Martin Henry
CHRISTIANITY WAS BORN into a first century Graeco-Roman world very comfortable with homosexuality. The Faith is now forced to live in a 21st century post-Christian world equally comfortable with homosexuality. The anti-homosexual battles being fought here and there are really rearguard battles. The ground has already substantially shifted in what used to be the 'Christian West'. And the fighting is on two fronts: against secular liberalism on the one hand, and against Christian liberalism on the other.
Ironically, when Christian lawyers and other righteously indignant believers in Jamaica criticise the new Charter of Rights as a door to the legitimisation of homosexuality and appeal to the old Christian-based legal code, they are mounting their struggle in a system whose legal, political and religious head is Her Majesty the Queen who, as head of the Church of England, already has a homosexual bishop among her clergy! And the home country is already far ahead in the legal recognition of same sex unions.
In the world of the ancient Middle East, from which so much of our philosophies of life and our foundations for law and society have come, it was only the Hebrew people and their peculiar One-God, Yahweh, who consistently railed against homosexuality and other sexual 'abominations'. At the time a young Galilean Rabbi launched a new religion out of Judaism, Greek Hellenistic culture and ideas, dating from the conquests of Alexander 300 years before, ruled the region alongside Roman law, politics and military power.
'BOY LOVE'
Pederasty, 'boy love', the relationship between an older male and a young man from middle teens to about twenty, was an institution in Greek life. It was an important element in civil life, the military, philosophy and the arts.
Roman law accepted homosexuality among male citizens as long as they played the active role in sexual relations with slaves. For any freeborn Roman to be penetrated, he would be legally penalised and socially disgraced.
When Paul roamed the Mediterranean world as the key leader in establishing the Christian Church and in writing its theology, Greek thought and Roman law ruled. In major cities like Ephesus and Corinth to whose congregation Paul addressed epistles, temples kept both male and female temple prostitutes.
It was in this cultural mileu, with Christianity very much a minority upstart religion, that Paul penned his scathing anti-homosexual polemic to the Church at the headquarters of sin and empire [Romans 1: 16 - 32] " ... Men turned aside from natural relations to women and are set ablaze with lust for one another committing shameful acts with men and suffering in their own bodies and personalities the inevitable consequences and penalty of their wrongdoing..." The kind of challenge to the powers that be which eventually cost him his head.
VERY LEGAL FOUNDATIONS
These pesky Christians, challenging the very legal and cultural foundations of an entire world order in the name of a new religion hatched at the troublesome periphery of empire, were soon to be thrown to lions, burnt at the stake, covered in pitch and used as torches in Caesar's gardens, sewn in wild animal skins to be ripped apart by hunting dogs, tortured and killed in ways unimaginably horrible.
But then all that changed after Emperor Constantine embraced the Faith in 321 AD. Roman law was Christianised; and Christian doctrine was romanised. The established Church has ever since felt it a right and a duty to control the legal code and the morals of society; and its adherents have developed a distinct distaste to be lion food or imperial garden torches.
But in the most traditionally 'Christian' of places the old paganism, with its own sexual, moral and legal codes, is reasserting itself with a vengeance, aided and abetted by a Church which has too often abandoned the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the wisdom of this world.
Historically, the Reformed Churches, although nowadays not given enough of the credit due, were in the forefront of the struggles against slavery, for human rights, civil rights, and for democracy. When, in a rights conscious age, homosexual rights are pre-sented as a continuation of these rights struggles, the argument is virtually irresistible on social, legal, political and philosophical grounds alone. And the moral/religious ground has been substantially cut away with the help of 'Christian' hands. That's where we are today - back to the first century AD. In one of Jesus' potent parables, while men slept an enemy sowed tares among the wheat.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
