A show that confronts toxic masculinity must inevitably also address homophobia, for each is the other’s evil cousin. Both are tools of patriarchy, called upon because a system that intends to keep one gender identity in power over others is built upon the theory of gender essentialism. This theory posits that certain things are simply true of men and others of women (this schema doesn’t typically account for non-binary identities at all). It requires stereotypes, and when the masculine stereotypes go unchallenged—things like fearless bravado and emotional impassivity—we have what is often called toxic masculinity. But some of the stereotypes that make up this vision of masculinity are indeed very challenged by queer and genderqueer identities; in comes homophobia to disparage or erase these identities so that gender essentialism, and the patriarchal system it upholds, can survive.

In the final season of Ted Lasso, the team is beginning to gel into a community that rejects toxic masculinity. They have already embraced mental health therapy, confronted various forms of misogyny, and learned to respect the “unimportant” members of the team’s staff. This is no small feat for a men’s sports team (recall that the former US president’s brag about sexual assault was explained away as locker room talk). But the specter of potential homophobia looms as the club’s final hurdle, or in video game parlance, its final boss.

The show introduces this challenge just how you might expect: one of the members of the club (Colin) is gay but in the closet, unsure of if or when to come out to his teammates. The first player to learn of his sexuality is his best friend Isaac, who accidentally discovers sexual text messages from men on Colin’s phone. Isaac immediately becomes angry and standoffish toward his friend, and as a viewer we are left to wonder if he is simply being homophobic.

Eventually Colin stands up in the locker room and reveals the truth to his teammates. This scene is the club’s true faceoff with its final boss. Around the room, one after another of the footballers voices their support, culminating in an insistence that the players don’t care that he’s gay. They mean it in a good way: we won’t treat you differently than we did before, we won’t make fun of you, etc. And indeed, as they make this declaration, we can see the relief and reassurance on Colin’s face. The dragon, it would seem, has been slain.

But the show’s central figure and namesake, coach Ted Lasso, raises the team’s eyes to a new moral horizon. He tells a convoluted parable about a childhood friend who was a Denver Broncos fan in a town of Kansas City Chiefs supporters. The weakness of the analogy is part of the joke, but it still resonates with the team. Ted explains that when his friend came out as a Broncos fan, Ted’s message was “I don’t care that you’re a Broncos fan,” and he meant it in a good way: I will still be friends with you no matter what team you cheer for. But when the Broncos reached the Super Bowl two years in a row, that friend celebrated alone, without Ted’s friendship… because ultimately Ted was true to his words and didn’t care.

Returning from his memory to the question of Colin’s sexuality, Ted revises the team’s answer and says, “Colin, we don’t not care. We care very much. We care about who you are and what you must’ve been going through. From now on, you don’t have to go through it all by yourself.”

When I watched this scene, I was reminded of the various ways churches communicate to (or don’t) and care for (or don’t) their LGBTQ+ members. Of course there are those churches who guzzle the entire cocktail of patriarchy, gender essentialism, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and homophobic theology. This article is not meant for those churches. But what about the congregations making real efforts at hospitality, at inclusiveness, at solidarity?

In the worst case of these churches, there can be an unwillingness to even have a conversation. These churches may say “All are welcome,” but there is no visible statement of LGBTQ affirmation anywhere on their website, and for a new visitor, there is no way to determine if queer clergy, trans congregants, or same-sex weddings have a place in the community. This sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” protocol is very harmful (and it’s often just an attempt at a more palatable patriarchy). I don’t think we go too far to tell churches like this to do better.

But I wonder if many churches who are doing better could still learn something from this Ted Lasso locker room scene. A congregation might have an official label like “open and affirming,” but could the message to queer folks actually amount to “We don’t care that you’re lesbian or gay or bisexual or trans”? In other words, we won’t discriminate against you, and we won’t make sour faces at you when you walk in. But will we march with you? Will we write letters to our representatives to oppose legislation that harms you? Will we invite you to share the story of your faith and sexuality in our gathering?

It may be time for some churches to move from “We don’t care that you’re gay” to “We do care about your sexual identity—and we’re with you.”

I don’t have a list of 10 easy steps for how to center and celebrate queerness in your congregation. Sure, endeavor to have LGBTQ+ folks in leadership positions. Learn from queer theology together when you can. But I think the most important step is that we will all need to listen and listen well to those in our communities who are different from us.

In Ted Lasso, Colin and Isaac get the chance to have one of these messy conversations. Isaac apologizes for his aloofness toward Colin and says he was hurt that Colin hadn’t trusted him enough to come out to him. Colin offers that he hadn’t withheld the news due to any trait in Isaac, but his own fears. 

Later the two are playing video games and Colin says to his friend, “I love you, boyo.” Isaac (seemingly still dealing with some deep-seated and latent homophobia) flinches. “You can’t say it, can you?” Colin asks with a smile. Isaac pauses before replying, “No… but you know I do, yeah?”

Isaac is on a journey, and as he gives himself grace (and Colin does the same), it seems their friendship is back on the road to flourishing. Our churches might follow their lead.

