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.