Reviving Monica
In his article in the February issue of First Things, “The Rise and Fall of Gay Activism,” Scott Yenor details the various waves of the gay liberation movement that, beginning around the time I was born, as an outgrowth of the sexual revolution both created and defined what has been the defining pastoral and theological issue for my generation of pastors. Yenor’s article is a deep-dive on the subject, detailing the thinking and strategies that took same-sex relationships from forbidden, to fringe, to fraught, to front-and-center. Same-sex attraction has in both the popular and scholarly imagination, gone from disordered to desirable in the space of living memory. Indeed, among many young people it is seen as in many ways more desirable than heterosexual attraction, as it does not carry with it two great risks; the risk of navigating the natural divide between male and female ways of encountering and engaging reality and the risk of the life-changing effects of pregnancy and parenthood, which necessarily involves the curtailing of one’s own desires for the sake of the children.
“The love that dare not speak its name” is not only shouting it from every height and corner of the culture, but all who do not add their enthusiastic endorsement are publicly regarded with the scorn and opprobrium once reserved for Nazis and the KKK. When I reposted a link to former New Atheist Aayan Hirsi-Ali’s now-viral essay “Why I Am Now a Christian,” all a high school friend, once a devout Roman Catholic, could reply in response was, “But Christianity still has no place for gay people.”
It was not worth responding to her that Christianity has all the room in the world for people who think of themselves as gay, it just has no ability nor authority to condone or bless same-sex sexual behavior… just as it has no room to do so for much (most?) of the behavior engaged in by heterosexual couples since the sexual revolution. It was not worth saying that the church is full of sinners who struggle to live out, live up to, and live into the fullness of God’s revealed intentions for not just sex, but the whole panoply of human behaviors.
There was no point in responding because social media is not a place to do pastoral counseling or theology, but rather to engage in rhetorical pugilism and gather an observing crowd whose primary purpose is not to thoughtfully listen and reconsider their own position, but to cheer for the point of view they already espouse.
In such contexts, truth is not the point. A generation ago, in a book that still stands without peer or persuasive reply, Robert Gagnon’s The Bible and Homosexual Practice demonstrated using historical-critical exegesis that orthodox, Biblically-based Christianity not only cannot endorse same-sex behavior, but that there were few moral perspectives in the Scripture more consistently attested to in both Testaments.
Christianity also cannot endorse the central claim of the sexual revolution, the claim that sexual orientation and expression is central to human identity and flourishing. Biblical Christianity insists that true human flourishing can only be found when one identifies themselves as “in Christ,” and that the human soul is only finally and properly ordered when it regards “everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus [as] Lord’ and gladly suffers “the loss of all things and counts them as rubbish, in order that [it] may gain Christ.” (Phil 3:8)
As a colleague once helpfully summarized, “The problem is not just what the Bible says about sex, it’s what ignoring that does to Biblical authority.” Put plainly, what it does is gut Biblical authority. This may be why on a recent podcast, an ELCA pastor who is a top-notch systematic theologian with a high regard for Biblical authority confessed their dismay at the confession of several ELCA seminarians that most of what they learned at seminary “bashed” the Bible, clearly seeking to undermine its witness in every way.
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My purpose in this article is not to re-adjudicate the theological disputes that have divided not just the Lutheran communion in this regard, but every Christian communion functioning in the West. It is also not to outline tactics or strategies to win the erstwhile “culture war”—Yenor does that in his article, and besides, in my estimation, Christianity has been decisively on the back foot culturally since it accepted what social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead termed “expressive divorce’ thirty years after the legalization of no-fault divorce.
My purpose is rather to point out that the Church needs to be not only teaching faithfully what Christian life entails, it must be preparing her members for the distrust, resistance, revulsion, and sometimes betrayal of those they love because of it, particularly in the area of sexual behavior. I have had more than one person to whom I ministered and who at one time both embraced and professed the Christian faith reject that faith so that they could embrace a “sexual identity” or demonstrate public support for behaviors that are clearly at variance with the requirements of Biblical Christianity in the realms of sexual identity, sexual behavior, and the related area of the sanctity of human life. Occasionally, such people have gone so far as to excoriate me publicly or cut off contact with me.
This hurts, and we do nobody any favors by pretending that it doesn’t. In fact, we must prepare people as we teach them not only the negative demands of God’s Word regarding sexual issues, but also the exhortations of God to ongoing faithfulness and trust in that Word and the promises of God that He will both help us in that steadfastness and reward us for it in the fulness of time.
What this means is that the Church needs to be catechizing her congregants on how to be resilient, long-suffering, and loving toward those who reject them or their faith. We must be teaching our people to have the trust and steadfastness of purpose that Monica, the mother of Augustine, showed for the twenty seven years that she prayed for her son’s conversion from sensualism and Manichaeanism. Augustine ultimately became one of the greatest theologians in Church history, but he did not get there without the Lord working through his mother’s prayers. We must teach our people to be a Monica for every Augustine in their lives… especially when they despair of that person ever changing.
What we can be sure of is this; learning to face persecution, pray unswervingly, and love those who scorn us is the very essence of becoming more Christ-like in our character. As an Orthodox friend once said to me (Orthodoxy has a rather more fraught regard for Augustine’s theology than Lutheranism), “We are pretty sure Augustine was a saint… we are POSITIVE that his mother was!”
The church’s pastoral ministry has always been long-suffering when it comes to helping people live into the Christian standards of chastity outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage, and most pastors I knew prior to Obergefell and the concomitant liberalization of ecclesiastical disciplines that began to be officially enacted around that time were caring and deeply sensitive in their pastoral work with their LGB (T’s and Q’s were beyond the horizon as of then) members. The Church can be infinitely patient with sinners, but it cannot redefine sin, for if we do, we end up proclaiming nothing but our faith in our own contemporary judgments—and such affirmations are deficient in their ability to console or instruct when sin, death, and the devil inevitably come knocking, for they lack the substance of revealed truth, which is the heart of the Word of God.
For the sake of the wellbeing and comfort of both Her members and those who do not yet call Christ Lord, the Church needs to be preparing its members for misunderstanding, resentment, and even persecution from those who reject “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” especially the people closest to them and especially in regards to sexual issues. To do less is spiritual malpractice… and it will mean the eventual caving of orthodoxy to the spirit of the age.