But unlike Isaac, we can say it.

Now, this podcast comes from an evangelical outlet. So it is a deeply flawed exploration, in my opinion, because it bends over backward to point out the benefits of megachurches and Mars Hill despite all the patriarchy and harm. Setting that aside, it is a well-made, honest, and informative look at one of the most hyper-masculine, toxic, and influential church leaders of our generation. If it’s not too triggering for you to hear about this stuff, it is probably worth the listen.

One of the questions that the host, Mike Cosper, asks many times throughout the program is some version of what’s wrong with us?  Why do we keep empowering, following, and fawning over this type of leader? Why was Mark Driscoll, despite all the damage he was doing, catapulted to fame as a preacher, pastor, speaker, and author? 

An obvious answer is talent. He was and is a charismatic, funny, and brash public speaker. But that can’t be the full explanation. There are plenty of funny and talented people of faith. Why do the ones who are also narcissists so often rise to prominence as leaders within (white, western) Christianity—a faith tradition named after Jesus Christ, who taught and modeled humility and meekness?

Like most big questions, there are probably many, many reasons for this phenomenon. But one we must confront as a culture is the relationship between the nature of churches and the types of leaders who are chosen to lead them.

READ: Reaching Past the Obvious to Find Belonging

What is a church? The answer to that question will determine, of course, who is best-suited to lead one:

• If a church is mostly about people getting their doctrines right, then a brilliant theologian would be a good pastor.
• If a church is mostly about people helping each other, then a compassionate therapist would be a good pastor.
• If a church is mostly about working toward justice, then a tireless activist would be a good pastor.
• If a church is mostly about people’s relationships with each other, then a socially gifted connector would be a good pastor.
• If a church is mostly about getting more people into the pews (i.e. more people “hearing the gospel,” converting to the faith, donating to the church, etc.), then a savvy business leader or talented entertainer would be a good pastor.

Of course, a church is not just about one thing—and so in reality, a good pastor will have a varied skill set. But to the extent that growth, brand, and empire-building are emphasized, the ideal pastor will be a CEO type or at least a compelling orator.

Unfortunately, this is a massive problem to try to untangle. One of the reasons we keep seeing toxic, egomaniacal leaders is that they are the best at leading the type of churches we’ve created! So we’ll keep on seeing precisely those leaders until the nature and purposes of church are deconstructed.

That work of deconstruction will take significant time and effort. But perhaps we should begin with this thought: the reason white churches in the USA have been constructed this way is that they are deeply entwined with America’s white supremacist corporate culture. In the article “White Supremacy Culture,” Dr. Tema Okun lists 15 characteristics of cultures steeped in white supremacy.

At a glance, my last evangelical church exhibits at least 14 of them. This is something that deserves our attention.

 A version of this article first appeared on the Harbor Online Community blog.

(1) Our churches and denominations (and non-denominations) are still largely patriarchal.

(2) The vast majority of people refer to God with male pronouns.

What may be less clear to many American Christians is how these two facts are tied together at deep levels of our understanding of church and God. Many who would lament and oppose patriarchy still use gendered language about the Divine—language that subtly and implacably reinforces our patriarchal tendencies. Let’s examine each of these facts in turn, and perhaps the connections between them will emerge and suggest to us a new way forward.

Smash the Patriarchy

There are plenty of good articles out there that make the case for the importance of female leadership in our churches (here’s an incredibly thorough and Scriptural explanation from Fuller Seminary). I’ll assume that for most readers here at RLC, full gender equality in the church is a clear and obvious need. But even in “egalitarian” contexts, the sad truth is that patriarchy still linger—hiding (or out in the open) in our organizational charts, hiring practices, and ministry committees.

Sometimes this is obvious, as when a church only partially embraces gender equality in the first place. My last church, for instance, made the monumental decision to begin ordaining women as pastors for the first time (in the year of our Lord 2019), but they continue to reserve the elder role—which includes the lead pastor job—only for men. This sort of thing is perhaps unsurprising in conservative evangelical contexts so steeped in patriarchy, but patriarchy is not limited to these churches. Report after report detail the hardships that women face, even in egalitarian traditions, every step along the way in their pastoral journeys: from seminary education to ordination processes to the quest for a pastoral placement (see, for instance, Jaco Hamman’s “Resistance to Women in Ministry and the Psychodynamics of Sadness”).

In traditions whose official statements and by-laws call for women to fully and equally engage in church leadership at all levels, why is there still so much resistance to female leadership? The answer to that question is probably multi-layered and complex, reflecting all the ways our society still suffers from gender bias, male privilege, resistance to change, and on and on. But one factor we may need to start taking more seriously is our gendered language about God.

God, Mother of Us All

There are many understandable reasons we default to “he/his” when referring to God: two persons of the Trinity are Father and Son; the Son became flesh in a male human body; the Bible itself and people throughout church history use male pronouns this way. To be clear, I do not want to vilify anyone who uses male pronouns for God. But just because something is reasonable and historical does not mean it’s without consequence. We can and should examine this very reasonable practice for any damage it might be causing.

