Episode 89: Justin Lee on interpreting difficult scripture

With a deeply personal testimony about being gay and a Christian, Justin Lee opens up about why he can't abandon his identity and won't abandon his faith. Listen with an open mind and a loving heart, and you will surely learn a lot.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: What do you do when you find out that someone close to you, someone you know as a family member, or a friend, is gay? Justin Lee is here to talk to us about his experience of discovery of his own sexual orientation, and how he wrestled with that in the church as well as in his family and personal life. He's written a book about that called Torn, and also one about how to talk across the divide when we disagree. Stay tuned for Good God with Justin Lee.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm George Mason, your host, and I'm delighted to welcome back to the program, Justin Lee. Justin, glad to have you with us.

Justin Lee: Glad to be back, thanks.

George Mason: So, Justin has been talking with us on a previous episode about his work with Nuance Ministries now for 20 years or so. He's been doing the hard work of coming to grips with his own sexual identity as a Christian, and helping other people come to grips with that in the church. Because this is a matter of great concern in the church in America today. Well, worldwide as a matter of fact, and everyone wants to be faithful. Everyone wants to do the right thing in this respect, but it's important to listen to people's stories, I think, Justin, as well. You've written a book called Torn, Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, and a good bit about this is autobiographical.

Justin Lee: Yeah.

George Mason: It's not all a memoir, it's also other people's stories. It's also talking about how Christians can move forward together on the matter. But I'd love to hear you talk briefly about your own experience growing up in the church, coming to grips with who you are, and how you discovered that.

Justin Lee: Well, sorry, I grew up Southern Baptist, grew up in North Carolina, and for me, my faith, my Christian faith has always been at the heart of who I am and how I understand the world. Growing up, I understood that there were certain cultural controversies, theological controversies that people in my church had positions on. Christians like me had a certain position on certain issues. These days, I would encourage people not to use just the broad term homosexuality, because I don't think it's super helpful. But at the time, I would have said, "Well, I know what my position on homosexuality is."

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: It's a choice. It's a sin. It's my job as a Christian to speak out against it. What I didn't want to face at that time was that from the moment I hit puberty, my attractions, all the other guys were noticing girls, and my attractions were exclusively for other guys, and I thought for years that it was something that I would grow out of, that it was just a quirk of adolescence. I considered myself straight. I dated girls. I continued to believe that being gay was a choice, and my image of gay men was the farthest thing from who I was, is this very conservative bookworm of a Southern Baptist kid, who got nicknamed God Boy by one of the other kids in school, in high school. Because I was the-

George Mason: The religious one.

Justin Lee: ... the religious one obnoxiously handing out tracks to everybody.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: And so, for years I didn't admit that I was gay. I didn't think that I was gay. It finally got to the point where I was just crying myself to sleep night after night, begging God to change these feelings, to give me attraction to women and take away my attraction to men, and it wasn't happening. Eventually, when I was 18, the light bulb went on, and I recognized, "Oh, this is what people mean when they say gay. They mean someone who's attracted to the same sex."

George Mason: This is not something you can easily talk through with your family and your church, so, 18?

Justin Lee: Yeah.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: And this was in the 90s, when the culture was having much less conversation on this than it is now, and so, I recognized that. But even then, at first, it wasn't something that I embraced. It was more like a diagnosis for a disease. It was like, you got the gay and now you've got to find the cure to the gay. And as much as I make light of it a little now, just for the sake of humor, it was a serious thing to me. I was deeply depressed about it. I believed still that God was going to make me straight if I found the right ministry, if I trusted Christ enough, if I found the right therapy, and that didn't happen. I started, eventually, having to face the reality that it looks like I may well be gay for the rest of my life. And that didn't fit my understanding of what it was to be a Christian.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: I knew I wasn't going to abandon my faith, and I found that a lot of the Christians I trusted and looked up to when I told them I was gay and I asked for their advice about what to do, they also assumed that it was a choice and that it was something I could choose not to be. And instead of offering advice, and sympathy, and support, and asking to hear more about my story and figuring out how to journey with me, they would just lecture me as if I were rebelling in some way. I was the last person in the world to rebel. I was the golden child, I was trying to be the good kid.

