Rhetoric Race and Religion
Yesterday I wrote about the decline of anti-gay religion. The context was the recentFaith Angle conference at which speakers and participants discussed the shifting views of Catholics and evangelical Protestants on homosexuality. The one speaker who clearly reaffirmed his belief in the sinfulness of homosexual behavior was Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Even he acknowledged that his brethren were becoming more realistic and modest in their approach to the issue.
One thing I didn’t write about was Moore’s cultural view of the anti-gay resistance. I’m using the term anti-gay here to mean opposition to homosexual behavior, not to homosexual inclination, since Moore would certainly say that he loves the sinner, gay or straight. What’s striking about Moore’s perspective is that he no longer sees gay people as the deviant minority. The deviants, in his view, are Christians.
I don’t mean that he thinks there’s anything wrong with being Christian. I’m using the technical definition of deviance: divergence from the norm. The new norm is acceptance of homosexuality. Those who disagree are, in Moore’s language, freaks.
“The illusion of a Moral Majority is no longer sustainable in this country,” Moore told the conference participants. Given the country’s cultural transformation, he argued, pursuing “a constitutional amendment for same-sex marriage is a politically ridiculous thing to talk about.”
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