Ask any theologian if God is male or female, and they will undoubtedly give you an answer that amounts to “neither” or “gender-expansive” (perhaps explaining that God contains all good characteristics of the full gender spectrum). You might even repeat the question, just to make sure, “God is not a male?” Yes, you heard right the first time, they explain—God is not a male.

Why, then, do we exclusively and always describe God as a Him? Well, we do have the reasons given above, but since we do not consider God to actually be male, the only real answer is that we (read: the biblical authors, priests of old, and our mentors) have always done it that way. We have always done it that way.

READ: On Gender Equality: We Have Made Great Strides & We Are Not There Yet

And when a practice is doing good, and not harm, we can just keep on doing what we’re doing. But is that the case here? Or is our constant use of male pronouns for God causing us to actually view God as masculine (and by extension favoring men over women deep in our psyches)? Often when asked this, people are somewhat defensive and claim that no, using masculine pronouns in no way causes them to view God as masculine or male. If that’s so—if gendered pronouns do not affect our perception of their referents—then using female or nonbinary pronouns instead shouldn’t make any difference. 

Let’s put this theory to the test. Here are two well-known passages to reflect on:

“For God so loved the world that she gave her one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. She makes me lie down in green pastures; she leads me beside still waters; she restores my soul. She leads me in right paths for her name’s sake.” (Psalm 23:1-3)

I’ve engaged in this exercise with people in real life (well, what passes for real life in the age of quarantine), and the unanimous feedback I’ve received is that these pronouns do change our reception of such verses. And that should be no surprise, given how deeply ingrained the gender binary is in our thinking from childhood. This ought to disturb us on a theological level alone. Why are we using language about a non-gendered or gender-expansive God that makes us view God in accordance with deeply ingrained notions of binary gender? 

It must be clear that this is also deeply problematic in our concrete experiences. If our mind holds some qualities to be masculine and some to be feminine, and our pronouns teach us over and over and over again to more closely associate the masculine traits with God, then we will ultimately want the leaders of our homes, churches, businesses, and government to be people who have those masculine traits. And because society conditions males to become masculine men and females to become feminine women, we will simply be reinforcing patriarchy.

There may be even more roads out of this quagmire, but I’ve come across two since my flight from conservatism. One is to simply not use pronouns for God (as I’ve done in this article aside from the thought experiment). This solution helps us question the gender binary and free ourselves from gendered thinking about God. Another option is to use a variety of pronouns when speaking about God (for instance, “Our Father and Mother, who art in Heaven” or “Our Good Parent, who art in heaven”). This allows us to broaden our view of God to more readily include those traits we normally think of as feminine or nonbinary.

May God bring full equality to our churches, and may she teach us how to rightly think and speak about her.

This division feels deeply unsettling to many Christians. The “good news” at the heart of the faith is a message of reconciliation. We’ve heard about how this gospel famously tore down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles in the first century. Many Christians can remember when that same gospel fueled the work of Dr. King and other American Civil Rights leaders. At some critical moments of division, the message of Jesus has inspired a justice that breaks barriers. 

But what if now, at a time when the need for unity feels more urgent than ever, the church has lost sight of what the idea really means? What if we’ve settled for the easiest imaginable version of unity, and it’s slowly tearing us apart?

In the opening pages of his classic book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer made some incisive observations about the churches of his day. He noticed that people had traded in the real and costly grace of God for “cheap grace.” 

Cheap grace, he described, is a grace that is so free it demands nothing of anyone at any time. It is so free that it dares not introduce an obligation upon people, before or after forgiveness is granted. It amounts to “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” 

The key point here, and the reason these words are so bold, is that cheap grace does not come from God: it is “the grace we bestow upon ourselves.” Real grace, he insisted, is costly. It is costly not only to God, who gave up the one and only Son, but also to us. It demands and entails our repentance. The loving of our neighbors as ourselves. The picking up our crosses and following Jesus into discipleship.

Perhaps this contrast—the real, difficult version of something held up against the cheap and easy imitation—will help us navigate the disaster of American disunity. 

READ: In a New Moment, Do a New Thing

In the context of the Christian faith, we could describe the ideal of unity this way: despite the many factors that would threaten to divide us, Christians’ shared faith in Jesus binds us together in loving relationship. If ever there were a case of “easier said than done,” this is it. And so we have to consider, how exactly might we do this? How does a group of people who experience a host of divisive pressures maintain the love, resilience, forgiveness, belonging, and unity of its members? There seem to be three possible paths to unity—two that lead to something cheap, and one that leads to something real.

First is the path of conformity. A church that might theoretically contain Republicans and Democrats, for instance, creates a culture where being a true Christian requires a particular political affiliation. Litmus tests are employed, such as people’s views on abortion or the Black Lives Matter movement. Unity is lost because those who don’t conform one way or another are excluded and eventually expelled.

