Why Christians Will Keep Losing the Homosexuality Debate

Approximate Reading Time: 8 minutes

Year by year, homosexuality grows more accepted across the world. Not only does secular culture encourage it, but individual Christians, local churches, and major denominations are likewise learning to embrace loving relationships, regardless of gender. It’s become a test that measures whether someone has kept up with the times or continues to stand on the wrong side of history.

For Christians who argue that homosexuality is never God’s design, it can seem overwhelming. It seems like the church held the world to godly standards for so long, then everything changed overnight. The world seems like it’s leaving traditional Christian beliefs in the dust as it keeps racing for acceptance, tolerance, and equality for all sexualities.

In the midst of this, Christians may wonder what happened. How did we go from the traditional marriages seen in old-fashioned movies and sitcoms to what we see today? How could the world be so corrupt that many Christians are taking what God has condemned and arguing that it’s good?

Although there’s like no singular answer, I believe a large part of this shift is because the modern church has always embraced what the world says about love and marriage. For generations, we’ve surrendered the purpose and value of love and marriage to a secular worldview. It’s only recently that we’ve realized where this secular belief must eventually lead. 

What the heart wants

Although there is a lot wrapped up in the homosexuality debate, it really boils down to one thing: Is it right to tell someone who they can or can’t love?

Fundamentally, that’s what we think marriage is about. You find someone you love. For one reason or another, you eventually decide to get married. You get married because it’s tradition, a commitment to a monogamous relationship, an official statement to the world, and usually the ultimate goal of any romantic relationship.

That’s what the world thinks about marriage. If we find someone who makes us happy, we should be with them. Conversely, when they stop making us happy, divorce is logical so that one or both people can find happiness elsewhere. It’s all about what, and who, makes us happy.

And Christians agree with this. We’ve agreed with it for centuries. We’ve let the world dictate everything we think about love. We’ve conformed ourselves so much to a worldly way of thinking that we probably don’t even realize it.

Conformed to this world

We date as the world does. We find someone who makes us feel good, or someone we’re attracted to, and we start dating. We likely date multiple people throughout our lives so that we can figure out what want in a partner as though we’re shopping around for a new car. Perhaps we engage in any level of sexual intimacy because it’s important to know what you like and whether a potential partner is sexually compatible. Like the world, we make our preferences of utmost importance.

We break up as the world does. We practice for divorce by bouncing from partner to partner, letting our emotional whims carry us in and out of romance. We treat every relationship as something that serves us well when things are good, but is easily (or painfully) cast aside when more of our happiness would be found apart from them. 

We treat love selfishly as the world does. We choose or discard our partners based on what they provide for us. We determine the value of a relationship as a transaction – we’ll take some bad spots, but overall we are only interested in the relationship if it proves to be more of an asset than a detriment to our happiness.

We make marriage selfish and hollow as the world does.

We teach our kids to think about marriage as the world does.

We make preference and emotion our greatest decider for finding a romantic partner. Then, like a person being surprised that their pet scorpion stung them, we are shocked when an ungodly belief leads to more ungodly beliefs.

An unsurprising surprise

We tell the world that they have everything about marriage correct, as long as the relationship has two different genders. Is it any wonder that the world “suddenly” made the jump to embracing homosexuality? 

We’ve taught generation after generation that they should look to the world to understand love. We watch movies and shows without a second thought for what we’re accepting as normal. We rock out to songs praising selfish, emotion-driven romance.

We sit our kids in front of similar entertainment and let their worldview be shaped by secular thinking. We let them get wrapped up in relationships that begin and end based on emotion or sexual attraction. We encourage them in a quest for “true love” that has no basis in God’s word.

The Christian world is entrenched in a secular, ungodly, and unbiblical idea of love and marriage. Our entire emphasis is on finding someone who makes us happy, is attractive/smart/funny (with bonus points if you can get two or three), and ultimately marrying that person because we love them.

With Christians talking to one another like the rest of the world, why does it surprise us that the world takes our essentials of marriage and says “Hey, why not two people of the same gender?”

This is why homosexuality took Christianity by surprise. We’ve spent generations telling people to follow their hearts, “fall” in love, then marry the person they love. When they’re attracted to someone of the same gender, what right do we have to now look at the Bible and tell them they’re doing it wrong? 

