The problem of liberal Christianity undermining Gay rights.
The problem of liberal Christianity undermining Gay rights.
They aren't really concerned about Gay rights, they are concerned about trying to survive social change in a society which is more and more accepting Gays.
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Introduction
Time and time again when I bring up Christian homophobia, I find someone say, “That’s not what true Christianity is,” and then want to lead the discussion into the Bible and into discussing Christianity.
This is also a discussion leading away from the fact we have rights whether Christians approve or not. Or a discussion what is going to be an effective tactic to fight back.
This essay is about how the “true Christianity” argument and liberal Christianity in general undermines our rights.
It is the first draft, but I want to get more Gay atheists and atheists in general realizing that they are not our friends.
They are one of the major factors in the Gay community’s failure to mount an effective defense of the Gay community and mount a offense against homophobic Christianity.
Liberal Christianity undermining Gay rights.
Homophobic Christianity is the primary cause the adverse situation that Gays face nationally in the United States and is a major cause globally. Effective strategies are needed to bring down homophobic Christianity. Liberal and progressive Christianity are the primary obstacles to having effective strategie against homophobic Christianity.
It is obvious that homophobic Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christians are a problem and are the opponents of Gays regardless of how they might pose their homophobia. (Such as “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”)
What isn’t obvious to the Gay community is how the agenda of liberal Christians undermines the Gay community’s fight for social justice in multiple ways. Their agenda is pernicious because it isn’t recognized as undermining the Gay community and so it does its damage unopposed.
Christianity has a long history of persecution, violence and intolerance over 20 centuries only to be matched by other Abrahamic religions such as Islam.
It would be very reasonable to say that it is the inherent nature of Christianity to be violently persecuting. The homophobia of Christianity can be seen as part of this religion’s inherent pathology.
The rise of religious tolerance in the modern world has attributed to historical progress into an age of reason from the “Dark Ages,” and therefore we have a modern reasonable Christianity. Earlier Christianity’s behavior is attributed to a lack of modern thinking, as if people are inherently intolerant and vicious in the past and not that it might be inherent to Christianity.
The rise of tolerance in religion coincides with African slavery and imperial expansion in the West. If a place has a ratio of slaves to white people of 2 to 1, or 3 to 1, or highter, whites can’t have religious divisions. In a colonial occupation with the ratio of natives to occupiers in the hundreds, the white occupiers must not be divided by religion.
With the end of European imperialism, African slavery, the end of legal systems of white supremacy and the Cold War between Capitalist and Communist nations having come to an end, we see the rise of Christian nationalism wanting to make government theocratic.
Even without accepting this historical interpretation, it can be seen that the intolerant persecuting nature isn’t necessarily going to be ended by some inherent element in in the process of history in the present and in the future
Given the inherent threat that Christianity poses to Gays globally, an obvious strategy would be to attack Christianity itself. It is, if objectively viewed, a religion based on a book full of murder, intolerance, and death. It has a long history of murder and mayhem, intolerance and persecution including burning at the stake each other for heresy and others for witchcraft and idolatry. It is solidly pro-slavery, which modern Christians avoid recognizing with the most careful selective readings and denial. The modern interpretation of the Bible being not supporting slavery was somehow not discovered 18 or 19 centuries. It has weird religious cannibal sacraments such as communion where they devour their God. Can a girl of 12 to 14 consent to being impregnated by a god who she knows has slaughtered thousands?
The motivations of many of these Christians to be Christians, to join these churches and to campaign against Gays is obviously self-indulgent and self-serving.
Christianity is vulnerable. The opportunity to knock it down is there.
Christianity has already alienated a very large fraction of the public and some segments of Christianity are already in rapid decline.
Comparing 2024 to 1924 you can see that the historical factors that once empowered it, are no longer present. Whereas the world was once ruled by the Christian European empires identifying Christianity with power favored by god, and Christian society being advanced socially, technologically, scientifically, and economically, that is no longer true. It is now a multi-polar world where non-Christian Asian nations have arisen with economic and political power and technological leadership in multiple areas. Today the advanced semiconductors that the world’s economy depends on all come from East Asian nations. Many parents want their children to learn Mandarin in the schools for their careers.
Christianity also has a negative legacy of having been part of the European conquest and exploitation of the world.