George Mason: Right. I was taken, by reading your book, about the fact that even when you were in college, there was a Christian club that you were part of. And even when you did have someone listen to your story and really pay attention, still, at the end of that whole process it was still, "Well, I'm sorry Justin, you can't be part of this group anymore."

Justin Lee: Yeah, that's right, and it was over and over again. Either I would get kicked out of the group just for being gay. And to be clear, I wasn't an activist of some kind. I wasn't in a relationship or sexually active. I was just admitting, this is what I feel and I don't know how to not feel it, and people had such an oppositional approach to that because they were afraid this was like a theological or political statement I was making, that they didn't know how to respond. So, either I would get kicked out or I would sort of get pushed to the side. People would distance themselves from me, and it was incredibly painful.

Justin Lee: I've watched a lot of other folks go through that and ultimately they walk away from their faith as a result, because they don't think they can be both who they are and a Christian. They don't think they can be both honest and a Christian. And so, they can't choose not to be who they are, but they could choose not to be a Christian, and that's the choice they make.

Justin Lee: So, I have dedicated the last 20 years of my life to trying to both minister to folks who find themselves in those positions and to help the rest of the church understand what that feels like, how painful that is, and to do a better job, even in the midst of our theological disagreement on issues like marriage, to do a better job of caring for the gay, bi, trans, queer Christian who says, "This is my experience. This is what I'm going through." And really making sure those people are heard, and feel known, and loved rather than just treated like an issue or somebody to be pushed away.

George Mason: Right. So, we seem to have seen a faster change in people's attitudes in the church about this than any other, sorry, I'm going to go back to issue, but difficult moral position than any other that I've seen in my lifetime. It took an enormously long time for us to come to grips with whether people who failed in a marriage could have a place of leadership and honor in the church or even be remarried and have a sense of the blessing of God and the congregation. That was decades long. The shift on this matter seems to have been the fastest, almost lightning pace. And I'm sure there are many reasons for that, but my sense is that as positive as that move has been, it's been a kind of whiplash for some people in the church as well.

Justin Lee: I do think that's how it feels to a lot of folks, and I think that shows in the way that people talk about worrying about a slippery slope.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: There's this fear that things are changing so quickly, where are they going to go next? I think part of why we've seen this change happens so quickly is that for so long in our history there have been people who've been gay, or bi, or trans, but they weren't able to be honest about it. They just suffered in silence. They may have married someone they weren't attracted to, and maybe their spouse always felt like something was wrong and felt like something was wrong with them. Their families may have known that something was wrong, but they just tried to grin and bear it, and suffer in silence. As people in our culture started to come out and say, "This is what's going on with me and here's a word to describe it, gay, trans, whatever."

Justin Lee: It's given a lot of people the courage for the first time to say something that in decades past they wouldn't have said. A lot of people are finding out that somebody close to them, somebody that they love, and who they respect and know to be a person of integrity, that this is what they're going through. And that, I think, is motivating a lot of people to say, "Oh, I thought I knew what this was all about, but this image that I had of gay people doesn't match what I know of this person who I love."

George Mason: That's right.

Justin Lee: In my case, it was myself, but in my parents' case it was their son.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: In my siblings case, it was their brother. And so, I think that's part of what's causing this shift to happen so quickly because it's that personal connection, and people are having to rethink their image.

George Mason: I also think that less often now do I hear people assuming that if you are gay that means that you are promiscuous by nature. So, more and more, I think people are recognizing that their image of gay persons being in the bath houses and trolling from one partner to another, or whatever, that that's really, first of all, a very narrow slice of history of gay people in America that they've known. And second, it's also partly the product of a culture of silence and shame that has produced, that produced for a long time unhealthy relationships because of the inability to have open and healthy ones.

Justin Lee: Sure. Well, you imagine if marriage did not exist in our culture and if heterosexual men and heterosexual women were forced to pretend not to have sexual feelings, you would very quickly see a culture of private sort of illicit affairs happening as people tried to find a way to deal with what they were feeling, and it wouldn't be a healthy approach. But it's true, when I first told people that I was gay, one of the things that was so frustrating was that I felt like whenever I came out to a Christian, I had to always assure them that I was not sexually active. And I thought, "Boy, what straight guy my age has to always say every in every conversation, 'By the way, let me tell you about how I'm not sexually active.'"