Christians will keep losing the homosexuality debate because we have a fundamental misunderstanding of marriage. We cannot embrace the standards set by God’s enemies and then try to argue that they’re in rebellion against God. 

Of course they are! That’s what an unbiblical worldview is all about. It should never surprise us that sinners do sinful things. And when we define things like love and marriage using their standards, it also shouldn’t surprise us that we start compromising God’s word to stay consistent with where we’ve been getting our truth.

Love wins

In 2015, the Supreme Court determined that same-sex marriage is as valid as heterosexual marriage. All across the country and internet, people cheered for “Love Wins!” 

And they were right. The right to marry who you love won. Everything we’ve ever believed about “love conquering all” or “all you need is love” finally proved itself to be true.

The idea that love matters most has been increasingly dominant in our culture. We gorge ourselves on books, movies, and music featuring two people who overcome everything because of their unbreakable love. We cheer when we see love win out over every obstacle that tries to keep two lovers apart.

Everything about our culture is compatible with the idea that love is all a relationship needs. But just like any good love story, there needs to be a villain keeping the lovers apart. Our culture has decided that outdated ideas founded on Christian tradition are the problem. 

But love won out in the end, proving that it doesn’t matter who you love, as long as you love someone and they love you in return.

Now, Christians are left with three choices.

1. We keep up with the times and continue embracing a worldly standard for love and marriage, moving in step with the ever-changing standards of who can love whom
2. We promote the majority of a secular worldview but break out a handful of Bible verses when it gets a little too worldly for us, hoping our children and grandchildren only embrace part of secular culture
3. We get back to a biblical understanding of what love is, why marriage exists, and how we should think about both of them in our lives

If Christians have any desire to give future generations a better chance to stand apart from the world, we have to equip them with a biblical understanding of love and marriage. We need to examine our own beliefs and honestly find areas where we’ve spent our whole lives being shaped by the world without realizing it. 

The growing acceptance and defense of homosexuality within Christianity shows us what happens when we make secular culture a natural part of our worldview. And we will continue losing ground on all forms of sexuality as the world embraces the same core beliefs about love, marriage, and sexuality as we do. 

A Bible verse here or there isn’t enough to recapture God’s desire for marriage. It requires us to realize just how much the world has formed our beliefs by digging deeper into why God established marriage in the first place.

But if we insist on having the same starting point as God’s enemies regarding love and marriage, we’ll have no choice but to follow whatever path they continue to create.

Glimpsing marriage through God’s eyes

Many reading this may not know how to think different about love and marriage. I don’t think a few paragraphs tacked on to this article will do justice to the topic, so I’ll leave you with a brief summary and a few sources you can check out.

Simply put, the purpose of marriage is to serve God with another person. If the purpose of our lives is to serve and glorify God, then a marriage is two people walking in the same direction. That’s the danger of being “unequally yoked” in any relationship, but especially within marriage. 

If God allows a couple to have children, then their goal continues to be glorifying God as they raise those children to understand the Christian faith and prepare them to enter the world as a child of God who understands why they believe what they believe.

In a bigger sense, Ephesians 5:31-32 reveals that God created marriage as a picture of Christ and the church. Thus, how we think about marriage and our spouse should be a shadow of the relationship between Christ and His own bride.

No where in God’s word do we see the purpose of marriage being finding someone who makes us happy. Love is a choice, not something we’re helpless against, and godly love is a choice that isn’t based on a person’s merit or what they bring us. Likewise, marriage has a greater purpose than our own happiness, but instead is a union of two people who are moving in the same direction and will serve God even more by joining together.

Not only is it important for us to grow in understanding these things, but we need to equip our children to understand them as they navigate a world that revels against God’s purpose for marriage. 

Resources

Although I haven’t specifically dug into this topic in this ministry, I have hinted at it across various articles. I’ll also include some articles from other sources who handle this topic well.

You can visit my topics page to see everything I’ve written about Marriage, Family, and Parenting.

Is It Cheating If You Just Look? discusses the purpose of marriage and why adultery is such a violation of it

The Most Important Parenting Question I Ask Myself looks at the greater goal of parenting

My article on divorce and remarriage emphasizes the purpose of marriage

Desiring God has an article titled Staying Married Is Not About Staying in Love

Focus on the Family has an article titled God’s Design for Marriage

The Gospel Coalition has an article titled A Biblical View of Marriage