Over a Pew Research, Caryle Murphy has an encouraging breakdown of various Christian groups and how they changed their attitude towards homosexuality in the seven year interval between Pew’s religious landscape surveys in 2007 and 2014. Basically, almost every sect is getting less intolerant over time, mostly because of the influence of the younger generations.
Among Christians, this trend is driven partly by younger church members, who are generally more accepting of homosexuality than their elder counterparts. For example, roughly half (51%) of evangelical Protestants in the Millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996) say homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared with a third of evangelical Baby Boomers and a fifth of evangelicals in the Silent generation. Generational differences with similar patterns also are evident among Catholics, mainline Protestants and members of the historically black Protestant tradition.
It is no doubt puzzling to the church elders how the younger folks have somehow managed to ignore a bevy of clear Biblical teachings on the immorality of same-sex coupling, but I have something of a working theory based on my personal experience growing up in at least four distinct Christian denominations.
When we moved from an Assembly of God church in Texas to a Southern Baptist church in Oklahoma (smack the middle of middle school, alas) I discovered that the Bible verses emphasizing speaking in tongues suddenly went from highly relevant to the practice of worship to an scriptural embarrassment best left unmentioned or (more rarely) carefully pigeonholed by a clever apologist into a sort of historical cultural cul-du-sac. This was my first hint that (1) not all Christian denominations see all of the New Testament as relevant to modern life (2) they differ widely amongst themselves as to what gets put in the “talking to us” category and what gets tossed into the “talking to them” bin.
Part of the process of acclimation to any new church is coming to understand which bits of the Bible they take seriously as a guide to modern living and which bits are relegated to historical irrelevance. For example, if you were to ask most any American Christian about biblical advice regarding head coverings, they will usually respond that this particular advice was intended to be taken in a first-century cultural context, rather than as a set of timeless moral injunctions. The same goes for other Scriptural traditions which are generally ignored by modern Christians, such as the Pauline prohibitions on fancy hair and jewelry, which are thought to be either irrelevant or (at most) injunctions to practice modesty relative to modern cultural norms. And you’d be very hard-pressed to find a modern (non-Mormon) Christian who can make sense of 1 Cor 15:29, which speaks favorably of baptism for the dead.
What is happening today is that the younger generation of churchgoers—who understand that some Bible verses should be taken as timeless moral guidance while others should be labeled as “rooted in a particular historical context” and left behind—are slowly but surely moving the scriptural condemnations of gays and lesbians from the timeless moral teachings category into the historical dustbin.
God bless them for it.