Justin Lee: And I felt like I had to just always reassure people and I thought, "Boy, I feel like I'm sharing so much personal information with people every day."

George Mason: So, I think it would be helpful to spend a little time, we're going to take a break here at the moment, but when we come back, I think there are a lot of people who by instinct, Justin, they want to be able to say as Christians, "I hear what you're saying and I want to be one of those people who says yes to you and not ... that says yes to my gay friends and family members, but I have this worry that I'm going against the Bible." I think it would be helpful for us to spend a little time just hitting some of the key passages and talking through that. So, when we come back from the break, let's do some of that work together. Okay?

Justin Lee: Sure.

George Mason: Great. The Good God program is a project of Faith Commons, a nonprofit organization that I founded in 2018 to promote the common good. Think of a commons on a campus and how you can bring all your faith in people from all corners of the campus together. Think of the city that way. Think of the country that way. Faith Commons aims to bring people together to promote greater understanding and peace throughout our communities. You can find more information about it at faithcommons.org.

George Mason: We're back with Justin Lee, and Justin, we've been talking about how to interpret the Bible in a way that is not simply having it say what we want it to say. But trying to understand it in its context and in its time, and then not dismissing it, but taking it seriously, but understanding it really in a way that Christians have often failed to appreciate.

George Mason: So, let's look at some of the Bible passages together that are what some had called the clobber texts, right? All right. That are used to sort of clobber gay people over the head with, "The Bible says and therefore ... " Where do you want to begin?

Justin Lee: Well, maybe let me first just set this up a little bit by saying, and I so appreciate the context you just offered, that I think often people worry that to go back and re-look at that these texts would amount to looking for loopholes.

George Mason: That's right.

Justin Lee: I don't believe in looking for loopholes. I think if the Bible tells me to do something difficult, then I need to do something difficult.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: But I believe that context matters, and we know this as Christians. When we read a passage that says that women have to be silent in church, we typically then have a historical conversation about, what did Paul mean by silent? What was going on in the church that might have caused him to say this to these women? And what does that mean? Very few churches today would require women to immediately be silent when they walk in a church. I think most of us would think that was horribly sexist.

George Mason: Or to wear a hat.

Justin Lee: Yes.

George Mason: Or, not to cut her hair.

Justin Lee: Exactly.

George Mason: Or, not to wear jewelry, et cetera, et cetera.

Justin Lee: Exactly, yes. Similarly, when we look at in the gospels, tax collectors are repeatedly referred to as terrible sinners for some reason. But we understand historically there were practices going on at the time and it's not the fact that they were collecting taxes, it's what the tax collectors of the day were known for, that's why they were being criticized. I think the same thing is true when we look at these texts about same sex, sexual behavior. None of these texts are, I think, about gay people. None of them talk about same-sex committed relationships. And one of the most famous is in the Old Testament, the Sodom story, Genesis 19. I grew up hearing God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

Justin Lee: And this tells us what God thinks about gay folks. Well, Gomorrah is not even part of the story that they're referencing, it's just Sodom. The short version of the story is that angels disguised as men come to visit Lot in Sodom. Lot's living there with his daughters, and Lot takes them in and were told that, all of the men of the entire city of Sodom, young and old, surround Lot's house and demand that Lot release these travelers. The text says, "So, that we may know them." Generally, this is interpreted as a threat of gang rape. Well, there's so much to unpack there. We wouldn't have time to get into it all. Why is this happening?

Justin Lee: It's a very strange story to our modern ears. I think ultimately this is a passage that is about, telling us about how Sodom viewed foreigners much more than anything about sex. But a story about a threat of gang rape doesn't tell me anything as a gay Christian about how God wants me to live. I think we can all agree that sexual assault of any kind for any reason is a horrible thing.

George Mason: Of course, right.

Justin Lee: And so, that's an easy example of how these texts...

