(Not So) Divine Revelations

Trey Smith

There is an excellent article posted at AlterNet about Ryan Shattuck, a young man who grew up Mormon...and gay. He's still the latter, but not the former!

Near the end of the article, Shattuck states that he believes that a time will come, perhaps in his lifetime, when the Mormon Church will no longer consider homosexuality to be a sin. While I personally don't think it will happen that quickly, I do tend to agree that such a day will come. I think that there's a very good chance that, in another two or three generations, few conservative Christian churches even will see homosexuality as an issue.

One of the reasons that I think that more and more Christian churches openly will accept homosexuality and the "homosexual lifestyle" is bound up in earthly economics. As the general public becomes more accepting (as it continues to happen right now), churches need to consider the bottom line. A church after all is a business and businesses must generate a profit to keep the doors open.

When we get to the point that 75% or more of the general public readily accepts the notion of gay marriage, being on the other side of the equation could easily mean less members and fewer dollars for those churches that today campaign against anything homosexual. And so, for a majority of churches that fall into this category, a day will come when the leaders tell the followers of a divine revelation from the almighty that what use to be a major no-no now, somehow, is no longer taboo.

We've been down this same road in the US several times before. Back in the early to mid 1800s, it was accepted by the majority of Christian churches that slavery was ordained by God. Many churches, particularly those in the South, fought tooth-and-nail to uphold the divine right of godly white people to own (and abuse) those inferior black creatures.

Very few churches today would make that same claim. Somewhere along the line God himself must have had a change of heart and informed earthly leaders to change their tunes. The same thing happened when it came to women voting or working outside the home as well as interracial marriage.

I think it should be obvious that these sorts of positional changes were not due to divine revelations. Church leaders came to realize that being far out-of-step with popular public sentiment was a bad business strategy -- one that could sink a church or denomination's bottom line to the utter depths. So, to keep the money flowing in, they adapt to changing times by actively contradicting what they had previously spent generations saying was divinely incontrovertible.