Homosexuality and the Poverty of Christian Imagination

The Bible is silent.

Since officially becoming religiously unaffiliated for the first time in my life, I have returned to contemplating Christianity, engaging with its online communities, and even considering returning to it as a religious identity.

In doing so, I have been thinking about the Bible, and noting its beauty, depth, and complexity. I have also discovered, perhaps for the first time, the complete voicelessness of the Bible on certain experiences fundamental to my life.

Early in our relationship, Jonathan and I were hiking in the Appalachian wilderness. However, we misjudged the amount of snowfall in the area and Jon, not wearing good footwear for the weather, started to freeze, his feet becoming dangerously cold.

I lifted him onto my back and carried him down the mountain, running him back to the warmth of our car, navigating the precarious ice and snow.

We reached the car, and I turned on the heat. I stripped off his shoes and socks and warmed his feet with my hands, body, and breath. Once warmth started to return to his extremities, he grabbed me by the face and kissed me, deeply. “That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me,” he said.

I can’t recall if we made love after that incident on the mountain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we did, since young men in love are wont to do so.

Jonathan and I have protected and fought for each other more times than I can count ever since. For a decade, we have been carrying each other down the mountain.

He has been an anchor amid my mental torture. He has held me as the strange fire of Bipolar ravaged my brain. One night years ago, as my body shook, he held me and whispered the prayer of St. Teresa of Avila into my ear, again and again:

Let nothing disturb you, 
Let nothing frighten you, 
All things are passing away: 
God never changes. 
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing; 
God alone suffices.

He is there when I wake up screaming in the middle of the night. He shelters me with a home, financial security, and love since I am certainly the less stable of the two of us. I am indebted to him, literally, with my life.

I finally got medical attention for Bipolar II and changed my entire life because I could no longer bear to hurt and exhaust him the way I did in my illness. I provide him with love, a listening ear, and my body. I wish I could say I offer him more, but everything I have feels insufficient to match my love for him or the debt I owe him. And I know he feels the same towards me.

Jonathan and I have seen each other at our worst: at our most dysregulated, selfish, and petty. And yet, we must love each other despite these moments, and temper our worst impulses for of love for each other.

“Can't you have all that good self-sacrificing friendship stuff without the sex stuff?” you may ask. Certainly, and I have many close friendships that are as dear to me as Jonathan is. A life without friendship is impoverished, and relying solely on a spouse is an insufficient way to live. Love is an ecosystem, and we need many different types of love to flourish. But sex is not incidental to our partnership; it is a crucial ingredient. Sex cannot be separated from the virtues of our relationship.

But you already know this, dear Christian. Otherwise, you would have no yearning for sex in your own romantic relationships, and you wouldn’t value marriage the way you do. You would live in spiritual friendship the way you admonish us to, and the virtues espoused in The Song of Solomon would fall on your deaf ears.

I know every inch of Jonathan’s body, and he knows every scar, contour, flaw, and blemish of mine. Together, we have explored secret yearnings and pleasures. I think he's hot, and he thinks I'm hot. I see him engrossed in work at his desk, or reading a book on the couch, and admire the masculine beauty of his profile.

I know what turns him on, he knows what turns me on. We've seen each other, untold thousands of times, in that most vulnerable place: at the height of physical pleasure. To love someone through the exchange of that vulnerability is precious.

We have watched each other age from dumb kids in our twenties to men in our thirties. He’s going prematurely grey, and I think it’s hot. We’ve gained and lost and gained muscle and fat. Lines are forming where there used to be smooth skin. We’ve loved each other’s bodies through all these changes. We are committed to continuing to love each other’s bodies into old age.

Incidentally, being enjoyed naked by someone who loves you more than himself is an excellent inspiration to never engage in self-harm ever again. I was a cutter for a decade. I stopped when Jonathan started loving my body as he loves his own. I would have to explain my fresh cuts, not to someone who accuses and punishes, but to someone who loves and only wants the best for me.

We are brothers as much as we are lovers. It isn't a heterosexual love. This is obvious, but the implications are profound. Macklemore declared it a "same love," but nothing can be further from the truth. No, it is a sexual love entirely masculine in kind. There is no womanly touch, no femaleness to act as a balancing weight to maleness, and no egg to receive the seed. It is only male, and that has its own kind of rugged, tender beauty.

Above all, I respect Jonathan. He makes me want to be a better man. I am a better man because of him.

The Bible has roughly six passages prohibiting homosexual activity. It also speaks, in my opinion, with a unified voice that heterosexuality is God’s plan for human sexuality. At the same time, the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality is impoverished. It has no imagination of what homosexual love is and means. Nowhere does it speak to what I have experienced for the past decade with Jon. I therefore find it hilarious, impossible, and insulting to take its unified voice seriously.

The pagans of Romans 1 who “exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” (NIV) because God abandoned them to idol worship comically have nothing in common with me. I exchanged nothing for homosexuality. I remember feeling the first stirrings of homosexuality when I was an 8-year-old boy. As a young Christian man, I did nothing but submit, and submit, and submit to God until I was broken husk.

