14. We Can’t Live without Intimacy
14
We Can’t Live without Intimacy
Good faith Christians welcome those who are single or celibate into their households.
Sadly, I have few memories of my brother-in-law, Brian Searles, a handsome, gregarious guy who oozed natural charisma. We just didn’t hang out that much.
I remember a couple of times in college when Brian visited his sister, Jill, while on leave from the Air Force.
There was our wedding in 1995, when I gave Brian a Bible as a groomsman’s gift. “David, thank you! I’ve really been wanting to read this more,” he said, smiling.
Another time Brian visited us in California for a few days when we were still newlyweds. He brought along his “friend.” It didn’t dawn on Jill and me until they drove away that they were more than friends. For the first time, we realized Brian was gay.
I remember other brief meetings through the years, mostly at family get-togethers, when Uncle Brian impressed our three kids with his wit and fun-loving nature. During one of those visits, we noticed how much weight he had lost. He didn’t look well.
Brian had contracted HIV, which had turned to AIDS. After a painful journey of failed treatments, he passed away in January 2009.
I thought of Brian as a great guy and a good big brother to Jill. But if I am honest, I never really saw Brian as anything more than my wife’s gay brother.
I’m embarrassed to admit it. It is one of the things I regret most. But it’s true.
As we worked on this book and tried to think well about good faith, Gabe and I were convicted by the truth proclaimed by our friend Julie Rodgers, who identifies as a gay Christian: “We can live without sex, but we can’t live without intimacy.”1
I never offered that to my brother-in-law, and it still haunts me. I never tried to understand him or create a deeper friendship with him. What could I have done differently? Might we have been better friends? Why wasn’t I more interested in him? Why didn’t I spend more time with him when he was sick?
And if Christians are truly committed to the idea of chastity outside of marriage—and I am—why didn’t I offer Brian more opportunities for closeness with our family, with his sister, with his nephew and nieces? What if we had invited him to live with us, to become a part of our family’s day-to-day life?
In a heartbreaking parody of the good Samaritan, why did my family, the committed Christians, never visit Brian while he was dying, even as his LGBT friends cared for him to his very last breath?
As straight, married men, we can’t speak about same-sex attraction with the authority that comes with firsthand experience. Neither of us has experienced it. Beyond the consequences of sin every person endures, we don’t know what it’s like to feel fundamentally out of step with family, church, and community, to be the target of gossip or, too often, something darker. The internal anguish that torments our same-sex-attracted Christian friends is awful. And the fact is that many of them, until very recently, faced that anguish alone. It is absolutely essential for Christian communities of faith to walk alongside our sisters and brothers who identify as gay with hearts of compassion and an unwavering commitment to their well-being.
But being gay doesn’t come with a different set of rules.
Christianity’s biblical sexual ethic is this: sex was designed by God to be between a man and a woman in a covenant marriage. All others are to be celibate or single and sexually chaste, no matter their orientation.
Our research shows that eight out of ten practicing Christians and virtually all evangelicals believe it is “reasonable for Christians to expect fellow Christians who are unmarried to abstain from sex.” A majority of US adults across all faith groups agree this is reasonable (56 percent).
In addition, four out of five practicing Christians and nine out of ten evangelicals believe it is “reasonable to expect fellow Christians who experience same-sex attractions to abstain from romantic relationships.” Just over half of US adults (52 percent) also believe this is reasonable. Interestingly, younger practicing Christians are just as likely as older Christians to believe these standards of celibacy are reasonable.
About one-third of gay and lesbian adults (across all faith groups, including Christianity), say heterosexual celibacy is reasonable to expect of unmarried Christians. And roughly one out of five of these adults believe it is reasonable for Christians to expect same-sex-attracted Christians to remain celibate. That’s lower than the national average, but it still shows that many gay people consider celibacy a viable sexual standard within the Christian community.
Disorientation
Do you have friends or family members who have been aware of their homosexual orientation from their earliest memories? When you hear their stories, it’s easy to believe that most gay people didn’t choose this path.
Sitting on the stage of the Memorial Church in Palo Alto with Bishop Gene Robinson, I saw the pain in his eyes when he noted that, according to the Catholic Church, “People like me are intrinsically disordered. It’s kind of a brick wall. If you are intrinsically disordered, there is not much you can do about that.”
