What the Bible Says: A Letter to A Straight Christian about Gay Rights

By Micah Royal

This is based on a correspondence I had with another Christian a few years ago who wrote saying that, like me, they were straight and had several important people in their life who were gay, but didn’t see how I could believe gay people could be Christians because of specific verses in the Bible. I am sharing this article during Gay Pride month for anyone struggling over whether the Bible condemns their sexuality or for anyone, gay or straight, struggling over how they as a Christian should respond to gay people.

Dear Friend,

It’s great you want to enter a dialogue!
I can understand where you describe yourself to be on this issue right now. In many ways I’ve been there. In fact about the time I was ordained I was in the same place you are. God kept leading gay, lesbian, and transgendered people along my path to minister to. I tried to counsel them according to what the “traditions” of the church I was a part of gave me — telling them to of course accept Christ, but also telling them to abandon their same-sex relationships. Alas, I found how very destructive alot of the “wisdom” I’ve been given over the years in my ministry training was for these folks. I knew many of them sincerely wanted a relationship with God, I knew that God’s truth sets free and leads you to a fullness of life as Jesus promised, but I knew that the way I and the church in general was addressing this question brought people into greater spiritual and emotional bondage. Something didn’t add up to me.
During that time a couple of verses from Scripture came to have some significance to me. One was1 Corinthians 4:5 –
“Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God.”
This verse spoke to me of the need not to assume that what I had always been taught about how to understand God’s will and Scripture was right. Not to get into too long of an autobiography, but I already knew that, having grown up in some legalistic churches before I found Jesus for myself in a personal relationship when I discovered salvation was a free gift we receive through simply trusting in Christ as our Savior. But this verse spoke to me of the need not to go ahead and prejudge a person or an action as wrong because I had been taught to, but to wait for Jesus to show me His will through His Holy Spirit and through the Scriptures. I had found in my own life how wrong the church can be by twisting the liberating message of Jesus Christ into a message of legalism and condemnation.
The words of Scripture in 2 Timothy 2 also spoke to me — “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.” Another was in 2 Peter 3 : 16– “He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
These verses showed me that the Word of God is something that can be handled correctly and incorrectly. Some parts are easy to interpret and straightforward. Some aren’t and have been distorted over the years by people with their own agendas. I had already seen this in my life.
If you haven’t been exposed to legalistic and abusive ways of expressing Christianity, here’s a history lesson I learned through a friend who works with racial reconciliation ministry. Did you know that there are verses in the Old and New Testament which, when taken out of context, led folks who grew up in a slave-owning culture in the South a century and a half ago to conclude that God ordained slavery and that God wanted some people to be slaves? Or that Martin Luther and the Pope of his day condemned astronomers like Galileo and Copernicus as heretics for saying the world circled the sun due to what their telescopes said since the Bible clearly said that the sun rises and sets, not the world spins? Those are real extreme examples but they are ones I thought on during this time. Knowing those examples of Scripture-twisting made me wonder as I reflected on how the interpretation of Scripture I was using in my ministry was harming people’s lives. I wondered, could my church be like the southern churches a century or two ago, who had let their culture dictate to them that some people ought to be slaves of others, and thus caused them to find what they already believed in Scripture? Was I being like Martin Luther who just assumed how he had always read the poetic literature of the Bible, which talks of the sun circling the earth and it setting and rising, as literal instead of symbolic in the way modern Christians understand it as today?
And I thought about how Satan could quote Scripture too, in Luke 4, and did so to try to trip Jesus up. I tended to think it was Satan behind churches at one point saying blacks deserve to be slaves based on verses pulled out of context. Could he be doing the same thing now in our interpretation of verses people say condemn gays? I wondered as I saw the heartache our traditional approach to homosexual people brought. After all isn’t it Satan who steals and kills and destroys and Jesus the one who bring life? I could see in front of me how the interpretation of Scripture in regards to gay and lesbian people that I had been handed by my church did not give life. Those wrecked and damaged lives were not the life with more abundance Jesus promised in the Gospels.
So for me that time was a time to do as the verses above suggest and study Scripture for myself, to really dig into the Bible. And of course, not just the Bible, for wasn’t the reason that Martin Luther and the then-pope condemned folks who thought the earth circled the sun as godless heretics because they failed to remember that since science studies what God made and Romans 1 tells us we can learn of God’s attributes through what God made, we must look at what science teaches us from the Book of Nature?
