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Distorted Love: The Toll Of Our Christian Theology On The LGBTQ Community


Love doesn’t always look like love.

When I published this blog post, I was prepared for some people to applaud it and for others to condemn it. That’s what happens whenever you put an opinion out there.

I was fully prepared for the waves of both support and hostility that accompany a vantage point on anything, especially a controversial topic like Sexuality. 

What I was not prepared for in any way, were the literally hundreds and hundreds of people who have reached out to me personally to thank me for bringing some healing and hope to their families: parents, children, siblings, and adults who have confided in me (some for the first time anywhere) telling of the pain and bullying and shunning they’re received from churches, pastors, and church members—professed followers of Jesus.

Scores of people from all over the world have shared with me their devastating stories of exclusion and isolation, of unanswered prayers to change, of destructive conversion therapies, of repeated suicide attempts, and of being actively and passively driven from faith by people of faith.

Church, this is the reality of our theology on homosexuality.

This is the cost of our religion to the LGBTQ community. More accurately, it’s the cost of our religion to LGBTQ human beings. This is the painful collateral damage that comes when we see principles and ignore people, when we refuse to give them the dignity they deserve.

Apparently Love does hurt—really, really badly.

The most common defense I’ve heard over from Christians who believe that being gay is both chosen and sinful, has been some variation of the supposedly well-meaning, “Well, we’re just loving people by being honest with them, by giving them ‘the Truth’. Telling people the truth is loving them.”

Well every single day I have a crammed, bursting inbox of “Truth” for you if you’re interested in reading it, Church.

It’s full of vile profanity and utter contempt and crude jokes and physical violence and white-hot fear. It’s packed with school hallway harassment and city street beat downs and church expulsion and workplace hazing and brutal self-harm and all sorts of perpetual, personal terrorism.

And none of it looks a thing like Love to me.

It certainly doesn’t look like love to the sweet, 12-year old middle school girl in your church whose been repeatedly told she’s an abomination; that God already despises her.

It doesn’t look like love to the devastated parents who have watched their son hang himself because he was assured by his Christian schoolmates that he’s better dead than gay.

It doesn’t look like love to the devoted, faithful Christian school teacher who has lost her life-long career for no other reason than her Relationship Status.

It doesn’t look like love to the 60-year old Christian man who has prayed his whole life to be “fixed”, and who God has refused to and yet who remains an outcast in his family of faith.

It doesn’t look like love to the gay couple having their heads smashed-in by professed “Christian” strangers while walking down the street.

It doesn’t look like love to the family of a Transgender high school Junior, who can’t find a church family that will welcome them or include them or acknowledge their child as she now requests to be acknowledged.

And I’m totally comfortable believing that it doesn’t look like love to Jesus either.

The real problem with so much Christian theology toward the LGBTQ community, is that it seemingly works fine from a distance, for someone firing-off Scripture passages or religious phrases; it just often falls apart for them when trying to translate it to actual human lives and within authentic, caring relationships.

When you have the guts and the decency and the compassion to crawl out from behind computer keyboards and touch screens and raised pulpits; from radio show phone calls and bullhorn shouting, you end up standing face-to-face with beautiful, wounded, scarred people with real stories, and you realize something’s wrong here.

Something’s badly broken.

This is not what Christ’s love looks like.

Jesus’ love, even if it came with hard words somehow always seemed and felt like love. People were seen. They were heard. They were touched. They were left with more dignity than when they started. I’m not sure LGBTQ people can say the same about their encounters with most Christians.

Can they say it about you? About your church? About your small group?

So many believers want to make this all about sin; about the “Biblical position on homosexuality” that they’re claiming to be defending, but it really isn’t. Regardless of where you stand theologically as a Christian, this is about treating all people like they are made by God and in the image of God.

Jesus’ command to love God and love others as we would desire to be loved, that is theology too. In fact, He said it was the greatest portion of it; our most pressing personal moral responsibility. You wanna argue that? Argue with Jesus.

Church, the blood and the bruises of the LGBTQ community are on your hands and mine as believers, as long we allow any Christian to dehumanize people under the guise of loving them.

However we want to frame it or justify it, the net result of our religion to so many gay people is that entire families are being torn apart, sent to the shadows, and horribly mistreated in the name of Jesus. Real flesh-and-blood people are going through uninvited, individual Hell every day at the hands of people who claim Christ. The Church’s treatment of the LGBTQ community people has been downright sinful, and it’s killing our testimony to the world.

We’re making it virtually impossible for gay people to exist in our churches and then feeling justified in damning them for walking away from God when they leave. The truth is, so often they aren’t turning away from God, they’re just removing themselves from harm’s way.

We are losing credibility to those outside the organized Christianity, not because we’re condoning sin, but because when the rubber meets the road we really don’t know how to “love the sinner” in any way that remotely resembles Jesus, and all our God is Love platitudes ring hollow.

Church, this is our legacy that we are building in these days to the LGBTQ community and those who love them, and I assure you it’s not legacy of love.

I don’t know what the answer is for you and I can’t tell you how your theology gets expressed in the trenches of real people’s lives. I only know that we as Christ’s Church can do better, regardless of our theological stance. We have to do better.

This is where our faith is proven to be made of Jesus-stuff or not.

This is where the love of God we like to preach about is either clearly seen—or terribly distorted.

 

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