Given the opportunity, I responded as gently as I could, “Gene, I’m intrinsically disordered. Being a human being with a fallen nature is disordered. I’m with you. That is who I am. That’s where I start. We are all disordered. We start disordered, and our path to knowing Christ fully is to identify in Christ.”2
The church has historically taught that same-sex attractions—and plenty of other desires—are disordered as a result of sin. In our politically correct world, however, it’s awkward to hear the word disordered, much less the word sin. And to apply it to a group of people seems hurtful or even hateful. Remember, one of the moral perspectives that is widely embraced is that we should not criticize someone else’s life choices, much less call into question their sense of identity. Add to that, most people believe that to find yourself you have to look within yourself.
But the biblical account of human nature is that we are all disordered. Relationally disordered, sexually disordered, physically disordered, spiritually disordered . . . just plain disordered. We are all “born that way.” The fall of Adam and Eve had consequences; distortion of God’s design is one of them. Not every longing is a desire God intended us to experience. You can’t find who you are simply by actualizing your desires—gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, or whatever.
The intricate blend of nurture, nature, and environment is a powerful, but mysterious, force on sexuality. Most prominent LGBT advocates and the American Psychological Association acknowledge that the origins of sexual orientation are not a known science.3, 4 A homosexual orientation may include a genetic, physiological component (as many LGBT activists insist) that is then catalyzed by childhood experiences. It seems to be true that every person’s sexuality is fluid up to a certain age; a variety of influences have the potential to nest or take flight. In Jenel Williams Paris’s The End of Sexual Identity, she writes, “Scholars today agree that there are not two or three separate ‘types’ of humans, sexually speaking. Instead, there are ranges of behavior, fluidity in sexual feelings and complicated personal sexual histories.”5
To pretend to understand all the dynamics would be to play God. The delicate mix of nurture and nature is so complex that only the Creator can understand how each individual’s sexuality takes shape. We humbly suggest that trying to find a single answer to disordered human desire is a dead-end road. Rather, it’s more helpful just to acknowledge that most people who experience a lesbian or gay sexual orientation didn’t choose it. It is all they’ve ever known.
When the disciples asked Jesus whose sin was at fault to make a man blind—the man’s parents’ sin or his own—Jesus told them they were asking the wrong question (see John 9). According to the Lord, the right question, in essence, was, How is God revealing his purposes in and through this man’s life?
That’s the question we must ask today.
Good News for Everyone
For many Christians with same-sex attractions who tried to become “ex-gay,” the “good news” was synonymous with experiencing a complete orientation change. For some, that meant becoming heterosexual and being happily married to a person of the opposite sex. Anything else felt “less” or insufficient. But while a small percentage of people do report such a shift of their sexual attractions away from the same sex and toward the opposite sex, it is not a common experience.6 We trust that transformation in Christ brings freedom from the old self. But how do we walk alongside brothers and sisters whose same-sex attractions don’t shift, or don’t shift quickly? Their presence among us begs the question: is the American dream of a nuclear family really the only place the gospel leads us?
No.
We fundamentally misunderstand the good news of Jesus if “happily married with two kids” is our first picture of salvation. Or, for that matter, if we say the good news for anyone is about finding a fulfilling sexual relationship.
When we make the good news about going straight or getting married or having fulfilling sex lives, but then most gay people don’t experience full transformation of their desires as part of their “salvation,” they are understandably sent reeling. It is no wonder that many look for other ways to sort out their confused reality and satisfy their good human desire for lifelong companionship.
Can we blame them? Walking a day in their shoes, we would be tempted to do the same. Feeling trapped and isolated, this is the story for many Christians who have decided that living out their gay sexual desires is not in conflict with Scripture.
We have listened to many friends describe their angst and agony. The common narrative goes something like this: “If I have gay feelings, God must want me to . . . after all, he made me. And if he made me and I have these feelings, he wouldn’t want me to repress these feelings and experience internal conflict about following him. So he must think it’s okay to be gay. We must have gotten something wrong in how we’ve interpreted Scripture.”
This is an oversimplified version of a typical story and is in no way meant to devalue the earnest searching that drives some LGBT Christians to try to harmonize their sexual desires with their longing to follow Christ. But reading Scripture solely through the lens of our personal experiences is a dead end.
It’s not only LGBT Christians looking for new interpretations, but their friends too: about nine out of ten Americans say they personally know someone who is gay,7 and those relational bonds can be a powerful motivator for people to reexamine their beliefs about what Scripture does and does not say.
