'The issue of gay relationships is a fault line between two worlds, two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world.'

Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Anglican bishop, has been on a book tour in the UK this week. Steve Tomkins wonders why homosexuality is such a divisive issue for Christians

What is it with homosexuality? I’m not asking what’s appeal is for those who do it. I think I can grasp that much, though I’m perhaps not the only straight man who finds it easier to see its appeal for women than men.

The question is why it has become the hottest religious topic of our age. What makes it the centre of such constant, intractable debate and division for Christians?

Some would say it’s because the church has a prurient interest in what people get up to behind closed doors, but that’s hardly it.

Christians have been hung up about sex for 2,000 years, since the second-century gospel detailing the Virgin Mary’s gynaecological examination.

Why homosexuality now? Besides, conservative Christians in my experience aren’t obsessed with sex; they just have rules and this is one of them.

Differences

The real reason, it seems to me, is that the issue of gay relationships is a fault line between two worlds, two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world.

At the heart of the traditional outlook is the idea that I belong to something bigger than myself. I come from a family, from a people group, from God. I have responsibilities to them, to fulfil my role as one of their people.

So if God says, Thou shalt not make a graven image, the fact that I might personally get a lot out of sculpture is neither here nor there. Obedience to God who made me is more important than personal fulfillment.

The west, on the other hand, has undergone revolution in the way we see the world. The revolution in the way we live came in the 1960s, but its roots in how we see are easily 300 years deep, perhaps twice that.

The heart of it is the idea that I belong to myself. I have a right to do what makes me happy and fulfilled. And as long as it doesn’t stop anyone else being happy and fulfilled, it can’t be wrong – whoever might disapprove of it.

So if there is a God he couldn’t possibly forbid us anything that harmlessly makes us happy.

Worldviews

You can see that these two worldviews – let’s call them Christian tradition and western liberalism – are ultimately irreconcilable (though many of us are drawn both ways). And homosexuality is the issue that brings them into head-on conflict.

For western liberals, a sexual relationship is one of the greatest sources of fulfilment life has to offer, and affects no one but the two people involved. What could be better? To call it immoral is to call black white.

For Christian traditionalists, the command of God is unambiguous, and the ways of our people unvarying. To say that disobedience makes you happy is like saying that theft makes you rich. To call it moral is to call black white.

Western acceptance of gay relationships is very new and still growing, but the logic behind it is so deeply rooted that once you accept it, it becomes unassailable.

Those who don’t accept it, on the other hand, point out that western liberalism is geographically and historically in a small minority. Why must the rest of the world follow?

These assumptions are so deeply ingrained that arguing over Bible verses and case studies is pretty futile.

Earlier generations had their own issues that brought deeper differences into focus – icons, the filioque clause in the creed, the shape of monastic bald spots, Mary, predestination.

Till the world changes again, this will be ours.