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Difference Is Not A Sin

An Examination Of The Biblical Attitude To Homosexual Behaviour

Chapter 1: Introduction

I start from the basic premise that all people have the right to be loved and to love, in whatever way is natural - even, God given - to them. The idea that this privilege is to be reserved only to heterosexual people is preposterous. Difference is not a sin. We must always challenge conservative minded people who argue that homosexual relationships are in any way inferior to their heterosexual counterparts.

In the western world at least, homosexuals are much better off now than they were even twenty years ago. While they are still the butt of jokes in many quarters and many parents would still be very upset, at least initially, if they found that their son or daughter were homosexual, society in general is much more tolerant. There are no significant moves to recriminalize homosexual behaviour. Homosexuals in prominent positions feel more free to declare themselves, non stereotypical homosexual characters appear in popular media programmes and the general attitude seems increasingly to be `live and let live'.

This isn't true everywhere, there has been a move to the right in world politics, perhaps as a reaction to the perception that we live in an increasingly uncertain and threatening world. The growth of the religious right in the United States with the increased profile of people like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan and the election of George Bush is an example of this. Here in England, there is still resistance by conservative groups to extending full civil rights to homosexual people. The fight before the final equalization of the age of consent, the battle over Clause 28 and the bar on known homosexuals serving in the armed services are obvious examples of this.

In some parts of the world, and particularly in Moslem countries, the situation is much more bleak. Peter Tatchell has estimated from reports made by the exiled Iranian gay rights group, that some four thousand homosexual people have been killed in Iran since the revolution. It is reported that people condemned for homosexual behaviour in Afghanistan are being buried alive.

More cynical perhaps have been the speeches of dubious and thugish African leaders like Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Moi in Kenya who seek to bolster their own unpopular regimes by attacking gay groups in their own societies. In Rumania there are moves, actively supported by an extremely conservative and ill educated clergy, to recriminalize homosexuality and people convicted of homosexual behaviour are threatened with prison. The attitude of the newly resurgent American Republican Party becomes clear when you put together the actions and statements of local state and county authorities. For example, Governor George Allen of Virginia (a state which still outlaws anal and oral intercourse for all) successfully put pressure on the 'Virginia Housing Development Authority' to promote the traditional family and deny house loans for unmarried or gay couples. "You do not have the right to a loan from the government," said the Governor, "What these loans are designed for is to help out families." Actually the loans were intended to promote home ownership among less well off and first time buyers. This is typical of Republican moves across the country to reverse gay rights legislation passed over the last ten years. In this drive the Republicans are being lead by the Christian Coalition, the successor to Pat Robertson's Moral Majority. Newt Gingrich has said that he is "against any law which gives you a legal status based on your sexual orientation." He also said that it is madness to pretend that families are anything other that heterosexual couples. "I think it goes to that heart core of how civilization functions. Over time we want to have an explicit bias in favour of heterosexual marriage." By defining a family unit as being only a heterosexual arrangement and giving such a unit tax and other advantages you are automatically penalizing gay people, and you are using their money to do it. Compared with what is happening in other parts of the world these are comparatively minor concerns but it never-the-less makes an otherwise law abiding and productive group of people feel vulnerable and rejected.

Even in the comparatively liberal atmosphere of France the new conservative administration of President Chirac has taken a similar hard line stance on the position of gay people in stable relationships. According to a spokeswoman, in order to fight against social breakdown gay couples have to be excluded from state assistance. The R.P.R. presided over by Alan Juppe' which ruled France until the recent elections, made public its position over gay couples in an open letter from Danielle Giazzi the party's national secretary, and its spokeswoman on family affairs, published in Le Figaro on December 6th 1995. She asserted that the Republic is based on the 'familial cell' which ' of necessity is made up of a man and a woman ... and the children descended from it ... Families should be a rampart against the social exclusion of individuals and a ring of strength." She concludes, "The decision to accept gay relationships and to give a certificate of co-habitation to gay couples seriously damages our fight against exclusion and our efforts to promote solidarity, and endangers the future of our society." Fortunately these forces were successfully resisted and laws which allowed unmarried couples to register their relationship without getting married have been adopted.

Exclusion of gay couples from benefits and full civil rights is routine in England too. Gay couples in permanent relationships working in the private sector or for government departments have been refused benefits negotiated for married couples and people in permanent heterosexual relationships. "The tax payers would not be happy to see their money spent in this way," said the then Home Secretary Michael Howard. He was conveniently forgetting that up to ten percent of tax payers are homosexual too. The new Labour administration has proved to be more sympathetic to the position of gay people and their resistance to the bullying antics of the Conservative party in the Commons and Lords has been particularly welcome. The election of several new gay MPs at the last election and the elevation of openly gay men to the cabinet are certainly signs that society is changing.

