Marriage equality is often portrayed as being an agenda of those who oppose the Christian faith and despise heterosexual marriage.
But as a married, heterosexual, evangelical Christian pastor and theologian I support the legislative amendment to allow same-sex couples the right to formalise their commitments in the legally-recognised covenant of marriage.
Privileging one theology over another
While personally I would gladly conduct and bless same-sex weddings, some of my evangelical brothers and sisters who cannot go that far still support this legislative amendment.
The basis of our shared support lies in the doctrines of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
These beliefs, for which some of my Baptist forebears endured violent persecution, teach us firstly that it is a Christian duty to defend the right of others to follow their own conscience before God, free from coercive attempts to impose conformity of belief or practice; and secondly that the state should not privilege the convictions of any particular religious tradition, even a majority tradition, over the convictions of those who dissent from it.
It follows from these beliefs that Christians can hold that while same-sex marriage may not be allowed in the church, it should still be provided for by the state. It is, of course, these same doctrines that underpin the churches’ right to pursue their own distinctive beliefs and practices if the state provides for things they disagree with.
As an evangelical pastor and theologian, I am committed to the authority of the Bible. If I had all day, I could carefully take you through the Biblical cases for and against, but that is debate for the Church, not for the State.
The State ought not to privilege anyone’s reading of scripture, including mine, in reaching its conclusions on this issue. Anyway, as I am sure you are aware, the level of robust debate in the churches makes it clear that neither biblical case is a lay-down misère.
Commitment in relationships is a value both church and state should uphold
Marriage has been practiced by almost every culture down through history. Christians have no more claim on it than anyone else.
The question at issue here is whether this almost universal human institution should be made more universal still by being opened up to those whose sexual orientation has previously excluded them.
Both Church and State can surely agree that prohibiting homosexual marriage has not and will not diminish the incidence of homosexuality in the community.
Both can surely agree that promoting sexual fidelity and family stability is preferable to fostering cultures of promiscuity and easy dispensability.
And most married couples, Christian and non-Christian alike, will acknowledge that fidelity and stability are not easy and would be far more difficult still without the vows we have taken and the explicit social endorsement and support of our marital relationships.
To criticise the homosexual community, as many do, for its alleged promiscuity while at the same time working to deny them access to the social structures that encourage and support fidelity for the rest of us is surely disingenuous.
Even if I still believed, as I once did, that homosexual love-making was always a sin, I think I would still find myself compelled to conclude that anything we can do to promote the cause of faithful stable relationships in the homosexual community is, at the very least, a significant step in the direction of righteousness.
And surely if we can foster the valuing and practice of marriage in a sector of the community that has previously been excluded from it, that can only increase the valuing and practice of marriage by the community as a whole. And that, it seems to me, ought to be a cause about which Church and State can agree.
Gay marriage will benefit the institution of marriage not undermine
We often hear that gay marriage undermines heterosexual marriage. I have reflected on this at length, and it has become more and more apparent to me that this charge is an unfortunate, albeit somewhat understandable, example of scapegoating.
There is no doubt that heterosexual marriage is under threat, but the threat is from within, not from without. The real threats to marriage come from the commodification of sex and relationships, and the consumerist mindset that reduces everything to ephemera to be replaced as soon as a new model appears promising greater satisfaction.
But it is an almost universal human phenomena that when the things we hold dear are under threat from things we feel powerless to tackle, we deflect the blame onto a scapegoat, a more readily dentifiable “other” who we make the face of all that we fear and then crucify to appease our wrath.
Surely, though, there is no threat from same-sex marriage. What we have here is a group who are recognising the value of marriage, of faithful lifelong vowed relationships, and asking for the right to participate in the benefits of that.
Some heterosexual people are asking them why they would want it and suggesting that marriage is an outmoded institution that they are better off without. So surely when a group who have been stereotyped as the champions of hedonistic promiscuity begin extolling the virtues of marriage, that can only increase the regard in which marriage is held by the community as a whole.
Why I changed my views
Finally, I think it’s important to point out that I haven’t always held the views I hold today. I was quite homophobic as a young man, after being the target of a male sexual predator in my early teens.
As a conservative Christian, it was easy to find biblical justifications for my fear and hostility. But I married young and my wife left me for another man before I was 24. And as a divorcee, I found myself in a category of people who, according to my own biblical conservatism, were ruled out of marrying and confined to lifelong celibacy.
It was out there in that wilderness, and chaffing against the unfairness of it, that I began to look around to see who else was similarly excluded. For a conservative and homophobic young Christian, finding that I was standing alongside the gay community was a bit of a shock.
Now that I was being told that the Christian thing to do was give up sexual intimacy forever, I could see the injustice of what I had previously demanded of gay people.
I recognised that they didn’t choose to be gay any more than I chose to be divorced, and that they couldn’t become straight any more than I could become un-divorced.
And so it was out there, in that awkward and unexpected solidarity, that I discovered the biblical message of grace, the truth that God does not demand that we measure up to some pristine ideal before we can experience love and joy, but rather we are graciously accepted as we are, given new starts from where we are, and invited to journey with God’s blessing into all the fullness of life, including, if we are so called, the joys of sexual intimacy within the lifelong faithful covenant of marriage.
I am forever grateful that the Church and the State had changed their laws to allow divorcees to marry. Now, as a beneficiary of that, I am striving to achieve the same for my unexpected friends.
Postscript: This article reproduces the text of a presentation I made to a hearing of the Senate Inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Act 2009. In that context, it was not relevant to detail the biblical basis of my views. However, one of the Senators, an active Christian from my own faith tradition, requested a supplementary written submission detailing the biblical case. That submission can now be found at http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/legcon_ctte/marriage_equality/submissions/sublist3/for/Sub_ef44a.pdf
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