Preston Sprinkle is clearly trying to find a way to square himself with his tribe’s culture war in his book, People to Be Loved. I wanted to touch on what the “third way” is, how it came about, where he differs with it, and why the idea ultimately fails before I talk more about his various suggestions for Christians and LGBTQ people.
Preston Sprinkle is clearly trying to find a way to square himself with his tribe’s culture war in his book, People to Be Loved. I wanted to touch on what the “third way” is, how it came about, where he differs with it, and why the idea ultimately fails before I talk more about his various suggestions for Christians and LGBTQ people.
The book is meant to be a tightrope walk between the evangelical tribe’s current antipathy toward gay people and full affirmation, all laced with Bible verses and lots of careful hermeneutics. In its primary suggestion to his fellow evangelicals, its foundational assumptions ultimately destroy whatever good might have been intended–or accomplished.
Preston Sprinkle brings a full set of assumptions to the party and refuses to let go of them, and ultimately those assumptions bury any good intentions he might have had. Today we’ll talk about those assumptions and why they’re wrong.
As we discussed last time, Christians’ condemnation of gay people is not only quickly becoming one of their core marker beliefs, but it’s also becoming one of the beliefs they’re fighting the hardest to protect–and arguably the belief that is costing them the most in terms of both adherents and credibility. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a single other belief for right-wing Christians that is costing them as much as this one is. Today I’ll touch on why this belief is so hard for right-wing Christians to shake–and why Preston Sprinkle, in his book People to Be Loved, is starting his quest for understanding by asking the wrong question.
If it wasn’t resulting in endless abuse and cruelty against innocent people worldwide, there’d be something comical about where Christians find themselves nowadays thanks to their ceaseless demonization and harassment of LGBTQ people. I’m sure they thought this was one culture war guaranteed to shock Americans back into churches nationwide; the people responsible for the hatred probably had no idea in the world that anything could go wrong with a smear campaign against that group. The whole thing probably felt like a total slam-dunk. And now it’s all gone hideously pear-shaped.
You can probably imagine that Christians aren’t terribly happy about Shannon Low’s deconversion. Today we’ll look at what his onetime tribe is making of his defection, because most ex-Christians have encountered much the same treatment–and if you’re a newly-deconverted person and haven’t yet, hang in there because you probably will at some point.
Thousands of people every day join the ranks of the ones who know. That number comes from Christian leaders themselves, who might have reason to misrepresent and inflate it–but I see no reason to think it’s not accurate.
Well, our ranks just expanded recently with the deconversion of the leader of a Christian rock band. I want to show you how his story fits in with the experiences of other people who’ve left Christianity (including me!), because next time we’ll be talking about why the tribe reacts to poorly to deconversions.
One of the greatest gifts we can get is constructive feedback from our peers and loved ones. That kind of feedback–offered in affection with hopes of improvement–shows us that they care enough to say something and that they believe that we can do better than we are now. That give-and-take is part of how we learn and grow and can be an important part of how we reach our various goals in life. Because feedback is so important, though, it’s really easy to turn into a weapon. Either the feedback isn’t offered in a constructive way because it’s being used to control or hurt us, or else we’re so scared of being controlled or hurt that we have a lot of trouble accepting it.
Christians these days sure do sound angry. The more right-wing the Christian, the angrier they sound–and the more vengeful, controlling, belligerent, and aggressive. Some of their worst blustering to date has occurred around their current culture war against transgender people. They’re fighting as hard as they can against what are essentially human rights for people who, if these same Christians really cared about what Jesus told them to do, would be the first people they’d nurture, protect, and love. That anger comes from a place of fear more than anything else.