Next is the path of silence. A church that contains Republicans and Democrats, for instance, creates a culture where it is taboo to discuss anything with a political dimension—which includes all social issues. So whether you’re listening to a sermon or chatting in a Zoom small group, you won’t hear a word about immigration, racism, or marriage equality. Unity is unknown because the community only ever engages topics of personal piety.

These two approaches create the illusion of unity, but I’m afraid it’s what Bonhoeffer would call “the unity we bestow upon ourselves.”

There is only one path to true unity: honesty, grace, and most importantly, justice. This path is far costlier because it places demands on everyone. Demands to listen, to learn, to love. It requires that political opponents listen to each other. White and Black members in Sunday School must discuss systemic racial injustice. Straight and queer parishioners must grapple with the dehumanizing effects of heteronormativity. And unity demands that these same people, even when they disagree or miscommunicate, continue to love each other with the love Jesus displayed on the cross.

This path is even costlier because we can’t fall back on a simple both-sides-ism. The views of a white supremacist are not acceptable, while those of a justice-seeker are. Those who deny the outcome of a free and fair election are not on equal footing with those who accept it. People will need to be called out for bigotry and dehumanization, as all of these painful conversations must be conducted with an eye to God’s justice.

Yet, the church’s job is not to purge itself and cast out all conservatives. Its job is to disciple everyone, liberals and conservatives together, in the way of Jesus. There is a tension here—the church must cleanse itself of all racism, but not of all racists; all oppression, but not all oppressors; all evil, but not all evildoers (for who would be left within its walls?).

The work will be difficult. But true unity, like true grace, is worth it.  

I recently wrote a piece here at RLC arguing for affirmation and inclusion of LGBTQ Christians on the basis of compassion. Whenever one of my articles goes live, I also post it to my Facebook, hoping the people in my social network will read the materials and engage in thoughtful dialogue. The comment section that erupted when I posted that piece was so instructive that I’ve spent some time reflecting on it. If you’ve spent any time online recently in social settings, you’ve likely witnessed a familiar phenomenon: the evangelical gaze.

But first, let’s consider the OG gaze—the white gaze—courtesy of Willie James Jennings’s masterpiece, The Christian Imagination (the next four paragraphs are based almost entirely on my limited understanding of this wonderful book).

Race (as a concept, or more accurately a construct) was developed as a tool for the colonial project. European colonizers created a racial scale with Whiteness at the top and Blackness at the bottom. Any people group living outside Europe—regardless of where they were from, or what their distinct art, beliefs, and practices were—registered as some version of Black. While there were hierarchical distinctions in this scale (some peoples were more similar to Europeans in skin tone or culture), Blackness was a category that cut across continents, cultures, and languages. 

What’s crucially important for our reflection here is that the real goal of the racial scale was to establish, empower, and protect Whiteness. Whiteness (along with the Europeans who embodied it) was not only the pinnacle of the scale but was its “organizing conceptual framework”—only those in the White category could determine the race of another people, based on how that people related to the features of Whiteness.

Here we see the origins of the white gaze—that evaluative posture by which white people judge the beauty, truth, and goodness of all people and peoples. And the difficult truth many Christians today must face is the historical entanglement between colonialism and Christianity. For centuries, the white gaze was (and in some ways, still is) fused with Christian mission to carry forward a world-reshaping colonial project. 

Jennings brilliantly describes this fusion as the moment when the ancient principle of faith seeking understanding mutated to faith judging intelligence. Christianity’s adoption of this evaluative posture, this seat atop the religious scale from which it judges all beliefs and traditions against itself, has had tragic consequences. One of them, according to Jennings, is the complete absence of theological concurrency—the possibility that people with different ways of thinking might form intimate relationships and actually learn from each other. 

No, in the colonial project (as in today’s evangelical America), those atop the scale would be doing all the teaching.

READ: New Name, Same Mission

It is easy enough to find the evangelical gaze alive and well in our time. One prime example is in evangelical mission work. (I was an evangelical missionary for five years.) When being trained to enter a new context, a missionary is of course taught important lessons about cultural norms and the need to be sensitive. In the everyday aspects of learning a new culture, there is a sense of mutuality and even humble submission to the native people. But not so with the theological mission itself! The missionary is indeed trained to ask questions to learn the native person’s beliefs. Once those beliefs are known, the playbook is clear: affirm what can be affirmed (read: what conforms to my interpretation of the Bible), and challenge anything that can’t be affirmed (read: what is contrary to my interpretation of the Bible).

How can there be any concurrency in a dialogue like this? What can the missionary learn, theologically speaking, from the other person? Nothing! Because anything the person says will be mentally held up against what the missionary already believes about the Bible’s contents. If it matches, then great! If it doesn’t, the missionary must pivot to sharing the gospel message. The theological learning only moves in one direction, and only the missionary can decide if learning has successfully taken place.

This brings us back, I’m afraid, to the comment section of my Facebook post. For there, too, the evangelical gaze is alive and well. In my post, I invited people to engage in kind, thoughtful dialogue—with a reminder and caution that this is a deeply personal issue, and that many queer people would be reading the comment section. This warning failed to mitigate the evangelical gaze as it went to work comparing both me and LGBTQ folks against itself. And just as white colonizers found new peoples around the globe to be deficient in their measuring of white European-ness, so these commenters found both me and my queer friends to be deficient in their measuring of conservative evangelical-ness.