A growing number of Americans believe their feelings should dictate their identity. A good faith Christian’s identity, however, is found in Christ.
Our identity is not found by looking within.
God designed human identity to be found and fulfilled in a fixed point outside ourselves—in him. He beckons us toward his plan for our flourishing, toward what’s truly best for our hearts, minds, and bodies. This is good news, for gay people and everyone else!
When we understand who we are as God’s children and image-bearers, created to glorify him by becoming more like his Son, we experience our deepest fulfillment.
In fulfilling God’s purposes, we find our purpose.
Philosopher, scholar, and Roman Catholic Charles Taylor made the case three decades ago that America’s new religion is self-fulfillment. In his book The Ethics of Authenticity, he claims, “We set an overwhelmingly high value on self-fulfillment, on the idea that each of us should find some way of life that satisfies us and is authentically our own.”8 He goes further in diagnosing how we lost our way:
The rise of individualism has wrenched us loose from all the settings that gave meaning to the lives of our forebears; we have been thrown back on our inner resources, but when we look inside ourselves, we find emptiness because we have been cut adrift from everything that once supplied the resources we are seeking.9
Our society has cut itself adrift from the wisdom and knowledge of the ages. In the pursuit of progress, we’ve forgotten what life is all about.
As we argued in chapter 4, Christians believe life is not about self-fulfillment but about glorifying God and fulfilling his purpose to restore our relationships, our communities, and ourselves.
This is good news.
Our Identity in Christ
The world celebrated and debated the introduction of Caitlyn, Bruce Jenner’s transformed self. America’s athlete—the 1976 Olympic gold medal winner of the decathlon and official spokesman for Wheaties cereal—felt deep inside that he was a she. Years of mental anguish and soul searching led Jenner to decide he could no longer live as a man.
We are not at all callous toward the transgender experience. We feel sadness and compassion for those on this journey. Watching Jenner’s “coming out” interview with Diane Sawyer, we were moved by the former Olympian’s story. We also think there are huge lessons the church can learn (or remember) when engaging family, friends, and fellow believers who experience this disordered reality. Honestly, the urging of the trans community to look beyond superficiality and physicality to see a human soul inspires us. Many of the transgender people we’ve encountered ask bigger, more significant, questions than those who feel at home in their own skin about what it means to be human. This is good.
Christians must not be hard-hearted toward those who seek alternate identities. Their quest is a signpost pointing to a deep desire to be truly, profoundly known.
But we can offer timeless truth when it comes to how highly our culture values feelings. As Charles Taylor wrote, culture persuades us to find out who we are by looking within, at how we feel deep down.10 But feelings are not always to be trusted. They offer us important information about our internal disposition toward reality, but they themselves aren’t reality—and, on occasion, they directly contradict it. This is why Christians root our identity in something real. Humans need a fixed point outside ourselves that helps us know who we are, against which we can measure how well our feelings reflect reality.11
Our identity, calling, and purpose come from a source outside ourselves. When we do not submit our feelings to that source, to the Spirit of God, we risk deceiving ourselves.
In a video promoting Caitlyn’s introduction to the world in Vanity Fair, Jenner says, “As soon as [the cover] comes out, I’m free.”12 How sad. This is the enemy’s lie. The ultimate deception is that freedom can be found in chains. All the makeup, pretty dresses, and photo shoots in the world can’t free a person from bondage to feelings.
In a world where gender confusion abounds, distorted sexual desires and behaviors are celebrated, and the title “hero” is bestowed on those who live according to their feelings, the deceiver is having a field day.
Fulfillment is just around the corner.
My life will be better when I’m in charge of my own destiny.
I’ll be happy if I can make reality match my feelings.
The lies are as old as Eden’s tree.
How can Christians of good faith compete with the majority culture’s message, “To find yourself look within”? After all, valuing unique personalities, experiences, dreams, gifts, and points of view is a good thing. But it’s not the first thing. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”13
Christians must properly order first and second things.
But society’s uproar only gets louder, pointing people in the opposite direction. Tim Keller says our culture “presses its members to believe ‘you have to be yourself,’ that sexual desires are crucial to personal identity, that any curbing of strong sexual desires leads to psychological damage.”14 Or as Taylor Swift sings, you can “want who you want.”
This commonly held belief has become a kind of religion: to be fulfilled you must actualize your desires. But if we want to be people of good faith, we must distinguish good ideas from bad ideas and live our lives accordingly.