Anyway, what I found as I began to dig into the Bible and into history & science, and to really listen to others with different points of view was surprising to me.
First of all, I found affirmed in Scripture repeatedly that God was no respecter of persons. I found Acts 10 in which St. Peter tells us that “God does not show favoritism” (vv.34-35); I found 1 Sam. 16:7 where God tells us Samuel “”Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” I also found Galatians 3:27-29 which says “27for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
In the context of ministering to people who have exclusive same-sex attraction, I found these verses to sound a little strange. Hold on a second, I found myself saying, based on how I was then reading the verses you listed to me (don’t worry I will get to them), I had to say that God showed favoritism to people based on the outward appearance of the person they shared their life with, specifically (sorry this is crass) what hung or didn’t hang between their legs. I had to say that whether the one someone with was male or female was more important to God that if the two were in Christ and trying to keep Christ the center of their relationship.
Reading these verses made it more clear to me something must be wrong with my interpretation of the Bible. My approach to people with same-sex attraction was leading me to directly contradict these very clear words of Scripture — words that clearly say that, however it might appear otherwise, the God revealed in Jesus Christ is not a God worried about the outward appearance of what our skin color is (or that of our spouse) or what hangs between our legs or between the legs of the person we are with.
I also found that the claim I had read and heard many times by more fundamentalist Christian speakers that there was no evidence for people being born gay was both bogus and not really helpful. It was bogus because every reputable science book I could get my hands on (at that point at a library for a conservative Christian seminary no less!) said all evidence was for same-sex attraction being something not chosen, something with a biological cause not a social one. The only guys arguing against this were folks who were politically motivated. And all the science books I could find showed numerous studies that showed pretty conclusive evidence for the fact that, though a bisexual person might be able to give up men or women and live as if either heterosexual or gay if they choose, people did not and cannot change their basic biology — whether they were attracted to a man or a woman or both was built into their brain structure around birth. So whatever the cause of homosexuality, all the scientific evidence was one’s sexual orientation does not change.
I also found that there had been studies around for years showing that diversity in one’s sexual orientation is natural simply by studying nature. Notice the following, just a tip of the iceberg for the evidence I found — “The presence of same-sex sexual behavior was not scientifically observed on a large scale until recent times, possibly due to observer bias caused by social attitudes to same-sex sexual behavior. Homosexual behavior does occur in the animal kingdom, especially in social species, particularly in marine birds and mammals, monkeys and the great apes. Homosexual behavior has been observed among 1,500 species, and in 500 of those it is well documented[30]. Georgetown University professor Janet Mann has specifically theorized that homosexual behavior, at least in dolphins, is an evolutionary advantage that minimizes intraspecies aggression, especially among males.
Male penguin couples have been documented to mate for life, build nests together, and to use a stone as a surrogate egg in nesting and brooding. In 2004, the Central Park Zoo in the United States replaced one male couple’s stone with a fertilized egg, which the couple then raised as their own offspring.[31] German and Japanese zoos have also reported homosexual behavior among their penguins. This phenomenon has also been reported at Kelly Tarlton’s Aquarium in Auckland, New Zealand.
Courtship, mounting, and full anal penetration between bulls has been noted to occur among American Bison. The Mandan nation Okipa festival concludes with a ceremonial enactment of this behavior, to “ensure the return of the buffalo in the coming season.” [citation needed] Also, mounting of one female by another is common among cattle. (See also, Freemartin. Freemartins occur because of clearly causal hormonal factors at work during gestation.)
Homosexual behavior in male sheep (found in 6-10% of rams) is associated with variations in cerebral mass distribution and chemical activity. A study reported in Endocrinology concluded that biological and physiological factors are in effect.[32] These findings are similar to human findings studied by Simon LeVay.
“Approximately eight percent of [male] rams exhibit sexual preferences [that is, even when given a choice] for male partners (male-oriented rams) in contrast to most rams, which prefer female partners (female-oriented rams). We identified a cell group within the medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus of age-matched adult sheep that was significantly larger in adult rams than in ewes…”
Male bighorn sheep are divisible into two kinds, the typical males among whom homosexual behavior is common and “effeminate sheep” or “behavioral transvestites” which are not known to engage in homosexual behavior. [33] [34] ”

