It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we ought to celebrate it.
Alise Wright, a Christian and a frequent commenter on this site, has a wonderful post on her site about how she has come to not just “accept” or “tolerate” gay people, but rather affirm their relationships.
If I came to the conclusion that homosexuality was not a sin, there could be a rift in relationships with a number of people –- people who probably thought I believed the way I did on nearly everything else just to be contentious. I didn’t know how to look at a pastor and say, “I think you and most of your colleagues with years of biblical training are wrong about this issue.” I didn’t know how to tell my family, “Add this to the list of thing that I don’t agree with you about.” I didn’t know how to tell my kids, “You’re probably going to be told that homosexuality is a sin, but I don’t think it is.”
What caused her to jump from simply “being nice” to gay people — which so many Christians seem to think is the limit to their tolerance of the GLBT community — to affirming their relationships is her realization that her god is all about love, and why would a loving god condemn two consenting people from having a relationship?
Obviously, that reasoning doesn’t work for me.
But from the viewpoint of all those Christians who go on and on and on and on about how their faith is all about love — and then quickly back off when it comes to supporting same-sex marriage and the equal rights that come with it — at least Alise makes some sense.
The Christian church in this country can only change from within, and it’ll take more people like Alise coming out publicly in support of gay couples to make that happen. I’d love to see other Christians take a cue from her — have the courage to support gay relationships and gay marriage, no matter what the people in your church are going to say.
