Several progressive Christians have recently offered praise for the conversion of evangelical preacher and teacher, Tony Campolo, to affirming gays and lesbians being in the church and being married.
Campolo’s change of attitude is a good thing, of course, certainly better than Franklin Graham’s call for Christians to boycott businesses that support and/or endorse gay marriage. But, to be honest, it seems to me to be hardly noteworthy.
It’s not as if he has not heard the case made for gay marriage until recently. Twenty-five years ago I heard his wife, Peggy, make the argument for gay marriage at a church in Kansas City. At the very least we can conclude Tony has been more than a little slow on the uptake on this issue.
Worse, though, is that only now is he willing to welcome gays into the church. My question is, when did he decide that he gets to decide who is in and who is out when it comes to church?
In the Protestant tradition we are taught that the Communion Table belongs to God, not to the church, so how would any Protestant person or church presume to have authority over who comes to that Table?
Thus, at least for me Tony Campolo finally recognizing the audacity of his old attitude about who should and should not be welcomed into the church is hardly a moment for commendation. Contrition might be more fitting.
He does acknowledge in his statement that he remembers when the Bible was used to justify the subordination of women in the church, the exclusion of divorced people altogether, and even slavery, and worries that many Christians are making the same mistake now regarding gays and lesbians.
Talk about understatement. What he might have said that would have carried more credibility is that these examples of past errors in judgment should serve as a clarion call for evangelicals to stop misusing the Bible to justify every prejudicial and narrow, moralistic belief they have.
So for me the real story here is not that a prominent evangelical like Tony Campolo has now accepted gays and lesbians as brothers and sisters in the faith.
It is, instead, that he and others like him have yet to acknowledge the hurt evangelical Christianity inflicts on people and the damage it continues to do to the credibility of the Christian message.
There will always be a church for people who use religion to justify their own existence and wield faith as a sword against those who do not believe as they do.
But the decline of the church in America makes it abundantly clear that most people are done with that kind of church and church teaching, choosing instead to seek a better Christianity than what the church is offering on their own.
This is why reading Campolo’s statement actually made me feel sad. The man has been on the wrong side of civil rights for gays and lesbians his entire life and the best he can do is to offer an olive branch to those who have suffered at the hands of people like him.
What he might have written about that would have been more compelling is why he came to see so late what his wife had seen years before. He might have compared his faith to hers to see why for so long his was too weak to choose justice over prejudice.
If anyone is to be commended in this story it should be Peggy Campolo. She has been an example of those Christians who against great odds understand that sincerity is never a substitute for an informed faith, and that when it comes to relationships erring on the side of love is always redemptive.
So while I am glad Tony Campolo has had his heart opened to a bigger faith than he has had up to now, I will continue to look for inspiration and guidance to those whose faith has made their minds and hearts bigger rather than smaller.
Those are the kind of people from whom the rest of us can learn much.
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