In the United States, society has urbanization and become much more educated. The population is not only urbanized, but has been for more than one generation. Where in 1924 few had college educations, now for many, college education has been multi- generational in their family. Where in 1924 travel was by railways and ships, with automobiles being then new and the interstate highway system yet to be built, today travel is global on jets, resulting in broader and less parochial attitudes. Communications have revolutionized from when radiobroadcasting was starting to a world of smartphones, internet streaming, cable, television broadcasting, satellite broadcasting and fully developed extraterrestrial broadcasting. Christianity exists in a world of competing viewpoints and a public that isn’t isolated from the rest of the world and is no longer parochial.
Christianity is declining, has growing unpopularity, can no longer control, suppress or contain criticism and is vulnerable.
Further, though the percentage of Gays is only about 3%, the percentage of the population which is a relative of a Gay person, such as brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts, grandparents, adds up. Along with straight friends, colleagues, and other associations, it adds up to a majority. These persons may have problematic issues with homosexuality, but they don’t want to see the homosexual that they know or related to harmed or denounced. We are more popular than the Christians. That is why homophobic Christians have adopted the “Love the sinner, hate the sin approach.” Opinion polls have shown that homophobia is one of the major factors driving the decline in Christianity.
Certainly going after Christianity would be a very effective strategy.
Yet, if it is proposed to go after Christianity, the wailing response by Christians is that homophobic Christianity isn’t “true Christianity.”
This needs to be recognized as a block of an effective approach to fight homophobic Christianity for the purpose of the liberal Christians to save Christianity in the 21st century.
“True Christianity” needs to be understood as a misdirection into an entanglement. Christians themselves haven’t agreed on what true Christianity is over 20 centuries of strenuous and violent disagreement and there are an endless number of Christian denominations. On the basis of a supposed “true Christianity” we are supposed to give up a very promising approach to defeat homophobia.
Further it’s dragging our defense against homophobia into their Bible and a quagmire of endless and unresolvable and ineffective theological debate instead of our rights in a rational secular society not to be persecuted by theocratic crazies.
An equivalent of the “true Christianity,” is the argument that the “Bible isn’t anti-Gay,” claim.
What we need to do is to avoid getting pulled into these entangled theological debates, and instead look at what Christianity actually does. We need to ask what is its historical record and how does it behave now. We need to have an effective defense from homophobic Christian attacks being committed by homophobic Christianity.
These arguments about “real Christianity” and the Bible are really about saving Christianity and not about our security. The liberal Christians hope to escape public disapproval of homophobia. They hope not to be enemies with those Gays that they know and lose them socially. They hope to avoid extinction of their denomination in a changing world that is less and less homophobic.
The liberal Christian assertion that the Bible isn’t anti-Gay is a danger for Gays. An assessment of what the likely understanding of the Bible will be by Christians now and in the future is avoided. The non-homophobic interpretation of the Bible seems to involve a lot of involved theological contortions and heavy lifting. A plain reading likely concludes that homosexuality is an abomination deserving death. The liberal Christians avoid the question whether non-homophobic Christianity is likely to always be a small fraction of Christianity with a risk of reversion to homophobic Christianity. Currently, globally, the great majority of Christians are homophobic, and often intensely and angrily so.
What is pernicious about liberal Christianity is that it obscures that homophobia and persecuting and violent campaigns against Gays is very likely inherent to Christianity.
Liberal Christians frame the issue of the homophobic Christians as being persons having a technical error in their understanding of Christianity perhaps as a result of being misled.
There is some recognition that some Christians might have a pre-existing homophobia for which they are using the Bible to justify their prejudice.
Or they have some disorder of personality and just want to be hateful.
What isn’t recognized by the liberal Christian is that homophobic Christianity is integral to the role of being a Christian for many. It isn’t for homophobic Christians a side issue or tangential.
For the Evangelical Christian, they are the star in a drama where they are against the world crusading for the true faith and holiness. There are demons and devils which prayer warriors are to fight against. An obvious target for these dramas are Gays who are vociferously denounced in the Bible and are a small minority. By choosing this homophobic Christianity they are affirming their commitment to Christianity in defiance of the world in their personal drama filling up their empty lives. If condemned for their homophobia, they have the glory of some type of martyrdom.
Giving up their homophobia would mean deflating themselves, their self-worth, and having to face having been foolish and having meaningless lives.
These Christians desperately desire certainty. That their god and Christianity is unchanging, is a rock of the ages, gives a sense of something to cling for a sense of security in a changing world.
Acceptance of homosexuality now where it wasn’t accepted in the past, by an interpretation in defiance of the plain reading of the Bible, means nothing in Christianity is solid and unchanging. Instead of a rock of ages, there is more of the changing and bewildering world.
