Love the sinner, hate the sin. If you’ve been an Evangelical longer than a few days, you’ve heard it. Heck, if you’ve been in a room with an Evangelical for any period of time, you’ve probably heard it.
I heard these lines recently at the Miller/Meadows panel on homosexuality. I see the appeal of using it. It does sound nice. We can even accept this as a way of giving ourselves the ability to put “us” on “their” side.
However, it was used as an end-all answer to several questions at the panel, and I felt it prevented real discussion, which was already crippled by its lack of diversity of opinion (or at least expression of opinion).
This clichéd answer must be one of the first things to leave our talking points if we want to clear communication with our homosexual brothers and sisters.
“Love the sinner, hate the sin” insinuates two main ideas that I disagree with: sin can be separated from sinners and you are to somehow love in spite of that “sin.” When we try to separate sin and sinner, we risk losing a person to love. Jesus didn’t seem too concerned with those who believed themselves sinless anyway. He died for us because we are sinners.
This phrase is only the beginning of the communication problem the non-inclusive communities of homosexuals and Christians have.
The slogans must go; all of them. If what you need to say to another Christian can be condensed into less than 10 words, it probably ins’t worth hearing, especially if it rhymes. This includes, but does not restrict to, all the bumper stickers I’ve seen on cars (some on campus): “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” “Gay Marriage is a pit stop on the road to hell,” “Proposition 8 won now stop whining,” and “Marriage: Get it straight.” These are neither helpful nor loving.
I agree with the panel’s statement that the important thing is to to love people, but it can’t stop there.
What does it mean to love someone? It doesn’t mean to agree with everything they say or support them in everything they do. But there has to be a better answer than praying that someday they will convert to your like-mindedness.
The best place for HU to start is to respect others through language, whether it be bumper stickers or simple catch-all phrases.
I feel like there’s something profound being said here, and in most cases I would agree. However, I seem to have missed something in the main point, and am highly confused. How I have understood that tired cliche is that we are to hate that the person is sinning, and that it also applies to us, ourselves. What is wrong with crying for them and saying (not necessarily to their faces; that could cause unneccessary problems and push them farther away from God), “I hate this! I wish you would come to God so He can help you get away from it!” Am I misunderstanding something here?
I do, however, agree that all of the sayings and slogans on both sides need to go. All they do is prohibit communication and make people angry. The way one person understands a slogan might not be the way another person (especially someone from the so-called “other side”) understands it. They offer no love, no explanations, no olive branch or truce–just hatred. Even if those using them don’t really hate the people they’re using them to talk to.
I agree with Tabitha that this slogan does not help communication between conservative Christians and gay people (whether Christian or non-Christian). But I don’t think that’s what it’s used for. I think it’s mostly used among evangelicals, and I think Tabitha is right that it becomes a problem inasmuch as it’s used as a comforting mantra to let us off thinking about difficult subjects (like whether homosexuality is actually sin at all, and if so, how). I also take the point you expressed in class that the word “hate” is misleading. Indeed, in the absence of a traditional Christian metaphysics in which evil is a privation of the good and all natures are good, probably the whole phrase is misleading. However, I would defend the idea being expressed. I don’t know how else one is to approach sin. Think of something that you really believe to be evil–rape or murder or whatever. Do you hate the person? I hope not. But do you will with all your being that the person be free of the evil that corrupts the good nature God made? I hope so. (I don’t know how to define hate other than “to will the destruction of someone or something with all one’s might.”) If the slogan is wrong, I think it’s wrong because it implies that there is a difficult balance between loving the person and hating the evil that corrupts them. In fact, to love oneself or anyone else is to hate everything that corrupts and destroys the good nature God made. They are two sides of the same coin. If you don’t hate the perverted ideology of Nazism, you don’t love Adolf Hitler.
The bigger problem, I think, is that a monogamous homosexual relationship is pretty clearly not in the same category as genocide or racism or rape or even casual promiscuity. Such a relationship is, in many ways, a very good thing. It contains much that is virtuous and even holy. The evangelical cliche that I wish I had challenged at the panel was Shawn’s “sin is sin.” If this means that the word “sin” is univocal–that whenever it is used it is used in essentially the same way–I think the statement is clearly false. John Wesley made a distinction between “faults” or imperfections and “sins properly so called.” (He defined a “sin properly so called” as “a willful transgression of a known law of God.”) I think the biggest difference between myself and the other members of the panel–which I wish I had stated more clearly at the time–is that I find it hard to see how a monogamous, faithful homosexual relationship can be “sin properly so called.” At the same time, I agree with the other members of the panel that same-sex attraction is a result of the Fall, an expression of human brokenness. It is not, in itself, a characteristic of the good human nature intended by God. (I got into this only obliquely by my reference to homosexuality being “small potatoes,” because I knew that challenging the belief that all sins were equal would start a whole other debate. I now think that this decision on my part was a mistake–it accentuated the lack of diversity on the panel, which Tabitha has correctly criticized.)
At any rate, I appreciate Tabitha’s criticisms, and I hope that we will have more open debate about this issue on HU’s campus in the future.
http://www.newspirits.net/
This is a subject for which some sense of its history would be helpful. While Christians struggle to find a graceful response, graceful responses can be found in the past, whether in the works of Chaucer, the poetry of W.H. Auden, in the drama of Renaissance London, or even in the interactions involved in the translation of the King James Bible. (For that last one, read Adam Nicholson’s book on translating the Bible during King James’s reign.)