Red, Blue, or Purple? Voting the Christian Conscience: A Case of Moral Perplexity

This week, a friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest in Scranton, Pennsylvania, reported on his Facebook page that a group known as the Pennsylvania Pastors Network has recently been making automated phone calls to voters all over the state, urging them to “vote biblically” in the upcoming Presidential election. The implied message of this request was that true Christian discernment would ultimately lead to a conservative vote for Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Putting aside the fact that democracy and voting (as we know it) exists nowhere in the Bible, as well as the irony of conservative Christians pleading with voters to elect a Mormon, I am puzzled by what the PPN could actually mean by their appeal. As a Christian myself, my personal ethics are based upon the teachings of Jesus and the religious and social tradition offered by the Hebrew Bible. I am particularly concerned by how our nation treats the poor, as well as the manner in which we carry out social, economic, and punitive justice. The question, “How would Jesus vote?” has become worthy of serious consideration in this election. I am unsure of which Bible the PPN may be referring to, but the Bible I read offers little help when it comes to choosing the President of the United States, in part because the ethical demands of scripture go far beyond that which any political candidate may be willing or able to fulfill as a holder of public office. When seriously weighing the ethical options of my role in the democratic process, I appear to be faced with four major options of how to use (or not use) my vote in the upcoming election. I will attempt to list each of these options below, briefly offering the benefits and drawbacks of each option (when applicable) to better elucidate why I consider participating in the upcoming election to be a particularly difficult moral decision.

1) Vote for the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney.
            This is my least likely option. So many of my conservative friends who are voting for Romney in this election are doing so almost explicitly because Romney is not Obama. I do not feel that this is a viable way of ethical decision-making, nor is it a wise method for voting potential leaders into office. Additionally, I have tremendous misgivings about the federal budget plan proposed by Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan. I share nothing in common with Ryan’s Randian political philosophy, as I believe in the ethical teachings of Jesus which find their power within philosophical and theological understandings of altruism—that is, against Ayn Rand’s objectivism, I find serious concern for one’s neighbor to be the ultimate deciding factor in how I make moral choices, whether this involves grocery shopping for myself or cooking meals for the homeless. The Romney/Ryan budget would cut SNAPS (“food stamps”) benefits by $133 billion, making it more difficult for struggling families to attain basic necessities. Also under the proposed Romney/Ryan budget, Pell Grant subsidies would be drastically cut, which means that many students from lower-income families would be unable to pursue higher education. I see no semblance of divine justice (in the Jesus sense of the word) in this option.

2) Vote for the incumbent Democratic President, Barack Obama.

            The sitting President has instituted programs that have increased job growth and contributed greatly to social spending programs that have raised the quality of life for many low-income Americans. Additionally, Obama has passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which has extended health care benefits to millions of Americans (including myself) who would have otherwise been unable to afford even the most basic healthcare for themselves.

Yet under Barack Obama, our national debt has grown by more than $5.3 trillion dollars, our violent political conflicts have expanded to include at least three other countries in which we have yet to officially declare war, gun rights have been extended to allow concealed weapons in public places such as national parks, nothing has been done to lower the gluttonous defense budget (which currently accounts for roughly 60% of all federal discretionary spending, and has doubled since 2001), and counter-terrorism drone strikes—what the Department of Defense refers to as “pre-emptive defense,” if such a thing exists—have quadrupled under Obama since the Bush administration, possibly killing hundreds of civilians in the process. My conviction as a Christian will not allow me to vote for a national leader who allows such violent attacks to persist. Furthermore, while I am tempted to vote for Obama because he appears to me to be the “lesser of two evils” in this election, it should be pointed out that if it is irresponsible to vote for Romney because Romney is not Obama, then it is equally irresponsible to vote for Obama merely because Obama is not Romney. Voting for the lesser of two evils is—in my estimation—still a vote for an evil.

3) Vote for a third-party candidate.

            A few days ago I took an online poll that paired my political beliefs with those of 2012 Presidential candidates, including lesser-known third-party candidates, based upon statements made by each of the contenders for this year’s election. I was surprised to find that I held most of my views in common with Green Party candidate Jill Stein, followed closely by Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. Anderson’s appearance was no surprise—I have been following the development of the Justice Party for some time now, and have found that my personal ethics and political values line up with this group quite nicely.

