African little girl during her English class in orphanage. There is no light and electricity inside the classroom. Around 50-60 orphans live in this orphanage which is located near Nairobi.
Should Christian organizations participate in excluding gay persons from assisting in philanthropic work? Can or should a gay person aware of some Christian denomination’s history of discrimination against them partner with Christian organizations? Would you partner with someone in ministry whom you knew discriminated against someone in a same-sex relationship or marriage?
As head of World Vision Richard Stearns has had to wrestle with these types of questions over the past few days. The answers he came up with have sent a ripple of shock and confusion throughout the evangelical world.
World Vision made a declarative statement saying that it will not employ those in legal same-sex marriages. According to Stearns this was done in order to commit to greater unity in World Vision’s task of taking care of poor and hungry children. Many in the evangelical community see it not as a commitment to unity but a compromise of standards.
Stearns declared in a letter that he was not endorsing same sex marriages but had “chosen to defer to local churches on this issue. We have chosen not to exclude someone from employment at World Vision on this issue alone.” Now World Vision has reneged on this policy decision on the basis of following the authority of the Bible and failing to consult their supporters on this issue.
These decisions over policy will impact many other non-profit and para-church organizations in the near future as the same-sex marriage debate within the American Evangelical church continues to be a divisive issue. World Vision’s initial reasoning in changing their policy was that they are not a church and if those who want to work for their organization are in churches that affirm their same-sex committed relationships then they can join the organization to work for a greater task: tackling poverty and injustice on behalf of the poor.
In the matter of same-sex marriage marriage they planned to defer to the local church. This was the organization’s attempt at making a statement that Christian unity and serving the least of these is more important than people’s sexuality. The repeal of this decision is grounded in World Vision’s commitment to biblical authority and they have stated “marriage is an institution ordained by God between a man and a woman—those are age-old and fundamental Christian beliefs.”
The question Stearns and all who have to face similar decisions must answer is where to draw the line between gray areas and the central tenets of the faith. This is something the church will have to wrestle with not only on the issue of same-sex relationships but also on a whole host of other issues including recent attempts in Arizona and Kansas to pass legislation which allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.
But has there ever been a precedent for those of differing beliefs working together for a greater cause?
One case in point is the Civil Rights Movement. The main spokesman for the movement was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, but the movement was comprised of a multitude of different groups and individuals who didn’t necessarily hold the same religious beliefs and govern themselves by the same code of morality.
The demonstrators of the March on Washington were Jews, Catholics, Atheists, and Communists. These groups managed to work together for a cause, which was greater than their differences.
In fact, during the 1963 March on Washington one of the deputy organizers, Bayard Rustin, was an admitted same-gender loving man and a former sympathizer with Communists. Despite the controversy Rustin played an active role in the civil rights movement as an adviser and organizer.
King and the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement believed the greater cause–the fight for equality–trumped their differences. This seemed, initially, to be the route Richard Stearns was taking in regards to the change in World Vision’s employment policy but the verdict is still out on whether the reversal truly embodies a commitment to unity or compromises the gospel call to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
We can say that Stearns and World Vision are doing great things for the cause of overcoming poverty and injustice on a global scale, but we must also ask the question “Have they missed out on an opportunity to partner and ally with a group that is isolated and shunned by the Christian community?” That is a question that has been left unanswered.
Not only did King work with a variety of people but he also proffered ideas that were unpopular within his movement and honored people that others in his movement might not. He wrote that, economically, segregation hurts the poor whites along with poor blacks. His point being that forced, cheap labor, operating outside the labor laws, brings everyone down. Not a popular idea then, nor today. In Stride Toward Freedom (STF) he wrote that, among the white community, the group with the best attitude about adopting the federal ruling was the Men of Montgomery a white businessmen’s group not the Ministerial Alliance. Journalists like to take a lot of credit nowadays for publicizing the civil rights movement, but King writes about the challenges of doing his work despite the bias of journalists , one example being the press assumption that Rosa Parks was planted on the bus to create an incident by the NAACP. We live in a world that is rich with mythos nowadays where we think that truth is created by the number of people that say something, but King kept his distance from what was popular in the media, nor did he imagine media movements to have any meaningful power. In STF he speaks in this manner about publicity: “It is true that some of the leaders have received national and international publicity, but only the shallow minded are excited over publicity. Publicity is evanescent; it is here today and gone tomorrow … whoever falls in love with publicity is not fit to have it and will end up in misery.” His statement had historical foundation, since the greatest threat to the re-election of Lincoln, in the throes of the civil war was the New York City Press and at one point the Mayor was moved to try and have the city secede from the union and join the Confederacy.
The descendants of this Times Square heritage, fashionable then and fashionable now, would now have us believe that normalizing gay sex is equivalent to establishing equal rights for former slaves. Yet, in the latter case we were restoring life liberty and happiness and ending a system where one group of people enriched and engorged itself at the expense of another. Normalizing gay sex has the opposite effect.
