The Gospel Coalition and Rebecca McLaughlin have weighed in on the homosexuality question again.
Rebecca McLaughlin, a married woman who refers to herself as a Christian with lesbian desires, is best known for her intense focus on identity politics. McLaughlin recently published a book on apologetics which seeks to prove that the Christian faith has always bowed down to the most fashionable ideological idols of our day (more here and here).
This week The Gospel Coalition published an article by Rebecca McLaughlin entitled “5 Reasons to Disentangle Sexuality and Race.” In other words, McLaughlin takes up the question: Does homosexuality define a people group?
Rebecca McLaughlin cares deeply about getting this question right, and repeatedly invokes the prophetic warning, “Get this question wrong and you’ll be on the wrong side of history.”
McLaughlin Weighs In
To begin her answer, McLaughlin posits her own story, which is brief indeed:
“…as strongly as the Bible cuts in favor of mixed-race marriage, it cuts against same-sex marriage for believers. Part of me wishes this wasn’t true. I’ve been romantically attracted to women since childhood. Were I not a Christian, I expect I’d be married to a woman today.
Note: this testimony has not a hint to sin, repentance, forgiveness or even an ongoing struggle. It is merely a nod to identity. McLaughlin proceeds to normalize her “Christian” same-sex-attracted status:
“My same-sex attraction is more like my inclination for public speaking: It’s a mix of innate predispositions and contingent life experiences, a blend of chosen and unchosen, and according to the latest empirical research, might well be susceptible to change over time.”
Where is McLaughlin’s Bible? What she describes here like some sort of quirky freckle, God calls “vile affections,” and a desire to be “abusers of themselves with mankind.”
As things continue, God’s word never does speak authoritatively in this article. What does the Bible say directly about same-sex-lust? Those words go unmentioned. Instead Rebecca McLaughlin seeks to shy readers away from homosexuality through a trendier means: identity politics.
Try to keep up
Here is how Rebecca McLaughlin brings identity politics into her reasoning. Despite McLaughlin’s aversion to the Bible’s teaching on vile affections, she still wants to argue that gay marriage (as an institution) is wrong. Does she make her argument from the Bible? Actually McLaughlin prefers an argument from sociology laced with identity politics.
“More White Westerners Than People of Color Support Gay Marriage. White Westerners are far more likely than people of color in the two-thirds world to affirm gay marriage, and white Americans are more than 10 percent more likely than black Americans to affirm gay marriage.”
Less white representation = more true? This is identity politics all the way down.
“Most Religious Traditions Are Opposed to Homosexuality: Opposition to homosexual sex is common to the two largest global worldviews—Christianity and Islam—as well as to most other major religious traditions.
The God of the Bible, the Creator of the Universe waits on other “world religions” for confirmation?
At the end of her article, Rebecca McLaughlin does mention God and the Bible as deterrents for homosexuality. Well, almost. McLaughlin throws out references to the overarching story of God wooing a bride unto himself to warm readers to the alternative idea of heterosexuality. And here again she seeks to justify Christ’s bride through ethnic diversity:
“What’s more, this Bride is gloriously multi-racial, composed of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation…” (Rev. 7:9)
Weighed in the Balance
This is as good a place as any to help McLaughlin enlarge her focus:
Revelation 7 is about the Lamb conquering. The Lamb slain before the foundation of the world conquers. Christ Jesus redeems for himself a great multitude of people in white robes-robes washed white in the blood of the lamb; a great number that no one can count falling on their faces before the throne saying:
“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen” (Rev. 7:12).
“Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:14-15).
And Found Wanting
Rebecca McLaughlin’s identity politics study Bible is weighed in the balance and found wanting. She misses the eternal categories of sin, holiness, judgement, heaven, hell, righteousness, redemption, and reduces the ancient faith to a series of trendy virtue signals that will have no value at all when the judge of the earth returns. Christians have more than 5 reasons to disentangle their ears from teaching like this.
