In Answer
to the Question ‘Why Are There Gay People?’
Recently I
was invited to take part on a panel in a question-and-answer session in a
midweek Christian youth group. The three
panel members were given questions which had been pre-written by the teenagers
and we were asked to give impromptu answers to these questions. One of the questions that fell to me to
answer was the question above: “Why are there gay people?” What I have written below was the essence of
my answer to that question, elaborated for the sake of putting it in written
form.
When God
created us, he created us in his image to be male and female. The first couple were created with sexual
organs and sexual desires. These were
given to them by God and were intended by him for the mutual enjoyment of
expressing love and for procreation. The
couple lived in harmony with God and with each other until their fall into
sin. However, from that day onwards,
they were separated from the presence, life and power of God, and their lives
(and those of all their offspring) were affected by sin, confusion and
spiritual darkness. Fallenness is a
universal human experience and this fall into sin and separation from God has
consequences in every part of our lives.
Both the Bible and an honest-to-goodness look at human life and history show us
the sometimes dreadful consequences of the Fall in all the multitude of
different ways in which this manifests itself.
In particular, fallenness also affects the expression of human sexuality.
For example,
when the LORD brought the Israelites out of Egypt, he pointed out to them the
different ways in which human fallenness had affected both Egyptian society
(where they had been and whose lives they would have seen and been aware of)
and Canaanite society (into whose land they were going to enter). In Leviticus chs. 18 and 20, among other
things he gives them a long list of the different kinds of sexual practices
which were common among both these peoples, such as widespread incest, adultery,
homosexuality, bestiality and cross-dressing (cf. Deut. 22:5). These expressions of human sexuality did not
reflect God’s ideal purpose for humankind and were simply a consequence of the
human fall into sin and separation from God. The apostle Paul also mentions the fact that some of these practices were common in the Greek-Roman world of his day (1 Cor. 6:9). So LGBTQI+ lifestyles, in particular, have always been around in human life. In our own day, we could certainly
add on to the list such things as promiscuity, pornography, prostitution, strip clubs, group sex, child sexual abuse, sex trafficking and rape (whatever the sexuality of the person or people involved in these). The inexorable sexualization of western society in the last 50-60 years can only be described as destructively hedonistic. In short,
there is nothing that fallen human nature has not done with the human sexual
desire. All these things are examples
of what can and does happen when people go away from God and live without him. God told his people that he wanted them to live their lives in such a
way that they honoured him and remained free of the spiritual and moral
problems that were common in these other societies.
Human sexual
desires normally begin around the time of puberty and you need to understand
that these are perfectly normal God-given desires. We should not be ashamed or embarrassed about
them. They are part of who God has made
us to be. We should be free to face them
and to talk about them. They are a
normal and natural part of what it means to become an adult. Puberty can be a confusing time for many
teenagers as they learn to live with a physical body which is changing and
growing fast, with hormones that are affecting their bodies and stimulating
sexual desires, and with desires and natural attraction developing towards the
opposite sex.
However, as
with everything else in life, as believers we need to learn how to handle our
sexual desires and express them in ways which are honouring to God and to other people, and keep
ourselves away from problems or unintended and undesirable consequences. Like anything else in life, sexual desires can
be expressed or used in ways which are good, but they can also be used in ways
which may be abusive or destructive. I
can use a match to light a candle in my living room at home, but I can also use
it to start a wildfire and burn up a whole forest. I can use my car to go to work, to do the
shopping and to take my family away for a weekend, but I could also drive it at
140 mph down a motorway and cause great danger and damage to other people and
even get killed myself. It is no
different with sex. Sex is one of
the deepest drives within human nature, so we need to learn to control
ourselves and our sexual desires and use them honourably as God originally
intended within marriage, and reap the enjoyment and benefits that this brings, and not use them in ways that bring heartbreak, destructive
behaviour or even abuse into our lives and our relationships with other people.
Statistically,
around 95-97% of the human population is heterosexual. So the vast majority of men will marry women,
and vice-versa. The remaining minority
is LGBTQI+. As we saw above, there have
always been LGBTQI+ people in different societies and cultures in the world. However, because of our fallenness, in our
own society these people have often been treated badly. Certainly, looking back over my own lifetime,
I can remember the days when the LGBTQI+ lobby, civil partnerships and gay
marriage did not exist. Gay people, both
men and women, were called all sorts of names, were subjected to bullying both
in and out of school and were generally rejected by society. The political fight on the part of the LGBTQI+ community in the last few decades has been to make society accept the existence
of these minorities and to give them the legalized freedom to enjoy the same
rights that heterosexuals have always had.
There are many
reasons why people become gay or lesbian (or bisexual). Sometimes it is because they have been hurt
so many times in relationships with members of the opposite sex that they have
begun to hate the opposite sex altogether, and so they now express their
sexuality with others of their own sex.
Sometimes it is because they have been sexually abused when they were
young by a member of their own sex.
Sometimes they have been taken advantage of or seduced into a sexual
relationship by an older member of their own sex. Sometimes they have simply wanted to
experiment with sexual experiences and have ‘tried it’ with someone of their
own sex just to see what it was like and then, having done this, they continued
on in this kind of lifestyle. And so
on...
However, at
the same time that our society has developed recognition of the rights of the
LGBTQI+ community during the last 40-50 years, our society in UK has also been
slowly but surely moving away from God.
