Letter to the Editor: Serving Up Scapegoats with a Side of Hypocrisy

This time in American history when economic stress and generalized anxiety is abroad in the land, as it was in post-World War I Germany, Christianity seems once again prepared to serve up scapegoats as a lightning rod for anger and frustration in its majority white population. 

Beyond economic insecurity, we know that the biggest threat to the American family and its children is good ole red blooded American as apple pie infidelity. Yet the loudest voices of American Christianity are offering up the gay community as the major threat to the institution.

The political far right has been encouraged by what the religiously cast anti-abortion message has been able to do in fundraising and electoral outcomes. Now that headway has been made through Supreme Court appointments on this issue, the far right has landed on opposition to the gay community as its newest lever in the toxic electoral mix that is Christian Nationalism. 

Consider some inside biblical theology baseball on sexual sin.  Jesus never mentions homosexuality.  He does denounce divorce and remarriage, the former only permitted if there is infidelity and remarriage in any case constituting adultery.  How is it today in American Protestantism to ordain and employ divorced and remarried clergy as spiritual leaders of congregations and bless the exchange of wedding vows in remarriages.

The comfort with divorce and remarriage surely reflects an acceptance of modern understandings of personality psychology and human relationships.  Where is the same deference to modern psychological understandings in biblical interpretations of gender preference and identity.  

Modern biblical interpretation has made it possible for divorced and remarried congregants and clergy to bask in the comfort and acceptance of their church communities.  The hypocrisy is leaving their gay brothers and sisters out in the cold to be kicked around as political footballs. 

Holly Wright
Easton