The effects of this evaluation—this judgment—are of course brutal for LGBTQ folks. Two commenters explicitly stated that there will be eternal consequences for any practicing gay person who does not repent of this sin (i.e. live a celibate life). One commenter said he will not attend any same-sex weddings, should he be invited to one. 

So to be clear, I’m not the victim here. But I do want to point out that the evangelical gaze—like its white cousin—does not spare anyone. Because I had departed from the accepted evangelical interpretations of a few Bible verses, I too needed to be judged. One commenter told me that people would be in danger of hellfire if they read and believed my words. Another said I was only interested in proving people wrong, drowning out their views, and relying on “appeals to emotion.”

Friends, I’m sure that if you’ve taken a risk to speak, stand, or act for anyone in the margins, you too have felt the pain that comes with solidarity. I pray you will not grow weary! We are all called to follow Jesus into intimacy with those who are hurting and oppressed. 

I hope that as you’ve taken even small steps like mine to work for justice, you have had the blessing to see some fruit. When I posted my article, even as the evangelical gaze turned upon me, I received a private message from an old friend of mine who is queer. They told me that reading my piece was “the first time in a long time I haven’t felt hated from someone who I associate with the church.”

Those words, while affirming to me, are utterly heartbreaking. 

But I hope they inspire you, as they do me, to keep working for love and justice. Even when judgment is lurking. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from my comment section, when I replied to someone who warned me that I am heading down a dangerous path:

We have arrived at something we can agree on: I am walking down a dangerous road. The road of solidarity with oppressed and marginalized people is always dangerous. It was dangerous for the prophets, dangerous for Jesus, and it is dangerous for folks like me. It’s dangerous because there is always a powerful religious class (Pharisees, conservative evangelicals) who benefit from maintaining a status quo that privileges people who look, act, and think like they do, a status quo that provides the absolution and sanction they need. When those privileges are threatened, it means danger for those in the margins and anyone who chooses to stand with them.

Perhaps someday you’ll join me where it’s dangerous.

This isn’t something we need to deduce from the pattern of his many interactions with sex workers or leprous outcasts. It’s actually an explicit message in Jesus’ own words, often uttered at crucial moments. For example, after his temptation in the wilderness, Jesus begins his Galilean ministry in the synagogue. He reads aloud from Isaiah 61 and then says he is the fulfillment of the prophet’s words:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:11-12)

From the very outset, Jesus tells us who he is here for: the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed. In another powerful episode, an imprisoned John the Baptist sends two of his followers to ask Jesus if he’s really the one for whom they’ve been waiting. Rather than give a straightforward and static, “Yes,” Jesus instead tells the messengers to point John to Jesus’ actions: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (7:22). 

Jesus’ identity is inextricably linked to proclaiming good news to the poor.

Why is this the case? Why the poor? After all, as so many have been litigating on social media this year, isn’t it true that all lives matter? To understand God’s deep concern for those trapped in cycles of poverty, it might help to look again at the first example above, when Jesus reads from Isaiah. The final line reads: “[God has sent me] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” The ancient Jews who read Isaiah and listened to Jesus would have known right away that “the year of the Lord’s favor” meant a practice we now look back on as “the year of Jubilee.”

The year of Jubilee was one of several important pillars of economic policy enshrined in Old Testament Law. Let’s try to get the big picture of this economic system (with the help of pastor and community organizer Robert Linthicum’s “The Least of These: The War on Poverty by Israel and the Church” in the New Urban World Journal). Once we catch God’s view of poverty, Jesus’ words might take on exciting new meaning.

In Deuteronomy 15:4, God looks ahead to the people’s life in the promised land and declares, “There need be” (literally: there will be) “no poor people among you,” but just seven verses later, the text concedes, “There will always be poor people in the land.” What gives? Will there or won’t there be poor people? In this tension lies the tragic reality of human society: there does not need to be poverty, but because of the greed that causes and maintains wealth gaps and systems of oppression, there always will be.

The text of Deuteronomy 15 then provides an immediate takeaway: “Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” But the crucial thing to see here is that the fight against poverty was not simply a moral command to be carried out by individuals or families. It was codified in the social policies that governed the economic system itself. These policies in Leviticus and Deuteronomy are fascinating ideals that seem to be millennia ahead of their time. 

READ: On American Exceptionalism

Just consider four features of the Law that were designed to work together to end poverty: (1) money lenders were not allowed to charge interest, (2) regular tithes were mandatory to provide for not only the Levites, but also the immigrants, widows, and orphans, (3) every seven years all debts were forgiven, and (4) every fifty years (on the Year of Jubilee), all land—the cornerstone of wealth then as it is now—was returned to its ancestral owners. 

