153 Evangelical leaders convened recently in Nashville under the auspices of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Biblical Womanhood and issued a statement on sexuality. Signers include some of the most prominent and influential leaders in the Evangelical family: James Dobson, Richard Land, James Robinson, Tony Perkins. The statement targets gay, lesbian and transgender persons but also Christians, Christian churches and organizations that do not exclude gay, lesbian and transgender people from membership and leadership, and everyone who comes to different conclusions about sexuality and sexual morality.

The first section of the statement reads:

“We affirm that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.”

The hubris of that statement is breathtaking. Not only does it reaffirm the traditional evangelical position that any sexual relationship outside of heterosexual marriage is sinful, it also sweeps anyone who disagrees with that conclusion into the same category of sinfulness. According to the statement, I, and many other Christians, clergy and laity, have “departed from Christian faithfulness and witness.”

Absent is any sense of humility or acknowledgement that the topic is fraught with centuries of human pain and suffering as a result of the statement’s conclusions. Absent as well is any acknowledgment that human sexuality remains a mystery, a delightful mystery, but a mystery, none-the-less.

Instead of inviting dialogue and continued inquiry into our humanness, who we are, and what we are created for, the statement retreats to the simplistic traditional mechanical definition of sexuality : Part A fits in Part B: End of argument. Deviation is wrong, sinful.

The issue for pastors is experiential and personal. People come to us out of intensely painful struggles with sexual identity, incredibly painful family rejection, painful rupture of caring, essential relationships. My evangelical brothers and sisters simply pile on, adding divine condemnation to the searing pain of rejection.

Absent as well – and this is the tragedy of the statement – is any trace of the spirit of the Jesus of the New Testament who seemed to go out of his way to touch the untouchable, welcome the outcast, break bread with those his own religion and the prevailing traditions of his culture, called unclean.

And absent is the simple reality that Jesus never mentioned the subject. The only time he approached the issue of sexual values, norms and behavior, he came down on the side of the ones condemned and ostracized by both religion and culture.

I am certain that I am not alone in wanting to distance myself from the Nashville Statement and the narrow judgementalism it represents. Many of us come to profoundly different conclusions about gender identity and sexual morality, not in spite of our Christian Faith, but as a result of it.

There is an alternative, in the thoughtful, human and humane approach of Mainline Protestants and progressive Catholics, based not on prevailing cultural currents or political correctness, but precisely on the Christ revealed in the pages of the New Testament.