The fusion of race and sexuality – why it matters

“They are on the wrong side of history.” “Their views are no better than those of religious fanatics who used the Bible to oppose interracial marriage.”

Feelings like these are among the most important topics of conversation for LGBT activists today. They try to convince people that conservative Christian teaching on marriage, sexuality and gender is evil and bigoted. LGBT activists are attempting to conflate Christians’ theological beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman and that gender is invariably determined by biology with those of racists of the past who supported Jim Crow and white supremacy propagated.

These sentiments are very compelling, and quite a few Christians have been persuaded by pro-LGBT arguments based on this analogy. I know this very well because I myself came very close to engaging in this analogy for several years. When I was attending Oklahoma Baptist University – a Southern Baptist university – some events in my personal life caused me to plunge headlong into a major spiritual crisis surrounding this issue, and I was deathly afraid that my views on sexuality and gender would affect me the same way would do badly as a racist.

Get our latest news for FREE

Subscribe to receive daily/weekly emails with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.

The argument we often hear is that conservative evangelicals were just as wrong when it came to slavery and segregation, and they are also wrong today when it comes to homosexuality and transgenderism. To the world, both are invariably cases of bigotry and prejudice.

I wasn’t so much worried about how secular leftists saw me – I have no problem standing up for unpopular truths – I was worried that they were objectively right and I was objectively wrong. If they were right, I would be causing undue harm to my LGBT neighbors and misrepresenting the love of God, and the idea of ​​doing any of those things scared the crap out of me.

However, a survey of the history of the Christian church over the past 2,000 years ultimately dispels this conflation, however rhetorically attractive it may be in modern America. For one thing, the Catholic Church, which has been around for two millennia, has always defined marriage as one between a man and a woman, and as racist as some bishops have been throughout history, there has never been one in the Catholic Church an explicit doctrine that taught that interracial marriage was wrong. For evangelical Protestants, especially Reformed ones, the evidence is even clearer. The best-known Reformed creeds such as the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, the Baptist Confession of 1689, the Savoy Declaration and the earlier Second Helvetic Confession all contain explicit teachings on marriage and all but the last touch on gender. All of these confessions explicitly teach that marriage is between a man and a woman, but not a single one says anything about race or ethnicity.

The chapter on creation in the first three cases also explicitly teaches that God “created us male and female,” but there is nothing even remotely comparable to what Judge Leon Bazile infamously said about like “God Almighty the races White, Black, Yellow, Malay and Red” to deny the interracial loving couple Loving vs. Virginia the right to marry anywhere in these denominations. The Westminster Catechisms go one step further and in the seventh commandment condemn sodomy, incest and fornication in addition to sodomy, but are silent on the question of miscegenation.

The fact that even later versions of the Westminster Standards did not contain an injunction against interracial marriage proves that the Bible does not condemn interracial marriage, as fundamentalists and evangelicals of the past thought. It is very important that these are not obscure confessions or doctrinal statements; These are some of the most revered and influential Christian denominations in Protestant history. Far from being obscure sectarian documents, these confessions sit comfortably within the mainstream tradition of evangelical Protestantism.

However, there are still things Christians need to pay attention to. Some churches have shamefully used the Bible in the past to justify their ethnic bigotry, which in turn has been used by the LGBT crowd to use that history against us when we defend biblical sexuality. This story and my associated two-year spiritual crisis were enough for me to change my attitude toward race and racism in America as I describe it here. If American evangelical Christians want to have a moral foothold in the sex debate, we must own up to our sordid racial past.

We must be the most ethnically/racially united part of America instead of the most divided part. Our witness to a hostile world is invaluable to the kingdom of Christ. We cannot afford to tarnish it.