My God Cares About Hearts, Not Crotches

John, why do you write so much about gays? With all the issues we have in the world, why do you spend so much time obsessing on that one?

That was part of an email I just read.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked that question (especially lately). So, here’s le scam on that particular skinny:

Of the 865 posts I’ve written for this blog in the last three and a half years, maybe 15 are about the relationship between gays and Christianity. If that’s an obsession, I’m a meat-adorned Lady Gaga. (Mmmm … delicious gaga-bacon … .)

Speaking generally, the reason I write about gays and Christianity is because the church of Jesus Christ on earth is in the throes of its second great and terrible reformation. That’s happening over this single issue. I’m surprised I ever write about anything else.

Personally speaking, the reason I so care about this issue is because of my friends.

My father is a straight man with an overdeveloped hambone. He’s an actor; he’s always been Joe Local Theater. Thus did I grow up knowing gay men. Not that as a kid I knew or cared what “gay” even meant. But I knew that I liked pretty much all my dad’s thespian pals. They were fun people. I thought of some of them as my friends.

Fast forward to me at seventeen. I still had no clue what gay and/or lesbian even meant. I grew up in an upper-middle class suburb grounded in good, clean 50′s values. And I personally am almost frightfully straight. So as a teen, the very idea of homosexual sex was like unto my consciousness as was the proper conjugation of irregular verbs in Chinese, or the varying lifespans of moths native to Borneo. It was just … the opposite of present.

At seventeen I left high school and moved out of my house. Like my father, I’d become an actor. And so, in the natural course of things, I had made friends with other actors my age. Some of those actors went to schools other than mine. (We’d all met via contests of the National Forensics League; I was quite the Humorous and Dramatic Interpretation star.)

Wow. I can see this post is going to go on forever. I can’t tell my whole life here. (Though I am writing a book just now, see, which in some Major Ways is a memoir. But I digest.) Time to become …  Succincto Man!

I’m not sure I’ve ever not had in my life a very dear gay friend. Not a casual friend or acquaintance: an actual, true, day-in, day-out friend.

People (my age) who, by taking me into their family homes, rescued me from my own intolerable home. Roommates. Co-workers. College friends. Just … people. Friends.

You invite into your life the highest quality people in your life at that time, right? That’s just … what people do. As it happens, for me that’s often been people of the LGBT persuasion. Those relationships have never been any more about sex than doing science experiments has to do with the relationship between me and my good friend, the (straight) retired chemistry professor.

This thing with Christians having issues with people because they’re gay is, to me, so foreign, and so incomprehensibly bizarre, that it doesn’t even register with me as reality. It’s a dynamic that simply exists for me beyond what I can access or comprehend. It’s as if, having been, say, elected to a city council, I discovered that at night, after the city council meetings, all my fellow council members gathered together in a big room, got naked, laid on their backs, and sang Lithuanian military songs while kicking beach balls around in the air with their feet.

That just wouldn’t compute with me.

But what could I do? I’d be one of those elected to serve. I’d be obliged to be in that room.

But I wouldn’t take off my clothes. And I wouldn’t lie on the floor and kick beach balls around.

I’d probably sing some of the songs, though. I like songs. But that’s where I’d draw the line.

In my head and heart what matters is the quality of a person’s character. That’s it. It’s a one-issue deal for me. What I’m interested in is how kind someone is—how open, smart, wise, thoughtful. I care how moral they are.

What do I care if any given person is gay or straight? I’d be embarrassed to use a person’s sexual orientation as any sort of gauge by which to evaluate their moral character. It’s like trying to use a thermometer to check how fast a car is going. It’s just … well, stupid.

Becoming a Christian changed this core truth of my life and experience not one iota. I’m not turning my back on my friends because of the way in which someone once decided to interpret a few lines of the Bible. I can read the Bible on my own. I don’t need anyone to tell me what it says, or means, or means by what it says. I can do my own research. I got it.

I used to watch Jimmy and Tammy Bakker on TV. I watched Jimmy Swaggart. I watched Jerry Falwell. I watched Fred Price. I watched and read Billy Graham. I know from Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, Chuck Colson. I’ve read the Church Fathers. I’ve read Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Donne (Donne!), Hooker, Bunyan, Pascal, Milton, Wesley, Spurgeon, Merton, Bonhoeffer, Chesterton, Lewis. I know history. I know philosophy. I’ve think I’ve read as many Bible commentaries as I have People magazines.

I got it. I understand Christianity.

And not because of anything I ever read, either. All that’s superfluous to the ongoing and informing presence of God in my life.

If you think that when God, looking to determine a person’s moral status, looks to his or her crotch, then … then I’m guessing you blush a lot. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! We should probably all (and especially these days) blush a little more often than we do.

Hey: what most interests God about a person is hardly their crotch. What interests God about a person, first, foremost, and forever, is their heart.

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