Why Agree with Lorenzo Romar

BCC’s Campus Crusade for Christ stirred up some strong feelings last week with a controversial slate of speakers. The star of the show, Lorenzo Romar told a few engaging basketball stories and gave his personal testimony of religious faith. I heard nothing to get too excited about here. But the opening act Wayne Perryman addressed Christian students as an activist leader encouraging an oppressed and persecuted minority community of believers. The hostility of our liberal arts college towards Christians was assumed and decried by Perryman. I regretfully did not hear Ken Hutcherson, the closing act. But he was the subject of many heated e-mails around campus on account of the public stands he has taken in the past against equal rights for homosexuals. Is our Campus Crusade for Christ coming out of the closet as anti-gay? Other student Christian groups around the country are making headlines by doing so. I’d like to pursue the issue here because of the attention Rev. Hutcherson’s reputation brought to it and because I think discussion of this issue can be instructive in showing how religious believers are respected in higher education even when the things they believe are disputed.

There is the issue of freedom of expression that should be mentioned along the way.  I think it is a no-brainer. I have no problem with entertaining the anti-gay views of conservative Christians like Rev. Hutcherson. For that matter I would have no problem hearing them respectfully expressed on this campus. So long as my rebuttal is also heard.  I do believe in freedom of expression as the bedrock of rational inquiry. But freedom of expression won’t help us at all if we are merely airing raw unreasoned opinions (sadly, I did hear quite a lot of that last week). So to harness freely expressed views to good effect, I must engage the reasons offered in support of them and explain what I find lacking in them. So, what reasons might the conservative Christian offer for holding that homosexuality is immoral? Assorted quotes from the Bible were offered in campus wide e-mail last week, so let’s start there.

Those who appeal to literal readings of the Bible for moral authority are stuck with a circular argument at best.  The Bible is claimed to be the Word of God. What reason have we for believing this? The Bible says so. But its truth as the Word of God is just what is at issue here. But suppose we accept the Bible as the divinely inspired Word as a matter of faith. Do we then have a reason for thinking homosexuality is wrong? To think so requires literal interpretation of the Bible and this I find rather hopeless. Conservative Christians are quite selective in their appeals to the authority of Bible. The Old Testament, for instance, tells us to stone adulteresses. And it makes no exception for adulteresses that are with child. This should be a major embarrassment to ardently anti-abortion Christians. But the real point here is that we can’t both insist on literal interpretation of the Bible and then pick and choose which passages we take to be literally true. One further point against interpreting the Bible literally, I do not think that when the Bible says that we were created in the image of God, that this should be understood to mean that God is a greasy hairy thing that smells after a day or two without showering. I think it means that we are endowed to some limited degree with much more divine characteristics like the capacity for reason. My intention here, towards believers and non-believers alike, is just to encourage the vigorous use of that capacity. If the Christian God exists, I am pretty confident that this is in line with His intentions for us.

Biblical exegesis aside, there is a more general problem raised by Plato some 2500 years ago with appealing to divine authority as justification for ethical beliefs. If goodness is the product of God’s command then He has no more reason to command kindness than torturing innocent children just for fun. But whether God commands it or not, it is clearly absurd that torturing innocent children should be morally right. The Christian God is not so arbitrary and neither is genuinely Christian ethics. So if homosexuality is wrong, there must be some further reason than just God’s say so.

Well, this critique of the conservative Christian’s argument against homosexuality from Biblical authority is quick work. Perhaps it is not the end of the discussion. But it is a step. And now the ball is in the believer’s court. Whether or not any people change their view of the matter, we may yet come to learn something simply in virtue of better understanding each other.

But if I am prepared to reject Biblical authority as the basis for morality, am I not casting myself adrift on the sea of moral relativism? I don’t think so. A substantive ethics of respect for persons can more solidly be grounded in our nature as persons. As a person I am a self-aware being that values many things and is capable of autonomous deliberation and action based on those values. Having this nature as a person, I can not help but recognize my own moral importance. We are all keenly aware of our own moral value whenever we are on the receiving end of an injustice (of course, our perception of injustice, like other kinds of perception, is prone to misfire on occasion).  Given my awareness of my own moral importance, logical consistency demands that I recognize others that share my nature as a person as having similar moral value. Our shared nature as persons places us under a moral obligation to respect each other as beings with intrinsic moral value. If this sounds a bit like Jesus’ ethic of brotherly love, it is no coincidence. The line I’ve just offered is roughly that of Immanuel Kant, a Christian believer who thought Christian ethics could be rationally justified independent of faith. Just what does it mean to respect persons? You’ll have to sign up for an ethics class to tackle this very, very big question. But as an ethicist, and on behalf of my numerous and esteemed gay colleagues, I will inform you that I have never run across a good reason for thinking that consensual homosexual relationships violate ethical obligations of respect for persons.

So far I have considered and offered reasons against accepting the conservative Christian’s view on the morality of homosexuality. Have I thereby demonstrated intolerance of this religious belief? Hardly! I am not attacking members of the CCC for holding this belief. I am merely explaining reasons that speak against the belief that homosexuality is immoral. And the quality of these reasons is quite independent of my personal sentiments towards members of the CCC (in fact, I actually quite like the CCC members I know personally). I am not challenging the conservative Christian’s right to hold their belief (indeed how could I? I have no control whatsoever over what others believe). Members of the CCC are free to make what they will of these reasons. Indeed, for my own sake as well as theirs, I hope they will be reasonable and consider the arguments I’ve offered. If I’ve erred in my assessment of their views on homosexuality, I would count myself the gainer if they can show me how I have done so.

Contrary to Rev. Perryman’s sentiment, I do not think secular liberal arts education is hostile to religious believers. I can understand how the believer might feel that it is so when one of their religiously held beliefs conflicts with our best applications of reason and observation. But there is no coercion involved in the application of reason to scientific, social and ethical issues. Where a religious believer’s belief conflicts with the best academic application of reason, as is the case with the issue of the morality of homosexuality, they are free believe in spite of this conflict, or to challenge our application of reason if they feel it has been misapplied. But faith alone does not provide sufficient reason. Different people believe all manner of things as a matter of firm religious faith. At least some of those beliefs must be false.  Sometimes, on the other hand, reason supports beliefs that are religiously held, as I think is the case in Jesus’ central ethical teaching of brotherly love (read “respect” in secular lingo). In any case, in the academy, we can’t show respect for religious believers by showing partiality towards any particular religious view. To the contrary, not being partial to any specific faith based view is the only way we can be respectful of the diversity of religious views held by people. The only authority we can appeal to is sound reasoning based on the available evidence. If religious believers can’t be content with this, then it is they, not the rest of us, who lack respect for people in all of their diversity.

Regards,

Russ Payne

Philosophy

Bellevue Community College