So the more I picked up science books and read, the more I found that the evidence in science also pointed toward what the verses I found so troubling were saying: God does not show partiality based on what hangs between one’s legs or the legs of one’s significant other. It made the claims I was used to hearing about homosexuality sound alot like the claims that folks believing the sun was the center of the solar system were heretics.
But what about those verses you mentioned?
You mention first of all Genesis 19:1-13.
I could spend a long time going through the whole verse, but we both know the story. God tells Abram he is going to destroy the city Lot & his family live in. Abram begs him to consider another way. God offers to come down and visit the city and look for a few righteous people.
When God does so either as three theophanies or through sending three angels (depends on how you interpret that part), Lot takes them in but the whole city swarms around threatening Lot and asking him to send out the folks inside who are from outside so they can “know” them.
Three-four things here…
First, whatever you can say about the people (literally the men of the city) wanting to “know” the three visitors, this is not why the city is being destroyed. God already decided to destroy the city. What Genesis describes about Sodom’s treatment of Lot’s three guests is just proof none of them are hospital and righteous but Lot’s people. Now what was Sodom’s sin which was so grievous? Was it being gay? Or having gay citizens?
Well, Genesis doesn’t out and out tell us, but Ezekiel does in Ezekiel 16:48-49:
48 As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done. 49 ‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”

So it was lack of hospitality and care for the needy, poor, and oppressed — as well as an arrogance that was sinful, which led to Sodom’s demise.
Secondly, you need to note that “know” you may or may not mean sex. It is a double entendre in Hebrew which can mean to know through sex but also can merely mean to know or to investigate. Remember, Lot was a foreigner — and the three visitors were not from Sodom. Sodom had just had a war (read a few chapters earlier in Genesis). So essentially they may have been saying “are these illegal immigrants or spies you are harboring? Let’s check them to see their papers?”
Thirdly, if it is sex what type of sex is it the crowd wants? Is it consensual love between two people of the same sex? No, it is gang rape.
Funny thing about that — does the Bible condemn gang rape if it is heterosexual? Yep, sure does. I found that confirmed when I read Judges 19-21. Almost the same thing happens in Israel there which happened in Sodom here but it ends with a crowd gang-raping not a man, but a young lady. That is condemned as well. Yet we don’t conclude from that account in Judges that being heterosexual or in a straight marriage is a sin, do we? No, we don’t. We see just a condemnation on rape, and draw a big distinction between heterosexual rape and heterosexual marriage. How do we make the leap, I wondered, as I studied this passage, from possible same-sex rape being condemned to gay marriages being wrong, let alone being gay being a sin?
When I studied more deeply, I found that in the culture of the ancient Middle East gang-rape was a way some tribes tortured spies, criminals, and intimidated people. That rarely had to do with sexual desire, had nothing to do with love, and had everything to do with intimidation. To borrow a term from today, it was a “heightened interrogation technique” … it was a way to torture and intimidate someone viewed as an enemy.
The point? I found that Genesis 19 says nothing about the sort of same-sex relationship gay couples I knew had. It clearly condemns inhospitality and may condemn gang rape. But the Bible also condemns heterosexual gang-rape without meaning that heterosexual marriage is a sin.
As for the others…
Leviticus 18:22
To make this short and sweet: this is the holiness code. It condemns religious rituals that have to do with pagan worship in Israel. It doesn’t have anything to do with what is moral or immoral, but only with the sort of purity needed – the actions to be avoided or acted out – to be fit to sacrifice animals in the temple, which Christians don’t do anyway.

The word we translate “abomination is “to’ebah” — it refers to the breaking of a ritual law. To’ebah might be better translated “ritually improper,” or “involving forbidden religious ceremonies.” Most of the other “to’ebah” passages are considered without significance to Christians today even by the most fundamentalist Christians. Most activities which were “to’ebah” transgressions to the ancient Israelites simply do not apply to modern cultures.
Another Hebrew word zimah could have been used – if that was what the authors intended. Zimah means, not what is objectionable for religious or cultural reasons, but what is wrong in itself. It means an injustice, a sin. For example, in condemnation of temple prostitutes involving idolatry, “to’ebah” is employed (e.g. 1 (3) Kings 14:24), while in prohibitions of prostitution in general a different word “zimah,” appears (e.g. Lev. 19:29).
What is an abomination in Israel? Eating shrimp, wearing mixed fabrics, touching a dead body, touching someone who has a menstrual flow, being physically deformed and entering the temple. These deal with not moral sins but ritual laws that made one unclean to sacrifice. If you went to sacrifice in the temple while unclean, you would be stoned to death for disrespecting the temple.