Self-fulfillment is a bad idea, a dead end.
We don’t have to blindly go along with the majority culture’s reliance on feelings to discover the truth about ourselves. Instead, we can shed light on the distortions and offer a vision of wholeness and true identity found in Christ.
People to Be Loved
Our friend Preston Sprinkle has a great phrase for how Christians should respond to LGBT people, Christian or otherwise: as people to be loved.15
People.
To.
Be.
Loved.
Not an issue to be solved.
As we have said throughout this book, good faith is living out our love for others and our belief in God’s good ways. It’s easy to think that sex and sexuality can be boiled down to knowing what we believe, and to forget loving altogether.
That’s what Simon the Pharisee does, as recorded in Luke 7. He is at a dinner where Jesus is the guest of honor, and an immoral woman crashes the party. She makes an inappropriate scene by kissing Jesus’s feet and begging his forgiveness.
Simon knows what he believes about the woman’s sins but doesn’t see a person to be loved. His thoughts betray him: “If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. She’s a sinner!” (v. 39).
Contrary to Simon’s assumptions, Jesus knows and does not overlook the woman’s broken history. He even tells the dinner guests that her sins are “many.” But he doesn’t do so to rub her face in her past. He says it to show that his forgiveness can restore even the most broken of people.
Jesus restores people today, including refugees of the sexual revolution. He restores people through the church, the properly functioning household of God that loves, believes, and lives good faith.
Some people wonder when we should offer our love to people far from God, and when we should withhold it. This is an important question. Remember that Jesus loved us, enough to die, while we were still sinners. So while there will always be consequences of sin, including church discipline for those within the Christian community, those consequences should never exclude someone from love.
If you’re a Christian, offering people love is as basic as breathing.
Has a friend confessed his addiction to porn? Even if this disappoints you, he is a person to be loved.
Did your daughter come out as a lesbian? She is a person to be loved.
Has someone in your church gotten pregnant outside of marriage? She is a mom-to-be to be loved.
Is a young couple in your church living together outside of marriage? They are people to be loved.
As we begin to see people for who they are—created in the image of God—we think less of LGBT issues to be solved and instead see people to be loved. When we don’t, bad faith can creep in and distort Christ’s ongoing work of restoration within the Christian community.
Jesus went out of his way to reorient people to a new religious order. He called out religious leaders who avoided the marginalized members of society and taught their communities to do the same. The ostracized were destined to live lonely, scared, and painful lives, banished from safety, community, and intimacy.
Jesus flipped this upside down, and the marginalized were his choice to receive miracles and blessing. As Jesus healed and then welcomed them back into the community, their lives bore witness to the new order that indicted the old, revealing the ungodly legalism and self-righteousness that had taken deep root in God’s people.
Today’s questions surrounding sex and sexuality can be a gift. When the biblical sexual ethic calls our sisters and brothers attracted to the same sex to deny themselves, they model how the wider church already ought to be living.
Instead of singling out this one area of self-denial, what if we raise the stakes for everyone to live costly obedience?
The lives of single and celibate Christians give testimony to the kind of self-denial many of us have forgotten. Reflecting on their lives—on the people we love—we ought to be convicted and pressed to consider, What appetites am I denying myself for Jesus’s sake? Is discipleship costing me anything?
For many of us, the answer is no.
Most modern North American Christians have little imagination for self-denial. Who can blame us? The thousands of marketing messages we receive every day reinforce the idea that we should deny ourselves nothing, that we deserve to consume more, that seeking our own pleasure leads to “the good life.”
But self-denial is essential to following Jesus. The familiar command to
“Take up your cross and follow me”
begins with
“turn from your selfish ways”
and ends with a warning
“if you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it”
and a promise
“if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”16
It doesn’t make sense to a self-centered society that thinks denying our desires is extreme, but self-denial is part and parcel of good faith. As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “ ‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say—but not everything is beneficial” (1 Cor. 6:12 NIV). Acknowledging and living within God’s boundaries is not crazy. Weird, sure. But not crazy.
Christians in our churches who are committed to the biblical sexual ethic are living, breathing examples of the self-denial required by Jesus of those who want to be his disciples. The faithful lives of single and celibate Christians, gay or straight, are a call to the entire church to live out costly obedience—even when it hurts.
