“Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner” – a Christian Myth in Perspective

I recently wrote my Christian Fundamentalist Homophobia series to point out how I and other fundamentalist children were taught to feel contempt and disgust for people who didn’t live up to our artificial standards. We were taught to separate people from their self-expression, as though they were somehow trapped in an impregnable cocoon and all we could actually see was the demon that controlled them. In other words, we hated everything about them but loved a vague idea in our minds of the “saved” person the sinner could become – you know, someone who didn’t actually exist. Someone we made up.

My conclusion to the series was this:

Unconditional love does not mean loving someone while disapproving of their actions. It means forsaking the right to disapprove. You cannot love who I am and hate what I do. What I do shows you who I am. If you choose to love a figment of your imagination, some idea of who I might become, then you love only your own mind, and what you hate is me.

Melissa at Permission to Live and Katy-Anne Wilson at American N Aussie have both written posts that address this, too. Each writes from a different perspective: one religious, one social. Excerpts below:

“Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin” by Katy-Anne

I also think that “love the sinner but hate the sin” is hypocrisy because often, we hate somebody else’s sin and yet we fail to hate our own. We would be better served hating our own sin and working on correcting our own sins than worrying about the sins of someone else. It is easy for me to judge someone for struggling with sins that I don’t struggle with, but I’m often far more sympathetic of those that struggle with the same sins I do than those that struggle with other sins, and that’s wrong.

Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner? by Melissa

I grew up with people who claimed they didn’t hate anyone (remember? They “love” sinners.) I even claimed to “love sinners while hating their sin” myself once upon a time. I understood tolerance to mean extreme distaste and dislike and disapproval, coupled with an ability to refrain oneself from violence towards the person you felt that way about. I felt that acceptance better expressed an ability to disagree, but be OK with that person living their own life. In reality, The definition for the term Tolerance is: “A fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one’s own.”

This term encompasses perfectly what I am asking from people who do not agree with the reality of LGBTQ persons, and/or the exact ways they may choose to live their lives. Being willing to hear another person, seek to be fair and objective and impartial, is exactly what I meant to say by using the term “Acceptance”…. Many people who claim to be tolerant think that minorities should feel grateful that they are not being hung in the town square. They make no bones about the fact that they “Hate the sin.” And the “love the sinner” begins to sound more like “don’t kill the sinner”. This is not tolerance. 

Christian Fundamentalist Homophobia, Part Three: Finding Unconditional Love Outside the Church

Trigger warning: The following post contains frank descriptions of the hate speech against LGBTQ people that my church used to inculcate fear and contempt in its youth. I have decided to write about homophobia for two reasons: first, to demonstrate the falsity of fundamentalist rhetoric about “hating the sin and loving the sinner,” and, second, to shed light on the tools fundamentalists use to instill fear of LGBTQ people in their children.

This is the third and final part of a series called Homophobia: It Really Is About Fear. See the introduction here. Related posts are Fundamentalist Aesthetics and the Religious Fundamentalism and Sexuality Project, which is still accepting participants (until June 23).

In Part One, I described the way fundamentalist Christians construct an image of what LGBTQ people look like and how they taught their children to be afraid of that image. I imagine that an LGBTQ child growing up would find this kind of socialization very confusing, considering sexual orientation is not equal to a glitter-and-chains fetish. If you’re a boy with a crush on another boy, how do you interpret your feelings in the light of all this? As a straight woman, I can only speculate that it must be alienating, threatening, and confusing. In Part Two, I pointed out that subtle rhetorical tactics and body language were more powerful than the “logic” of anti-gay sermons in communicating to children that LGBTQ identities were not legitimate. Now, I’m going to talk about the realization that kept me from becoming another “hate the sin, love the sinner” fundamentalist.

Rachel Held Evans: Is Patriarchy Really God’s Dream for the World?

Rachel Held Evans has just followed up the discussion linked in my last post with the literary equivalent of an avalanche. She not only affirms her commitment to Christian egalitarianism, but she backs it up with a torrent of evidence demonstrating the very real harm done by patriarchy in the Bible and in the world.

An excerpt:

Our first glimpses into a patriarchal society, even one in which Yahweh is God, reveal inequity and violence against women.  Groups like the Vision Forum have long been advocating a return to “biblical patriarchy” that resembles the culture of the Old Testament, complete with fathers essentially owning daughters until they are given in marriage. I’ve always been careful to try and make a distinction between this group and complementarians, and am disheartened to see mainstream complementarianism move in this direction.

The effects of patriarchy around the world…

If scripture is not enough to convince you that patriarchy is a result of sin, you need only look at the world to observe its effects. 

• Worldwide, women ages fifteen to forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.

• Every 9 seconds, a woman  in the US is assaulted or beaten. Around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime. I wish I could say that all complementarians categorically condemn female submission to male violence, but John Piper has said that, in order to model godly submission, a woman may need to quietly “endure verbal abuse for a season” or “getting smacked one night” before “seeking help from the church.” (He says nothing about contacting authorities). Similarly, in Created to Be His Help Meet, Debi Pearl advises a woman whose husband pulled a knife on her to “stop complaining” and focus instead on not “provoking” her husband’s anger. This is destructive advice and reveals something of an assumption that the preservation of male hierarchy is more important than preservation of a woman’s dignity.

