 19 years was wrong. I’m not saying that I have it all correct now, but before my fellow Southern Baptists start condemning entire groups of people to an eternity of fiery judgment, they might want to make sure they’re not going to end up there too.

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