So the type of sex described here is not a sin, not immoral, but a false way of worshiping God that was common to the religions around the Israelites who followed Leviticus that God forbad.
The context of Lev. 18-20 is worship of pagan deities. One verse says specifically not to give a child as a burnt offering to the pagan idol of Moloch
Notice these verses , first in Leviticus 18.1-5, 24-26 then Leviticus 20.22-24–
The LORD said to Moses, 2 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the LORD your God. 3 You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. 4 You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the LORD your God. 5 Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live by them. I am the LORD .
24 ” ‘Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. 25 Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, 27 for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. 28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.
22 ” ‘Keep all my decrees and laws and follow them, so that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out. 23 You must not live according to the customs of the nations I am going to drive out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. 24 But I said to you, “You will possess their land; I will give it to you as an inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey.” I am the LORD your God, who has set you apart from the nations.
The point of the holiness code then is to avoid pagan worship at a shrine, to avoid worship that keeps them from being able to sacrifice at the temple. It is about what actions can be done – or not done – when sacrificing animals and making offerings to God. So the sex to avoid is a type of sex as an act of worship, the type of sex used in religions around them that are not based on the Bible. This meaning is furthered by the original Hebrew — Two different words are used for man in these verses – ish and and zakhar: “a man [ish] shall not lie with a male [zakhar] as with a woman”. Ish is the general word used for man in the sense of a male human being. Zakhar is a technical term meaning literally “holy one,” a man or male animal specifically dedicated to a deity for some sacred purpose. This technical term is used elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe male temple prostitutes of the type I’ve already described.” (taken from a series of articles on this passage at http://www.epistle.us/)
So Lev. seems to deal with sex involving a shrine prostitute in worship of a fertility god. It is ritual sex as a part of worship. God is saying don’t used sex as a way of worshiping me – that is forbidden even though other religions around you do that. I intend sex to be about love, not a type of ritual to earn my favor.

When I studied that, what I also found is temple prostitution and ritualized sex in worship was not just condemned in a same-sex context. It was condemned between a man and a woman. Yet people jump to the conclusion from the same-sex sex rituals being condemned that being gay was a sin … while not concluding being straight was a sin from condemnations of heterosexual pagan sex rituals.
Unless I either said this didn’t apply to the gay relationships of the people I knew – who were having sex as a part of love and commitment, not in rituals at pagan temples – or I said straight marriages were also sinful, I was being hypocritical to use this text to condemn gay people. What’s more, if I started to use it this way, I also needed to quit eating pork, not wear poly-cotton, and start sacrificing animals.
Next you mention Romans 1-2.
This is a passage that gave me alot of trouble until I noticed a few things.
First of all, these verses do not describe all people engage in same-sex intercourse but a particular group, those doing so because they had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (1:22).
Why would people engage in same-sex intercourse as a result of abandoning the true god for idol worship? Well, many pagan religions worshiped fertility gods who blessed those who performed the most entertaining sex. So folks would have sex with people as unlike those they normally would want to as possible to get the gods to have their jollies so they would pour out blessings. It was basically performed pornography with an audience of the pagan gods.
Is that why most gay people have sex? I had to ask myself as I read this passage. Well I can’t speak for all but none of the gay folks I ministered to then or now have sex in order to give pagan deities their jollies or as an act of worship for images of birds, animals, or reptiles.
Next, we see that this sex is done is “unnatural” for those who participate (v. 26 I believe of Romans 1). Until I read up on Greco-Roman culture (the culture in which Paul was writing) I thought that condemned gay sex as unnatural. When I did crack open some books, I found that fertility worship was designed to get people to have sex that was unlike what they normally would have — with people they would be less likely to normally have sex with — as possible. To do it right you had to push the envelope. Again, think pornography and you’ll understand that. Always keep it new — to entertain the gods.
Again, this is not at all like the sex between two people who are in love, in private, in their bedroom. This is more like pornography. This text didn’t describe the sort of relationships gay people who were coming to me for counsel were trying to decide if they could have.
What does this verse condemn? It does teach us that orgies and prostitution are not a form of worship God accepts. It teaches us idolatry is wrong. But that is wrong for straight people as well as gay.
Elsewhere the Bible tells us why — our God wants us to worship God from the heart by doing justly, loving mercy, and having a personal relationship with God. Also sex is to be an expression of love that binds two people together for life . It is to be a from the heart as an expression of love, not a performance.
But that’s just as true if you are with one gender or the other.
Then we have 1 Corinthians 6:9
What was interesting here is that no-one until modern society used this verse to condemn gay people.
In fact even the NIV doesn’t explicitly condemn all gay sex. Notice — “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders…”