            Voting for a third-party candidate would allow me to vote for the person whom I feel is best suited to lead our country according to my personal value system—that is, voting for Stein or Anderson (who is only a write-in candidate in my state) would give me the opportunity to “vote my conscience.” However, there is no possible chance of a third-party candidate actually winning a U.S. election. Voting my conscience, while taking a personal stand, would be a merely symbolic action, since choosing to cast my ballot for neither the Democratic nor Republican candidate would be largely ineffective for the actual election. In essence, a third-party candidate vote is a vote for the ultimate winner of the election—for better or worse. 

4) Do not vote.

            Emma Goldman supposedly once famously said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Most U.S citizens, however, would reject this position. Yet Christians have a powerful history of non-participation in the democratic voting process for moral purposes. Dorothy Day is perhaps the greatest American witness to non-voting as a matter of Christian conscience; though she once participated in a hunger strike and picketed the White House in support of women’s suffrage, Day herself never voted. With Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker Movement, she became a catalyst for change without ever casting a ballot, proving that positive moral influence can indeed come from Christian non-participation in the political system.

The argument might be made that regardless of who wins this election, either of the two principal candidates will make use of drone warfare, that both have spent a criminally disproportionate amount of money relative to the average citizen’s paycheck on their campaigns while many in our nation starve, and that voting for a third-party candidate would essentially be casting a vote for the ultimate winner of the election. The logical final choice, therefore, would be nonparticipation. After all, when the Israelites petitioned Samuel and Yahweh for a king so that they could be “like other nations” (1 Samuel 8), the response from God is that God wants to be our authority. And Peter, when cornered by the High Priest of Israel in Acts 5:29 for his participation in teaching the crowds the good news about Jesus, responds, “We must obey God rather than human authority.” Perhaps the most viable political option for Christians is the non-political one. Rather than participation in the system that has alienated and disenfranchised so many of our poorest citizens, perhaps Christians should instead be instigators, following in the footsteps of Jesus by using our political imaginations to circumvent authority and continue the subversive work of Christ.

Yet even this stance is unsatisfactory. If casting a ballot for a third-party candidate is “wasting” the vote, is nonparticipation not just as equally wasteful? While I do not necessarily agree with those who would assert that if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain, I still cannot bring myself to disregard the fact that the right to vote (especially for minorities and women) is a hard-won privilege, and that while many are indeed crushed by the gears and cogs of the political machine, many more still have benefited from much-needed aid dispensed by that very machine. 

Conclusion

            Is the lesser of two evils, as Joseph Fletcher once suggested, ultimately the good? I don’t think so. Being forced to choose between two candidates, neither of whose policies appears to me to be ethically compatible with the teachings of Jesus, does not seem like a decision that offers freedom. If I cast a vote for one of the primary candidates, they win and proceed to further engage the United States in violent military conflict with other nations or irresponsibly manage our federal budget, I will feel responsible for that action. Yet if I do not vote, or cast my vote for a third-party candidate, I am denying myself the opportunity to have my vote make a difference. Am I giving too much weight to one vote, overestimating the power of a single citizen’s opinions and convictions? Perhaps. But it remains a difficult ethical decision for me, and the election is coming up soon. One way or another, I will be making a choice of utmost moral concern.

Queering the Church: It's About Time (Part One)

Note: This is Part One of my two-part series on homosexuality and the Church. The first part examines supposed references to homosexuality in the letters of Paul; Part Two, which I will post tomorrow, will outline five primary ways to introduce this information to a church congregation.            

