If you know your history you know that history is frequently tragedy, the tragedy of good and earnest people who did things, espoused ideas, and supported political causes that turned out to be dead wrong. My current worry is that good and earnest people will deface our Constitution with a singular amendment dedicated to limiting liberty rather than protecting it: an amendment forbidding gay marriage. Such an amendment is another tragedy in the making.
One of the key themes in the tragedy of history is that while Christianity has been the inspiration for much of our social progress, when Christians fall prey to crude literal interpretations of Scripture, Christianity can be joined in an unholy alliance with those who seek to protect privilege and tyranny. This tragic alliance has a long history, but we might begin with the American Revolution when Loyalists relied on Romans 13:1-8 to argue that “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power [of England], resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” With due respect to our Tory Christian brethren who resettled in Canada, I think such literalism was a clear mistake.
You would have thought our forefathers would have learned from their mistake, but sadly they were soon serving up more verses to justify the peculiar institution of racial slavery. Sadly, they found ample support for slavery in naïve literalism, for the Apostle Paul takes frequent pains to command the obedience of slaves to masters (e.g. I Timothy 6:1-2, 1 Corinthians 7:20-24, Ephesians 6: 5-9. Colossians 3: 22, Titus 2:9-10). It was verses such as these that led to the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination dedicated to the incredible proposition that the Gospel was consistent with slavery.
How could they have thought that the Gospel of universal love, servanthood, and redemption could be reduced to support exploitation of the most vicious kind? Reading our history we long for such Christians to learn from their mistakes, and some did. But many lined themselves up for the next trainwreck of literalism.
That was over women’s rights. Today I know of no reasonable person who does not support equal political and economic rights for women: property rights, the vote, access to divorce, equal pay for equal work, access to birth control, protection from sexual harassment and sexual assault. Yet each of these reforms was fought tooth and nail by the unholy alliance between biblical literalism and conservatism. Again, they found ample support for the subordination of women to men in such verses as I Corinthians 11:3 and Ephesians 5: 22-24. Now, some earnest Christians still support male headship in church and family and many (including me) hold divorce to be a sin, but overwhelmingly Christians nonetheless see such issues as handled by the covenant community of the Church rather than the political community.
It is interesting to contrast the role literalism played in the controversy over slavery with the role it played in the Civil Rights Movement. When confronted with the Civil Rights Movement, segregationists did parrot the literalist arguments of their Confederate forebears. But their invocations of the “Curse of Noah” in Genessis 9: 25, prohibitions in the Old Testament against Jews marrying non-Jews (e.g. Genesis 24:3, 28:1, Nehemiah 13:3,25,27), and some terribly stretched passages of the New Testament (e.g. Act 18:26, Mathew 10:5,6) were minor elements of the debate. By the 1950s Christians had seemingly learned to appreciate the perils of literalism. Segregationist arguments instead centered on states rights, psuedo-scientific racism, and crude prejudice rather than the Bible. It’s no wonder given that a literalist defense of segregation simply wilted in response to the profound Christian defense of integration mounted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As a result, while some Christians stood by their retrograde literalist defense of Jim Crow, by the 1950s most Southern Christian denominations had embraced integration. The Gospel of universal love, servanthood, and redemption simply won out over prejudice.
But now we confront yet another battle over Biblical literalism, the debate about homosexuality and gay marriage. Many of my readers will respond that the Bible clearly and explicitly condemns homosexuality, but I hope my tale of past misuses of literalism might make Christians pause long enough to give the issue another look. There is an important debate among theologians about the appropriateness of the translations usually cited by literalists as condemning homosexuality (Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11, 1 Timothy 1:9-11). For instance, John Boswell argued that these passages in the original Greek speak of prostitution, idolatry, or ritual impurity rather than committed monogamous same-sex relationships. Compare the lack of literal clarity here with the clear biblical injunctions against divorce, and I have to wonder why a defense of marriage is focused on outlawing gay marriage rather than outlawing re-marriage.
One would think that Christians who know their history, a history of earnest and forthright Christian forebears who nonetheless made colossal moral, spiritual, and political blunders due to blind literalism, would pause a moment and be a bit more careful. Yet I fear this will not be the case.