By William Sierichs Jr.

 

Despite Christianity’s routine claim that, at its heart, it’s all about some abstract concept of love, Christians historically were among the worst real-world enemies of that powerful, universal emotion.

The struggle over gay marriage is simply one facet of an old, vicious, theocratic tyranny. Christians have always obsessed over controlling who should be allowed to love and/or marry whom. Driven by theological paranoia and authoritarianism, combined with an often-intense misogyny that is unfortunately not specific to it, Christianity has kept countless millions of potential lovers separated or has forced them to engage in illicit love.

The issue of equal rights for gays, especially for the many legal benefits of marriage, is a church-state separation battle. The predominant source of anti-homosexual discrimination in law and policy in the United States is Christian, Bible-based bigotry. While members of other religions in the U.S. also can be anti-gay, the major enemy is Christianity.

One consequence is that there is no secular basis for any government discrimination against homosexuals. The laws and state constitutional articles prohibiting gay marriage, equal government treatment of gays, bans on gays in the military, etc. turn purely religious prejudice into public policy, thus are a plain violation of the First Amendment. Putting religious bigotry into the law is absolutely an establishment of religion. No credible secular argument has ever been put forward against equal rights for gays. The claim that homosexuality is “unnatural,” for example, is so much hogwash, as biologists have observed homosexual conduct in many animal species. Some people simply are attracted to members of the same sex, and that is natural for them.

Also, foes often loudly denounce claims that the gay-rights movement is comparable to the civil-rights movement. In fact, the only or primary source of opposition to equal rights for blacks, women and gays in the U.S. has been/is Christianity, so all movements for equal rights for these groups share a common enemy and therefore a deep connection that makes them functionally identical. Anyone who supports equal rights for black Americans must, to be consistent, support equal rights for women and gays.

This four-part article will examine how Christianity has been relentlessly bigoted on the whole issue of marriage and sexuality, and the damage such prejudice has and still causes. Long before the gay marriage struggle broke out, Christians were using government powers to restrict who could marry or have sex with whom, solely from theology- and Bible-based beliefs. Thus, as late as 1930, a pope could declare that no marriages were valid outside of the Roman Catholic Church, and could compare the “haphazard unions” of Protestants and non-Christians to the “union of animals,” while demanding that governments enforce his church’s strictures on everyone.

Christian attitudes toward marriage/sex are deeply intertwined with its founding worldview that an evil supernatural power is constantly trying to corrupt Christians, primarily by using non-Christians and “heretics” as its foot-soldiers to lure or mislead the purified believers into eternal damnation. Thus, contact with pagans, Jews or “heretics” put a Christian at risk of angering God. Furthermore, the Church, as defined by the majority of clergy, backed by government violence when possible, needed to ensure that only the majority’s doctrines were taught, to prevent dissenters from leading Christians astray. The demand for blind obedience to and absolute authority for the Church leadership derives from this set of beliefs.

One aspect of this is the claim that marriage exists solely in a Christian context, having been created as a sacrament by their god, so only Christian marriages are valid. In reality, marriage is very ancient and worldwide, although in different forms in various societies.

Christianity’s attitude to sexuality was also influenced by the Bible’s misogyny. The Jewish scriptures treated women as inferior to men. The Christian scriptures contain passages ordering women to be obedient and subordinate to men. More significantly, in 1 Cor. 7, Paul basically condemned sex and marriage, justifying the latter only as the lesser evil for people who could not control themselves. Thus he told the unmarried and widows, “I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” He did, however, counsel Christians married to non-Christians to remain married in the hopes that the believer might “save” the nonbeliever, reflecting the belief in non-Christians’ moral and spiritual inferiority. This hostility toward a basic human and social need skews Christian attitudes, such as in the demand that Catholic priests be celibate, even if numerous sex scandals show they rarely are.

In the 4th century, the theologian Augustine of Hippo drew together various strands of Christian thinking to conclude that sexual passion existed as a consequence of the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Apparently, they were supposed to have had sex without lust before they “sinned” and developed “rebellious” parts they could not control.

Consequently, Christianity has treated sexually-active people as too impure for certain religious duties and over time came to bar them from the priesthood in Catholicism. Anti-fornication laws in the U.S., which prohibited singles from having sex, reflect this obsession. In Colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut, Puritans earned their reputations as pious prudes by punishing premarital sex and pregnancy. Massachusetts even banned short-sleeved shirts, “whereby the nakedness of the arme may bee discovered.” In Connecticut, where the laws were openly based upon Leviticus, bestiality, sodomy/homosexuality and adultery all carried the death penalty. Even an animal used in bestiality was to be killed as well, as if it were at fault. The laws complained of “seuerall other wayes of vncleanes and lasiuious caridges practised among vs …” and ordered “seuere and sharpe punishment” such as fines, imprisonment or corporal punishment.

So Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter” about his Puritan ancestors’ hostility to sexuality and its tragic consequences; while “banned in Boston” was practically a guarantee that a racy story (often quite tame by modern standards) would get national attention. The movie industry’s code of censorship, developed in the 1930s and later applied to television, was forced on it by Christian clergy, acting through the “Legion of Decency.” In its early years, television could not show even married couples sleeping in the same bed!

Also, Christianity ultimately drew its marriage theology from Jewish scripture, because in supersessionist theology, Christians were the “New Israel” or “New Jews.” Christians claimed that they had a “New Covenant/Testament” with the god of Israel, who was fed up with Jews’ alleged inability to obey its laws. Christians were relieved of some Jewish obligations, such as circumcision and dietary rules, but were required to obey other scriptural laws.

So Christians based their marriage/sex ideas on such passages as Gen. 24:3, Num. 25:1-9, Ezra 9:12 and Neh. 10:30, which banned marriage/sex with anyone outside of the people of Israel. Christians interpreted these as banning marriage/sex with non-Christians, and that included Christian dissenters (“heretics”) who were really servants of Satan.

Num. 25:1-9, in which the high god of Israel purportedly sent a plague that killed 24,000 Israelites because some Israelite men had Moabite lovers, has had particularly nasty modern consequences. Yahweh orders the murder of the offenders, so an Israelite, Phinehas, stabs an Israelite and his Midianite lover to death, which leads Yahweh to make Phinehas and his male descendants priests. This paranoid story, combined with other tales of divine wrath at disobedience and divine edicts to kill apostates, drove Christians to relentless bigotry, discrimination and violence against non-Christians and “heretics.” Legal restrictions on love, sex and marriage were one aspect of this worldview.

As a side note, the modern, Christianity-based, Militia movement, has adopted the “Phineas (sic) Priesthood” idea that Militia members have a right and duty to kill anyone they believe is violating God’s laws (also based on Ps. 106:28-31). Several murders of U.S. Jews, blacks and other dark-skinned peoples have been tied to the Phineas Priesthood belief among Militia members, who also routinely espouse bigotry against “mixed” marriages of Christians with non-Christians and white with black Americans.

Christian paranoia and bigotry are, above all, based upon the sayings of the almost-certainly fictional figure of Jesus, who purportedly said, “He who is not with me is against me” (Mt. 12:30) and repeatedly declared that anyone not saved/purified through him would be tortured in a lake of fire for all eternity, while also declaring himself a king at a time when that was considered a claim to absolute power.

Paul criticized Christians who associated too closely with non-Christians, who supposedly worshiped demons. In 1 Cor. 10:20-21, for example, says: “I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.” In 2 Cor. 6:14, Paul orders Christians to avoid unbelievers. Titus 3:10 has Paul declare that Christians should admonish dissenters, and if they fail to listen, “have nothing more to do with anyone who causes divisions.” That’s because Satan could disguise himself as “an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14), so a dissenter/heretic would lead Christians into damnation. History shows that these statements attributed to Jesus and Paul, accurately or not, dominated Christian views of non-Christians far more than any “love your enemies” aphorisms.

For this reason, the prominent, 2nd-3rd-century theologian Tertullian denounced marriages to pagans, especially by Christian women, in his “Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage.” He did not argue from the Jewish scriptural laws, but rather from Paul’s idea that association with demon-worshipers was corrupting, especially for women, because in the Roman era, a wife was supposed to obey and support her husband, which led to serious moral consequences if he was a Satan-dominated pagan and she was a purified Christian.

He argued this caused “injuries which affect not just the body; they do serious harm to the soul as well. For who could doubt that faith is weakened day by day through contact with a pagan? Evil conversations corrupt good manners: how much more will uninterrupted familiarity under the same roof do so? Every Christian woman is obliged to obey the will of God. Yet how can she serve two masters, the Lord and her husband, especially when her husband is a pagan? If she obeys a pagan, her conduct will be pagan.” It got worse: “Her duties to the Lord she certainly cannot fulfill according to the demands of ecclesiastical discipline, since she has by her side a servant of Satan who will act as an agent of his master in obstructing the performance of Christian duties and devotions.” He hammered this theme: “Moreover the handmaid of God is kept constantly engaged in duties foreign to her calling. She is occupied in them on all the holidays of demons. … She who served the saints in days gone by will minister to sinners now, and not infrequently. Will she not see in this a sentence of damnation passed upon herself before the time …” Even the music she heard would be “some song which sounds in the throat of the devil himself.” Tertullian insisted, “Whatever does not please the Lord, most certainly displeases Him and is most certainly the work of the Evil One.”

When Christians had the power, they acted in two ways to control marriages. First, they enacted direct bans — enforced by governments when possible — on “mixed” marriages with “wrong” Christians or with non-Christians. Second, they also often suppressed all dissent, so that only the “right” Christians lived in a society, making “mixed” marriages impossible. The Roman Catholic Church used both methods, holding to the first one with all means available whenever it lacked legal power to suppress non-Catholics. Protestants, in their diversity, seem to have been less concerned about “mixed marriages,” with one major exception, but quite a few Protestant states suppressed Christian minorities, so that “mixed” marriages were impossible. The exception was the ban on any marriages between Christians and dark-skinned pagans in England’s American colonies, a significant basis of the later concept of racism.