For the Evangelical Christian who leans even modestly leftward, it is not a difficult task to hermeneutically bypass Hebrew scripture that appears to condemn homosexual activity. The admonition found in Leviticus 20:13 that anyone found to be engaged in same-sex intercourse should be put to death can be cast in doubt simply by engaging in the process of questioning: In our current cultural context of modern and postmodern American Christianity, who should be deemed worthy by the public to carry out the sentencing of such a crime? Should it be our officers of the law who are to put all homosexuals to death? The absurdity of the question exposes the cultural and contextual gap between ancient Hebrew Yahwism and twenty-first century American globalism, and is often left unconsidered by many who vehemently defend what they call “traditional marriage.” The New Testament Gospels contain virtually no references to homosexuality at all (with the exception of a few queer theological interpretations of extracanonical Gospels[2]), so little can be argued from the authoritative words of Jesus of Nazareth. On this particular issue, he remains peculiarly silent. But what of the letters of Paul? How do we confront the theology of a man whose writings make up more than a quarter of the New Testament with our rapidly shifting knowledge of gender identity and human sexuality? Such is the aim of this study.

In Part One I will address two primary pericopae from the writings of the Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and Romans 1:24-27, and their literary, historical, and social context. In Part Two of this post, I will help to outline a method in which the material of Part One might be disseminated within a congregational or ministerial setting. 

PART ONE: Textual Analysis

1 Corinthians 6:9-10

Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth deals with several important issues with which the early Christians in that city struggled, particularly unity, holiness, love, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and sexual morality. It is the latter with which this section is concerned. Paul was undertaking no small task to preach to the Corinthians about sexual ethic. Of the cultural setting of Corinth, David L. Tiede writes, “Corinth was a town with a reputation for cosmopolitan airs, for bawdy sex in the marketplace, for crafty dealings among the traders at the port…The human meat markets of every age have looked about the same, and every generation has had its high priests of sexual freedom and pornography.”[3] With this context in mind, two words in particular should be given special attention from 1 Corinthians 6:9-10: arsenokoitai (arsenokoitai) and malakoi (malakoi).

            The fluidity of language has a long history of birthing numerous interpretations of the Biblical text, both in ancient times and throughout recent history. Dale B. Martin, in his excellent study of human sexuality and the Church, Sex and the Single Savior, notes that both of these mysterious terms included in Paul’s Corinthian vice list held, until the 19^th or 20^th century, a distinctly male connotation, with no respect to our modern concept of sexual orientation. The term arsenokoitai, for example, took on new meaning when the Greek noun—which refers solely to men—was translated in the early twentieth century with the generic label of “homosexual,” thereby feeding the growing misconception that both the male and female gay identity stemmed from what was commonly considered to be a mental disorder.[4]

Furthermore, Martin suggests that arsenokoitai (arsenokoiteV) has a much more specific meaning than any generic homosexual activity. This specific meaning might be lost to us, but contextual hints may be found in the Sibylline Oracles (2nd - 5th cent., CE), an ancient Greek text which utilizes the word in a vice list very similar to (yet totally independent of) Paul’s reference in 1 Corinthians. However, arsenokoiteV here takes on a distinctly economic meaning, sandwiched between such admonitions as “Do not steal seeds. Whoever takes for himself is accursed,” and “Give one who has labored his wage. Do not oppress the poor man.”[5] In addition, two other early Christian texts, The Acts of John (2^nd cent.) and Theophilus of Antioch’s To Autolychus, also include arsenokoiteV among economic vice lists.[6] It is possible that by including aresenokoitai among such sexual sinners as adulterers (moicoi) and fornicators (pornoi), Paul is attempting to single out those who are motivated by their own greed toward sexual exploitation. In any case, it should be pointed out that the exact definition of this term has been and will most likely remain a mystery, and that due to this ambiguity, translations will continue to be influenced by the particular ideological milieu or bias of the translator. 

Unlike arsenokoiteV, however, the word malakoV (plural: malakoi) does have a well-documented meaning. Long before Arnold Schwarzenegger referred to his political opponents as “girly-men,” the ancients used the term malakoV to refer to any man with a less-than-masculine demeanor, a physically feminine build, distaste for hard work, or an otherwise milquetoast disposition. Josephus and Plutarch both use the term in their writings to refer to the cowardly.[7] The Greek word is actually the etymological ancestor of the English word malleable, and means, literally, soft. Often translated together with arsenokoitai as “sexual perverts” or “homosexuals,” a much closer understanding of the word might be its original King James English translation, effeminate, which inadvertently takes into consideration the inherent sexism of Paul’s culture. Men were chiseled and virile, but women were weak, both in will and in physical stature. The ancient understanding of the feminine was very much influenced by the coital act—men were aggressive penetrators, while women were to passively allow themselves to be penetrated. Any man who was seen to be “soft” followed the natural order of distinction bestowed specifically upon women, and was therefore weak and cowardly. As Martin concludes, the difficulty with Paul’s use of the term malakoV is not the inherently sinful nature of homosexuality, but instead the “rank misogyny” implied by the term.[8] This concept will be explored further in Part II of this study, which will be posted tomorrow.

