The Evangelical Chronicles: Crazy-Making Christian Love For LGBTQ+ People
Many of our LGBTQ+ congregants are steeling themselves for a visit home for the holidays — and a dose of crazy-making Christian love.
Crazy-making love combines the real warmth, kindness, and affection of kinship bonds (the kind of love we often associate with mother-love in families) with religiously-nurtured disapproval.
How does it manifest in the evangelical world? First, a little background (skip this paragraph to get straight to the point.) Evangelicalism is profoundly shaped by the holiness movement (think John Wesley, the Great Awakenings, and the Black Pentecostal church ) — with its emphasis on conversion followed by “sanctification” understood as living according to a clearly spelled-out moral code. Add a bid dose of certainty with virtually no room to question who those six “clobber texts” really apply to. Then reinforce the code as it applies to LGBTQ+ loved ones under the banner of “speaking the truth in love.” Because the purveyors of crazy-making love believe they have a moral duty under God to make their disapproval clear (while maintaining a loving posture). All of this is overshadowed by a belief that every day in every way our eternal destiny is on the line (everlasting glory or eternal conscious torment). Thus, Evangelicalism breeds an emotional atmosphere in which the…
