A few weeks ago, President Obama announced his unqualified support for gay marriage. Immediately following the President's statement, the NAACP Board with nearly unanimous support, passed a resolution supporting gay marriage as a civil right. Interestingly, the President’s declaration came a day after North Carolina voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional ban on gay marriages by a vote of 60-40 percent. In fact, whenever the issue of gay marriage has been voted on by the public, it has been rejected. And there is greater opposition among black Democrats than white Democrats to the President’s decision. 61% of white Democrats supported legalizing marriage for same-sex couples, compared with 36% of black Democrats. 35% of black Democrats opposed any legal recognition, compared with just 18% of white Democrats.
Gay rights and civil rights groups were ecstatic over the President’s and the NAACP’s decisions. However, many in the religious community view the movement towards approving gay marriage as another sign of America’s moral erosion and an attack on “traditional marriage.”
How should we approach the gay marriage debate?
One of the things we must admit at the front end is that any discussion about gay marriage is really complex. Often Christians, especially Christians who have a conservative view of the Bible, communicate that the issue of the government’s recognition of gay marriage is really easy to resolve. It is not!
Dennis Hollinger is the president and professor of Christian Ethics at the Evangelical School of Theology in Pennsylvania. He very helpfully distinguishes between three things that Christians often stir together – Christian ethics, Christian pastoral care, and a Christian approach to public policy (1).
When we’re talking about Christian ethics, we are talking about what is God’s ideal, what is God will, and what does God intend for our sexuality? If we are talking about Christian pastoral care, we are talking about how we relate to people who have fallen short of God’s ideal. What do we do with people who don’t live up to the standard as it is expressed in God’s Word? And what is the Christian approach to public policy? Even if we agree on what God’s ideal is regarding our human sexuality, and we agree on a pastoral approach within the church regarding how we’re going to relate to people who fall short of the ideal, what is our approach in a pluralistic society that doesn’t necessarily agrees with a Christian view of sexuality? As Christians relate to politics, you can’t simply say, “Well, this is what it says in the Bible.” And now we’re going to demand that everyone – Christian and non-Christian alike, people who know Jesus and have God’s Spirit in their lives, and people who don’t have a relationship with Jesus – everyone has to follow this. Public policy gets into practical concerns about what is enforceable, what is possible, what will harm the spread of the gospel, and what is wise.
I will be tackling some of the public policy issues in future blog posts. For now, my simple point is that one cannot simply draw a straight line from one’s reading of the Bible concerning an issue of sexual ethics to the application of that reading onto the larger society which does not accept the Bible’s authority. We need to think long and hard about why, in this particular instance, the Christian ethic ought to be the law of the land.
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(1) Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2002)