50 Crucial Questions - Question 41

Why do you bring up homosexuality when discussing male and female role distinctions in the home and the church (as in question 1)? Most evangelical feminists are just as opposed as you are to the practice of homosexuality.
We bring up homosexuality because we believe that by minimizing the differences in sexual roles, feminists contribute to the confusion of sexual identity that, especially in the second and third generations, gives rise to more homosexuality in society. Some evangelicals who once disapproved of homosexuality have been carried by their feminist arguments to the approval of faithful homosexual alliances. Gerald Sheppard, a professor of Old Testament Literature at Emmanuel College in the University of Toronto, was nurtured in a conservative evangelical tradition and attended an evangelical seminary. In recent years he has argued for the ordination of women to the pastorate. He has also moved on to say, “On a much more controversial matter, the presence of gay and lesbian Christians and ministers in our churches is for me a similar issue."
Another example is Karen J. Torjesen, who argues that removing hierarchy in sexual relations will probably mean that the primacy of heterosexual marriage will have to go.
The Evangelical Women’s Caucus was split in 1986 over whether there should be “recognition of the presence of the lesbian minority in EWCI.” We are glad that many evangelical women distanced themselves from the endorsement of lesbianism. But what is significant is how many evangelical feminists considered the endorsement “a step of maturity within the organization”. In other words, they view the movement away from role distinctions grounded in the natural created order as leading inevitably to the overthrow of normative heterosexuality. It seems to us that the evangelical feminists who do not embrace homosexuality will be increasingly hard put to escape this logic.
Paul Jewett, too, seems to illustrate a move from biblical feminism toward endorsing certain expressions of homosexuality. In his defense of equal roles for men and women in Man as Male and Female in 1975, he said that he was uncertain “what it means to be a man in distinction to a woman or a woman in distinction to a man.” That seemed to us to bode ill for preserving the primacy of heterosexuality. In 1983, he reviewed the historical defense of homosexuality by John Boswell, who argued that Paul’s meaning in Romans 1:26-27 was that the only thing condemned was homosexual behavior by heterosexuals, not by homosexuals who
acted according to their “nature.” Jewett rejected this interpretation with the words, “For [Paul] the ‘nature’ against which a homosexual acts is not simply his individual nature, but the generic human nature in which he shares as an individual.”
This was gratifying, but it seemed strange again to us that he would say homosexual behavior is a sin against “generic human nature” rather than masculine or feminine nature. Then, in 1985, Jewett seemed to give away the biblical case for heterosexuality in a review of Robin Scroggs’s book, The New Testament and Homosexuality. Scroggs argued that the passages that relate to homosexual behavior in the New Testament “are irrelevant and provide no help in the heated debate today” because they refer not to homosexual “inversion,” which is a natural orientation, but to homosexual “perversion.” Jewett responded, “If this is the meaning of the original sources-and the scholarship is competent, the argument is careful and, therefore, the conclusion is rather convincing-then what the New Testament is against is something significantly different from a homosexual orientation which some people have from their earliest days.” (More recently, other prominent evangelical feminists have voiced their
endorsement of committed homosexual relationships, including Jim Wallis, Anthony Campolo, and David Neff.)
But even evangelical feminists who continue to agree with us that Scripture views homosexual conduct as sinful face the very real danger of imparting gender role confusion to their children. How can a firm and loving affirmation of a son’s masculinity or a daughter’s femininity be cultivated in an atmosphere where role differences between masculinity and femininity are constantly denied or minimized? If the only significant role differentiation is based on competency and has no root in nature, what will parents do to shape the sexual identity of their children? If they say that they will do nothing, common sense and many psychological studies tell us that the children will be confused about who they are and will therefore be far more likely to develop a homosexual orientation.
To us, it is increasingly and painfully clear that biblical feminism is an unwitting partner in unraveling the fabric of the complementary manhood and womanhood that provide the foundation not only for biblical marriage and biblical church order but also for heterosexuality itself.