What sort of sex does this condemn?
Male prostitute is someone who has sex for money or as a priest of a fertility (ie sex) god(dess) and happens to be a man. Does this describe all gay people or even most? No. Some maybe — but is the sin the partner or is not female prostitution also condemned?
Next we have “homosexual offenders”. Again in the NIV — offender, not homosexual. If you read “heterosexual sex offender” would you conclude the offense was sex with someone the person was married to and in love, or perhaps rape, child molestation, etc.? NIV, a very literal translation, doesn’t even say “homosexual” but homosexual offender, a term that literally applies more to same-sex rape, child molestation, etc.
More literal translations don’t use the term homosexual at all — but effeminate or soft and abusers of themselves with mankind. Literally the two words — malakoi and arsekenoites — are two words that there is not agreement about Greek scholars what means.
Malakoi means soft literally but was a pejorative term that could mean morally spineless, weak-willed, and was also used to describe young male prostitutes.
Arsekenoites is a term that is never used before the Bible and no-one agrees on. The earliest commentators viewed it as a reference to a sin involving a man and a woman in some form of exploitive and abusive situation. Others viewed it as a reference to pederasty — basically an older man sexually molesting a young boy. Most linguists think it is a reference to either that or the person who would frequent male prostitutes.
Is frequenting a prostitute or molesting a child the same thing as sex between two consenting adults who are in love? No. Is this type of sex just as wrong in a straight context as gay? You bet. The problem isn’t the genders of the people involved but that sex is being misused, turned into something that uses and abuses others instead of expressing real love and faithfulness.
Finding out that these verses, in the original languages, do not condemn gay love but instead abusive and exploitive forms of sex which are also condemned in a heterosexual context, helped me make peace with the verses about God not being a respecter of person and the scientific data I had found from studying.
I discovered the simple truth — that God looks not an outward appearance but the heart. Rape, abuse, molestation, prostitution, are all wrong because they distort sex into a tool of control, abuse, and exploitation instead of having sex be an expression of heart-felt and Christlike love between two people who have committed themselves to each other for life.
I found out that God’s Word was not biased based on what hangs between people’s legs — whether yours or the person you are with. I found that Christ really did die for all people, irregardless of if they are gay or straight, male or female.
For me this has been a hard journey. I have been faithful to what God has shown me but that has meant I’ve lost alot of friends who think that I have somehow abandoned God because we don’t agree on this one issue of theology. And being a straight man means it can be a bit tough ministering in the gay community, feeling like a fish out of water. But the Lord is using me to help touch some people who would otherwise believe God has no room for them in his kingdom.
Anyway, hopefully that answers your questions. Despite your worries, I am concerned about preaching truth. But with all the people I have seen with their lives shattered as the result of ex-gay therapy I can tell you again and again I have seen proof that the folks twisting Scripture are not those proclaiming that Christ died for all people and God does not show partiality but rather the folks committed to forcing people to fit their cookie cutter image of who folks ought to be irregardless of how God made us.
Anyway, I hope this begins a good and long discussion. I’ll say this — if you are open to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit will guide you where you need to be!
Pastor Mike

Micah lives in the Sandhills of NC with his wife Katharine and their two dogs, Isaiah and Gabriel. They – Micah and Kat, that is – are working on planting new socially progressive ministries and churches together in the Sandhills area of NC, including Diversity in Faith: A Christian Church for All People in Fayetteville and a Bible study group in Lumberton.