Presbyterian church director Monty Bennett tells The Atlantic that gay marriage is a settled issue for many Americans, but for Southern Baptists it’s still open. And that’s why she had to leave.
“In their view, political and theological opposition is the only possible Christian response to gay marriage, and continuing to challenge marriage equality is a moral duty,” said Bennett, who is lesbian. “The Church they have shaped has no room for the alternative path that many gay Christians have found: not leaving our religion, but embracing our sexuality alongside our faith.”
A June resolution from the Southern Baptist Convention calls for a nationwide ban on gay marriage, and it echoes arguments Bennett said she heard as a student: Secular laws are meant to reflect God’s moral order, and calling a same-sex partnership a marriage is flatly lying.
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One of her college professors claimed being “born gay” earns no compassion. Rather the professor compared it to a physical affliction similar to a child born with cancer.
Bennett said her decision to leave her original church “was agonizing,” but it was important for her to listen “to the voice of the Spirit within.”
“In my Southern Baptist university and the evangelical Churches I grew up attending, I often heard that opposition to gay marriage was a sincerely held religious belief that Christians should be allowed to practice. I never heard this same language extended to Christians who affirmed the goodness of same-sex relationships,” Bennett said.
But for many Christians, affirmation of queer identities is an equally sincere religious conviction, and churches that embrace LGBTQ people as beloved members of the community are motivated “by Christian love for God and neighbor.”
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“We see the beauty of God’s design in our real, embodied lives, and we seek human flourishing that is more than an abstract promise of finding meaning in the pain,” Benett explained.
Today Bennett works for the Presbyterian Church and remains “effectively estranged” from the communities she grew up in. But the gay and trans Christians she has met in the church community “are the most committed people of faith I have ever met.”
“We had every reason to leave, and yet we are still here,” Bennett said.
Read the full Atlantic report at this link.