The conflation of race and sexuality — why it matters for Evangelical America

“You’re on the wrong side of history.” “Your views are no better than that of religious bigots who used the Bible to oppose interracial marriage.”

Sentiments like these are among the biggest talking points LGBT activists use today. They try to convince folks that conservative Christian doctrine on marriage, sexuality, and gender is evil and bigoted. LGBT activists attempt to conflate Christians’ theological beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that gender is immutably determined by biology, with those of racists from the past who promoted Jim Crow and white supremacy.

These sentiments are very persuasive, and no small amount of Christians have been won over by LGBT-affirming arguments on the basis of that analogy. I know this very well, because I was very close to buying into this analogy myself for several years. When I was attending Oklahoma Baptist University — a Southern Baptist college — some events in my personal life caused me to dive headfirst into a large spiritual crisis surrounding this issue, and I was scared to death that my views on sexuality and gender made me as bad as a racist.

The argument we often hear is that just like conservative Evangelicals were wrong about slavery and segregation, they’re also wrong about homosexuality and transgenderism today. To the world, both are cases of bigotry and prejudice, without exception.

I wasn’t so much worried about how secular leftists viewed me — I have no problem standing for unpopular truths — I was worried that they were objectively right, and I was objectively wrong. If they were right, then I’d be causing undue harm to my LGBT neighbors and misrepresenting the love of God, and the idea of doing either of those things scared me to death.

However, a survey of Christian Church history over the past 2,000 years does ultimately dispel this conflation, however rhetorically attractive it may be in modern America. For one, the Catholic Church, which has been around for two millennia, has always defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, and as racist as some bishops throughout history may have been, there was never an explicit doctrine in the Catholic Church that taught that interracial marriage was wrong. For Evangelical Protestants, especially Reformed folks, the evidence is even more glaring. The most prominent Reformed confessions of faith like the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, the 1689 Baptist Confession, the Savoy Declaration, as well as the earlier Second Helvetic Confession, all have explicit teachings on marriage, and all but the last one touch on gender too. All of these confessions explicitly teach that marriage is between a man and a woman, but not a single one says anything about race or ethnicity.

In the chapter on creation in the former three, it also explicitly teaches that God “created us male and female,” but there’s nothing remotely similar to what Judge Leon Bazile infamously said about how “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red” to deny the interracial loving couple in Loving v. Virginia the right to marry anywhere in these confessions. The Westminster Catechisms also go further, with sodomy being condemned under the seventh commandment alongside bestiality, incest, and fornication — but remains silent on the issue of miscegenation.

The fact that even later iterations of the Westminster Standards didn’t include an injunction against interracial marriage proves that the Bible does not condemn interracial marriage like fundamentalists and Evangelicals of the past thought it did. Very importantly, these are not obscure confessions or doctrinal statements; these are some of the most revered and influential Christian confessions in Protestant history. These confessions are anything but obscure sectarian documents — they are easily within the mainstream tradition of Evangelical Protestantism.

Having said that, there are still things Christians need to be mindful of. Some churches in the past have shamefully deployed the Bible to justify their ethnic bigotry, which has been used, in turn, by the LGBT crowd to wield that history against us when we defend biblical sexuality. This history and my two yearlong spiritual crisis surrounding it was enough for me to change the way I think about race and racism in America, as I describe here. If American Evangelical Christians want any moral legs to stand on in the sexuality debate, we must own up to our sordid racial past.

We must be the most radically ethnically/racially united part of America instead of being the most segregated part. Our witness to a hostile world is priceless for the sake of Christ’s Kingdom. We can’t afford to tarnish it.