How to talk to anti-LGBT Christians
Some Bible facts will help you out
Christians can get hostile when it comes to LGBT issues. If you have to deal with it, breathe through it, and remember? Jesus loves facts.
Here’s ten approaches to Bible issues, with scholarly sources, to whip out as needed.
1. “I prefer to emphasize that ‘love’ stuff.”
For all the Christian fascination with sex rules, the teachings of Jesus seem to concern the idea of just loving people. “I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says in John 13:34, “to love one another” (cf. 15:12 & 17).
Is evaluating and condemning other people ever called for? Jesus indicates one is not to judge (Mt 7:1). One loves enemies! (Mt 5:55). He affirms the “golden rule” as a guide. This isn’t a spiritual practice of reading people’s “sins” and attacking them.
The love theology is repeated over and over, from 1 Peter 4:8 (“Above all, love each other deeply”) to Galatians 5:6: “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”
The 1 John letter cites “love one another” five times (3:11, 3:23, 4:7, 4:11, 4:12; cf. 2 Jn 6). That’s a lot for even Christians to ignore.
2. “Is God about policing gender norms?”
A lot of traditional Christianity is about keeping people within a little box, especially with gender norms. Is that what the Bible is about? A reference like Galatians 3:28 gets seriously confusing.
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Christians may try to point to the creation of humans in Genesis. Doesn’t that have humans defined as ‘male’ or ‘female’?
“And God created man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Except, what Genesis 1:27 tells us is different. We learn, first of all, that God is ‘male and female’, and created the first human in this ‘image’. As God does not seem to have a physical body, this ‘male’ and ‘female’ may refer to aspects of consciousness—ways of thinking and feeling.
Then the first human created seems to have been androgynous. As Elliot R. Wolfson summarizes: “God created Adam as male and female concurrently, which has been interpreted through the centuries as an affirmation of the androgynous status of the primordial human being.”
A creation story of an original bisexed human is hardly unusual. “Myths of a bisexual progenitor of the human race were very common in antiquity,” notes Wayne A. Meeks. And it was typical for Jews and early Christians to read Genesis this way. We find it in Philo, Clement, Origen, etc.
The Bible would seem to be a story about a God who loves androgynous states, this being God’s own nature.
3. “The Bible has lots of LGBT stories”
Christian tradition is frequently deceptive in its presentation of the Bible, as was not widely known until modern Bible scholarship began to supply different information. Now we see that gender fluidity is the norm not just with God, but all created beings.
Angels appear to have oscillating gender. The angels in Ezekiel 1:5–25 have pronouns that shift from male to female, though this is disguised in Christian translations. Many sex-crossing figures are found in the Bible’s narratives. “The gender of Jonah’s fish changes twice in the course of its appearance in the book,” notes Thomas M. Bolin.
Joseph is “beautiful” just like his mother, and wears a special garment identified as female, and cries often. He seem to read as nearly transgender. Then Jael, overtly female, has many odd male features.
There are overtly ‘gay’ stories, like Ehud in Judges 3:12–30 who has sex with an enemy leader and then kills him.“The number of scholars who have resisted reading this as male-on-male sex is really quite astonishing,” says Christine Mitchell.
In Matthew 8:5–13, a Roman Centurion asks Jesus to heal a male slave with whom he has a touching relationship that could easily be sexual. Jesus is happy to help. Paul’s letter to Philemon seems to concern a sex slave. Paul’s advice? Try loving him.
Paul’s praises Euodia and Syntyche in Philippians 4: 2–3, a female couple who has “co-contested” with him. A reading is possible, Mary Rose D’Angelo notes, in which these strong ladies are lesbians. It goes on and on.
4. “Sorry, God doesn’t go to Sodom to kill gays.”
Christians have taken a story in the Old Testament and read it to define a character called ‘sodomites’ who are doomed to destruction. This is the most bizarre reading imaginable of Genesis 19.
God reflects back on the scene, first of all, in Ezekiel 16:19, identifying the problem as the city being “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” This has been the typical Jewish reading. Judith H. Newman notes that for Jews the story was about “lack of hospitality and antagonism toward strangers.”
But Christian tradition knew the truth. It was about anal sex.
Line by line, the scene is full of details they ignore. Note the city’s punishment is decided on by Abraham before God visits the city. And it concerns a crime which has already occurred. Joshua W. Jipp helps out:
“The reader is not yet told the exact content of Sodom’s ‘grave sin’ but with the repeated usage of the term ‘outcry’ (twice in vv.20–21) it is clear the Sodomites are accused of an abuse of social justice (cf. Genesis 4:-9–11; Exodus 2:23–3:7; Isaiah 5:7).”
Christians have badly misread the action of the plot. As Scott Morschauser documents, the angels are suspected of being spies in a city at war. In a typical Old Testament situation, Lot attempts a hostage exchange. His daughters are valuable property—betrothed to citizens of Sodom—and he offers to put them up as collateral until his guests leave.
It never involves rape, and the angels are never even accosted.