I can remember when I was young, on Sundays many more people went to
church than do now. We read the Bible in
school RE classes and we sang hymns and said prayers every morning in school
assembly. However, in these last
decades, we have rejected God and thrown him out to the fringes of our society
(if not completely under the carpet!) and, although outwardly we profess to be
multicultural, yet practically we have embraced the philosophy, beliefs and
lifestyle of secular humanism. We
conveniently tolerate Christianity and we don’t talk openly and publicly about God. Although there are still many Christians
around and although new church movements have sprung up, yet attendance in the
institutional churches has plummeted, many older church buildings are no longer
used, have been sold for other purposes or have simply been closed down and
demolished. As a society, in many
ways we have not considered it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God
(cf. Rom. 1:28); we have rejected him and his word, and therefore also
rejected biblical values and teachings in the life of our society. It is now generally considered to be
politically incorrect to do ‘the God thing.’
And we have reaped the consequences of this in many different ways...
If we do not
love God, then we will not love our neighbour.
So, if we reject God, then we are no longer able to relate to others in
the way that he ideally intends, and we end up with the friction, irritation,
self-centredness, rejection, anger, hatred and other forms of brokenness (including
sexual expressions of our fallenness) which characterise human relationships (including heterosexual relationships). And we may also reject or not love ourselves
either. Self-rejection is the end
result of rejecting God and his love for us. In Romans ch. 1, the apostle Paul makes this
point in regard to sexuality. If we
reject the knowledge of God as not being worthwhile to hold on to
(vv.19,21,28), we then begin to reject his ideal pattern for the expression of
our sexual desires. And so the
fallenness of sexuality then gets expressed in overt ways. What is inside us, simply comes out. So men may turn away from women and get involved in
homosexuality and, vice versa, women may turn away from men and get involved in
lesbianism (vv.24,26-27). Building on
this, Townsend also suggests that, not only may we turn away from our natural God-given
desire for the opposite sex, in our fallenness and confusion we may also even
begin to reject our God-given bodies:
‘Faced with “gender confusion,”
we should remember Paul leads us to expect that in a culture which pushes God
to the margins of life and ignores divine revelation, God will allow our minds
and hearts to mislead us – especially in relation to spirituality and
sexuality. The outworking of the human
race’s rebellion against God can go beyond rejection of God and his moral law
and spill over into a rejection of “nature” as made by God. It is not fanciful to ask whether,
consciously or unconsciously, sex reassignment procedures amount to an attempt
to usurp the role of creator.’[1]
So the
confusion caused by our fallenness continues on into transgenderism: males may
want to become female by undergoing certain surgical procedures and hormonal
treatments, and similarly females may want to become male. The present trend of transgenderism has
built on the successes of the LGBTQI+ community’s recent recognition, and it
overtly expresses this inner sexual confusion (or ‘gender dysphoria,’ as it is
called). So rejection of God can lead to
the rejection and abuse of one another, to the rejection of natural male-female
sexual expressions, and even to the rejection of our own bodies. In our confusion, we have now become so
conditioned by political correctness that medical doctors in the UK’s NHS have
recently been informed by the BMA that they can no longer call a pregnant woman
‘an expectant mother.’ She will have to
be called ‘a pregnant person.’[2] This is because of the projected rise in the
number of transgender men who will perhaps desire to become pregnant and have
their own children. They are to be known
as ‘pregnant persons’ rather than ‘pregnant men.’[3]
In my work
as a pastor, I have occasionally been able to minister to and help gay men and
lesbian women. Of those I have known, several had accepted
Jesus in their life and had reached the point where they confessed that they
genuinely wanted to leave their LGBTQI+ lifestyle.
In every case, I have found that they were confused and hurt people. Some of them eventually got free from their
lifestyle, became heterosexual and are now happily married. The ones who did not get free and did not
follow Jesus were the ones who, at the end of the day and after lots of
discussion, did not really want to let go of their lifestyle.
It does no
good to simply go out and tell people that you do not agree with their
lifestyle and choices and fight a verbal war with them.
This simply makes them feel rejected and makes your own job of
witnessing to them even harder. It
builds walls, not bridges. No, people
need the deep grace and love of God expressed and freely offered to them in the
gospel. God loves ALL people regardless
of the state their lives are in. Jesus
came to free people from any and all kinds of brokenness and expressions of
human fallenness. And he will do this and
redeem them into the life of his kingdom when they truly come to him with all
of their hearts and give their lives to him.
Then, God will be able to restore their lives to the pattern he
originally intended. God cares about us
in our entire being: from the top of our head to the soles of our feet, all the
way round and everything in-between. He
wants to minister his transforming life and power into every part of our lives
(including the sexual part of our lives) and thereby heal our brokenness. He wants us to be able to live freely in his
love and blessing as he originally intended.
So as you go
through your teenage years and face the issue of handling your own sexual
desires and sexuality, and as you accept and walk with Christ, God will give you
his Holy Spirit within you, and it is this life and power within you that can
give you the strength and grace you need to overcome any desires to express your
sexuality in ways which are inappropriate or harmful to either yourselves or
others. He can give you the grace to
handle yourself in a way which is self-controlled and which protects yourself,
honours God and honours other people, and which keeps you free to become all
that God intends for you to become (cf. 1 Cor. ch.6).
[1] Townsend, C. Gender:
Where Next?, Cambridge Papers, Volume 25, Number 4, December 2016.
[2] See “Gender Neutral Police - ‘Expectant Mothers’ Considered Offensive”
at http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=996#SJF1FSuLcOhY7vgk.99, accessed 02.2017.
[3] A transgender man (or, a transman) is a person who was assigned female at birth and whose gender has become
male through surgical and hormonal treatments.
Some of these people keep their internal female reproductive
organs. By discontinuing their levels of
testosterone intake for a period of time, they can still become pregnant. Such people remain genetically female, of
course; their chromosome pattern is
still XX rather than XY.
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