| Posted March 3, 2020 | By Charles Fensham | Categorized under Missiology and Praxis |

In their book "UN-Christian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity" Kinnaman and Lyon write that people outside Christianity in North America perceive Christians as people who are, "antigay, antichoice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders..."  Clearly, North American Christianity has a problem with its public witness.  In no small way the harmful anger and hatred directed at sexual and gender minorities from within Christian circles has played a role in creating this perception.  From within many Christian contexts the perspective is quite different.  There people argue that Christianity always condemned "sodomy" or "homosexuality" and that the criticism and negative attitudes represent a form of tough love aimed at helping people reform their lives in accordance with Christian teaching.  Biblical texts such as Lev 18 and 20, Romans 1 and sometimes Genesis 19 as well as the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 are used as proof of a long and honorable Christian tradition rejecting same-sex relationships. 

The vehemence and angry forms of hatred I have observed among Christians and the mounting evidence of profound harm done, especially to sexual and gender minority youth, combined with the shadow that these attitudes cast over the Christian church has puzzled me and led me through a five year project of research resulting in my book, "Misguided Love: Christians and the Rupture of LGBTQI2+ People."  Even though I did not expect to find a lot of good history, I was profoundly disappointed in the ongoing historical failure of Christian behavior toward people who were singled out, tortured, and burned alive in public displays of extreme violence in the name of Christ.  The history, it turns out, is not a beautiful history of Christian holiness, but rather a history of Christian shame.  Unfortunately, Christians continue to behave in harmful ways.

Much of the contemporary culture wars have focused on parsing biblical texts, often taken out of context, and the literature on this is now very informative.  Perhaps the death blow to the Christian focus on two texts in Lev 18 and 20 came in the work of conservative Rabbi Jacob Milgrom.  In the Anchor Bible Commentary on Leviticus he demonstrated that Christians misread these texts and pull them out of the cultural context and ethos of the Jewish law. He argues persuasively that these texts are not about universal sexual morality, but rather, about the moral procreative responsibility of a married Jewish man, toward his wives. 

In my journey of research, I explored Christian sexual ethics and some of the latest research on the role of internalized homophobia that shapes societal attitudes toward sexual and gender minorities.  The greatest surprise, however, was to be found in the history of the rise of the myth of the sin of sodomy.  As Missiologists, we pride ourselves in understanding the role of culture in relation to our faith.  The story of Sodom and how it impacted the formation of early Christianity in the Roman Empire and particularly stoic Roman culture is a fascinating case study.  It seems that it started with a Jewish Scholar, Philo of Alexandria (20 BC - 50 CE), who sought to make Judaism amenable to the popular stoic instincts of Roman culture.  Philo built his ideas about the story of Sodom in Gen 19 on reading the Septuagint version of the Bible without a good grasp of the original Hebrew.  He absorbed the profound misogyny of Roman society and started describing same sex relations as a form corruption of manliness.  The flipside of this is the denigration of women.  He considered women to be inferior human beings subject to their passions particularly displayed in sexuality.  Men who indulge in such womanly behavior were to be put to death. 

Philo's writing became so influential in early Christianity that many believed he was a Christian bishop.  His writings shaped the emergence of the Alexandrian rule that considered sexual relations as undesirable amongst Christians and only permissible for the sake of procreation.  Being celibate was proclaimed as the better way and was particularly important to establish the image of a Christian man. Such men were considered completely rational and not influenced by any form of sexual desire.  Out of the cauldron of the collapsing Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity came a new negative conception of sex.  The rest of the history is deeply troubling including protestants in Geneva literally slowly beating people to death, and the hanging of young boys in the 18^th Century Protestant Dutch Republic.  I believe this history of harm and new biblical research calls us to repentance and to a new assessment of our attitude toward sexual and gender minorities.

(Misguided Love: Christians and the Rupture of LGBTQI2+ People is a peer reviewed publication of the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling and is available at http://www.harvard.com/book/misguided_love/)