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Beyond belief

Beyond belief

Last updated on: December 24, 2009 at 5:34 am by Fred Clark

Beyond belief 2009-12-24T05:34:31-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte is rightly irked by a peculiar verbal tic employed by many American evangelical Christians when expressing their disapproval of homosexuality.

In a post mainly celebrating the milestone election this month of an openly gay mayor in Houston — Houston, Texas — she quotes from an article on the election in which one Houston resident says, "I don't believe in homosexuality … I think that's a sin."

Amanda notes that this doesn't make much sense when read as standard English:

What’s it going to take to get people to stop misusing the word “believe”? If you think homosexuality is a sin, then you think that it exists, and therefore you absolutely believe in it. I’m usually sanguine on the way that words shift meanings, but in this case, I have to protest. People are using the word “believe” instead of the more accurate words “approve” or even “accept”, because they want cover for their bigotry. They hope the word “believe” puts their bigotry into the Religion Zone, therefore above criticism.

Her translation from evangelicalese is spot on for the strict denotation of this weird idiom. When evangelicals say "I don't believe in X," what they mean is "I don't approve of X."

But such a direct translation loses many of the additional connotations of the sectarian jargon. And to try to appreciate some of those — and to get a sense of how this odd construction came to be the preferred evangelical phrasing — I want to turn briefly to another story in the news about evangelicals and homosexuality. This one is from Associated Press religion writer Eric Gorski: "Evangelical church opens doors fully to gays."

The 55-year-old pastor with spiked gray hair and blue jeans launches into his weekly welcome, a poem-like litany that includes the line "queer or straight here, there's no hate here."

The Rev. Mark Tidd initially used the word "gay." But he changed it to "queer" because it's the preferred term of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people invited to participate fully at Highlands Church.

Tidd is an outlaw pastor of sorts. His community, less than a year old, is an evangelical Christian church guided both by the Apostle's Creed and the belief that gay people can embrace their sexual orientation as God-given and seek fulfillment in committed same-sex relationships.

First of all, we should say this: Hallelujah!

And then we should note how this is working out for the congregation:

Just over a month ago, 81 adults showed up for 10 a.m. services at Highlands Church. Tidd started draping white ribbon over the back rows so people would sit together up front.

Last Sunday, there was a record crowd of 220. The auditorium was twinkling with Christmas lights. And four couples carried babies to the front of the church for Tidd to bless.

Hmm. Whoever would have guessed that welcoming people into your church might somehow lead to the congregation actually growing?

I want to revisit Gorski's story on Highlands Church in a later post to explore in more detail the biggest theological distinction between the Rev. Tidd and more typical American evangelical pastors — namely that he has worked out a (biblical) sexual ethic and they have not — but here and now I want to focus less on Highlands itself and more on summarizing and predicting the inevitable apoplectic backlash to this congregation's sensible answer to the question WWJD?

That criticism is centered not on the specifics of Highlands' inclusive stance, but on their presumed disregard for the Bible. Begging the question, their critics will presume that Tidd et. al. don't take the Bible seriously, and then they will condemn them for that. That presumption may be difficult to square with Gorski's portrait of a pastor and a congregation who do, in fact, act out of the utmost respect for the Christian scriptures, but — at the risk of getting ahead of ourselves — these critics have found a way not to have to square their presumptions with the facts.

The particular phrases that will be hurled, repeatedly, at a church like Highlands is that it lacks "a high view" of "the authority of scripture." Both of those phrases suggest an implicit hierarchy, but a hierarchy of what, exactly? What is it that scripture must be viewed as authoritatively higher than?

The answer, it seems, involves a kind of blurring of the lines between hermeneutics and epistemology. What they mean is that the Bible must be treated as "higher" than all the other sources and resources that Christians might rely on for doing theology or for ethical guidance — reason, evidence, the world as it is, tradition, conscience, consequence, etc.

Methodists, for example, rely on John Wesley's "quadrilateral" of scripture, tradition, reason and experience. The American evangelicals appealing to a "high view of scripture" don't necessarily oppose such a scheme, but they would insist that one leg of Wesley's four-legged stool was more important than the others. Scripture, they argue, is the trump card. And the claims of scripture supercede the claims of tradition, reason and experience when those claims are in conflict.

This is the precise point at which my attempts to achieve disagreement with my evangelical brothers and sisters inevitably fails. Because at this point I want to say that if your reading of scripture conflicts with reason and experience, then you're reading it wrong. But I can't seem to phrase this in such a way that this is what they hear. What they hear, instead — and quickly leap to shout down — is me suggesting that reason or experience, rather than scripture, should be the trump card and the tallest leg on this off-kilter stool.

The reason I think that my HV of S friends can't hear what I'm saying is that the suggestion that one might read the Bible wrong causes them to recoil in horror. The Bible, they insist, is infallible — by which they mean that it cannot be read wrong. What good would an infallible text be, after all, without infallible readers?

I know what you're thinking: There are all kinds of people who go by the name Christian and they have widely divergent readings of the Bible and that very diversity would seem to demonstrate that it must be possible to read the Bible incorrectly. But here they will cite one of those sorely abused Pauline passages about the foolishness of God being wiser than men and explain that real, true Christians read the infallible Bible with the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit, unlike those liberals and seminarians and pointy-headed wise-fools who read it without such divine divination and therefore find it only foolishness and a stumbling block.

And if you understand where they're coming from there, you'll understand why it is they can't manage to hear what I'm trying to say when I suggest that their reading of the Bible might be wrong if it can't be reconciled with reason and experience. That suggestion, to me, is merely a recognition that we humans don't know everything — that we see through a glass, darkly, even when reading the verse, "For now we see through a glass, darkly." But to them it is tantamount to saying that they are cut off from the guidance of the Holy Spirit. They hear it as an accusation in which I am saying, in effect, the worst possible thing anyone could sa

y to them, "You don't really love
Jesus, really, truly in your heart." And that just makes them angry because they know that I'm wrong about that.

And but so anyway, my point here is to explore the unenviable consequences of adopting this perspective of a "high view" of "the authority of scripture." If one accepts that one's reading of the Bible cannot be wrong and cannot be changed, and that this reading must triumph in any apparent conflict with reason and experience, then one must be willing to reject reason and experience whenever they stubbornly refuse to be reconciled to your interpretation.

When that is your predicament, then a statement like "I disapprove of homosexuality" will be inadequate. Disapproval, as Amanda noted, still acknowledges the existence, the reality of the thing of which you're disapproving and it is that very existence that is irreconcilable and intolerable and which therefore must not be admitted or acknowledged. So mere disapproval won't cut it.

What you'll need, instead, is a way of expressing that disapproval that also conveys your refusal to accept the actuality of the unacceptable thing — a way of saying that the thing you're disapproving of isn't really even a thing at all. And this is what American evangelical Christians are stumbling to communicate with that awkward locution: "I don't believe in homosexuality."

That phrasing expresses more than disapproval. It says that the speaker has chosen to live in a world in which the fact of homosexuality is not accepted as a fact and therefore does not need to be accounted for.

As for me, well, I do believe in homosexuality. I've seen it. It's existence does not seem to me to be subject to reasonable controversy. Someone who declares "I do not believe in homosexuality" seems to me, therefore, to be declaring their own unreasonableness. Thus before we can turn to the question of whether their implied disapproval constitutes bigotry we are first forced to grapple with the more urgent question of whether or not people who say they "do not believe in" reality can be regarded as meaningfully sane.

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