The apostle Peter calls all exiles “to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul” (1 Pet. 2:11 NIV), but self-denial was never meant to be practiced in isolation. Through the presence of the Holy Spirit and our brothers and sisters in Christ, we are meant to live out costly obedience in close communion with God and others.
This is true for us all but especially for single Christians. As theologian Dayna Olson-Getty cautions, “To say ‘no’ to something as powerfully magnetic as sex requires something even more powerful to which one is saying ‘yes.’ ”17 Expanding our vision to see the church as our first family is critical . . . and biblical. We can’t ask gay Christians to deny themselves the intimacy of a close sexual relationship without offering the intimacy of close godly relationships.
In Eve Tushnet’s memoir, Gay and Catholic, she writes, “Knitting single people more closely into families is one of the biggest things the Christian churches could do.”18 She speaks directly to the need of the day: for the church to become a family for those who don’t feel a part of one. As just one example of how this could look, Tushnet points to the blog of Matthew Jones, who relates the joyful experience of attending a straight friend’s wedding:
After I came out to the groom, he sent me a letter explaining how, even should I never have a family of my own, I had to know that I would always be a part of theirs—that I was someone they wanted their kids to know and learn from. They have demonstrated that their love for each other somehow includes me. . . . [At their wedding] I caught the slightest glimpse of a future spent never too far from a warm living room full of people who will gladly call me brother and friend.19
Tushnet offers practical suggestions for making church a safe and welcoming place for same-sex-attracted Christians to belong.20 One of the most important is to “talk about gay issues with a spirit of welcome.” She writes:
If your church has a moment when you can add a public prayer, you might pray for God to bless gay, lesbian, and/or same-sex attracted people. Or you could pray that all people, regardless of sexual orientation, will find their vocation as they learn to give and receive love. Similarly, a lot of spiritual topics have some aspect that is especially relevant to gay or same-sex attracted people. If you’re talking about “guardianship of the tongue,” why not include homophobic slurs as something to avoid along with gossip and jokes at other people’s expense? If you’re talking about how God the Father can offer a model of fatherhood for those whose earthly fathers aren’t too loving, why not include the fathers who reject their gay children? There are countless little ways to indicate that you know that gay and same-sex attracted people are part of the Body of Christ.21
All LGBT Christians need to know their church recognizes and celebrates the gifts they bring to the community. We must welcome them into our homes and family life and support the unique contributions they make to fulfilling God’s purposes. Because they might never enter into a covenant marriage with a person of the opposite sex, their church family must be exactly that: family.
For many young Americans, a church community does not present an obvious solution to their lack of stable family connections. Only 44 percent of unchurched adults are married, compared to nearly six out of ten churchgoers. Three out of ten churchless Americans have never been married, compared to 20 percent of churchgoing adults.
Our society feels the very real need for family, yet it seems that families are more comfortable than singles in church.
You can be a gift to same-sex-attracted and other single people in your church by changing your everyday, ordinary rhythms to involve them. For families with children, it could mean inviting a single friend over for a weekly movie or pizza night. Include them in holiday get-togethers and bestow on them “aunt” and “uncle” honors for your children. Invite those without an immediate nuclear family to experience the joys, hardships, and routine patterns of family life.
They, in turn, will be a gift to you. You can take friendship out of the virtual and put it back in the real world, sharing the ups and downs of daily life with a sister or brother who sees past your filtered profile picture (and loves you anyway). Your children will have a trusted, godly adult other than you and your spouse to mentor, care for, and be a friend to them.
This will not always be easy. (Relationships never are.) But it is a vision for church as first family, as we explored in chapter 10.
A more nuanced (and biblical) theology of the family and a more robust theology of singleness and celibacy will allow the church to gain a more credible position on the joys and hardships of living the biblical sexual ethic. Only as the family of God can we credibly call gay and bisexual Christians to celibacy. If we do not reconfigure our churches to be communities that welcome, support, and celebrate singleness, we are asking gay and straight brothers and sisters to do hard, lifelong work without the willingness to do so ourselves.
“God places the lonely in families,” Psalm 68:6 says. Are we teaching straight Christian couples a wide-enough view of family, wide enough to enfold sisters and brothers who are single and those answering God’s call to celibacy? Asking single Christians to remain chaste on their own is not biblical. We must not ask them to carry this burden alone.
We all need intimacy. And when we live into Jesus’s vision of the church as family, we can find it in each other.