7 Way Christian Homeschooling Parents Can Support LGBT Kids.
It’s one of those cathartic rants dripping with emotion that complains about how “my life has been ruined because I was homeschooled by crazy Fundamentalist parents.” The Homeschool Apostates, I mean, Anonymous blog also cross-posted it at their place. I thought I would use it as a spring board to offer a rebuttal and response to the author.
Let me begin with some of my own background for the author’s consideration.
Look it. We all understand that you were raised in a wacky, Fundamentalist atmosphere. You’re ashamed and embarrassed about your past. Now that you have freed yourself from the shackles of your Fundy upbringing, you believe you have ascended to a fuller life. We get it, okay.
I can sympathize. I spent some time floating in those orbits as well. In fact, I’ve been in both spheres — The liberal ones as well as the wacky IFB ones.
I was raised in a liberal United Methodist church pretty much all of my early life until about high school. At the Methodist church, I rarely, if ever, learned anything about Jesus. I was exposed to weirdie, quasi-spirituality that you probably now think is “Christianity.” The worship songs we sang were old 60s-70s hippy songs like “One Tin Soldier,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.” We didn’t really believe in a “historical” Jesus. He was more of a religious figure from long ago who had some good ethical advice. Occasionally we studied the Bible — the Good News translation with the stick figure illustrations. My 6th grade Sunday school teacher was a local public school teacher who wrote trashy Harlequin romance novels as a hobby, so I didn’t get a whole lot in way of “sword drills” if you know what I mean.
When the family moved to Arkansas later when I was a teen, we began attending the Free-Will Baptist church where the family on my mother’s side went. That was a major paradigm shift for me. There I learned about Jesus and legalism. I experienced the prying eyes of the community Dolores Umbridges who scrutinized the length of my hair and the sheen of my parachute pants. So believe me, I know all about stifling religious ideology.
I genuinely was saved during the last week of my freshman year at college, and even there I became involved with an extremely conservative, SBC church and even became a passionate KJV-onlyist. But God is gracious, and steadily the work of the Spirit straightened me out.
All of that to say that even though I may have been raised in misguided Fundamental Christianity, that doesn’t mean a biblical Christianity that affirms all the things you now despise, like creationism and inerrancy, is untrue. No matter what sort of twisted nonsense your parents may have subjected you to in the name of being “spiritual,” their warped views of Fundamentalism does not mean Fundamentalism itself is warped. You seriously need to keep in mind that your so-called new found “faith journey” is just as warped and twisted as your parents’ Fundamentalism.
If I may, let me offer seven truths I think you need to seriously ponder. I warn you now that they will sting; but you need to read them.
Consider the fact that you may be wrong – fatally so. Like I stated in my opening remarks, you have convinced yourself that you now transcend your Christian Fundamentalist past. You believe your shunning of your parents and their ways is sophisticated, so if they shun you in return, then the feeling is mutual. As much as you think they are wrong about everything in life, you are just as equally wrong. In your case, however, your rebellion against your parents’ form of Christianity extends to rebellion against the genuine truth: that homosexuality is a damnable sin against our Creator.
Declaring homosexuality as sinful and being pro-family values is NOT bigoted. I know you probably would say you would never think a Christian is a “bigot” for standing against homosexual sin, but you do. When you are by yourself with your friends, you all sneer at those “stupid Fundies” and those “family values retards” and you satisfy yourselves by saying how you are happy you learned better than what your parents believe. So don’t act all self-righteous when you tell homeschool parents, who you hate to begin with, to “prove” their love to you. When they weep privately together before God imploring Him to bring you to repentance, and yet stand firm in the biblical conviction that homosexuality is sin, that is not bigotry, but love calling you back to the truth.
If you believe your parents are wrong about textual criticism, do your own research into textual criticism. You’ve probably have gathered around yourself a bunch of apostate textual critics like Bart Ehrman and others of his ilk who provide you with intellectual comfort for your re-reading of the Bible and its dismissal as God’s infallible revelation. Please understand that such men, as smart as they may be, are dishonest frauds, and they DO NOT represent all of textual criticism. Their warped take on the discipline has been soundly answered and refuted by capable men.
If you are actively involved with a “faith community” now, you are blindly being led to the destruction of your soul. You need to bravely confront the historical truth: Biblical Christianity does not, nor cannot, affirm homosexual behavior as normative and still remain biblical Christianity. Homosexual sin has never been affirmed as normal by any genuine Christian body of believers, nor will it ever be. Christ’s Church cannot affirm homosexual behavior and remain biblical Christianity. Only liars and deceivers tell you that being gay is normal. If you attend a “church” now that tells you you’re okay being gay, you are being woefully deceived. The leaders there are heaping upon you massive amounts of spiritual abuse the same as your Fundamentalist parents may have heaped when you were homeschooled.
Thoroughly research the rebuttals to the gay “Christian” literature you have more than likely read. When you began your new “faith journey” you probably secretly read gay revisionist literature that told you the Bible mistranslated specific passages that condemn homosexuality. Such things as Paul was condemning just pederasty in Romans 1 and not homosexuality, and that David and Jonathan were lovers, that sort of nonsense.
Just because an author has “Dr.” in front of his or her name, or graduated from some Ivory league school, does not mean the person is a scholar and thus competent with handling the biblical text. The person has an agenda. Additionally, the arguments in those books have been soundly refuted and shown to be propaganda rather than genuine scholarship. I would exhort you to go HERE and read a scholarly refutation of such works, or HERE to hear a lengthy audio presentation interacting with pro-gay “Christian” apologetics. Just make sure you don’t smugly go away falsely believing no one has offered any response. That is not true.
Treat the Evangelical Christians in your life with mutual love and respect. You implore Christian homeschooling parents to treat the LGBT kids in their lives with mutual love and respect, but that cuts both ways. You cannot hypocritically suggest they treat you with love and respect, yet at the same time demand they overturn what historical, biblical Christianity has fundamentally taught concerning gender, marriage, and sex, so as to embrace your false revisionistic version that confirms homosexuality. Such is not being mutually loving and respectful.
Don’t interpret any pointed criticism as an ignorant, bigoted attack against you. Stop wearing your feelings on your sleeve. The people who are offering pointed challenges to your new found “convictions” don’t do it because they think gays are “icky” or they are attempting to shut-down some social iconoclasts that are rocking the boat of tradition.
You alone have chosen to stir up your inordinate affections and rush headlong into a lifestyle that will not only lead to the physical destruction of your health, but also the spiritual destruction of your soul. Moreover, you insist that the entire Christian worldview that you were taught as a kid, no matter how misappropriated by your well-intentioned, but misguided parents, be overturned and done away with all for the purpose of soothing your hurt sensibilities.
Right here you need to draw a dividing line. We, the Christian Fundamentalists homeschooling parents, will never yield to your assaults against our God and our faith. We will never accommodate your sexual perversion just to prop up some phony canard about “reaching out” and “showing respect” and so forth. Though you may not believe it, we do love you. We have hope for you because we know our God is a redeeming God who can restore broken sinners and the broken relationships their sin has caused with the people who love them.
But we also realize that Jesus Himself stated clearly,
“For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. “And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.” (Matthew 10:35-38)
And if regrettably, that means you may chose to continually be our enemy in spite of our best efforts to bring our restoration, then I decide to follow Jesus.