Romans 1:24-27

In this text-segment, as in the Corinthian correspondence, context becomes one of the key issues to interpreting the passage. It should first be noted that the overarching theme of the Romans letter involves the complicated interplay of salvation for the Jews and salvation for the Gentiles, and it is through this lens that Romans 1:24-27 must be viewed. Specifically, when Paul speaks of what many today consider to be a theological re-hashing of the Fall of Humanity, he is actually referring to the idolatry of the pre-Christian Gentiles, as is revealed by the preceding paragraphs.

It should not be overlooked or ignored that the primary sin that Paul is speaking against here is not some modern concept of sexual orientation, but the sin of idolatry. The  “exchanging of natural intercourse [Greek: cresin, or use] for unnatural” among men and women is not the sin being committed, but is instead punishment meted out by God for the sin of worshiping false gods! Furthermore, David L. Balch observes that “Paul is not evaluating homosexual ‘relationships,’ a modern value, but judges the psychological state of the person experiencing addictive desire…Paul's terms desire, passion, inflame, appetite, and error suggest that he is critiquing unbridled eros, sexual passion.”[9] Paul, like many other ancient moralists, viewed homosexual activity as “the most extreme expression of heterosexual lust.”[10] This interpretation of the pericope holds that Paul was instead noting the consequences of idolatry; that is, the total abandonment of will to appetite. Indeed, the link between sexual promiscuity and gluttony has been well-explored by recent scholars:

Sexual desire and hunger for food were thought to be analogous. The pleasure or use of sex is to be limited by satisfaction, as a full stomach limits eating. The Greco-Roman question of sexual use does not ask about the gender of the subject or the object, does not ask whether the activity is homo- or heterosexual.[11] 

Women being inflamed with passion for women and men being inflamed with passion for men is not, then, the result of any innate, natural, sexual orientation that causes one to be attracted to a person of the same sex, but is instead the carrying out of a natural sexual drive to its depraved ultimate conclusion.

Finally, it is a tragic irony that those who utilize this very passage as fuel for the fires of judgment against the LGBTQ community apparently (and most unfortunately) read no further than the end of the first chapter of Romans. The very next portion of the letter contains the following admonition:

Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. You say, ‘We know that God’s judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth.’ Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? 

The same Paul who proclaims that the New Age of Christ has arrived, urging Gentiles and 

Jews alike to embrace one another as brothers and sisters, also writes to the Church in 

Galatia that “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no 

longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This understanding of God 

as no respecter of persons bears a remarkable resemblance to Peter’s epiphany in Acts 10, 

as he preaches to Cornelius following his own vision regarding the acceptance of the 

profane: “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a 

Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.” As long 

as proof-texting is utilized by those perceived to be in power as a tool for marginalization 

and rejection of our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters, the church 

will never be seen by the oppressed as the catalyst for the New Age of Christ that Paul 

envisioned it to be.

---

[2] For more on this, see Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone, Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies) (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), particularly Jione Havea‘s chapter, “Lazarus Troubles.”

[3] David L. Tiede, "Will idolaters, sodomizers, or the greedy inherit the kingdom of God : A pastoral exposition of 1 Cor 6:9-10." Word & World 10, no. 2 (March 1, 1990): 152.

[4] Dale B. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 39.

[5] Ibid, 40.

[6] Ibid, 41.

[7] Ibid, 45.

[8] Ibid, 47.

[9] Balch, David L. "Romans 1:24-27, Science, and Homosexuality." Currents In Theology And Mission 25, no. 6 (December 1, 1998): p 437.

[10] Victor Paul Furnish, “The Bible and Homosexuality,” in Homosexuality: In Search of a Christian Understanding, ed. by Leon Smith, p 13, quoted by Martin, p 49.

[11] Balch, 437.