Let me start with some absolutely necessary background. Firstly, this post is not meant to advance the debate on the hot button issue of gay marriage. Rather, since we know that tensions are only made worse when each side fails to understand the other, this post is meant to help increase understanding. Specifically, I’m hoping to help an average American who supports gay marriage to understand why many Christians are opposed to it.
Secondly, the term “Christian” cannot be used to lump together all groups who claim to follow Christ. The church has fractured and broken off in so many directions that it is no longer a single body working in unity. I mention this to emphasize that you cannot get an accurate understanding of what “Christians” think about gay marriage from any single source. Most religions have extremists, and Christianity is not immune to that. The Westboro Baptist Church is one example of this. The vast majority of Christians do not agree with their beliefs or their methods. Jesus’ primary message was love and The Westboro Baptist Church seems to have missed his point.
Thirdly, Christians are human too. We make mistakes and we sometimes hold onto old prejudices just like anybody else. Almost all of us fail to exhibit God’s love in the way that Jesus taught us. We try very hard, but even non-Christians know what it is like to strive for something difficult to attain. You fail. But that should never stop you from getting back up and trying again. In the area of homosexuality especially, many Christians fail to demonstrate the kind of love Jesus intended.
There is no quick answer to the question “Why do Christians oppose gay marriage?” Like most things worth knowing, you have to look deeper. We have to start by looking at homosexuality and marriage separately.
Let’s start by looking at homosexuality from a Christian perspective. If you are not a Christian, I usually would avoid speaking about the topic of homosexuality with you. It’s not that I’m afraid to talk about it or anything like that; it’s just that homosexuality is a divisive issue between Christians and non-Christians. The conversation would eventually drift towards a definition of sin and whether or not homosexuality fits the definition. And before we got that deep, I’d rather begin where we have some common ground. Let me explain in kind of a roundabout way with some Christianity 101.
Do you think you are a good person? Most people would answer yes. Now let me ask you a few questions to see if that’s true. Have you ever told a lie, even a small one? Maybe a white lie? I think all of us have, and you know what that makes us? Liars. Have you ever stolen anything, even something small like a pen? I stole some candy from the grocery store when I was a little kid. You know what that makes me? A thief. Jesus said whoever looks at another person in lust has committed adultery with them in his heart (Matthew 5:28); have you ever looked at someone in lust? C’mon, be honest. I think all of us have.
So, by your own admission, you are a lying thief and an adulterer at heart (and that’s only three of the ten commandments) and you have to face God on judgment day. If he judges you by the ten commandments, do you think he’ll find you innocent or guilty? If he is an honest and true judge who judges by the law he has written, he will find you guilty.
Does that surprise you? The Bible is very clear that we are all guilty (Romans 3:23). Many people who misunderstand Christianity would like to take Jesus’ message of love and apply it here. They’d like to be found innocent because God is a God of love. But, while that is true, it is not the whole truth. God is also righteous and true, and he would be neither of these if he found you innocent (since you are not innocent).
Luckily for us, God IS a God of love, and so he wrote an escape clause. He sent his only son, Jesus, to die so we wouldn’t have to. And what do you have to do to receive this amazing gift? Simply accept it. There’s a reason John 3:16 is such a popular verse; it boils all of this down into one simple statement: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
I know that it seems like I just went off on a tangent to preach, but I feel strongly that this basic understanding is necessary. We have so much common ground when it comes to sin that it seems pointless to focus on something like homosexuality that is so divisive and debatable. Once you believe that the Bible is the true word of God, then I’d be happy to dive into the finer points with you as we try to understand it together.
That being said, one reason many Christians are opposed to homosexuality is because there is sufficient evidence in the Bible to suggest that God deems it to be a sin. In Genesis 18-19, we can read about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Much has been said about this, so I’m not going to say too much about it. I will mention, though, that when the men of the city asked Lot (the man of God) if they could have sex with his male guests, Lot offered them his virgin daughters instead. It seems clear by this simple distinction that homosexuality was one thing that Lot (and God) saw as sin.
And then God’s stance is stated plainly in Leviticus 18:22, “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.” There are several other verses scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments that affirm God’s stance that homosexuality is a sin. (Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10).
That being said, Christians should not expect non-Christians to behave according to the same belief system. This is where the Christianity 101 stuff that I shared before is important to understand. God’s law (all those commandments and sins and such) is not meant to be a set of rules that we can follow in order for God to find us innocent on judgment day. Quite the contrary. There is nothing we can do to earn God’s grace, and that is the point; we all have to depend on Jesus, not ourselves.
Because of this, there would be no point in me telling you not to lie, steal, lust, or even to practice homosexuality. Even if you stopped sinning altogether, you would not be able to earn God’s grace.
(Incidentally, this is why Christians often seem like hypocrites. It’s because we are. We also struggle with lying, stealing, lusting, and yes, even some of us struggle with homosexuality (see Exodus Int’l). Remember, we’re human too.)
So now we finally move on to marriage. To boil it down, Christians believe that marriage is something different than what non-Christians believe marriage is. Christians believe that marriage was created by God and therefore the definition of it also belongs to God. In the Bible, God clearly defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. There are many verses that affirm this, and you can see several of them at this website. Pay particular attention to what God says in Exodus 2 and what Jesus says in Matthew 19.
So now we get to the crux of the issue as to why many Christians oppose gay marriage. Marriage began as something Holy and as something only between a man and a woman. Non-Christians liked the idea of a deep bond between a man and a woman, and so they adopted the practice and called it the same thing. At this point, all was fine because, on a basic level, it was the same thing; a spiritual bonding of a man and a woman.
But now we’ve gone so long that marriage has come to mean different things to different people. It has become ingrained into our society and now carries certain rights and privileges that are purely based in society and politics. These rights and privileges have come to mean the same thing as “marriage” to many people, but they are quite separate from the Biblical foundation on which it began. Biblically speaking, you could take or leave the political rights and privileges of marriage because they are not relevant to what marriage is.
Most Christians who oppose gay marriage do so not because we feel that homosexuals are second-class citizens who do not deserve those rights and privileges. In fact, we believe that God loves homosexuals every bit as much as he loves all of us, which is infinitely beyond what any of us can even imagine. We oppose gay marriage because it is a foundational contradiction of terms. God made marriage and so he gets to define it, not us. For marriage to be taken and made into something different is sacrilegious and a violation of our religious rights. It is a group of people telling us that we can believe what we want to believe but then taking something we believe and molding it into something they like better.
To draw a religious parallel, think about an Islamic mosque. Men and women are segregated and are not allowed in the same areas at the same time. An outside observer might see this and feel that it is a violation of women’s rights. Should we then impose our beliefs on them and force them to integrate their mosque? Absolutely not! This would violate their religious rights.
In the same way, many Christians feel that changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples is a violation of our religious rights. It isn’t religion imposing itself on the government; it is the government imposing itself on religion.
I’m not saying you have to agree with this; it is completely up to you. As I mentioned at the start, this is not meant to advance the debate or to convince anyone to see things my way. It is merely intended to increase understanding by helping advocates for gay marriage understand why many Christians are opposed.
