A Secular Response to BJU’s Anti-Gay Week

by Blair Durkee

“In light of the growing cultural pressure combined with the increasing numbers of Christian young people struggling with the issue of same sex attraction, Bob Jones University is taking a week of chapels (November 11-15) to address same sex attraction in a way that gives the biblical position, provides the biblical solution, and gives hope and help to those who are struggling with this desire.”

So begins the internal announcement of BJU’s infamous anti-gay chapel week. The university’s stance on gay people came as a surprise to no one, but to those of us who attended the school, there is one notable development in this statement: gay people exist at Bob Jones University. What they long knew—due in no small part to the steady pipeline of student expulsions—they now admit publicly for the first time. Gay is no longer just out there in “the world”; it is inside the bubble too. And along with this admission comes a completely predictable consequence—this issue needs to be addressed.

***

When looking out upon our world, it is not difficult to identify a myriad of problems that exist. Hunger, disease, poverty, assault, abuse, natural disaster, economic uncertainty, oppression in all of its forms. Each of these things is bad for self-evident reasons. There are clear, direct cause-and-effect relationships between these phenomena and human suffering. For many people, this is an understood and unquestioned metric of good and bad, of morality. But what if you were to reject that notion completely? What if your idea of morality—by your own admission—had no grounding in reality, but instead in some metaphysical, unfalsifiable claim? Well, you would have something like religion.

The inherent fallibility in speaking of “religion” as a single entity is not lost on me. There are, of course, religions that manage their metaphysical claims responsibly and revise them appropriately as new discoveries about our world are made. But in the broadest sense, religion is a pseudo-intellectual’s carte blanche to ascribe their prejudices divine significance. And religion has used this advantage to declare immoral a lot of really arbitrary things.

Mormonism says it’s immoral to drink coffee. Islam says it’s immoral to draw pictures of its founder. Jehovah’s Witnesses say it’s immoral to celebrate your birthday. Orthodox Judaism says it’s immoral to push buttons during every seventh rotation of the earth. Christian Science says it’s immoral to take medicine if you are sick. Scientology says it’s immoral to make noise during childbirth. Sikhism says it’s immoral to cut your hair. Bob Jones says it’s immoral to play a power chord on a guitar.

One wonders if, for religion, immorality were determined by writing down a bunch of things average people do and pulling some out of a hat. These prohibitions are really, really, really arbitrary. They bear no resemblance to things that actually have negative effects in the empirical world.

And so, apart from the indoctrination of religious tradition, it seems equally arbitrary to select love between people of the same sex as an “issue” that needs to be “addressed.” There is no real-world problem that would prompt this idea. Thousands of colleges and universities all over the world allow gay and bisexual people to exist and to love freely, and yet the world keeps spinning. Nobody is harmed, save for the occasional heartbreak one may experience in any quest for love.

It is no wonder, then, why religious mouthpieces so often resort to calls of divine retribution—usually future tense—for these supposed sins. Hypothetical fire and brimstone is necessary to fill the void of reality’s inconsequence. It is unclear how anyone is harmed by Sarah and Natalie’s dinner-and-a-movie date, but it’s probably why hurricanes and earthquakes happen.

***

The arbitrary nature of this condemnation, however, does not resonate inside fundamentalist groupthink. There, they rely on the usual platitudes: “the bible says so,” “it displeases God,” etc. But it doesn’t really matter why they choose to condemn homosexuality; the result is the same. They want to entice (read: guilt) you into a “better” deal.

Specifically, they want to “[give] hope and help to those who are struggling with this desire.” That message of “hope” was both explicit and implicit throughout the week of chapels. As Jason Ormiston said it during Friday’s Q&A, “Maybe you [as a gay person] aren’t called to marriage; maybe you’re called to singleness. And that’s okay. That honors God.”

One might be inclined to think that because this moral framework is arbitrary it must also be harmless, or at least passed off as a mere “difference of opinion.” It is anything but harmless. Stephen Jones put it another way in his Monday sermon:

“One man with one woman for life. And the only other option is abstinence.”

This idea is not only arbitrary. It is not only harmful. It is inhuman.

If you, the reader, are a heterosexual person, try and put yourself in the position of a gay person hearing this assertion. Or if you find that difficult, imagine the tables were turned: “One man and one man, or one woman and one woman for life. And the only other option is abstinence.”

Every human impulse you have to love and be loved, the time and intimacy and revelry and delight you desire to share with the person of your affection… is disgusting. It is repulsive to God and he will brutally chastise you for all eternity if you dare to indulge in your love for that person. Your only option is tear out your own heart and endure the interminable pain of bitter isolation, taking your unfulfilled longing for love to your very grave.

This is the Bob Jones University message of hope.

If you are reading this as a BJU student who is gay or bisexual or questioning, you might be feeling in the back of your mind that this isn’t very hopeful. I and everyone else here at BJUnity are here to tell you that your instinct is absolutely correct. Of course it is not hopeful. It strips you of everything that makes you human—your autonomy, your capacity to love, your very dignity.

But you have the power to reject it. You could go to counseling every week for four years trying to stop yourself from falling in love… or you could just fall in love. The world will not end; bad fortune will not inevitably befall you; an invisible deity in the sky will not strike you down. What will happen? You will be happier. You will no longer be living a lie. You’ll live, well, like you would have unquestioningly lived had this religious nonsense never been forced on you in the first place. You don’t have to fit any stereotype or embrace any culture or live any “lifestyle”; you just get to be you.

That is hope.

***

It really should go without saying: love is not an issue. Our world has many problems. Love between people of the same sex is not one of them. The entire notion would be silly, if it were not so profoundly damaging.

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