As a happily married, heterosexual male, this question never used to come up for me. Now that I've written a book on God, I'm being asked to voice my opinion on religion and homosexuality and the vexed question of gay marriage. In all honesty, I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body so I'm immediately and instinctively on the side of anyone who feels oppressed as a minority (and - ironically - almost everybody seems to fall into that category these days!); I also know what it feels like to be outnumbered and scared by majority power. But I haven't given this particular question a great deal of thought, largely because it's so far removed from my experience. What thought I have given to it runs something like this:
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Before I wrote The Attempted Murder of God: Hidden Science You Really Need To Know, nobody really questioned my view on gays and religion because it never came up. It’s not my world. But there’s been a presumption that because I believe in God I must therefore be homophobic and against gay marriage. The logic is always missing among the bigoted and it’s sad that this view, that believers are inherently prejudiced in this way, prevails. I was brought up to view character as the definer of people, nothing else. What they do and say in relation to how they interact with others tells me who they are and what to think about them. Colour, sexuality, race, religion, disability, difference itself has no bearing on how I judge others. Never has, never will. And on this vexed question of gays and religion I’m no different; I don’t judge. I was like this as far back as I can remember, before I got the scriptural authority to back it up: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” I figure I was on the right track from the start.
But there’s a specific question that’s come up from a Twitter follower of mine - whom I follow (Catholic Kevin Maxwell, on Channel 4's 4thought.tv 7.2.12, speaking on this question) - that maybe it would help to answer, for what it’s worth to anyone in the debate on gays and marriage. The question was, ‘Should gay couples be allowed to marry in places of worship?” And he's recently 'messaged' me to ask my opinion on the whole thing in the run up to his TV appearance. This guy is gay and black and is toughing it out against a hostile background. I’m on his side. So I’ll weigh in on this one.
I kind of answered it briefly already on Twitter, but the character limit’s probably not the best place to tackle this one at length over multiple tweets. I ran to four or five in a row and thought better of it. On Twitter, you can find me under @mrchrismcgrath and @scroobytweets. And on both accounts I’m followed by people from many religions;one in particular seemed geared to the preservation of traditional marriage and I tweeted a reply to their following me. It went like this:
“Society values marriage & I value all people. If gays want to share in the societal value of marriage that has to be right.
Whatever God finds sinful, he doesn't ask us to condemn on his behalf; nor would I ever even if he asked me to;) -It's his job;).
Key is 'render unto Caesar':We set our rules; where they conflict with God that's 4 individuals 2deal with, not for us 2 condemn.
Finally, defence of the sanctity of the human heart supersedes defence of God's opinion: He doesn't need our help. Cherish the heart.”
A Salvation Army tweeter kindly reminded me: “God is expecting His children to warn others about their mistaken ways.(2Chron 19:10) We should do so with love.”
And I answered: "Often,tone is condemnatory with real relish in adopting God's moral indignation. I like:"Do not judge,or you too will be judged";) "
To which he replied; “I quite agree. Thx 4 the reminder.”
But this is all to say that society gets to say what values we have and we then enact laws to suit. Those laws, however, are often in conflict with organised religion. And here’s where it makes the difference. Society would have to ban religion altogether or make them conform to secular society. To ban a religion is to enter Communist territory, and that’s a ‘no’ from me. To enforce conformity with secular society is Fascism, and that’s a ‘no’ from me. If a religion can be persuaded to change from within then that’s a yes from me, but persuasion should not involve coercion. Religions can and do adapt to secular society's norms, but they should not be condemned if they don’t – because that’s groupthink in play, an offshoot of Fascism bearing down on a religion to make it bend and change against its better judgement. The individual counts more than society counts, because it is from many individuals that society is built; it works from the bottom up. The troubles in the world (e.g.Communism and Fascism) start when we allow the overarching society to obliterate the individual. I would view any religion as a kind of individual expression when set against wider, secular society, and so it would be to the obliteration of individual expression to let secular society supersede organised religion. However at odds with secular society an organised religion is, no religion should be browbeaten into conformity. That’s the bottom line.
And I can understand the resistance to the proposal (pun-alert) in this particular question: should same sex couples be allowed to marry in places of worship? If a religion derives its authority from the spiritual and the spiritual is considered to them to be sacred and within that sacred world it is forbidden for gays to be married as if with the blessing of that sacred world and/or with the blessing of that sacred world’s god then it can seem quite wrong constantly to challenge that sacred world with secular society's concerns, such as equality in secular marriage; for equality in secular marriage is entirely right--and entirely wrong in the sacred world if that sacred world forbids it.
Secular dialogue goes like this at the moment: your religion thinks gay sex is an abomination in the eyes of God but our secular society doesn’t agree and we think our secular society matters more than your sacred world – we’ve sanctioned gay marriage and so should you. And yet the logical difficulty in that argument is that it is precisely that sacred world to which gay marriage is trying gain access. It wants the sanction of the spiritual world, but asks the spiritual to overlook one of the tenets of its spirituality. It does seem to me to be a confused proposal, to say we love your church but we don’t love your church’s condemnation of our behaviour: the church’s authority is being sought in sanctioning a marriage, which in the case of the Christian tradition is to gain the blessing of God, and yet its authority is being questioned because the secular world’s view on gay marriage has moved on, and it expects the religion’s view to move with it; but it is precisely the separation of the secular and the religious that attracts us all to the church. The secular derives its authority from the state and the church derives its authority from God. And in this proposal what is really being sought – it is feared by many - is the circumvention of God’s authority by secular means, and that itself has the effect of damaging the spiritual thread from the individual to God in the act of marriage.
