Why Same Sex Marriage Might Just Be Good For Christians

Yep, thats right. Your eyes do not deceive you, that’s what the title says alright. Same sex marriage might just be what Christianity needs.

OK here’s whats going on.

It all started when I tuned in to Q&A recently, that shameful episode that pitted Fred Nile against three atheists and Bishop Gene Robinson, an openly gay Episcopal priest.

But its what happened a few days later that got me thinking. ABC RN hosted Gene Robinson and John Dickson talking about the whole gay marriage thing (no doubt a more robust dialogue than Q&A). I was reading through the report on it when something caught my attention.

According to the report, John Dickson maintains that “‘the sky will not fall in’ if gay marriage becomes law. But Dr Dickson believes a gay marriage bill would remind Christians that they are often countercultural in the literal rather than groovy sense, offering radical witness to eternal truths that have in some places and at some times been deeply unfashionable.

That struck me as a pretty telling summary and it raised the question for me: What if God means for us to lose the argument?

What if this is God using this issue to bring Christians back to something far more significant, deeper and more important?
Not to be hip or groovy, not to be ‘relevant’ or fashionably different, but to stand within society and articulate an alternative, sometimes prophetic viewpoint. God’s way of living. To be willing to stand out from the crowd when all of society – even some we call friends – are putting pressure on us to change.

Christianity has overall been a largely popular, widely followed faith for hundreds of years. But it didn’t start out that way, almost right from the start Christians got into trouble for their beliefs, their refusal to do what everyone else was doing. It was a faith pushed to the margins of society until the Roman Emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the Empire, thus making it popular, fashionable and the religion of choice if you wanted to get that better job, or be seen with the ‘in’ crowd. It moved from the margins to the centre.

Maybe Christianity has spent so long at the centre of society that we have become used to it, comfortable with it, dependent on it. We didn’t really have to be missional, no need for that when you are the religion of choice. Have we spent so long being at the centre that we have largely forgotten who we are and what we are meant to be?

And maybe that’s what this is really all about.

What if this is God’s way of calling us out of our infatuation with the fashionable, and away from our need for popularity and ‘acceptance’? What if this is God calling us out of comfort and popularity and into real, costly discipleship?

I’m not suggesting we give up being relevant, or speaking out on issues, or that we go back to wearing 3-piece suits and using only the King James Bible. I’m simply saying that Christianity is no longer popular, and maybe we just need to get over it. Some of our stances will be decidedly unpopular, and we shouldn’t be surprised by that. Our loyalties lie elsewhere.