In 339, the Christian Roman Emperor Constantine II declared that Jews were leading women into their “fellowship of turpitude” and “deeds of disgrace,” which he banned under penalty of death. A footnote to a translation said the “fellowship” could mean marriage or various types of legal contacts, including religious associations.

In 388, the Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered: “No Jew shall receive a Christian woman in marriage, nor shall a Christian man contract a marriage with a Jewish woman. … the crime of this misdeed shall be considered as the equivalent of adultery, and freedom to bring accusation shall be granted also to the voices of the public.” The penalties for adultery were harsh; and this law allowed anyone to make an accusation.

This ban on marriage to “impure” Jews showed up repeatedly across the centuries, and was the underlying reason many European Christians in the 1930s and 1940s considered a convert still Jewish if he or she had Jewish parents; some extended the “pollution” to having two Jewish grandparents, even if the parents were Christians or converts. The “impurity” of even a little bit of Jewish blood was enough to send people to the gas chambers. Here you can draw a direct line from Jesus, Paul, Tertullian, Theodosius and other Christian leaders to the Holocaust and 20th-century Christians such as Adolf Hitler.

Because women were considered to be “weaker” than men and therefore more easily seduced into spiritual error, protecting women from “bad influences” was important, explaining the clergy’s obsession with blocking marriages to non-Christians. Ironically, a purported critic of Christianity, the pagan Caecilius, credited Christianity’s spread in part to credulous women who fell for Christian lies. Likewise, the Christian scriptures warned against “corrupt” peoples to be avoided, including: “For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:6-7). Some 15 centuries later, the Puritan leader John Winthrop claimed that the Antinomian controversy of the 1630s was widespread in part because the Christian dissenters “commonly laboured to worke first upon women, being (as they conceived) the weaker to resist, the more flexible, tender and ready to yeeld: and if once they could winde in them, they hoped by them, as by an Eve, to catch their husbands also, which indeed often proved too true amongst us there.”

In Scotland in the 1660s, the earl of Rothes tried to suppress unauthorized services (“conventicles”) led by clergy ousted from their churches after the restoration of King Charles II. Rothes waxed wroth that: “these rogues stir up the women so as they are worse than devils. Yea, I dare say if it were not for the women we should have little trouble with conventicles or such kind of stuff. But there are such a foolish generation of people in this country who are so influenced with their fanatic wives as I think will bring ruin upon them.”

At the same time, women were a threat to men because of their seductive power (i.e., the myth of Adam and Eve). For example, in 1485 in Innsbruck, inquisitor Henry Institoris launched a witch hunt that yielded 50 suspects. He later narrowed this list to seven and began interrogations. “At the beginning of the interrogation he posed questions of a personal character, pertaining to the sexual lives of the accused. From his viewpoint these questions were vital to the trial, since he maintained that witches were generally women who had been promiscuous from youth, and a history of sexual laxity would presumably support the charge of witchcraft,” historian Richard Kieckhefer explains. Institoris was the infamous co-author of the “Malleus Maleficarum,” an extremely misogynistic manual for “identifying” and interrogating (with extreme torture) suspected witches. While men could be suspected of being witches, the majority of witch-hunt victims were women.

So women and sexuality both were threats to Christianity, explaining why control of women, sex and marriage alike were deemed vital to the movement’s survival. But marriage could also be used as a weapon for Christianity.

In 527, the Emperor Justin ordered: “… that differences of opinion frequently arise between Orthodox and non-Orthodox parents, when a father or a mother wants to bring their common children to the faith of the Orthodox but the other parent opposes it, we decree that the opinion of the parent that leads the children to the Orthodox faith is the stronger and certainly the more predominant.” It ordered parents of nonorthodox faith to financially support children who became orthodox, including dowries for daughters and prenuptial gifts to sons. A similar decree in 527 or 528 ordered that orthodox children were not to have their inheritances reduced by parents who were “heretics,” Jews or Samaritans. So here a Christian ruler discriminates against Christian dissenters, as well as non-Christians, within a mixed marriage.

In the late 5th century in Arabia, Archbishop Gregentius, in the Himyarite kingdom, reportedly debated Herban, a spokesman for the Jewish community. Jesus supposedly committed a miracle that led the king and archbishop to order all Jews in the kingdom baptized, with a ban on unbaptized Jews marrying.

A 589 law by Visigothic Spainish King Recared prohibited marriages between Jewish men and Christian women, and ordered the children of any such unions to be baptized as Christians. This ban was repeated by the Visigothic King Sisebut (612-621).

In 633, the Fourth Council of Toledo, Spain, issued a canon, number 60, saying that baptized children of Jews were to be taken from their parents and brought up by Christians; and the children of any Jewish-Christian marriage were to be brought up as Christians. It also decreed that a Jewish man could not have a Christian wife unless he converted.

To be continued