Secular marriage does not require God’s blessing and there is no argument: gays should be allowed to marry because secular society deems marriage a good thing. A church marriage does require God’s blessing and asking religions to overlook passages in the Bible that say God finds homosexual sex acts an abomination is to ask the religion to ignore God’s disgust. That seems to me to be the main objection by religion to gay marriage in a church.
However, I go one step further. I ask what is it that God find’s an abomination? It is the sex act itself. But marriage is not the sanction of a sex act. It is the union of love between hearts. To reduce marriage to the sanction of a sex act is in fact to cut the spiritual heart out of it, especially since sex in the Bible is recognised more often than not as the source of immoral behaviour saved only by marriage, so that to say marriage is a celebration or spiritual sanction of the sex act is to misunderstand the Bible’s view entirely, I think. And remember, we were having babies long before religion got a hold of marriage and so marriage cannot be the golden key to sexual union for God. Indeed, God initially sees sex as a curse not a blessing:
“I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”
Sex must therefore be viewed separately from marriage, I think. Religion wants sex and marriage to go hand in hand but there’s no clear scriptural authority for that I know of beyond using marriage as a way to guard against sexual immorality (i.e. promiscuity; for example, 1:Corinthians:7:2). There’s ‘go forth and multiply’ in Genesis, which relates to sex not marriage and there’s Matthew:19:
:“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,'" and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
And this relates to marriage not sex. The marriage itself makes them one flesh. Marriage is the spiritual union of souls! Sex is not the issue.
And so I return to my personal guide: to cherish the heart.
For God, it’s the heart that counts above all. And I would say that while God has his reasons for finding the homosexual sex act an abomination – and as a heterosexual I don’t think I’m qualified to comment one way or the other beyond saying it’s not for me – I see nowhere in the Bible the idea that homosexual hearts are not as worthy of God’s love as anyone else’s. Their sexual union may bar access to the Kingdom of God, as per Paul in I Corinthians 6:9,10 - God may not like what they get up to in bed. And Leviticus 18:22 is clear in its condemnation of the act itself. But God doesn’t say they themselves, in their hearts, are an abomination. And I think the church is in the business of sanctioning spiritual union of hearts in marriage with the blessing of God before the sex act comes into it.
Once the ceremony is over, then whatever sex act gays engage in is answerable to God and that’s for them to decide how to handle that – to ignore it or not. But they should be left alone to decide to abstain from the act itself if they’ve chosen to seek spiritual union in a church of God. If they seek spiritual sanction from God through a church, get it, and then start to attack the church for condemning their sex act when God himself condemns it, that would be hypocritical and logically unsupportable, except with this in mind: in that eventuality, their best option would be to remind the church as I reminded the good Salvation Army man: ‘judge not lest you be judged’. Leave the judging to God and meanwhile let people express their love and commitment and the truth of their heart in marriage before God. If it offends God to do so, the church cannot be blamed for trying to cherish all hearts above all else. And God does not need our help to judge others. He’s quite capable of doing that himself. In fact while he does judge, he explicitly asks us not to. So… don’t.
Overall, my advice is do not browbeat the church into sanctioning gay marriage, but do point out that there is logical room for them to allow it with the sanction of God, on the proviso that it is understood that hearts alone and not the sexual act itself is being blessed by God. To bless the sexual act in the face of God’s obvious disgust would be a logical abomination! But it should be for gays to face the music upon death – whatever that music may be - not for us to exclude their love from spiritual sanction if their hearts are pure and their love and commitment true.
So I’m for gay marriage in a church if a church can be persuaded without coercion to understand there’s room for manoeuvre and maintain the sanctity of God’s word. Although I doubt the Pope would go for it and that’s his call and should also be respected. It is, after all, a religion, not the X-factor. Public opinion is not the point. It’s weighing up God’s opinion that counts and I come back to the beginning: I follow the 'render unto Caesar' rule: we set our rules; where they conflict with God that's for individuals to deal with, not for us to condemn; and the defence of the sanctity of the human heart supersedes our defence of God's opinion because he doesn't need our help. He’s the boss. But we must first look to the human heart, not to what consenting adults get up to in bed. Sex leading to procreation keeps the human story alive, but it’s the story that counts – hearts and minds working for a better way to live with each other.
Weigh the pain in the heart of a gay couple denied spiritual sanction in marriage against anyone’s near-blasphemous adoption of God’s moral indignation when we are told not to judge others! I would never presume to adopt God’s moral indignation, not when he asks me not to judge others; and I therefore leave the moral indignation to him, and let the conversation rest between him and gays alone. It’s their conversation. Let them handle it like grown-ups. Yes, point out God’s scriptural disgust at the act as a loving reminder that God has his opinions and that transgression has its consequences, but no, do not relish pointing it out with the zeal of a bigot. Then remind the church that their first duty is to guide people to heaven and to cherish the human heart, and not to exclude any one of us from the possibility of God’s blessing upon human hearts in love.
I think the wording of the marriage ceremony might need a tweak (!), but other than that:
Good luck.
(Update later in the day: To Kevin Maxwell, well done on 4thought.tv - Great job!).