4. “Stop mistranslating Leviticus 18:22!”
Christians tend to love that sentence: “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.”
They would love it, since they made it up themselves. The actual Hebrew original text is, as Renato Lings notes, “so arcane that the entire verse becomes almost untranslatable.”
Jan Joosten suggests a literal translation: “And-with a male not you-will-lie ‘lyings-of’ a woman.” Susan Pigott suggests: “And with a male you will not lay (on) the couches/beds of a woman.”
She helpfully takes on the Christian efforts to use this verse against gays:
“Out of all the verses in Leviticus that could be singled out, people filled with hate have chosen two obscure verses and ignored their context . . . Isn’t it interesting, that when Jesus quoted Leviticus, he quoted a verse about love (Lev. 19:18)? Maybe, if we’re going to pick one verse out of Leviticus to plaster on signs, that’s the one we should choose.”
5. “No, God doesn’t police the gender of clothes.”
When facing transgender people, drag queens, etc., a lot of Christians will not just admit that Jesus seems unconcerned about clothes (Mt. 6:25). Instead, they again dive back into the Old Testament law, and find in Deuteronomy 22:5 a deity policing the gender of garments:
“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” (KJV)
So here’s some facts. The Bible makes little or no difference between the gender of male and female clothing. As Nili Sacher Fox notes: “The Hebrew names for articles of clothing rarely distinguish between male and female garments.”
Whatever is going on in Deuteronomy 22:5 (and the language is full of oddness the translations omit), the Bible’s language of terms for clothes, as Fox notes, “actually render men and women in gender-neutral dress.”
Note to Christians: This is a sacred text in which garments can be used for Temple worship, divination, etc. And the details get really complicated.
6. “Doesn’t Jesus say eunuchs are great?”
Traditional Christians often like to pretend that the Bible creates a system that criminalizes unmarried sex, and promotes marriage and reproduction. But does Jesus ever say so? He’s off praising the ‘eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven’.
It seems like Matthew 19:12 is a problem for traditional morality, since eunuchs were not so good with gender role. But Christians have an answer! The eunuchs are non-sexual.
If only there were facts to back it up. As J. David Hester reminds us in “Eunuchs and the Postgender Jesus,” even the early Christian “Church Fathers” complained how sexual eunuchs were!
There is no reason to think the verse was ever hinging on sex vs. no sex. Rather, Jesus seems to like the freedom of eunuchs, who were often combining male and female qualities. Like God!
7. “Sorry, ‘arsenokoita’ are not gay people.”
Rarely has Christian tradition been more deceptive than in translating a rare Greek word as ‘Sodomite’ or ‘homosexual’. So we find arsenokoita in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 used as an attack.
Bible scholars knew it was a problem and kept quiet about it. But a young Medieval historian named John Boswell reminded Christianity, in his 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, that the word’s meaning wasn’t known. Early on in Christianity, he writes, it was “associated with masturbation or general moral laxity.”
In 1989, William L. Petersen hunted down all evidence of the word in the ancient world, and found it pointed to an episode in Greek mythology: Zeus’ abduction of Ganymede. The word might be just a cue to Zeus worship.
It’s time to stop taking weird old Greek words and reassigning them meanings they never had.
8. “No, the Bible isn’t about having children.”
Christians try to use the Bible to advance their own ideas of “family values.” Back in reality, the teachings of Jesus are not about being married or having children. He often insults biological family!
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)
As Dale B. Martin notes: “Jesus refused to identify with his traditional family and instead substituted for it the eschatological community that shared his vision of a new, divinely constituted family.” The messiah is here for the ‘family of God’.
Christians cite the “be fruitful and multiply” language back in Genesis, so remind them that “bearing fruit” in John 15:16 refers to how you live your life. To bear fruit is to contribute to the world around you.
Family is great. Paul notes in 1 Timothy 5:4, that biological family can be a place for Christians to “put their religion into practice…” You can put it in practice in a lot of places.
In reality, the Bible stakes out the importance of non-reproductive people as spirit guides and unbiased mediators. From Jesus to Paul to the Ethiopian Eunuch, on and on, it’s a parade of wonderful, childless people.
10. “Jesus isn’t the straightest thing ever”
Christians dreams of a religion that rewards them for being…ordinary? But Jesus, that deity wandering around the countryside, is never ordinary. It’s not just his weird ideas on gender. He travels around with men and women, not caring about being married and ‘responsible’.
It’s not even the love story with the ‘Beloved Disciple’, though that is indeed very strange. No matter how much Christians try to explain it away, the gospels tell a story of a special love between two men.
But finally, Jesus’ strange ideas on gender are present in his language for himself. As Aída Besançon Spencer notes: “Jesus never uses the Greek masculine term anēr (male) for self-description. Jesus always uses the generic or inclusive term anthrōpos (human).”
He calls himself the ‘son of Man’. “In Hebrew the phrase simply means ‘a human being’,” notes Walter Wink.
Maybe we could try being ‘human’ to each other? 🔶