George Mason: And the irony of that text is that Lot's willing to give his daughters to them as substitute, which is even ickier, if you will, I mean in terms of looking at that. But all of which should make us say, "What's going on in that culture? What's happening in the violation of these hospitality codes that are really powerfully different from ours?

Justin Lee: Well, and particularly when you look at that in light of another parallel text in the town of Gibeah, in Judges 19, where in the end rather than rape the traveler, they rape and murder his concubine instead. It seems that this is less about sexual desire and more about, as is often the case with sexual assault, about power, about, in this case, sending a message. It's a threat of violence.

George Mason: And we know that historically, and it continues to be true today, people who conquer another people often in their lust for power and their need to communicate their conquest, rape the women and men sometimes, as well, in order to humiliate them.

Justin Lee: Yeah, and it's a horrible thing. These are horrifying stories and I think the message that these were terrible cities is very clear. But these aren't stories that tell us what God thinks about committed same sex relationships. In Romans 1, Paul tells us about people who turned from God worship idols, and engaged in lustful behavior that includes same sex lustful behavior.

George Mason: And the only place of the same sex behavior of women to women.

Justin Lee: Yes.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: Yeah, and again, this is a complicated passage and we could easily take 30 minutes-

George Mason: Oh my goodness, it is. A lot of people say, "I can go with you on the Sodom story, but when we get to Romans 1, that's clear." And I think, "Wow, you stopped pretty fast on, that's clear."

Justin Lee: Yeah. Well, because for it to be clear, people typically interpret Romans 1 as if Paul is talking about all of humanity. I think it's more likely that Paul is talking about the sexual rights that were associated with idol worship at the time. And I think one of the keys to that, one of the keys is what comes at the end of that passage, when he's essentially encouraging his audience to point the finger at someone they see as more sinful before he says, "And you're just as sinful as they are."

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: But another key is that he refers to the people as them, as somebody else. So, he says, "Their women." Rather than women, all of humanity. But again, these are complicated passages that we have to like ... There are people who have spent many years studying these passages. Ultimately...

George Mason: Oh my, yes.

Justin Lee: And there are other passages we could talk about 1 Corinthians 6:9, in the interpretation or the translation of the word arsenokoitai, which the NIV that I grew up reading originally in that passage, it translated these two Greek words, arsenokoitai and malakoi as homosexual offenders and male prostitutes. And then, now, it translates them together as men who have sex with men. Well, that's different.

George Mason: Yes.

Justin Lee: But ultimately, there's a lot of analysis we could do here. But one of the things that I think is important is that we also look at other passages in scripture that talk about how we should understand what sin is, how we interpret and apply these kinds of scriptures to difficult issues. I think that, for instance, when we look at ... Well, when we look at parallel examples like how tax collectors are treated and we say, "Well, we know tax collectors, it's about what was going on in the culture of the day." And we look at, well, the people who are engaging in same sex, sexual behavior in Greco Roman culture when Paul's writing, what were they doing?

George Mason: Temple prostitution, these sorts of things that gay people today, gay Christians say, "Oh, I'm out on that. We're not asking for ... " Exactly.

Justin Lee: Absolutely. But then, also, we look at passages, like earlier when we were talking, I mentioned Romans 13 where Paul talks about love as the fulfillment of law, or when Jesus is accused of working on the Sabbath because he heals people on the Sabbath. There are folks who say, "Well, you're violating the law." I think it's really interesting that Jesus doesn't get into a nitty gritty argument about what counts his work on the Sabbath, which is the way the Pharisees want to parse this stuff. And it's kind of the way that we tend to deal with these clobber passages. We get into these nitty gritty arguments. Jesus backs up and he says things like, "Let me give you an example of somebody violating the law.

Justin Lee: "David ate the bread of the presence," and this is an Old Testament passage, "it was consecrated bread. Only the priests were allowed to eat it, but David ate it because in that context it made sense." He says, "If your child or your ox fell into a well on the Sabbath, we know it would be work to pull that child or ox out of a well." Pulling an ox out of a well. Can you imagine the work? And you're not supposed to work on the Sabbath. But he says, "Wouldn't you do it anyway?" I think essentially what Jesus is saying is God ... Well, in fact, Jesus says, the Sabbath was made for people, people weren't made for the Sabbath.

