The way we talk about the world matters. Our doctrine of creation tells us that words do not simply reflect reality. They also shape it and the way we inhabit it. Among the world’s many language groups, the Church is distinct. She is called to name things with Scriptural language, and sometimes this will involve using language in markedly different ways from the alternative cultures that surround us.[1]
In this short essay, I shall argue that it is time for Christians to stop using the borrowed language of homosexuality and heterosexuality, lesbian and bisexual, gay and straight. The Bible nowhere uses these terms, for the very simple reason that the writers of the Bible had never so much as heard of homosexuality, nor had they ever encountered a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person. Not even the Church in Corinth knew of such things.
When we think about sexuality in general, and same-sex sex in particular, we must pay attention to the effects that culture and language have in constructing our sexuality. Same-sex attraction and same-sex sexual practices are widely attested in many if not most cultures. But the way in which they are understood and expressed varies widely, and in many cases it is inaccurate to describe them with the label “homosexual.”[2]
The homosexual, along with his cousin the heterosexual, is an invention of nineteenth century European medical discourse. Originally, both terms named a form of sexual deviance. They were coined to describe people who engaged in non-procreative sex outside marriage with members of the same or opposite sex, respectively. In his The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault traces the term “homosexual” to the publication of an article by Carl Westphal in Archiv für Neurologie in 1870.
Foucault was concerned to counter the hypothesis of Victorian repression of sexuality and to demonstrate that the seventeenth century onwards saw an explosion of new ways of talking about sex. He shows how these new ways of putting sex into discourse led to an explosion of new sexualities.[3] With respect to sex between men, Foucault describes how this new language led to a movement away from the juridical category of sodomy, which consists of legal condemnations of certain forbidden acts, in favor of the medical category of the “homosexual,” who “became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology . . . Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle…It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature.”[4]
This had profound consequences for understanding the person involved in these particular sexual acts: “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”
This way of talking and thinking about sexuality began to enter popular media in American in the 1930s, and by the 1960s, “homosexuals” were reclaiming the language as something positive, rather than as the name of a pathology. But before this, no one thought that someone’s sexuality was so diffused throughout his person as to confer a sexual identity. Asking your great-grandfather if he were heterosexual would likely have been met with a blank stare. The idea that one’s sexuality permeates one’s whole person is a relatively new, culturally shaped phenomenon. It is intimately connected to the way in we which now talk about, think about, and inhabit our sexual desires. And it causes a number of problems.
First, the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” imply that sexual attraction exists in exclusively binary categories. But it is now commonly understood that sexual attraction is more like a scale of gray. At one end of the scale are men and women who are (almost) exclusively attracted to people of the opposite sex. At the other end of the scale are people who are (almost) exclusively attracted to people of the same sex. But in the middle are a whole variety of attractions to people of the same and of the opposite sex. It is also well documented that some men and women go through a temporary period of same-sex attraction. How should we label them? Gay? Bisexual? Formerly gay? Similarly, how should we label the happily and faithfully married man who is occasionally attracted to other men? Is he gay and just kidding himself about his real identity? Or is he bisexual? But can you really be bisexual if you never actually have sex with a man? Perhaps it would be better just to admit that he’s a married man, who, like all married men, is sometimes attracted to someone other than his wife.
Secondly, even when this scale of sexuality is acknowledged, the word “gay” is almost inescapably paired in our minds with “straight.” But which Christian would honestly describe their sexuality and sexual desires as “straight”? God’s design in creation was not for a man to be sexually oriented towards women. As a married man, to the extent that I am sexually oriented towards women, it’s a problem! I should be oriented to my wife. It is more accurate to speak of our sexual disorientation. And not only our sexual desires are disoriented. We have all kinds of desires: for friendship, success, comfort, respect, pleasure, control. To a greater or lesser degree, all of them are twisted. As Augustine taught so eloquently, because of original sin we are a tangle of disordered desires.[5] Scripture gives no sense that our sexual desires can be separated out into a unique category that is more basic and identity constituting than the others.
Thirdly, the idea that the direction of one’s sexual desires confers a sexual identity leads to acute pastoral problems. In our highly sexualized culture, the idea that one’s sexual orientation might be “straight” unconsciously allows for a significant amount of sexual license on the part of “heterosexual” men and women. In contrast, the idea that one might be “gay” adds a significant burden to those in our churches who battle with sexual attraction to someone of the same sex, because it implies that their whole identity is bound up with their sexual sin. Thus, sexual temptation carries a freight that no other kind of temptation does.
Lastly, these categories make it hard to hear and then proclaim what the Bible says on the subject of same-sex sexuality. They distort the language God has given us to name the world. In speaking of sex and sexuality, Scripture tells us that God has appointed a particular relational context for sexual intercourse—marriage—and that he forbids looking in order to lust and all sexual practices outside of marriage. These prohibitions include condemnation of all sex acts between two men or two women, and all lustful desires for another person of the same sex. But God condemns sexual actions, not sexual identities.
When God addresses the issue of sex and sexuality, he addresses us as persons whose identities are constituted in Adam or in Christ, persons created in the image of God as male and female, fallen persons with sin natures, who do sinful deeds and desire things in sinful ways. But he does not address us as sexually defined subjects. And therefore neither should we.
Matthew Mason is Associate Rector of Church of the Resurrection on Capitol Hill. He is a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology, and editor of their forthcoming new journal, Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology. He blogs at the SAET website.
[1] Cf. Peter Leithart, Against Christianity (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2003) 51-2.
[2] See the research of sociologist Stephen Murray as summarized in Jennell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011) 63-9.
[3] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1978]).
[4] Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 43.
[5] I discuss this in more detail with reference to Book 2 of the Confessions in a forthcoming article on same-sex sexuality in the Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology.