Loving them into hell?
The other day, I posted about why “speaking the truth in love” isn’t an excuse for theological debates. I said that real love needs to be evident through grace, not just trying to make me agree with you.
One of my Facebook friends responded with this comment:
I have been told that by loving people and not telling them the truth I am loving them into hell. Then they told me some famous Christian artist wrote a song saying that. It just made me feel like poo.
If a Christian singer said it, it must be true!
After I stopped my inner child from giggling at the word “poo,” I thought about this. Many of you may have been subjected to the same pressures. But I think this person’s friend has it all wrong.
Some of you will no doubt want to respond right away by pointing out that you either don’t believe in a literal hell or don’t view it the same way this person’s friend does. I don’t really want to get into a debate about hell, though, so for the sake of argument, let’s say that this person is right that gay sex is sinful and that hell is a place of eternal torment for people who die without repenting of their sins and giving their lives to Christ.
Well, if that’s true, then I can tell you right now that the American church—particularly those conservative and evangelical segments of it, like the ones I grew up in—has already developed the most effective strategy I can imagine… for sending gay people straight to hell.
Yeah, I said it.
What many people would consider “loving me by telling me the truth” I would call “constantly harassing me with Bible passages and arguments about sin until I’m sick of listening to anything they have to say.”
“Wait, that’s not fair,” some Christians might say. “I’m not constantly harassing you. I only bring it up sometimes.”
True, maybe you don’t bring it up constantly, but you are one of many Christians I know, all of whom think they’re only bringing it up “sometimes”—to the point that I have to listen to it… ALL. THE. TIME.
Imagine waking up with a large, very noticeable zit on your face. All day long, as you interact with people, one person after another takes the opportunity to say, “Hey, did you know you’ve got a big zit?” It’s a bit uncomfortable when the first or second person mentions it, but by the tenth person, you’re ready to bite someone’s head off:
“Yes, I know!!!!! Shut up about it already!!!!!!”
On the other hand, what if you have food in your teeth and no one bothers to tell you? You might be a bit embarrassed, but you’d surely be grateful for the friend who loves you enough to (privately) tell you the truth: “Hey, there’s a bit of spinach in there. Also, your zipper’s undone.”
The key is knowing the difference. When you “share the truth in love,” are you the lone person offering a new perspective? Or are you just piling on?
When it comes to gay people in our culture, I can guarantee you that you’re piling on. There is not a single gay person in the United States—no matter how many affirming friends they have, and no matter how liberal an area they live in—who hasn’t already heard time and time again that many Christians believe them to be abominable. If people get irritated about being reminded of a silly pimple, how do you think they feel about being reminded that others believe they’re going to hell?
I know I find it painful. And I’m a Christian who actually cares about this stuff, so if I’m sick of it, you know my agnostic, atheist, and other non-Christian friends are ready to pull their hair out. (I have an advantage in that my hair is already out.)
It’s no secret that I don’t think being gay is a sin or that gay relationships are sinful. But if you do, and you’re concerned about my eternal destiny, a strategy where you keep your emotional distance and regularly remind me of your disapproval isn’t going to change my mind. If anything, it’s going to make me less likely to believe anything you say, and less likely to be interested in being a Christian.
“Tough love” is a good strategy sometimes. But this isn’t an intervention for a drug addict, and if you don’t see the difference between drug addiction and being gay, you haven’t spent very much time listening to gay people.
The irony, you see, is that the person who is supposedly “loving me into hell” by just being my friend and showing me the grace and love of Christ is the person I’m much more likely to listen to when it comes to big decisions in my life.
But in the end, if I don’t ask them for their opinion on the issue, it ultimately won’t be because they were too loving. It’ll be because I’m so sick of hearing the ungracious messages from the “truth-telling” crowd.
“I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?”
Yesterday, a restaurant server posted the following photo to reddit; it’s already going viral.
The story: The pastor was part of a large party who ate at this server’s restaurant. Like many American restaurants, this particular one has a policy of adding an automatic 18% tip for large parties. It’s something the computer does automatically, not something the server has any control over.
According to the server, the pastor’s party tried to get around the automatic 18% tip by asking for separate checks, even though the same person was paying for the whole table. The server says that everyone was happy with the service; they just didn’t like the idea of a compulsory tip.
The result? The pastor scribbled out the tip, leaving none at all, and adding the note, “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?”
(As a side note, I suspect the server would have been happy with 10% of the diner’s income as a tip. Only 18% of the cost of the meal is a bargain.)
Oh, and just to drive the point home, the diner made sure to add the word “Pastor” above their signature at the bottom.
Really?
If you’ve read my book TORN, you know that I had similar experiences waiting tables:
“Sundays are the worst,” one of the servers explained to me. “That’s when the church crowd goes out to eat.”
“What’s wrong with the church crowd?” I asked.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “They’re usually the most demanding, and they’re always the worst tippers. I guarantee you, if you see your table praying before the meal, you can mentally subtract a third from your tip.”
Standing nearby, the manager cracked a smile. “They already gave at church,” he said. “They don’t have any money left.”
In the book, I talk about what this means for the reputation of the church. (Hint: It’s not good.)
Yes, a lot of us think the tipping system in America could be improved. In many countries, servers are paid a decent wage, and tips are an added incentive to reward a job especially well done. I know a lot of people who think it should be that way in the United States, too, but it’s not. In most states, servers are paid only a little over $2 an hour (yes, you read that right), with the expectation that they will make their living from tips. You might not like that system, but if you choose to express your displeasure with it by tipping your server poorly, the only person you’re hurting is the server—someone who is already living on very little money and depending on your tip to help them pay their bills.
As a former server myself, I always tip at least 18-20% unless the service was just so unbearably horrible that it destroyed the dining experience. Even then, I still tip, just not as much. If I can’t afford the tip, I don’t eat out, or I eat someplace where diners aren’t expected to tip. Otherwise, I consider paying my server to be part of the cost of the meal.
I think everyone should tip that way, but if you choose not to, do me a favor: Don’t pray before your meal, don’t go out to eat right after church, and don’t sign your receipt with the word “pastor.” In short, don’t let people know you’re a Christian. Because when Christians are the worst tippers, it destroys our witness. We’re supposed to be the generous ones, not the stingy and selfish ones. And I can tell you from experience, when servers see a pattern of Christians who tip poorly, it makes them far less interested in any of this “Jesus stuff.”
It’s worth noting that the original image above was posted on reddit’s “atheism” forum.
And for heaven’s sake, whatever you do, please don’t leave these as part of your tip:
No.
No. No. No.
Bad Christian. Bad! No!
As I put it in the book:
Why would anyone think that tricking and disappointing a broke food-service employee would be a good way of spreading the Christian good news?
Remember, whatever you do, wherever you go, whenever you tip, you are representing Jesus. And what makes the most difference in that moment isn’t your words or your theology; it’s your grace, love, and generosity.
If we miss that, we’ve missed the gospel.
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An update: The story has now been confirmed by several press accounts, but with a few detail changes. The pastor had been described as male by the reddit poster, but was in fact a woman. The size of the party was 10, not 20. And the server who posted the image—and has now been fired—was not the same server who waited on the table. I’ve made a few minor wording changes to the post to reflect the updated details.
And hey, if this is your first exposure to my blog, welcome! Here’s a special message just for you.
Can you feel the sex tonight?
I was 16 years old when Disney’s The Lion King first hit theaters.
I fell in love with it. The opening sequence is breathtaking. The music is entrancing. The story hit all the right spots for me emotionally. It was the first movie I ever went back to see a second time in the theater.
In the story, a lion cub named Simba runs away from home, believing he’s responsible for a terrible tragedy. After several very emotional scenes, the tension is finally broken when Simba finds himself in the company of the film’s comic relief: a warthog named Pumbaa and a meerkat named Timon.
I loved Timon and Pumbaa, and so I distinctly remember when, during all the press surrounding the film, I read that Nathan Lane, the voice of Timon, had said that he believed Timon and Pumbaa were a gay couple.
I was furious.
How dare he?, I thought. I don’t care if he is the voice of the character; how dare he try to sexualize cartoon characters?
I didn’t know then that Nathan Lane was gay himself, but if I had known, it would only have made me angrier. In my mind, he was trying to assign sexuality—and a perverse sexuality at that—to two characters who were clearly just friends in a movie aimed at children. What could be more inappropriate?
I was 16, and it would be at least two years before I began to suspect that I was gay myself, and even longer before I began to understand what being gay really meant. It wasn’t until years later that I thought back to my anger at Nathan Lane and sat down to analyze it.
Now first of all, let me say that I don’t have any reason to think that Timon and Pumbaa were intended to be gay characters. I didn’t write the screenplay, and I don’t have any opinion on their sexual orientation or lack thereof. (Save your letters and calls for when I say something else controversial.)
But why was the idea of it so upsetting to me?
In my 16-year-old mind, calling Timon and Pumbaa gay was sexualizing them. It conjured up images of a male warthog and a male meerkat having sex, which felt wrong on so many levels—not only was it male-male sex, but it was (incredibly improbable) interspecies sex at that—and ultimately, I just didn’t think any Lion King characters should be thought of as sexual. (They are all drawn without genitals, after all.)
But wait… in the film, Simba grows up and falls in love with a lioness named Nala; during a rather lengthy sequence, they playfully wrestle, caress, and nuzzle one another as a love song (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”) plays, and I never thought of that as sexualizing those characters at all. Why not?
In my mind, for Timon and Pumbaa to be gay would have meant that they were having sex. But for Simba and Nala to be straight meant only that they were in love—even though we see the evidence of their sexual union at the end of the film when a child is born. (Oops, um, spoiler alert.)
I hear people do this all the time. When we think about a straight couple, we typically imagine the relationship in non-sexual terms: Love. Romance. Dating. Weddings. We obviously know that any straight couple with biological children has had sex (probably many, many times), but we choose not to think about that. Instead, we focus on the true love that (we hope) is the real center of the relationship.
And yet, when we think about gay couples, many people conjure up images of sex acts. We wonder what people do in bed and how it all “works.” And so when we hear that someone is gay, we—and by “we” here, I mean many people but not all—naturally think of that in sexual terms rather than romantic ones.
Thus the reason that, as a 16-year-old kid, I could easily accept the nonsensical pairing of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy as a silly gag, and the child-producing union of Simba and Nala as romantic and essentially nonsexual, but Timon and Pumbaa? Disgusting! Gross! Perverted! I couldn’t imagine them falling in love; I could only imagine them having sex.
What if Pumbaa had been female, and she and Timon took in this stray cub after living on their own for years in the desert? I probably would have assumed that they were a couple, not just best friends. And it wouldn’t really have mattered to me either way. In my mind, straight couples weren’t inherently sexual. Gay couples were.
The truth, of course, is that gay couples are no more or less sexual that straight ones. You know the old jokes about straight married couples who never have sex? Plenty of gay couples are in the same boat. They watch TV together. They make dinner. They take out the trash. They’re not drawn together by sex—at least, not any more than straight couples are. They’re drawn together by that same human need that led God to say that it was “not good” for Adam to be alone.
Obviously, for Christians who believe that the Bible condemns same-sex sex, that condemnation would still hold even if it’s only a tiny part of a gay couple’s relationship. But in that case, it’s worth recognizing that what you’re condemning isn’t the relationship itself—the selfless service of one another, the chicken soup when the other is sick, the hand-holding in good times and bad, the laughter, the tears, the love. When the church fails to recognize that, it ends up coming across as ignoring 99% of someone’s relationship in order to focus on the 1% we have a conflict over, and in so doing, we convince the world that we, the Christians, are the ones who are obsessed with sex.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything.
People ask me why gay people feel the need to “come out.” This is why.
My heart’s desire: to see us all be nicer to others, even the people we imagine to be indestructible because they’re famous or separated by a computer screen.