In the Greek city state of Athens, where gay sex had been normalized, Plato lamented the bondage to gay sex that he saw around him. He equated the discontinuation of one’s parental lineage with murder and, if you have children of a child bearing age you get that. Particularly if you have boys. Millions of years of evolution tell you, you want your seed to survive. It’s why we sacrifice for our kids. You’d rather lose your own life than have them chose to discontinue theirs. In a son’s story about coming out to his Hindu parents, recently published in the New York press, his mother violently threw up on the floor of his apartment as she headed toward his bathroom. The son wrote that he found himself worrying about the carpet. He had lost the ability to imagine the effect of his choices on his mother.
Recently on the Bill Cunningham show, a young male prostitute told his mother she ”just had to accept who he was” — a gay male, now for hire. She was a single black, mother, of humble means. At some point in her pregnancy she probably asked herself whether or not it would be best to abort him rather than try to raise him. She probably gave up a lot of chances to date, marry and have more kids, in order to raise him. Single moms with babies just aren’t that attractive. … all those commitments and responsibilities. It’s the price we pay for holding sticky little hands. She gave her future so he could have one. He ended hers. She just had to accept it.
The journalism school at the University of Missouri celebrated young football player Michael Sam’s decision to be gay with two and a half hours of radio air-time on local NPR, even though he is at the age where some people aren’t yet settled on their sexual patterns. It made the professors and broadcasters look tolerant among middle class people and it certainly didn’t hurt their family did it? But what about Michael Sam’s family? Living in deep poverty, the parents had lost most of their children to prison or death. What does it matter to politically correct middle class people if another poor black family doesn’t continue forward in time? Where will all those happy, self-serving people from the suberbs be when Mr. Sams wakes up at 40 and realizes he will never raise his own kids, as so many gay men do? … or buys a stolen child from Latin America? … or if he becomes wealthy, pays a desperately poor woman in India to go against her culture and bear a child for him?
The gay sex relationships fed into our shared thinking on the Eye-tocracy of modern TV are happy, wealthy independent males. Gay sex relationships in the real world, however, are heavily weighted toward the poor and helpless. Young women in low income neighborhoods of early childbearing years, often minority, is where gay-sex families and relationships are most heavily concentrated. Among men there is some correlation with missing or troubled relationships with the dad. Maybe those are the problems we should be focused on. Maybe the slow-motion holocaust of urban, high-school educated males is the problem we should be attacking. For every young woman who has children in a gay-sex relationship, an unnamed men loose the right to raise their own child. For every young urban male consumed by a world that won’t raise him, educate him or support him when he falls, an unseen young woman somewhere loses a male marriage partner. Maybe that’s the problem we should be attacking. Statistics from the large scale Pew study suggest that most young women in gay sex relationships convert back as they get older, but with respect to children, fathers and future the damage is often already done.
Large scale, statistically significant twin studies, show little to no evidence of a genetic factor in homosexuality and conclusively show the environment and choice are more dominant than genes. Nevertheless, it is a hard path to break out of once people reach a certain age. Many gay men talk about a deep yearning for a man long before sexual development occurs and formerly gay men often talk about a “father-hunger.” If the lack of a resolved father figure draws some men to homosexuality then it’s not going away in this culture. People have all kinds of experiences over time and everyone has their own sexual history. We would be foolish and wrong to try to make gay sex illegal or forbidden, just as we would be wrong to try and normalize it under the cloak of marriage.
We don’t actually have to speculate about how Dr. King would have received people in gay sex relationships, because he wrote about it. In responding through an advice column to a young man who was worried about being attracted to men, he commended him for recognizing the problem honestly and encouraged him saying it was probably an environmental influence that could be dealt with overtime. In dealing with Bayard Rustin, a gay man in his own organization, he was accepting and valued him for his talents, just as we should be doing. Knowing this man over many years, didn’t convince him that redefining marriage held out an honest promise to gay people or their parents.
Given the entangled nature of homosexuality, World Vision’s approach probably strikes the perfect balance. While gay sex practices are bad for humanity overall, people have a tendency to become entangled or enslaved by their sexual desires and relationships. Unlike the Romans, we chose not to end this practice by the threat of death. We choose to accept it, as we do with much in the realm of human choice, aspiration and folly. World Vision may have always had members who practice gay sex in its ranks. When it comes to pretending that gay sex relationships don’t hurt the participants or anyone else and sanctifying it in the covenant of marriage World Vision chooses not to participate in that. This seems to be the right balance. They accept the variety of choices people come to them with and their attempts to make the best of those choices. They don’t try to pretend a problem which separates men and women – particularly in poverty neighborhoods, accelerates the decline of fatherhood, further separates men from children and reduces their reproductive opportunities, creates a false sense of attachment that doesn’t endure well, burdens young women with children they can’t explain when the convert back to heterosexuality – as they often do, and deeply wounds the genetically engrained yearning to continue that all parents have …. they don’t try to pretend that those things don’t exist or don’t hurt people.
In the case of World Vision, this is a particularly important ethic to have. As an outreach mission-focused group, it is important that they maintain the role of helper and not impose cultural imperialism on someone who needs food. The movement to normalize gay sex relationships, was clearly brought into our minds by the American TV networks and metropolitan journalists, primarily those broadcasting/publishing from New York. Whether or not this is what you want for your own children, it seems deeply wrong for us to impose these values it on impoverished people who, live on the edge of survival and depend on us to eat. This would be cultural imperialism of the worst kind in the most private important area of their lives.