Paul’s arsenokai and malakoi, which appear in his lists of sins, appear to have a great deal to do with male prostitution, temple worship, and unrestrained lust, but nothing to do with me.

And what am I to do with the prohibitions against homosexuality in the Old Testament? The attempted violent rape in Sodom and Gomorrah certainly has nothing to say about me. And why should I care about Leviticus, when even the most conservative Christians play fast and loose with what they take seriously in Mosaic law?

But these are not the strongest biblical cases against homosexuality. The greatest case against homosexuality is the Bible’s unified vision of heterosexuality as God’s blueprint for humanity. This blueprint is found from the first pages of Genesis, all the way to the end of the Old Testament. This vision includes Jewish law, Jesus’s teachings, and the letters of the New Testament.

Certainly, compelling and nuanced arguments for affirming gay relationships can be made, the very best of which are found in James Brownson’s Bible, Gender, Sexuality. I support Christians who put forward affirming arguments because I think it is objectively better for the world for them to do so. But, in my opinion, these arguments make the weaker case. Sometimes the plainest reading wins, and the position that the Bible condemns homosexuality is the most obvious of the two.

To which I must ask, with all sincerity: why should I care? The condemnation is so thin and lacking in imagination that it fails to speak to the complexity of my partnership. Without Jon I would be dead. It’s my life versus your theology, the holy scripture of reality versus the scripture of your God.

Even if it were true that homosexuality is a damaged and imperfect vision of God’s vision, why not flip this Necker cube? Instead of seeing it as totally sinful, why not celebrate it for the good it retains? We don’t begrudge Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica for being unfinished. Why scorn homosexual love for being an incomplete vision of God’s original plan?

Presumably, it is the role of church tradition to flesh out the thin voice of scripture. But Christians – even sophisticated ones – don’t exactly cover themselves in glory here either. Often the best they can muster is a comparison to their own sins rather than their most life-giving, complex, and virtuous relationships.

Oh, it's like alcoholism, they say, and I just need to get back on the wagon and stay sober. Or, they helpfully suggest, everyone is called to chastity and to not indulge their baser desires, like adultery or sleeping around. As if the full spectrum of homosexual light can be reduced to the monochrome of "baser desires,” to the absurd shadow of “addiction.”

Forgive me for finding all this laughable, and it's at this point that I want to become uncharitable. Are you not married? Have you never witnessed the complex depths of a committed, long-term marriage? Are you so blinkered and lacking in theory of mind that you can't, at least to some degree, relate your experience of marriage to the relationships and yearnings of gay people? Or is homosexuality so alien, so other, that your capacity for cognitive empathy hits a wall? Do you have no imagination? Are you too frightened to have one?

I want to ask Christians: what do you expect me to do? Divorce Jonathan? Tear our lives asunder? Move back into my parent’s house because I have nowhere to live? Break his heart and destroy his life? If your answer to my question is a simple yes without hesitation, without a single tear, without fear and trembling, how am I to see your theology as anything other than morally monstrous? For once, think through the implications of your theology, and what you casually ask of me, and untold millions of gay couples like me and Jon.

I can only assume that such Christians do not have the eyes to see the beauty and virtue I have seen because the alternative to blindness is far uglier. If they saw the beauty of homosexual love but failed to grapple with it, they would be like the devil, calling beauty ugliness and goodness wickedness. They, like Satan in Paradise Lost, would have declared, “evil, be thou my good.” To maintain my sense of charity, I choose to believe they are blind instead.

It’s worth pointing out that not all Christians committed to the traditional ethic are guilty of this. At least Christians like

Eve Tushnet

and her Building Catholic Futures project attempt to explore that which is holy in gay relationships while still maintaining the traditional ethic. While I believe this presents other problems, I deeply appreciate the humility and honesty on her part. I have a lot of time for gay and straight Christians who don’t reduce homosexuality while trying to reconcile it with their traditional perspectives. It is a titanic struggle, one I know all too well, having lived it myself for years. I’m not satisfied with their answers, but I consider them more ally than enemy.

But this is all academic. I no longer believe in Christianity, and this is no longer my fight. I wash my hands of the whole debacle. It is only now, as a long-time post-Christian who has returned to considering Christianity, that I can accept what I couldn’t as a believer: the Bible is silent about many of the most important aspects of my life, and Christian imagination often fails me just as profoundly.

If you want me to care — if you want me to believe that the Bible has something meaningful to say about my life that is compelling enough for reconversion, then demonstrate to me that the Bible has anything meaningful to say about this decade of partnership.

The Bible is on Osiris' scale. On one side, the words and convictions of an ancient religion I no longer believe. On the other, the vast story of life and virtue that is my partnership of a decade. The Bible is found wanting, and until I see any reason to believe the Bible actually speaks meaningfully to the lived, embodied realities of my partnership, not only would it be stupid to exchange one for the other, it would be immoral.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section. If your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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