Right off the bat, we can safely conclude that God does not want poverty to exist, and to that end, God desires both radical personal generosity and laws and systems that continually pull people out of poverty. As Dr. Linthicum observes, these ancient statutes were instated “so that wealth and power could not accrue among a favored few at the expense of everyone else;” instead, resources were to be “intentionally and systematically redistributed to the people.”

I was reminded of Dr. Linthicum’s article when this winter, about five years late to the party, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s revelatory article, “The Case for Reparations,” in The Atlantic. The piece, which explains the history of housing discrimination within a much larger web of racist American systems, actually begins with a quotation from Deuteronomy. 

The parallels between the Year of Jubilee and reparations for Black Americans quickly become apparent. Both seem “unfair” to our capitalist sensibilities: why should I, a hard-working White American, have to give up resources to help people whose ancestors suffered from historical injustices I had nothing to do with? (There are many easy rebuttals to this, but this question is here for the sake of argument.) But we might as easily ask, why should the ancient hard-working Jewish landowner have had to give up resources to help people whose grandfathers had squandered their family wealth or had been invaded by foreign enemies?

God clearly was not concerned with capitalist sensibilities. God’s sense of justice was not constrained by the laws of the free market or Friedman’s shareholder theory. What is fair and right and just in God’s eyes is for no one to live in poverty—no matter how they got there. Linthicum explains, “The pointed message of Deuteronomy is that it is irrelevant whether one’s poverty is the result of a reversal in a nation’s economy, a family calamity or generational poverty, or an individual’s bad choices, laziness, or unfortunate circumstances. However the persons or families got into these circumstances, they are now poor and vulnerable, and it is the responsibility of each Israelite and the political and economic systems of Israel to resolve the situation.”

In today’s America, we actually know why there is such an immense wealth gap between Black and White Americans. We don’t need to speculate about calamities or bad choices. There is a well-documented history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, redlining, mass incarceration—and many more racist systems. Ancient Israel, had it followed this part of God’s Law, could never have inflicted this kind of generational poverty on any of God’s beloved children, because everyone would “begin every fifty-first year with an economically ‘level playing field.’”

Of course, American law doesn’t have a Year of Jubilee. But there’s a more insidious issue, isn’t there? At the end of the day, most of us don’t really want to repair the four hundred years of financial damage wreaked on Black Americans. To demonstrate this, Coates points to House bill HR 40. At the time of his writing in 2014, the bill had been sponsored every single year by Representative John Conyers since 1989—and in 25 years, it had failed to make it even once to the House floor. This is especially damning given that so many White Americans, even progressive ones, cite pragmatic and logistical problems as why they don’t favor reparations. This bill would simply form a commission to closely study the issue and make recommendations—recommendations that would address these complex pragmatic and logistical problems.

Imagine the Jubilee if we joined with God’s desire to end poverty! If we embraced the painful and costly work of not only rejecting but undoing systemic racial inequality. If we committed to follow, in Linthicum’s words, “the Jubilee Jesus, the Jesus who came to proclaim Jubilee to the people… and to call the Jewish political, economic, and religious systems to accountability for refusing to practice the full Jubilee.”

LGBTQ Christians are urging, pleading, shouting: “We are people too. We love Jesus too. Why can’t we belong in the family of God?”

The conservative response, which we will unpack below, always returns to some form of “…but I’m not a bigot, and how dare you call me that while I’m explicitly saying that I love you?” The traditionalist response, all these years later, is still based on the old maxim that we can “hate the sin, love the sinner.” In this case, which is it? Is the real essence of this position love or bigotry?

There is an analogy that might be helpful in our exploration of this question. But for it to be meaningful, the explorer must acknowledge the fact that sexuality is something a person is born with, just like skin color. It is not a “choice” or a “lifestyle.” If you can’t get on board with this, it might be a good time to close this window and look into some educational resources about LGBTQ people (perhaps by visiting Justin Lee’s website).

Okay, if we’re all still here, let’s consider some analogous questions of racial equality. Many American Christians argued passionately from Scripture in the 19th century to keep chattel slavery in place. After slavery was abolished, many turned back to the Bible for arguments against interracial marriages. Were these arguments offered from a place of love or bigotry? Were arguments to keep Black people enslaved really for the benefit of the slaves (as many people claimed they were), or were there ulterior motives?

At this point we might draw a few preliminary conclusions: just because we use the Bible to make an argument does not mean the argument is loving or correct; just because we say we love someone does not mean we are actually engaged in loving them.

Seven years ago, a quotation credited to pastor and author Rick Warren went viral. It reads, in part: “Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them.” He goes on to call this perspective nonsense and adds, “You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.” The quote was used by many to defend their traditionalist views of sexual ethics.

First of all, we’ve already agreed to acknowledge that being gay is absolutely, unequivocally not a “lifestyle” someone simply chooses. And by rejecting that characterization, we must also reject the idea that opposition to LGBTQ relationships is “disagreement.” You can’t “disagree” with a person’s sexuality any more than you can disagree with their height or age. The word Warren is looking for here—if he’s thinking of sexuality—is disapprove (as blogger Bryn Donovan noted years ago). But even “disapprove” is a little off, right? How can you disapprove of someone’s height, or age, or ethnicity?

