Rebecca McLaughlin is an apologist, co-founder of Vocable Communications, and author of several books including Confronting Christianity, the 2020 Outreach Resource of the Year in the apologetics category. This article is adapted from a talk McLaughlin gave at the 2022 Amplify Outreach Conference. To register for this year’s conference on October 17th & 18th go to AmplifyConference.org.
Our witness for Christ will never be safe. It is always going to be offensive because the gospel of Jesus is dangerous and extremely offensive. It involves heeding the words of Jesus, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are many yard signs in my neighborhood with words reflective of a kind of secular creed: “Black lives matter. Love is love. Women’s rights are human rights,” plus a mishmash of other ideas.
There are two ways that Christians have tended to respond to these, and both are unhelpful. On the one hand, some Christians—typically younger Christians—are profoundly aware of the history of racial injustice in this country and the ways their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have failed to live as if the lives of our Black brothers and sisters truly matter. The statement “Black lives matter,” they’ve been told, is intrinsically tied to the view that “love is love.” These Christians want to take these signs and likewise bang them into their own yards. On the other hand, however, other believers look at these signs and think, There are some things on these signs that Christians cannot affirm, and so I don’t want to hear any of it. In fact, I want to knock those signs down in one way or another.
But if we are listening to what the Scriptures say, we need to respond far more carefully. Instead of wielding a proverbial (or literal) mallet, we need to take out a Sharpie to clarify how the Bible addresses the ideas behind these claims. We need to recognize the ways in which the Bible both does and doesn’t align with those creedal statements. Each of those claims, even the ones that ultimately point people away from the Scriptures, have their origin in Christian soil: the idea that all human beings are morally equal; the idea that the strong, the rich, and the powerful have no right to trample the weak, the poor, and the marginalized, but should rather protect them; the idea that sex should not be forced upon people; the idea that minorities matter and shouldn’t be oppressed by majorities; the idea that love across racial, ethnic, cultural, and national differences is a good thing. These are all Christian ideas. They are not self-evident truths.
In his book Sapiens, Israeli historian and atheist Yuval Noah Harari says that “Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights” (p.111). He finds the scientific study of Homo sapiens has embarrassingly little to do with universal human rights and equality. Yet most of my non-Christian friends believe passionately in human rights and equality. They believe in the equality of men and women. They believe in love across racial differences. And in all this, they didn’t realize that these things came to them from Christianity.
This is the shared ground on which we can meet our non-Christian friends, neighbors, family members, and colleagues, recognizing the places where we can strongly agree as well as clearly disagree. For example, the slogan “Black Lives Matter” has become politically charged. But here’s the thing: the lives of black people do matter to Jesus. I personally am happy to say things that Jesus calls me to say, no matter who else is shouting them. And frankly, when people talk about racial justice and equality, many think, Oh! that’s liberal progressive thinking and not Bible-believing thinking. That’s to our shame, when it should have been our song all along.
One of the arguments against Christians today looks like this:
“Just like you white Christians in the ’60s used your Bibles to justify your opposition to integration of schools and the marriage of a Black person and a white person, so today you are using your Bibles to justify your opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender identities.”
Until we recognize that the first part of that statement is true, we’re never going to have any moral credibility to stand for Christian sexual ethics today. Why? Because the moral capital of the civil rights movement has been claimed by the gay rights movement and the transgender rights movement.
I think there are two things we need to do in this cultural moment more than ever, two things that Christians should be really good at doing: repent and believe. This is where those folks who take the signs and hammer them into their own yards are profoundly missing what the Bible says, since the claim “love is love” is code for same-sex marriage being as equally valid as the marriage of a man and a woman. The Bible is extremely clear that this isn’t true.
Same-sex sexual relationships are out of bounds for Christians. At the same time, the Bible calls us to same-sex loving relationships at a level of intimacy that we Christians seldom reach. On the night of his betrayal, Jesus says to his disciples, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12–13).
Paul calls us to love one another as brothers and sisters, to be knit together in love. In his letter to Philemon, Paul refers to his friend Onesimus as “my very heart” (Philemon 12). In his closing chapter of Romans, Paul refers to several men as “my beloved” (Romans 16:5, 8, 9, 12). There are no romantic relationships here. He’s unashamed to talk about dearly loving his brothers in Christ. In this regard, Sam Allberry is fond of saying that if someone leaves a gay relationship to enter the church, they should find more love and not less.
As Christians, we don’t believe that “love is love.” We believe that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16), and we get glimpses of God love in various human relationships, including marriage (which Paul presents to us as a small model of Jesus’ love for his church), parent-child relationships, and friendship. Glimpses of the kind of love where there is no greater love, as Jesus tells us.
If we are going to present a compelling alternative to non-Christian sexual ethics today, we need to recover a New Testament understanding of brotherly and sisterly love. Everywhere I go, I meet brothers and sisters in Christ who are trusting that Jesus’ love is better than any human love, leaving same-sex sexual relationships to follow Jesus. We tend think (and talk) as if the church is here, whereas the LGBT community is over there, all the while forgetting all the people in our churches who, were they not Christians, would be part of the LGBT community. We need to make our churches places where those brothers and sisters feel loved, encouraged and known, because for decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve been leaving them to feel like they’re unwanted, alone and unloved. And may I say that if you want to pour gasoline on sexual temptation, simply leave them alone.
People today are blocking their ears to the gospel because they think we’re homophobic bigots. But our brothers and sisters who experience same-sex attraction are like a God-given SWAT team to burst through those defenses, because there’s no more powerful way in today’s culture to point people to Jesus than to turn away from your own sexual romantic fulfilment because you believe in a better love. Let’s show them such love.
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