Thou Shalt Not Love: What Evangelicals Really Say To Gays

What do Evangelicals really say to gays?

That's the question posed, and the answer provided, by Patrick M. Chapman's expertly researched, informative, and exceedingly frustrating primer on how hard-line Christians regard homosexuality.

In the Foreword, Daniel Helminiak, Ph.D., makes the important observation that most of the extreme fundamentalist opposition and vitriol directed towards LGBT people comes from those who view the Bible as the infallible, immutable word of God.

These "Biblical literalists" as they are known, are the ones who refer to homosexuals with hate-the-sin phrases and buzzwords culled from the Bible; reliable, oft-quoted chestnuts like "abomination," "be put to death," and "not inherit the kingdom of God."

Faced with these and other such quotes, he makes his case that the only rational way of responding is to "insist that, as a baseline, the Scriptures mean what they meant to those who originally wrote them, not what they might happen to suggest to us who read them today."

This strategy of placing Biblical quotes within their proper historical and social context is picked up by Chapman, whose analytical mind excels at demanding consistency and rational thought. Chapman shows how those who wrote the Bible (and those who read it at the time) lived in a vastly different culture from our own contemporary world. As a result, the Bible's original readers were compelled to interpret its words in a manner incompatible with the mindset of the modern reader.

Chapman also, in one beautifully efficient paragraph, lays bare the hypocrisy of those who say the Bible is word-for-word perfect. The same folks who use that justification to condemn same sex relations somehow fail to incorporate into their lives things such as the Bible's specific prohibition of investing money and allowing divorce: both are strictly forbidden by the Bible, and yet both are as common to its literalist readers as to everyone else.

To make his case, Chapman brings forth an enormous amount of scholarship: each chapter ends with a listing of roughly 100 sources. Well-structured and highly readable tables and charts (that actually make sense!) map out everything from the evolution of life to how different versions of the Bible translate specific passages. If you're curious to explore more fully the multitude of topics mentioned in passing, eighteen pages of references at the back of the book will fill out your reading list for a very, very long time.

While Foreword writer Helminiak is concerned with Biblical literalists, author Chapman concentrates on defining and identifying varying strains of Evangelical Christianity (of which the literalists are certainly part). Both men make the argument that, if we've any hope of reaching these people, we've got to explore and acknowledge their belief system before systematically pointing out its flaws.

This maddening, but necessary, call for tolerance toward our would-be oppressors takes up an enormous amount of the book's space, and requires an enormous amount of patience on the part of the reader. But for those willing to make the commitment and become well-informed in all areas of the argument (from getting to know your Bible to identifying various strains of Christian conservatism), there are significant rewards to be had.