Homosexuality

Last Friday night, a new episode of Radiolab went up, titled "Debatable." It was the story of how Ryan Wash and Elijah Smith became the first debate team to win both the National Debate Tournament and CEDA Nationals in the same year. (If you don't know what those are, don't sweat it: it had never been done before, and was a mammoth accomplishment.) It reminded me of one of my college coaches, Lyn Robbins, who also made history with a two-fer: he was the first debater ever to win the top speaker award at the National Debate Tournament in two consecutive years. But that's just about the only similarity between them: Lyn came to Baylor from Montgomery Bell Academy, which is quite a tony private school in Nashville, Tennessee. Elijah was from Newark, New Jersey, and Ryan was from the urban core of Kansas City. Lynn was not just white but blindingly white: sunburned easily, blond hair, very conservative taste in debate arguments, won a lot by doing very traditional debate so superbly well that his opponents were overwhelmed. Wash and Smith were both African-American, both queer, and devoted their debating to critiquing the exact practices that Lyn mastered. They couldn't be more different.

But there is one more thing they have in common. Lyn reached the final round his senior year, and in his very last debate ever, the debate for the championship, his very last words in his very last speech were "We'd like to thank God, without whom we wouldn't be here, but through whom all things are possible." That was, as far as I know, the only time a debater had mentioned his Christian faith during speech time in the final round of the NDT. Possibly I'm wrong, and I'm open to correction from a more studied debate historian, but it's certainly the only one I knew of.

Until Ryan.

The cornerstone of Ryan's argument was that he and Elijah were both positioned at the intersection of a number of identities that create barriers to access and inclusion in the debate world: they were both African-American, they were both queer ... and Christian. It's not clear to me whether Ryan was saying Elijah was also Christian, but it was clear to me that Ryan was saying he was. I thought that was what he said when I first listened to their final round recording, but because of an echo-y ballroom and a crappy microphone, I wasn't positive of it until he repeated it during the Radiolab episode. Now I'm certain: Ryan and Lyn are the only two debaters (that I'm aware of) who have made explicit references to their Christian faith during the championship round of the National Debate Tournament.

Just about every marker of Lyn's identity positions him to be powerful. I've already mentioned his race. He went to law school and is a practicing attorney. He is heterosexual and (last I checked) married. And I think in 1987 he made perfect sense as the Christian debater who would speak up and make a public profession. I've always admired that act, even when I sometimes found Lyn a bit much to deal with. It tickles my brain a little bit to think of Ryan as the Christian debater who would speak up and make a public profession in 2013. That's five years after President Obama and two years before Obergefell, and a lot of things simply no longer have the simple, uncomplicated appearance that they had in 1987. They never were that uncomplicated, please understand, but it was easy to make the mistake of thinking they were, because the complications were kept under wraps. But what excites me is that the forces that kept that complication hidden have shriveled to impotence.

I can't remember which podcast I heard it on -- I'm tempted to say it was Terry Gross's interview of Susan Jacoby -- but watchers of politics in the United States habitually make sweeping claims about evangelicals, and when they do, they nearly always leave out African-American Christians. Evangelicals are Republican, you see: white, suburban and Republican. The Black church is too complicated an institution, and too powerful and threatening in some unconventional ways, for commentators to factor it into a sound-bite about how voters think. That, of course, is absurd nonsense -- Black churches get more right about Christianity that white churches get emphatically wrong than I can fit into a blog post ten times as long as this one. They're not perfect either -- they've got their own dysfunctions -- but using sloppy verbal shorthand that renders them invisible is an exercise in the perpetuation of ignorance that does genuine damage. And just to wrap up this point, Beulah Mae Donald is still my hero and my role model.

What does all of this have to do with homosexuality? In 1987, the idea that someone could stand at the center of the debate world and say "I'm gay and I'm Christian" would've been unthinkable. It would have been received about as well as "I'm an orthodox rabbi and I'm a Nazi." Not by everyone: it was plainly true of me back then, plainly not true for 100% of the entire debate community, but I will boldly assert it was true for a critical mass of both participants in debate and of the wider public. But in 2013, and I hope even more in 2016, we've complicated our understanding of both homosexuality and Christianity. We're slower to draw sharp lines between categories and follow simple recipes for condemning and expelling. We haven't broken those habits, but there's a little more space to listen and ask questions.

