Gays, Gamblers and Gunslingers

Wesley Hill has asked if he will be gay in the resurrection. He raises the question thoughtfully and carefully, but the trajectory of his thinking is going in a decidedly different direction than my own thoughts have gone on this same general topic. His post is here if you want to check it out first.

First, the comparison with same sex temptations with other “disabilities” may seem initially attractive, but I don’t think it bears up under examination. If a man, for example, had levels of testosterone that precluded interest in women at all, that would be a disability. Some men are born eunuchs (Matt 19:12). It is no sin to not be attracted to anybody, but it is certainly would be a disability. But to “be gay” in the sense under discussion is a state the natural terminus of which is an unnatural, immoral, and prohibited act. And if a man were in possession of certain characteristics that did not create that particular temptation, then I wouldn’t see the sense in calling it gay. What would be gay about it? Are there no heterosexuals with the same gifts?

In short, is there such a thing as a “gay sensibility” that is a positive thing in its own right? I don’t see how this could be. What happens when we plug in other sins? Is there such a thing as a pedophile sensibility, for example? Is this something to be celebrated, just so long as the sexual aspect to it is resisted at all times? Will certain Christians have this pedophile sensibility in the resurrection? To ask it this way is to have the answer, it seems to me. To be attracted to the wrong sex is at least as bad as being attracted to an underage person of the right sex. So to have room for a “gay sensibility” in the resurrection, and to not have room for a “pedophile sensibility” there, is to demonstrate how effective the propaganda machine for the sexual revolution has been thus far. Too many Christians have been listening to broadcasts from Tokyo Rose.

Once every inclination to sinful behavior is completely removed in the resurrection, which it will be (from all of us), I don’t see how we will have any gays, gamblers, or gunslingers there.

Second, I think there is too much emphasis on “identity” thinking in all of this, and identity thinking is not only anchored to earth, but is also anchored to a particular intellectual fashion in our generation, a true wisp of fog if there ever was one.

If someone who is autistic, for example, cannot imagine life in the resurrection without that absence of autism destroying the “self” he had always known, what does this do to the healing miracles of Christ, which were, in their way, initial foretastes of what God will do on a cosmic scale in the resurrection? Confronted with a man born blind, or a lame man, or a leper, Jesus and the apostles always knew what direction the healing was supposed to go. Not only that, they went there. Even if the man born blind had his identity wrapped up in his blindness, Jesus still seems to have not cared about that very much.

I say this cheerfully granting that the resurrection will not take us down to a bare stump in order to grow us up again from scratch. I believe that we will still be men and women. And I believe that we will still belong to our nations and tribes. The resurrection will be in color, not black and white, which means that each of us will be a color. That’s fine. There will be true continuity with who and what we are here. But nobody will still be a member of their therapy support groups.

So last, my central concern in this is that by emphasizing the “positive aspects” and non-sinful ways of being gay, we may actually be perpetuating characteristics that we falsely believe to be virtuous. Whatever the resurrection is going to be, it will be glorious, and so in certain respects, we can wait to find out. But certain speculations about the resurrection should be a concern to us because they reveal something about what is going on down here — and not what will happen “up there.” For a ludicrous example, suppose you encountered a man who said that Heaven was going to be segregated, and he was looking forward to living forever in the “whites only” sector. The debate that followed would not be about the nature of the resurrection so much as it would be about his thinking here and now.

One of our problems with this is that the Christian world has lionized effeminacy, which is actually a hard thing to do. Effeminacy doesn’t lionize very well — but we have done it. In other words, we in the church have been really nervous about true masculinity for a long time. Not only are we generally nervous about this, I also know that I have a certain class of reader that goes off like a bottle rocket whenever I talk about recovering masculinity — as though I am urging all males to swagger a bit more, to grow John Knox beards, and to talk out of the corner of their mouths. So that’s not it.

But the church has falsely equated piety with certain feminine virtues for so long, we have created an environment in which women commend themselves to us as potentially superb pastors (which, by the new definitions, they would be), as well as create a scenario in which a number of men have cultivated virtues valued by the church, but which have also created a circumstance in which they, disciplined in this fashion, find themselves attracted to other men. Put bluntly, what we thought was the cart might actually be the horse.

I have often said that for all Christians — and not just those who struggle with homoerotic temptations — that the real trick is not to repent of our vices. The real trick is to repent of what we thought were our virtues.