Bigotry and the Bible

It's Easter morning and a day of rejoicing for Christian believers.  Personally, I see little reason for rejoicing when more and more the public face of Christians in America is that of hate-filled bigots who make the Pharisees condemned by Christ in the Bible look charitable and loving in comparison.  Yes, there are decent denominations - the Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterians among others that are more focused on doing the work of the gospel message, but they remain too invisible in the media and fail to loudly and openly condemn the hate merchants and white supremacists who wrap themselves in the mantle of Christianity.  The good news is that 33% of the Millennials have simple walked away from organized religion. I feel almost sorry for the "good Christians" if you will, but their silence is killing the Christian brand and allowing it to be hijacked by truly nasty people and their political prostitutes in the GOP.   Using the Bible to justify hatred is a choice - as is remaining silent when the Bible and religion are being used for hateful purposes.  An op-ed in the New York Times looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

THE drama in Indiana last week and the larger debate over so-called religious freedom laws in other states portray homosexuality and devout Christianity as forces in fierce collision. 

They’re not — at least not in several prominent denominations, which have come to a new understanding of what the Bible does and doesn’t decree, of what people can and cannot divine in regard to God’s will.  And homosexuality and Christianity don’t have to be in conflict in any church anywhere.

[I]n the end, the continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.

It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.  It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable.

And it elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance, above the evidence in front of you, because to look honestly at gay, lesbian and bisexual people is to see that we’re the same magnificent riddles as everyone else: no more or less flawed, no more or less dignified.

Most parents of gay children realize this. So do most children of gay parents. It’s a truth less ambiguous than any Scripture, less complicated than any creed.

So our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.

David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University, . . .  openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes.

For a very long time, he noted, “Many Christians thought slavery wasn’t sinful, until we finally concluded that it was.

“In the United States, we have abandoned the idea that women are second-class, inferior and subordinate to men, but the Bible clearly teaches that,” said Jimmy Creech, a former United Methodist pastor who was removed from ministry in the church after he performed a same-sex marriage ceremony in 1999. “We have said: That’s a part of the culture and history of the Bible. That is not appropriate for us today.”

And we could say the same about the idea that men and women in loving same-sex relationships are doing something wrong. In fact the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have said that. So have most American Catholics, in defiance of their church’s teaching.

Religion is going to be the final holdout and most stubborn refuge for homophobia. It will give license to discrimination. It will cause gay and lesbian teenagers in fundamentalist households to agonize needlessly: Am I broken? Am I damned?

A majority of Americans support marriage equality, including a majority of Catholics and most Jews. But a 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that while 62 percent of white mainline Protestants favor same-sex marriages, only 38 percent of black Protestants, 35 percent of Hispanic Protestants and 28 percent of white evangelical Protestants do.

[T]hese evangelical Protestants wield considerable power in the Republican primaries, thus speaking in a loud voice on the political stage. It’s no accident that none of the most prominent Republicans believed to be contending for the presidency favor same-sex marriage and that none of them joined the broad chorus of outrage over Indiana’s discriminatory religious freedom law. They had the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary to worry about.

[T]he New Testament, like the Old Testament, outlines bad and good behaviors that almost everyone deems archaic and irrelevant today. Why deem the descriptions of homosexual behavior any differently?

All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense. And that’s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.

Well said.  But sadly, the far right Christians - or perhaps I should say pastors and leaders of "family values" organizations will not do so.  There's still too much money to be made peddling hate and discord.  These modern day Pharisees live the good life selling hate and the millions spent opposing gay rights would be much more properly spent feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and providing shelter to the homeless.  Think about it: when have your heard of FRC or AFA engaging in actual works of charity of the sort Christ directed?  Never.  Because doing charitable works doesn't raise the same kind of money that hatred does.