Dear Rebecca:

Have you heard about The Nashville Statement? Here’s a taste:

WE AFFIRM that God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife, and is meant to signify the covenantlove between Christ and his bride the church.
WE DENY that God has designed marriage to be a homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous relationship. We also deny that marriage is a mere human contract rather than a covenant made before God.

WE AFFIRM that divinely ordained differences between male and female reflect God’s original creation design and are meant for human good and human flourishing.
WE DENY that such differences are a result of the Fall or are a tragedy to be overcome.

There’s more of this stuff, but you get the idea.

I never really want to tangle with people who express this stuff. Either you believe it or you don’t. I don’t. But I’m operating on different premises than these folks, and arguing with them would be like a German person and a French person debating, in their native languages, without use of a translator. You’ll get that there’s a difference of opinion, but not much way to bridge the gap.

But in a time when we’re led by a president who values women more as trophies than as individuals, who issues pardons that make it possible to oppress Latinos, who makes casual threats of nuclear war … to look at the country and decide that the real problem is that two men might love each other, or that a woman might try to be a soldier … strikes me as misguided. It’s a triumph of learned theology over lived experience.

It certainly doesn’t make me think a return to evangelicalism is in order for me.

Respectfully, Joel