In my grandparents' generation, the most respectable pastors with the most impeccable credentials preached from the pulpit that the curse of Ham and Ezra's rejection of the foreign wives proved that God intended that the races stay separate, and most importantly that no one marry across racial lines. Today, we look back at the church's awakening to its error on that question, and it's hard to understand, because of the way hindsight bias works, how we could have held to such ignorant, unjust, and glaringly mistaken beliefs. People like Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King were some of the more public faces in a movement that brought churches of every denomination to a tipping point -- even my own Southern Baptists finally had to admit that slavery was not God's blessing to the human race, and in particular the Negro race. The point here is that God was, and is, still working in the world. We have misunderstood God, and we still do. I always think of God's words in Jeremiah 19:5 about child sacrifice to Baal whenever I'm reminded of this; I can't help but think God is going to use more or less those words to us about some of the doctrines we defend most fiercely. 

Does that mean whenever I don't like a Biblical teaching, I just wave my hand and say "God is still at work in the world, so whatever I don't like is obsolete?" Far from it. But I, and all believers, have a duty to listen to Ryan Wash, to Mel White, to Justin Lee; to enter the conversation not to win, but to learn, and also to forge relationships through hard work, through humble service and heartfelt kindness. God is still working in the world, and when we slam shut the door on this issue, we make the same mistake the Pharisees made in Christ's presence.

Abortion 3

(Abortion 1 and Abortion 2 are here, in case you're wondering.)

After World War One, the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to repay what the war had cost the Allies. The point was to punish Germany, and it was short-sighted and disastrous. The hemorrhage of money, followed inevitably by hunger and desperation, paved an easy path for Hitler and the Third Reich.

In 1943, in Warsaw, a number of Jews confined to a ghetto managed to get their hands on weapons and stage an uprising that lasted just under a month, from April 19 to May 16. Fewer than three hundred German operatives were killed, and the uprising contributed nothing discernible to toppling the Nazis. It's arguable whether it was worthwhile for its own sake, as a last act of defiance, but it indisputably had nothing to do with putting a stop to the larger problem that put the fighters in the ghetto to begin with. Defeating Hitler's Germany took a systemic war prosecuted on all fronts: military, economic, informational, and perhaps most importantly of all, backstopped by a carefully designed plan for reconstruction. If all we'd done was battle Germany into collapse, we would've blotted out the symptoms, left the infection untouched, and cleared the battlefield for a third go.

We didn't. Instead, in 1948, under George Marshall's oversight, the United States began the project of helping Europe, and specifically Germany, rebuild. We spent thirteen billion dollars, nineteen-forties dollars, to restore infrastructure and institutions that been bombed into ashes and dust. It was farsighted and wise. Between the Marshall Plan and the European Union, we've gone more than seventy years without a European war involving Germany, something that at one point would have seemed as improbable as seventy years without a suicide bombing in the Middle East. Marshall won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, and deservingly so.

This morning, a member of my church's leadership posted approvingly about a bill in Oklahoma which would define abortion as first degree murder. There are two ways to think about the project of reducing the number of abortions: there's the impulse to lash out and punish harder, harder, harder, thinking that at some point the punishment will flip abortions off just like a light switch. Maybe if we pass laws declaring abortion a war crime! Maybe if we drop nuclear weapons on the abortion clinics! Hydrogen bombs! Maybe if we grind Germany under our heel until they teeter on the brink of bankruptcy and starvation, they'll just vanish and never be a threat again!

Or, maybe if our resources go into cutting down unwanted pregnancies, and providing material support to women who feel cornered, then all those efforts will pay off richly in fewer abortions. And if there are women who abort flippantly, then maybe we should try something radical like, oh, I don't know, relational ministry. Preach the Gospel. Pray for them, love them, teach them, introduce them to their Creator who promised to give them a new heart and a new spirit. Stop me when any of this sounds un-Biblical.