Perhaps the real word he’s saying-without-saying is “dislike.” Warren’s contention is that we can continue to hold onto our convictions and still be compassionate. But how can this be, when our conviction is a dogmatized, codified disliking of another person’s sexuality? Let’s just think of the concrete effects of holding onto this
conviction. People often think—especially if they hold a “Side B” view (that being gay isn’t a sin, but gay sexual activity is)—that the only demand of their view is that sex is denied to queer people. But communities who hold this position do not condone any romance in the lives of LGBTQ people. So the list is actually much longer:

READ: All Christians Should Celebrate the SCOTUS Ruling on LGBTQ+ Discrimination

-No sex

-No dating or marriage—meaning all the wonderful aspects of romance and commitment that have nothing to do with sex! (No one to hold hands with on a walk; no one to lovingly accept your deepest hopes and fears; no one to cuddle with when you’re lonely; no one to give you insightful words of correction because they see you at your worst; etc.—perhaps take a moment to consider what you have found to be life-giving in your own romantic relationships.)

-No child-raising with a co-parent who is present and committed to you and the children

-No participation in sacraments (if the person is “unrepentant,” i.e. dating or married)

-No baptism to symbolize new life and freedom upon entry into God’s family

-No communion with Jesus at the table of remembrance and belongingMaybe it’s becoming clear why queer folks think people hate them if they “disagree with their lifestyle”? The view would deny them important parts of the human experience that might help them flourish.

I thought of this Rick Warren quotation recently as I came into contact with a new movement called the (&) Campaign, whose website actually uses some of the same language when it declares that “we must speak truth with compassion (&) conviction.” I want to be clear up front that I think this seems like a great organization doing important work. They are seeking to gain a political voice for urban Christians with “a Gospel-centered worldview that is committed to redemptive justice (&) values-based policy.” However, what is “values-based policy”? They go on to define these values as “timeless moral codes and beliefs transferred through religious teaching, family, culture and community.”

It is clear from their 2020 Statement that one of these “values” is heteronormativity: “All attempts to remove more traditional religious beliefs from the public square should be opposed. We, like many other Americans, affirm the historic Christian sexual ethic.”

And here’s the proverbial proof in the pudding: even in a progressive-thinking, deeply justice-oriented organization like (&) with a brilliant and talented leadership team: the “disagreement” over the gay “lifestyle” has concrete and dehumanizing consequences. In that same 2020 Statement, the campaign goes on to say:
“Religious freedom and LGBTQ civil rights are not necessarily in irreconcilable conflict. Faith-based charities, hospitals and colleges should not have to choose between surrendering their convictions and closing their doors. At the same time, LGBTQ people should not lose jobs and housing because of how they identify… we encourage all 2020 candidates to support the Fairness for All Act, which will grant basic civil rights for LGBTQ people while also protecting religious freedom for all faiths.”

This is the best compromise an organization can offer when it insists on its traditionalist view: we won’t necessarily need to take away your civil rights; indeed, we believe you can retain your basic civil rights. Meanwhile, the ACLU has strongly criticized this same Fairness for All Act, warning that it would give permission to “those who would turn LGBTQ people away from jobs, health care, housing, even taxpayer-funded programs, simply because of who they are.”

For the (&) Campaign, what is at stake is religious freedom. The religious belief they no longer feel “free” to hold in our changing society is that sex is immoral outside a heterosexual marriage. There is no time here to make the argument that a faithful interpretation of the New Testament would lead us to fully include our queer siblings in the life of the church. (You can return to Justin Lee’s site for some accessible arguments.)

But my mind, as it does on most subjects, returns to Jesus. Imagine him in a marketplace where a vendor, because of their devout religious beliefs, refuses to do business with a (so-called) “sinner,” one who has deviated from the sexual mores of the culture. With whom does Jesus side? In the name of religious freedom, does he send the “sinner” away? Or does he rebuke the vendor, remove the outcast’s shame, and welcome them into God’s family?

This conversation is an old hat by now, and it’s unbelievable that these points still need to be made. But perhaps it’s time to inspect the argument that is, without fail, leveled against these cries for statue removal: the slippery slope. “Sure,” the statue-lover concedes, “we can remove statues of people who explicitly served in the Confederate army. But what’s next? Thomas Jefferson?! George Washington?” At this point, I trust you can hear the gasp of dismay as it echoes among white conservatives.

While slippery slope arguments are generally bad, and thus easy to dismiss out of hand, there is a real and practical challenge at the heart of this one. If we begin to remove plaques and statues, and rename schools once named after Confederate soldiers, what about other early Americans who were less explicitly enemy-of-America-and-all-Black-people bad? People who were slaveowners when it was more widely accepted among white people? What about someone who didn’t own slaves but who once published a racist remark in a newspaper? The practical challenge presented by this way of thinking is this: Who gets to decide how offensive is too offensive? Who adjudicates a complicated history and declares who is fit to be a public hero?

