Tony Jones asks us: "Can you please explain to me WHY a gay or lesbian person who is in a long-term, monogamous relationship would not be able to wholeheartedly follow Christ?" He asks respondents to do so without going back to scripture passages lest it become another unproductive foray into competing interpretations and hermeneutics. Reviewing the 300+ comments it is clear that the assertion raised is that from design. Thus, non-heterosexual people are not following Christ because they are not following the laws that Christ himself observed – the one who fulfilled them but did not abolish them. I think this view suffers from myopia and needs to be corrected with a family systems economic approach. So what can we learn of God's design for family systems and what Jesus did to correct traditional assumptions of God's design for family?
Pre-Industrial Families
The assertion from design fails to take into account the economic assumptions in the family structures during the time of Jesus and Paul, among many others. The family was the center of the economy. Local currencies ran beside the central currency of the Romans. These local currencies were literally developed by the goods that a family produced. The more you put into the system, the more you would get out. Labor was the investment, not speculative investment like a home-equity loan or TIAA-CREF fund that produced interest dividends. The greater the labor force you could muster as a family, the greater the economic output.
Marriages were important for family economics because it was as much a labor investment as a way to regulate economic competition between families who owned fields and so forth. Families would arrange marriages in contracts in order to maximize and protect mutual economic prosperity. A bride was the greatest speculative investment a family of a groom would make. Boys were prized because they were the source of economic output for the family – they were cheap labor. When a family gave their groom a wife from another family, it was an investment with the promise that the bride would produce boys and thus more labor. So a dowry price for a bride was like an insurance policy in the family contract. If the bride failed to produce boys, or God forbid any children at all, that dowry would not be entitled to her should her husband die. A barren wife could result in similar ostracism. An unmarried daughter was a bad family product because she would not be entitled to the money from another family. Tax collectors were ostracized by local communities because they would leech labor production out of local economies in the form of centralized Roman currency; kind of like why the New World colonies were a bit peeved at the Brits for leeching their labor output and giving it right back to the king. At any rate, marriage was the original speculative investment for two families to make, it was not a romantic partnering no matter how romantic a few narratives paint that picture through our current relational lens.
Widows, barren women, and orphans not to mention those pesky tax collectors, were all outcast as a result of their economic leeching of the community. They could not be part of any family contracts, were not producing goods through labor to help family economies, and were economically useless. It was also why polygamy was accepted. Polygamy is a good way to maximize the number of children you have, increase the odds you will have boys, thus increase labor production, and is a great way to invest in local economies. We don't like to think of wives today as investment property, but that is exactly what they were in the time of Jesus.
Post-Industrial Families
Fast forward to the 21st century. It was only at the dawn of the post-industrial society (which we can start to see emerge with the founding of the US Federal Reserve in 1913) that we began to see women's rights, gay rights, and rights for people of color take on a full head of steam. Slaves were an important part of the labor force, but once released from slavery, there was no longer a guarantee that they would produce at the cheap price they were once producing. What to do? Ostracize them from the economy. Women were no longer investment property yet did not have equal share in the economy. All of this and more would bubble up in the civil rights revolution in the next 60 years which is as much a shift in the economy, as it is a new understanding of humanity. Women still make less on the dollar than men ironically this time because of child-rearing since that leads to less hours worked and larger fringe costs in healthcare.
So what does this have to do with same-gender relationships? With the economic assumptions that governed societies until recently, the same kind of association to a same gender relationships would have applied as to the barren woman, widow, eunuch, etc. There was no possibility for economic stability and growth and no possibility that an inheritance for a gay man would persist to a future generation of sons! If a man cannot produce a child with another man, yet is an heir to the family inheritance, it is far better for the economy to ostracize these men from the community by shunning or death. As women caught in adultery were stoned because they betrayed the family investment and could not remarry, gay men were ostracized as a matter of economic health for the community. This is likely why lesbianism was not as much of a concern and is not mentioned in the Bible. Men were the focus because the social system placed on men the greatest source of economic gain. Only economic loss would have been seen with gay men.