THE INTOLERANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

The resistance, you could almost say rearguard action, against the acceptance of homosexuality and the extension of full civil rights to homosexual people is, and always has been, lead by religious groups. In the pre-Christian Roman Empire and in the Greek culture which preceded and influenced it, there was general tolerance of homosexual activity. It is the Judeao Christian culture which has brought so much misery and suffering to homosexuals. Under the circumstances it is amazing that so many gay people are faithful priests and members of congregations.

The church, taking its starting point from Jewish sensibilities has always laboured under the feeling that sexual relations are somehow only justified if they are linked to the possibility of reproduction. The idea that sexual pleasure is a justification in itself is viewed with considerable suspicion.

Under the catch-all and rather silly phrase 'family values', some, usually evangelical, sections of the church, have launched a concerted and well funded attack on homosexual people and any political or business organization which is seen to support them. Examples of this is the American Southern Baptist Church's proposed boycott of Disney films and products or the urging of Baroness Young here in England to boycott companies with equal opportunity policies which include gay people. In the United States this has gone hand in hand with an attack on single parents, welfare benefits and black affirmative action. Pat Robertson one of the leaders of "The Christian Coalition" and the founder of its precursor "The Moral Majority" said in a fund raising letter that the liberal feminist agenda encouraged women "to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." (One is tempted to feel that of these sins he would probably consider the threat to capitalism the most serious.) Some local leaders of coalition chapters are even more forthright. One west coaster said that homosexuals should be executed. There is strong evidence which links many of these groups to white supremacist and anti Jewish organisations.

The link which joins these right wing organisations, who come from all the main stream churches as well as the more fringe fundamentalist groups, (with the possible exception of the Anglicans or Episcopalians as they are known in the States) is an "almost paranoid fear of the future and a near mystic belief in some past golden age." (Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein, `Storming the gates; Politics and the Republican Revival' 1996) Ralf Reid, the leader of the Christian Coalition, said in a recent speech that the evangelical and catholic churches must unite. "We have got to literally end the centuries of distrust and suspicion that have divided us and we've got to unite together and return America to moral greatness.... the reason is because the darkness has become so great and the social pathologies have become so cancerous .... that we can no longer afford to be divided." It is bizarre and rather chilling that this ludicrous reasoning has so much acceptance.

Even in England where traditionally, fundamentalist religious views have not had a strong following, attitudes in some sections of the church are hardening. There is evidence from within the General Synod that some members would like to move against gay clergy. Certainly any moves towards the acceptance that gay relationships may reflect the Christian understanding of love, could be blessed by God, or might be beneficial to the individuals concerned and to society as a whole, are being vigorously opposed by such groups as `Reform' lead by the arch self publicist, The Revd. David Holloway which claims to have several hundred clergy in its membership. While much other biblical moral teaching is rejected or rightly seen as having limited application today the biblical injunctions against homosexual activity are given almost unique authority. This is not I believe because they merit such authority but because they happen to coincide with the prejudices and fears of the commentators concerned.

The cosy conspiracy of silence to which the late Archbishop Runcie recently admitted, which in the past has attended the ordination of known homosexuals to the priesthood, has been blown open by the activities of groups like 'Outrage'. They have pointed to the hypocrisy of the church espousing one moral position in public while adopting a different practice in fact. The church may have acted out of a desire to be charitable to individuals, and certainly many homosexual priests and bishops gained a measure of protection from this policy, but as many evangelical Christians pointed out, it all smacked of intellectual confusion and dishonesty. Clearly Archbishop Runcie and many of his colleagues did not accept the church's traditional teaching on homosexuality and I have been present at dinner parties where the diocesan bishop has happily and knowingly been entertained by a gay priest and his male partner. The Church of England is heavily dependent, particularly in urban areas on the ministry of homosexual clergy, and it has been estimated that about a quarter of the Anglican priests ministering in central London are gay. If the Church of England really did decide to dispense with the services of its actively gay clergy its pastoral ministry would not merely suffer, it would in whole swathes of our cities simply cease to exist.