I do not have an answer to that question, because I do, in fact, reject the entire slippery slope. The slope itself—which is to say, all the statues of our heroic Founding Fathers—should be torn down and moved to museums. The primary reason for this approach is not to resolve the tricky questions posed above; those only matter if you value the statues to begin with. No, we should free ourselves from these statues because doing so may heal us from the poison of our own naïve reading of history.

Justo González hits this home in Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. While making the point that Latinx Christians have treasure troves of wisdom to offer white Christians, he reveals that one such treasure is “responsible remembrance.” Because of their brutal genesis (“our Spanish forefathers raped our Indian mothers”), González contends that Hispanic people live with a full view of the ugliness of history. White Americans, meanwhile, have the privilege to selectively remember or forget history in whatever ways suit them. We can choose to remember Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration but forget that he raped slaves.

READ: A World of Lies When the Truth Sets Us Free

Statues (along with history books) are one of the primary tools of this irresponsible remembrance, this selective forgetfulness. Statues are erected to immortalize heroes, to forever remember their best achievements and attributes. When we have moved someone into the mental category of “hero,” we must forget the dark parts of their story. We can’t have evil heroes.

And so we romantically remember an America forged for the sake of freedom, forgetting that white people summarily denied this freedom to Black people. We remember an America whose land we were manifestly destined to explore and settle, forgetting that white people violently stole it from Indigenous peoples.

This project, perfectly encapsulated in the building of a statue, has served to effectively shield white Americans from feelings of guilt or thoughts of reparation—but it has left us woefully unable or unwilling to fix systemically racist systems. The cure, of course, isn’t just the rote removal of statues—it’s the interrogation of our false, innocent view of history. But tearing down the statues is a start. This is not to say that, practically speaking, we must immediately remove every statue in our nation. However, when a group of people is hurt enough by any given monument to protest for its removal, rather than attempt to debate the merits of the historical figure, we should remove the damned statue.

All of this may be even more pressing for followers of Jesus and for communities of faith. We who view all of history as a gift and each person as an image-bearer of God cannot afford to pick and choose which parts of history we will acknowledge. We must work to understand and own every piece of what created our churches, cities, and country as we know them today. 

Who knows what peace and freedom this difficult work might one day yield? As Peter Choi noted in his affirmation of a George Whitefield statue’s removal, each concrete act of removal “might serve as a moment of reckoning, for redress. If it sparks conversations where we interrogate tropes of white saviorism and nationalistic greatness, that would be… a sign of hope.”

I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.—Psalm 34:1

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.—Psalm 104:33

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.—Philippians 4:4

Yet worship and praise are only meaningful if they are holistic: we are called to align our words, actions, thoughts, and communities to the will and way of the God who loves us and who died for us. There are few things that enrage God more in the pages of Scripture than when God’s people only perform worship—in temple ritual, prayer, or song—but do not live in worship. 

This principle is on glaring display in the writings of the Old Testament prophets. Isaiah railed against Israel and Judah because their wealthiest leaders had joined house to house and added field to field, so that there was no land left for the poor (5:7-8). These “blessed” landowners no doubt worshiped God in gratitude, but this wasn’t the type of praise God desired: the Lord of hosts is exalted by justice (5:16).

The prophet Amos, serving during the peak of Israel’s prosperity, used even stronger language to denounce the nation’s inequality and hypocrisy. Because the people had discarded any sense of justice toward the poor and oppressed, God had discarded any interest in their acts of worship! “I despise your festivals… Take away from me the noise of your songs” (5:21, 23). It seems so unlike God to reject sincere acts of worship. But the worship was only in music and word, and perhaps thought—not in the concrete economic, social, and policy decisions of those in power.

God was waiting for real worship, for justice to roll down like waters.

READ: Let Lament Lead to These 12 Actions

It is no surprise that Jesus—the very image of the invisible God—carried on this passion for just living. We forget this sometimes when we remember his rebukes of the Pharisees as attacks on only their pride or self-righteousness. But Jesus often exposed the corrupt religious systems they exploited to accumulate wealth and power: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23).

This raises an all-too-pressing question for us today, particularly for those of us who identify as white evangelicals. As we continue to hold worship services over social media or video chat, or begin to regather in person as church communities, is God interested in the noise of our songs? 

Many churches across the nation and world are trying their best to engage issues of race, perhaps for the first time. Some are praying for unity and healing. Some are hosting black guest speakers. But, sadly, many are quickly returning to business as usual. It must be time for the next sermon series on anxiety, or leadership, or spiritual gifts. The band is back together for more electric guitar riffs and soaring choruses about God’s goodness and the need to surrender.

It just might not mean anything while the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others wait for justice. While Black Americans, Christian and non-Christian alike, cannot escape centuries-old systems designed to maintain white supremacy. 

It might be time for an extended season of lament. Perhaps our worship services should focus on psalms of complaint and prayers of repentance. Maybe our Sunday school classes and small groups should study the history of American racial injustice—including in our church traditions. It might be time for our financial resources to be funneled to causes that raise up the oppressed.

Because our songs of praise might not mean anything until we choose to exalt God with concrete acts of justice.