This makes as much economic sense as polygamy. If we travel to the Southern Hemisphere of the planet we see the same sorts of social structures operative in the various agrarian economies. Polygamy and wives that can produce sons are both central to family production of goods and labor. Hence, we also see rather consistent ostracism of gays, widows, adulterers, etc.
A "biblical family" is an economic one, not a romantic one. True, romantic love and affection can exist in these kinds of social systems, but that is not the purpose for which they are intended. This is one of the reasons why what Jesus did with those ostracized from the economic system of his day was so radical. He openly accepted widows, adulterers, and tax collectors into his new vision of what a community should look like. It is a community not founded under the economic assumptions of the law, but under the new Kingdom of grace and charity that God intends for humanity. Paul reiterates this new revealed economy in Galatians 3:
26 You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Something different is happening here. Jesus and Paul are both making proclamations that run directly counter to an assumed economic family system that was at the very heart of the societies in which they lived. They are revealing something radically different from the design that the people had understood God had intended for the family then. True, neither mention same gender relationships and still assume the economic importance of families that produce offspring. Even though Jesus and Paul opened the possibility for fundamental differences with respect to those ostracized from the economic system, the central unit for economic stability was still the family which required heterosexuality to be economically viable.
In post industrial societies where economies are rooted in centralized monetary systems, the family is no longer an economic unit that functions in the same way as it did in "biblical times." Children are no longer economically cost-effective for families since rather than bring revenue into a family, they are sources of economic cost. Children are thus not produced for economic reasons unless where exceptions such as welfare or prospective tax credits factor. Thrity-eight percent of heterosexual couples have no children while 90% of male couple and 77% of female couples are childless. Gay and lesbian couples also trend with more college degrees and higher median incomes compared to heterosexual couples where both couples work. Only men in heterosexual couples make the most income, but this is in large part due to the increase in income related to children. Lesbians attain higher market position, education, and incomes than other women. For total household income, gay male households earn the most total income while lesbian and heterosexual households earn virtually the same.* Thus, under post-industrial economic constraints, gay and lesbian households seem to fare as well or better in terms of economic attainment as heterosexual families. Yet adoption continues to be blocked where it is already more difficult and expensive for these couples to do when compared to heterosexual couples.
The thrust of this point is that the economic system in a post-industrial economy actually favors households without children and may favor households with same gender couples. This is not to say that the economy itself is a good to which faith should be made relative. However, the very economic structure itself has moved from family production to family consumption as what moves capital, increases income, and what makes full participation in the economy possible. It is within this kind of economic frame that we must understand the issue of homosexuality as it is in reference to the biblical notion of marriage. That we have failed to explore this fundamental difference with regard to the question of same gender relationships misses the intractable contextual frame of God's apparent design for families as a unit of economic production, to the relational purpose of family that persists in post-industrial societies.
Marriage itself is no longer an economic contract, but a relational fulfillment. To suggest that same gender couples ought not seek marriage and intimacy to pursue this same goal seems to miss the entire social structure in which marriage functions as an integral part of our psycho-social development. Rooted in the radical responses that Jesus and Paul made to their own socio-economic frame that defined "the family" it baffles the entire assertion from design today. If Jesus accepted such economically unsustainable persons then who were rejected due to their inability to produce children through marriage contracts, would Jesus reject gays and lesbians today? It would certainly be inconsistent if he did. Yet the assertion from design is ultimately tied to the economic constraints supposedly designed by God then that Jesus and Paul nonetheless disrupted and are now completely different in this day and age.
Neither Jesus nor Paul assumed the family to function in a purely economic function and thus, neither should we read our current social frame onto the assumptions about family on which they made their statements about family. But what we do know is that they welcomed those who were economic outcasts with open arms and commanded others to do the same. Christianity's de-legitimation of same gender relationships is thus an unfortunate irony rooted in a fundamentally flawed economic ignorance to the dimensions of the current family system as it compares to so-called "biblical marriage."
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*These data can be found here.
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