The liberal Christian idea of the issue of seeing homophobic Christianity as a technical error of Biblical interpretation avoids recognizing that Christian theology is a plan and an operating system for exterminating religious competition and achieving domination to totally control society.
The New Testament asserts that those who refuse to believe will suffer terribly. All other religions are evil. The goal is the elimination of other beliefs and a theocracy.
The toleration of Gays at all, let alone Gay pride, represents the Christian failure to dominate theology and society, a failure to execute the Christian theological operating plan. It undermines Christian belief that they will triumph in the end and that their god is in control.
That theocratic control won’t be achieved or isn’t a valid goal is in contradiction to core operating system of Christianity.
Toleration of homosexuality is inherently the destruction of the credibility of Christianity.
Liberal Christianity with its framing the issue as being a particular interpretation of a particular part or parts of the Bible avoids these other questions about the nature of Christianity and the danger to Gays.
The liberal Christian framework for Christianity and Gays works to shutdown Gay discussions of strategies to effectively defend the Gay community from the attacks of homophobic Christianity.
It might be argued that Liberal Christians are at least fighting with us as allies. However assessing them as allies shows them lacking and inconsequential as allies.
The Stonewall Riots were in 1969. It is now 2024, 55 years after the riots. It is nearly three generations later. The logic and rational behind accepting Gays were fairly obvious from early on. The liberal Christian denominations have only started to accept Gays within the last decade, crumbling into fragments as they do. They have been very slow, remarkably slow considering that they make some claim to being especially connected to the divine and having some type of spiritual guidance. Apologists for this slow pace argue that religions change slowly, not realizing that they are arguing that their religion is a mental impairment.
Even when they do change and liberal Christians carry on like it is some great accomplishment, close examination reveals that the change is trivial and trivializing of the humanity of Gays.
The recent 2024 trumpeted change in the policies of the United Methodist Church towards homosexuals upon examination reveals a travesty of triviality mocking the humanity of Gays.
The change in the policy has broken up the denomination in the United States and so the scope of this change is a small fragment of Christianity in the United States.
Further the change isn’t binding on individual churches. Some Methodist churches have declared that they won’t do Gay marriages and the United Methodist Church has said that individual churches can do this. The change turns out to merely be that they aren’t going to go after and prosecute churches that have Gay weddings as they were doing before.
A Gay Methodist might be a member of on accepting church but has no assurance that another United Methodist church will be accepting. A Gay Methodist might find that his own long-time church might go from accepting to none accepting. If individual churches can be unaccepting, there is even the possibility that some time in the future the denomination might officially be accepting, but with a great majority of individual churches being unaccepting, the denomination is in practice actually unaccepting.
Further, what does accepting individual homophobic churches say about how the United Methodists value the humanity of Gays. Would they accept a church that was white supremacist or anti-Semitic, a church that refused to marry an interracial couple? No they would not? But they accept a church which would refuse to marry a Gay couple.
Similarly, the American branch of United Methodists plan on having continuing relations with the virulent homophobic branches in Africa. It again shows how trivial the humanity of Gays is valued by the United Methodist Church.
As allies, liberal Christian denominations can be seen as attempting to survive social change by adopting some superficial changes and fragmenting as they do. How much they can possibly be allies, when they break up with just attempting basic minimal changes while taking decades to do so has to be questioned.
As allies liberal Christians don’t do much. During 2023 a group of LGBT protested and picketed a church in Cedar Hill, Texas that called for the government to execute homosexuals. The liberal Christian churches and denominations never sent anyone to protest with us. They never denounced Stedfast Baptist Church in the media. They never even made public pronouncements about the “true Christianity.” I am sure they have rationalizations if questioned about this.
What did occur was that a Christian Paula Dardaganian had published in the Dallas Morning News, the local major daily, a letter to the editor arguing that if Gays were to be executed or punished, it was the Christian god who is to do the executing or punishing. The question as to whether Gays should be executed or punished was avoided entirely.
No liberal church or denomination criticized her letter either.
The “true Christianity” argument comes up when Gays are having their patience exhausted by Christianity and being vocal about it, questions about Christianity being a problem are discussed, and when serious counter measures against Christianity are being discussed.
The liberal Christians aren’t going to be doing anything much besides trivialities to defend the Gay community from the attacks by homophobic Christians, and we should not allow them to shut down our discussion of effective tactics and strategies to bring down homophobic Christianity.
We shouldn’t let the Gay members of these churches block effective self-defense of the Gay community either.
We need to understand that liberal Christianity is a problem because their agenda is to shut down our agenda of self-defense against homophobic Christianity, which is most of Christianity on the globe.