Far more seriously perhaps for its reputation the Christian church has found itself rocked in recent years by a tide of sexual scandals and controversies. Cardinal Cahil Daly the former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland spoke of "...wave after wave of scandal crashing and breaking against the church." The Roman Catholic Church has at long last been forced to admit that many of its clergy have been involved in paedophilia and the Christian Brothers in particular have now issued a formal apology for their previous behaviour. Even more Roman Catholic clergy have broken their vows of celibacy. Such scandals have surfaced in the United States, Canada, and Australia as well as in Ireland.

But this is not the only, or even the most important, sexual problem which is facing the Catholic Church. It has been estimated that world wide, up to one hundred thousand priests have left the ministry in the last ten years, one thousand in the United Kingdom alone. Most of these priests have left to get married or pursue relationships with women, the latest being the Bishop of Argyle and the Isles, Roderick White. The position of the Roman Catholic Church over the question of a celibate priesthood is hopelessly muddled, particularly in England where married ex Anglican priests have been re-ordained as Roman Catholics. In Brazil there is even a married Bishop. Ordinations are at an all time low, forty-seven in the U.K. last year. In France the catholic leadership has announced that while each year eight hundred priests die or retire, only one hundred new priests are ordained.

As significant has been the rejection of traditional teaching about sexual matters by the faithful. Teaching against birth control and even abortion has been rejected by people everywhere where methods of birth control are available. The church teaching that sexual relations outside marriage are always wrong, is simply no longer accepted by people both inside and outside the church and is observed only in the breach.

The situation in the Anglican church is different but hardly less serious. Its unity has been tested to breaking point and beyond, by the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood. Though many opponents of such ordinations would deny it, this is also a dispute which hinges on questions of sexuality. My own church has been involved in a heated debate about whether women should be allowed to serve at the Mass. And as I have already said the position of gay clergy is rising up the church's political agenda.

THE SHAPE OF THIS BOOK

In this book I am primarily interested with the attitude of biblical writers to homosexual behaviour, and how their writings have influenced and shaped the hostile attitudes of some parts of the church today. However this is only one aspect of the debate about human sexuality which is so seriously dividing the church. Sexuality is to the church of the twentieth century what Galileo was to the church of the sixteenth or Darwin to the church of the nineteenth century. We cannot expect the church to come to a reasonable or reasoned, understanding of gay sexuality while it is so clearly divided about human sexuality itself. This is a symptom of the general failure of the church to come to terms with increasing human knowledge whether scientific or psychological. In my opinion this failure has been the principal cause of its diminishing congregations and dwindling influence. In popular understanding God has been replaced by science. For the church to regain its credibility and maintain its influence in our society it must be intellectually credible.

I hope this book will contribute to enhancing the moral credibility of the Church. It is in five sections: first I want to look at the ideas about the human body which are explicit and implicit in the Old and New Testaments and compare them with the attitudes current in other areas of the contemporary classical world particularly Greece and later in Rome.

The second part is a detailed examination of the eighteen biblical texts which may refer to homosexual activity. The Old Testament passages are examined under four headings: homosexual rape; laws against homosexual behaviour; ritual homosexual prostitution; and the examination of a homosexual love story. The New Testament passages are all from the Epistles, no mention of homosexual behaviour is made in the four Gospels. Of all these biblical texts only three I believe, are unequivocal condemnations of homosexual behaviour as such. They are the two passages in Leviticus in the Old Testament and the passage in Paul's letter to the Romans in the New Testament. The other passages condemn behaviour of which homosexuality is a side issue, as at Sodom; or prostitution ritual or otherwise; or present such problems of translation or interpretation, as in the verses in 1 Corinthians, that the meaning is far from clear.

In the third part, I want to examine the idea of using the Bible as a moral guide which has been the tradition throughout the history of the church. In condemning homosexuality the church has always appealed to the Bible to justify its attitudes. However as I believe I demonstrate, we have to be very careful about using the Bible in this way. The Bible is a very uncertain guide for ethical teaching, and as an example of this I shall examine four biblical attitudes which we no longer accept as appropriate teaching today; attitudes which are clearly limited by the knowledge and the social and cultural assumptions of their time.

In the fourth section I shall look at some of the findings from recent medical research and how increasing knowledge of sexual psychology and human genetics has changed medical opinion about homosexuality. While psychiatrists have ceased to treat homosexuality as an illness, some parts of the church still promote so called `gay cures'.

Finally, on the basis of all this information, I will suggest a Christian approach to homosexuality which I believe is both moral and consistent with modern biblical, medical and psychological knowledge.