{"id":1209,"date":"2011-01-21T12:25:47","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T17:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jasonstaples.com\/blog\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2015-06-26T18:19:23","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T22:19:23","slug":"a-civil-war-between-the-church-and-the-gay-community-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonstaples.com\/ethics\/a-civil-war-between-the-church-and-the-gay-community-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"A Civil War Between the Church and the Gay Community? Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
In the wake of the Supreme Court refusing to hear a case challenging the Washington, DC law recognizing gay marriages, DC pastor Anthony Evans has declared a “civil war between the church and the gay community<\/a>“:<\/p>\n “[W]hat the Supreme Court has set up is the greatest civil war between the church and the gay community,” Evans said. “And let me just state for the record, we don’t want that fight. We love our gay brothers and sisters. But if the Supreme Court is not going to acknowledge the fact that we have a right as religious people to have a say-so in the framework of religious ethics for our culture and society, then we reject the Supreme Court on this issue.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Wow. There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start. Evans complains that the Supreme court had denied “religious people” the right “to have a say so in the framework of religious ethics,” but that’s not what’s under discussion at all. On the contrary, the court decision concerns the question of\u00a0 secular legality<\/em>, not religious ethics. That is to say, morality and legality in a secular society are two different domains, though there is certainly overlap (chainsaw murder, for example). But the Supreme Court had nothing whatsoever to say about Evans’ (or anyone else’s) right to declare an action immoral within a given framework of religious ethics.<\/p>\n This conflation of political and religious spheres has become an increasingly visible problem in the political arena over the past thirty years (tracing at least to the beginning of Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” and the rise of “dominion theology,” which I’ll address later), a conflation that rests on a misunderstanding both of the foundations of US government and early Christian theology. (It has also caused much hand wringing from the secular Left, which worries that fundamentalist Christians are seeking to impose a Taliban-style theocratic system in the USA, a concern that both grossly overestimates and misunderstands its opposition. But that’s a subject for another time.) In this post, I’ll address the first misunderstanding (that of the foundations of US government), before turning to Christian theological issues in Part Two<\/a> and finally the specific question of a “civil war between the church and the gay community” in Part Three. (After all this, I then attempt to explore the question of how the church can appropriately interact with the state in this post<\/a>.) To briefly sum up my conclusion from the start: the state should get out of the marriage business altogether, leaving “marriage” to be defined by religious (and para-religious) institutions, while the church should differentiate between marriage and any state-sanctioned civil recognition of a union.<\/p>\n First, part of the problem is a frequently-perpetuated myth of American exceptionalism\u2014that is, the notion that the United States was somehow established and put in place by (the Christian) God as his own specific nation, “[the] one nation under God,” different from all the other nations in the world, set apart as God’s special Christian land. This myth has a long and distinguished list, dating back to the early Puritans who settled in the USA, seeking a new land in which they could practice their Christianity as they saw fit. Though not especially notable at the time, John Winthrop’s famous 1630 sermon, A Model of Christian Charity<\/em> (better known as the “City on a Hill Sermon”), which proclaimed that God had made a special covenant with the Puritans coming to the New World wherein they would be his own holy community, has continued to influence political rhetoric to this day, with such 20th century giants as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan utilizing that speech to proclaim the “uniqueness” of the USA as God’s chosen instrument to lead the world. This sentiment provided the foundation for “Manifest Destiny,” justified massacres of Native Americans, and has continued to undergird notions of American superiority up to the present.<\/p>\nAmerican Exceptionalism: One (the only) Nation Under God?<\/h3>\n