Christian Fundamentalist Homophobia, Part Two: The Argument is in the Eyebrows

Trigger warning: The following post contains frank descriptions of the hate speech against LGBTQ people that my church used to inculcate fear and contempt in its youth. It’s probably not something you want to read if you’re already having a bad day. I have decided to write about homophobia for two reasons: first, to demonstrate the falsity of fundamentalist rhetoric about “hating the sin and loving the sinner,” and, second, to shed light on the tools fundamentalists use to instill fear of LGBTQ people in their children.

Christian Fundamentalist Homophobia, Part One: Generalized Anxiety and Images of Depravity

Trigger warning: The following post contains frank descriptions of the hate speech against LGBTQ people that my church used to inculcate fear and contempt in its youth. It’s probably not something you want to read if you’re already having a bad day. I have decided to write about homophobia for two reasons: first, to demonstrate the falsity of fundamentalist rhetoric about “hating the sin and loving the sinner,” and, second, to shed light on the tools fundamentalists use to instill fear of LGBTQ people in their children.

Love is corrective

William Branham and his second wife, Meda

In The Uncertain Sound (July 14, 1962), William Branham responded to complaints that he preached too much about various “sins” like smoking, drinking and wearing short skirts:

That’s the reason sometimes people think I–I–I get rough with people, bawling them out. It’s not ’cause I don’t love you, it’s because I do love you. What if your little boy was setting out in the street, and you said, “Junior, dear, I–I… You shouldn’t set out there. Daddy don’t want to hurt…” You’d better strip the hide off of him, if you love him. Keep him in off of that street. Real love is corrective. Genuine love is corrective.
What if your wife was running around with some other man, and you said, “Dear, I–I hope you have a good time, but really I don’t think you should do it.” She ought to kick you out the door. That’s right. Yeah. Real love is corrective. That’s right.

Drawing upon this passage, Message believers invoke the phrase “love is corrective” in many contexts. Most often, it is deployed against perceived sensitivity or sentimentality. Believers are exhorted to correct their friends or family members regardless of how ill-received their godly advice might be. There are varying levels of hesitancy and soul-searching involved in the process, depending on the relationship between the believer and the party in error. Parents are expected to correct their children in everything. In friendships, it is more likely that a Message believer will pray first and ensure that she or he is being “led” to bring the problem to the friend’s attention.

But what does it mean to say that love is corrective? Where does this idea come from? And how does it affect the practice of love in Message communities?

The burden of being a witness

Sharing the Message with someone for the first time is a terrifying process for the believer. You’ll never see Message folks picketing a funeral like the Westboro Baptist Church, or handing out tracts in the mall. The Message is usually transmitted from friend to friend, in a sober, cautious way.

“The Message is heavy,” my mother explained to me recently. “I didn’t want to share it with [my friend], but she kept pulling it out of me. I didn’t want to scare her away. And it was the same when [my other friend] shared it with me. I was the one who asked for it all the time. I had to drag it out of her.”

Believers speak frequently of introducing the ideas of the Message slowly: spiritual “babies” are only able to stomach the “milk” of the Word of God. The “milk” is the gospel: the love and forgiveness of Christ, His desire for a personal relationship with you, and the joy of recognizing your place as His Bride. The “meat” of the word, however, is the stuff usually saved for last: matters of marriage and divorce, the destruction of the world, the order of the church and the family. Message believers share this material reluctantly, carefully, and almost mournfully. It marks the maturity of the believer if they are able to accept Message doctrines on these matters: the end of the innocence of baby faith.

Moving up from spiritual infancy is a solemn process, and believers take up their roles as mentors to their “spiritual children” with trepidation. Although every mentor embarks on the journey of witnessing with intense prayer and consideration, there is a general order and pattern to the materials shared with the new believer.

The fear of falling apart

During his altar calls, William Branham liked to tell a story about a young deacon’s daughter who rejected the voice of the Lord for the last time. It was a popular story, and unsurprisingly so, for it was based around the chilling words of the girl herself.* It was the perfect example of the sin and destruction that awaited those who left the Message. If we left, we could rest assured, without the Message we would fall apart.

The fear of falling away

For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.
Hebrews 6:4-6.

Growing up in a Message church, I lived in mortal terror of this verse. After all, was not I the perpetual repentant? Wasn’t I the one always on my knees, begging God to give me His spirit once and for all – again? This verse was poison to the imperfect heart: any failure, no matter how banal (complaining about a frozen computer, making a thoughtless remark to a brother or sister), was evidence that obviously Christ was not yet the ruler of my spirit. Every time I fell to my knees, pleading for Jesus’ forgiveness, I wondered if His patience hadn’t yet run out.

The Message teaches that God is in the process of leaving the altar where His blood previously atoned for the sins of His children. There will be a time, they say, when the doors of the ark (metaphorically) will be shut. Those with the Holy Spirit at that time will be sealed in eternally, and those without will be condemned to the Tribulation. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know whether or not you’ve got the Spirit… other than “just knowing.” For a teenager convinced that the world will end before she’s old enough to drive a car, this doctrine can cause paroxysms of fear.