Christianity Today interviews evangelical Ron Sider, who for decades has preached — better than I can — against the anticommunity individualism, legalism, materialism, worldliness and general hypocrisy that seem to be not only consuming the religious right, but hobbling U.S. evangelicals and born-again Christians as well.
The conservative CT doesn’t often spotlight well-balanced Christians, but I give the magazine some credit now — Sider appears to be one of them.
Another of the few dozen conservative Christians concerned with the poor, suffering and so forth is heard from. What I do not comprehend is why such people feel they are saying something cC’s are interested in. As one ministry in Colorado used to put it: Jesus is for winners! The poor are loosers so good Christians should just forget them. Which very much seems to be what is happening. Thanks for showing us the views of this tiny minority. Good post.
Sider says in this interview:
“And it’s incredibly ironic that one of the issues—and one I agree vigorously with—is concerned with how public life affects marriage. I’m in favor of the marriage amendment. But at precisely a point in time when our political rhetoric as evangelicals has focused on that, we have to face the fact that we’re not any different from the world. And that’s just incredible hypocrisy and it undercuts our message to the larger society in a terrible way.”
So, this fair and balanced concerned for the poor onandonandon Evangelical Christians thinks it is a good thing to outlaw gay marriage. And so I must ask what makes Sider any sort of an improvement for gay people over the usual crowd? All of them seem to be ‘phobes. I can see nothing in his statements that would recommend him over Dobson. Just Dobson-lite.
I seriously can’t figure out the point of this post. CT interviews an evangelical christian communitarian, one who obviously objects to equal rights for gay people. So? Even Jim Wallis, who presents himself as being on the more liberal side of evangelical christianity, objects to equal rights for gay people.
It should be evident to any sentient being that organized christian organizations (I know I’m being redundant) don’t want to afford equal rights to gay people.
So, pray tell, what is the point of the post?
Hey Guys and Gals,
One thing I’ve noticed here in some posts in the last few days is this sense of hopelessness when it comes to conservative or evangelical Christians.
There seems to be a belief that these people start from a position of hatred or antipathy towards gay people and work backwards to find justifying scripture. That may be true for some. But, having grown up in a very conservative Christian family (my grandfather, father, and both brothers are/were Pentecostal preachers) I have not found that to be the case with all cC’s.
Most of the cC’s I’ve know want the following: to live good moral lives, to love their neighbor, to stand up for righteousness, and to provide guidance in a confusing and quickly changing world.
For most of these people, they see gay people in the same way they see drug addicts. They don’t know why anyone would “get into all that” to begin with. It must be just to be rebellion or the wrong crowd or something like that. The “fight for what’s good and right” is directed against our rights out of ignorance.
They have been told that gay people choose to be homosexuals, and often they have no personal experience to contradict that notion. And they are more likely to believe other good Christians like Dobson or Falwell in the heartland than they are some “atheist scientist” in some godless big city.
Which brings me to the second group, the espousers of lies. Dobson isn’t unaware that he’s selling a “cure” with an amazingly low success rate; he deliberately distorts and lies. As time goes by I’ve become more convinced that people like Dobson, Nicolosi, Sheldon, and Falwell are truly evil; willing to do incredible harm to gay people for their own gain.
But my Dad doesn’t know that.
Which is why it is so very important that we counter the distortions, half-truths and outright lies that come from the ex-gay groups and the religious manipulators who use them. And we must do so in language my family and their friends understand. So those of us who either are from that background or have gone through the ex-gay movement know how to speak to the good decent minded evangelical Christians (no offence to the pagans among us, but you don’t speak the same language).
When they come to understand (and they can) that one’s orientation is not self-determined to begin with and that very very few people can “change” in the sense that most people understand the word, they are then open to hearing what some of the more liberal denominations have been saying for years. When faced with “God made ‘em that way and they ain’t changing”, they will find it hard to be cruel and punitive. These are mostly good people who to a great extent measure their Godliness in terms of their goodness.
Thank you Tom for these insights. As someone who is a frank Pagan, I realize I can not communicate with these ‘decent’ evangelicals. If indeed there are a whole lot of such people. What frustrates me no end, is to look at the evangelical church and realize that today it is no different from the evangelicals described in Mencken’s ‘Hills of Zion’ written 80 years ago. Basically, we are looking at a system of sympathetic magic presented as religion. Which is not what the adherents present it as being.
And then to be presented with someone who while he does not buy into the crass consumerism of so much of conservative Christianity, is still a 100% heterosexist anti-gay activist. Like this is an improvement. To my mind it only goes to prove that the whole conservative Christian movement is beyond any rational approach.
Hi, im confused as to what this website is and i figured writing here on the first story this would get a respnse… is this a biased website in anyway, as in does it have an opinion about homosexuality? i thought it was one way but i clicked on a few links that are opposite of that so i dont know.
Thanks
Sorry, but I don’t see anything “good” or “decent minded” about people who don’t believe in civil rights. This isn’t a parlor game that we’re playing, it’s about human lives. Bending over backwards to try to “communicate” with people who don’t even want to hear from us is hardly the way to go.
Wayne, Regan,
One of the points made often and eloquently on this site is that “gay” is not a monolithic description. Gay people come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors and all degrees of open-mindedness.
So too are evangelical Christians. Don’t assume you know about them from what some of their “leaders” say – any more than you can tell about gay people based on what our “leaders” say.
My experience may not be all-inclusive, but I do know that I can speak about a portion of the evangelical Christian community. They don’t view us as mentally ill, necessarily, but rather as willful sinners. As an example, I remember being a teenager and finding out that another minister’s son had moved to San Francisco to be one of them homosexuals. My Dad told me “he’s doing that just to embarrass his father”.
These people (contrary to what you may think) are not deliberately cruel. They aren’t even unkind. Most probably even feel a little embarrassed about anti-gay activists.
They have always believed that we choose to be gay. They think that if we would just choose to be straight then all of their conflict would go away and everyone would be happier.
I am encouraged, though, that this belief is slowly changing as more of us are honest and open. I don’t think the President was being solely political when he was asked in the debates if he thought sexual orientation was a choice and he responded “I don’t know”. He, like many, are hearing both sides and no longer hold tightly to old assumptions.
The evangelical Christians are not unreachable. We just have to balance the fraud of the leaders of the ex-gay movements and their televangelist backers with the truth of our lives. The blame lies not with those who are believing the lie, but with those who are telling it.
Erika asked about XGW.
Buried at the base of the side column is a link to ‘About’ which gives an explanation.
https://exgaywatch.com/about.html
As to bias, my experience of this site is that comments come from folk of all opinions and biases. It’s helpful to understand both sides of the story, even if you lean to one side.
Hi, im confused as to what this website is and i figured writing here on the first story this would get a respnse… is this a biased website in anyway, as in does it have an opinion about homosexuality?
Erika, more than a few web sites have links from their home pages to “about me” or “about us” pages from which you can get a bit of insight as to the proprietors of the web site. You might consider doing a bit of “clicking around” to try to find pages like that. I’ve done that–not here–and it can really be enlightening. Some sites have next to nothing, but others can be quite extensive.