The un-Biblical part is responding to it by lashing out in anger and trying to extinguish behavior with punishment. God will judge, but our part is to love. God doesn't need our help judging or punishing. He doesn't need our help keeping the galaxies in the right orbits, and frankly I'd be terrified of piloting one of those monsters. He similarly doesn't need our help responding to evil with justice, and frankly I'm terrified of the part of my soul that wants control over that.

I do fully understand that what underpins the motive to punish is a desperate wish to protect the innocent. I do get that stubbornly irreducible number of abortions each year, each week, each day, is heartbreaking. But the sin of meeting force with force, of meeting violence with violence, is such a ready tool in the hands of our Adversary that we have to use all our wisdom to steer clear of it. It's no excuse before God that we committed our own sins in opposition to others' sins, no matter how much their sins sicken us. Jesus wasn't pleased when Peter cut off Malchus' ear; He praised the centurion whose faith was entirely in His word, His provision. I'm all for fewer abortions, but unless we do it the right way, we do wrong. Simple as that.

Want fewer abortions? Pray for that. Then get up and go share the Gospel with someone. The rest is God's, so get your grubby hands off it.

Trump

For a while, I was as baffled as anyone at Donald Trump's success, and I just couldn't see how any voter could listen to what the man says, and know what he's done, and still support him. But a few things have dawned on me, and I think they go most of the way toward explaining what's happening.

In 2006, I voted in my last Texas gubernatorial election. One of the candidates for governor was Kinky Friedman. In case you haven't heard of him, he's a novelist, musician, and a humorist, and he ran as a joke. He had several slogans, but the one I remembered without having to check Wikipedia was, "How hard could it be?" I was mystified and frustrated as to why so many intelligent people were voting for him, until I realized that they weren't in favor of Kinky Friedman at all; it was just that they fundamentally held the office of Texas governor in contempt. 

They had been fed a steady diet of maddeningly context-free political bickering through the Perry, Bush and Richards administrations, and probably before that as well. At some point it just became too much, and now their most accessible impression of the entire institution of Texas state government was that it was broken, dysfunctional, ineffectual, and good only for a laugh. Thinking too carefully about it was a baited trap, a whirlpool down into charges and counter-charges and attacks and counter-attacks. Why not elect a comedian? Why not? In fact, that was actually another one of his slogans: "Why the hell not?"

Now, I fully get that political campaigns are supposed to be partisan. I understand and agree that highlighting the contrasts between candidates makes it clear to voters what their choices are. I also am not so romantic that I think political campaigns in the past were dignified and polite; I'm well read enough in American history to know that even the founding fathers took vicious cheap shots at one another. But we clearly have gone roaring past some critical point of structural integrity in our ability, or possibly our motivation, to think carefully about our national leadership. The people who are turning out in enormous numbers to vote for Donald Trump are not, I genuinely believe, passionate admirers of Donald Trump. Some are, sure, but some people also think the earth is flat and vaccines cause autism. For the overwhelming majority, I think a vote for Trump seems like a good idea not because of his merits, but because of the utter meaninglessness of the presidency. 

I imagine there's some parallel between this turn in American politics and the explosive leap in power and appeal of British comedy in the 1960s. One explanation that accounts for a lot of types of humor is that humor is about toppling the powerful, about bringing low the mighty. At the start of the twentieth century, Great Britain was still an empire and global superpower, but the first fifty years of the century didn't go so well for them. By the nineteen sixties, with their power hollowed out and their colonies nearly all independent, they were cranking out performing groups like Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python and the Goodies and the Two Ronnies, who took sacred institutions and shared understandings from the glory days and made them fodder for jokes. Anyone at all who proposed anything in earnest, anyone who treated any person, situation or institution as important, was begging for a truly pulverizing salvo of ridicule. What I think provided such fertile soil for all that truly acerbic and hostile humor was the steep decline, the fresh memory of depleted strength, the echoes of lost confidence. 

And I think the largest segment of the Trump vote is a variation on the same theme.