Justin Lee: I think Jesus is saying this about the whole law. The law exists for you to help you, these rules are guidelines for you. But there are times that honoring the spirit of the law may involve breaking the letter of the law. Pulling your child out of the well on the Sabbath may be a violation of no work on the Sabbath to the letter, but it is certainly honoring the spirit of, this is God's day, don't leave your child in the well overnight.

George Mason: So, let's work a little more on this idea of the spirit, because the early church had to do this work, too.

Justin Lee: Yeah, right.

George Mason: And the Jerusalem council, the first big issue that the early church had to wrestle with was whether Gentiles had to change and become physically Jews through circumcision.

Justin Lee: That's right.

George Mason: Before they could actually be part of an accepted and full fledged part of the church. What's fascinating about that is that there was this vigorous debate and discussion in the early church. Leaders reading scripture at each other, debating the scriptures, and doing it apparently in a way that was at times contentious, but apparently respectful enough that they could persevere together. Then, they ended up not all agreeing, but a decision was made because it says, it seemed right to them in the spirit not to add further burdens to these Gentiles. They came up with what was essentially a way of moving forward saying, "We're going to recognize that, yes, scripture has said this and this was part of our tradition, but this is a new day in the Spirit. And we see the presence of the Spirit in these Gentiles already. They're not waiting until they get circumcised before they have evidence of the Spirit."

George Mason: So, if that's true, can we not look at gay Christians and say, "We see the presence of the Spirit in their lives, the fruit of the Spirit, it is an undeniable fact that God is at work in their lives, in powerful and beautiful ways." How can the church recognize that now and say, "As the early church did, yes, we once thought this and read the scripture this way, but we see that God is moving in this direction."

Justin Lee: Yeah, and I think anybody could have said at that time, "Well, these Gentile men, they just don't want to make the sacrifice that God's calling them to make." And people say that of gay Christians as well, you just don't want to make the sacrifice. I think it's interesting that Paul goes further than just saying to the Gentile men, "You don't have to do this." He says, "Actually, don't do this. If you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you." Because he says, "You'd be putting yourself back under a burden of legalism and Christ died to free you from that." I think the same principle applies here.

George Mason: Well, and this is part of the struggle that gay people have had through the years in trying to have the appearance of satisfying the demands of the church. How many gay men and women have entered into marriages with the opposite sex and had children and families, and woke up in midlife and said, "I can't do this anymore." And on the one hand, we want to express our sympathy, and our care, and to recognize that God has brought children into the world and that there may have been many good things to come from these decisions on the one hand. On the other, do we really want to subject people to this further burden where Christ is of no effect in that sacrifice in a sense?

Justin Lee: Yeah, and the result is, when we do put those burdens on people, people walk away from their faith. And we see in the case of many of the marriages that you're talking about, those marriages falling apart and people being wounded, and the fruit of that is bad. Jesus said, "You will recognize good trees by their good fruit and bad trees by their bad fruit." I think the fruit of that kind of approach we've seen now and I think the fruit of allowing for Christ-centered same sex marriages for people to be in love and commit their lives to Christ together, I think, has been good and that should tell us something.

George Mason: And it's early still in this regard. We only had this decision of the Supreme Court just a few years ago, and so, in the church as more and more of us are willing to officiate same gender marriages, and we see them beginning to take place in the church and people finding their place in the church, it's going to take a little while. But I think that until such thing becomes a new normal in the church, it's still new and there's some anxiety about that. But until we cross that threshold and begin to see it, we can't really know. And so, now we're beginning to see, yes, this can be healthy.

George Mason: It can be a good thing in the life of people in the church, and I am looking forward to the stories of those young people who grew up with role models of fidelity, and of covenant relationships, and say, "I could be like Justin Lee." Justin, you are a good model for us. We thank you for your love for the church and for human beings on both sides who struggle with how to deal with the difficult battle in the church, but we're grateful for your time with us on Good God.

Justin Lee: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Jim White: Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God, Conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God, and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.