What Harm Can It Do to Study the Issue?
Alan P. Medinger on Homosexuality
Francis Osgood and several fellow clergy, along with several leading laymen, approached the Reverend Hugh Benchley, the head of their denomination, with a proposal. They believed that the church should study whether or not it would be appropriate for their denomination to cut off all assistance to the poor and needy. They threw out a few reasons having to do with the modern economy—jobs were available for everyone—and the fact that some modern studies showed how much people are damaged psychologically by receiving charity, and they offered a few references to Scripture, including the one that said if you didn’t work, you shouldn’t eat.
Benchley was shocked. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “We are not going to cut off all of our programs for the poor and needy.” “No, no,” cried Osgood. “I am not saying we should cut them off, just that we should study the subject. After all, how can we know whether or not we should do this if we don’t discuss it? We have new economic and psychological understanding now—knowledge that wasn’t available 2,000 years ago. We really don’t know what God is saying about charity. Let’s just keep an open mind and enter into dialogue about it. Appoint a commission of experts in the field and let’s see what they come up with. What harm can it do?”
If there was anything Benchley feared it was appearing narrow-minded and not open to new things. The idea sounded crazy to him, but he could not muster up any reason to oppose appointing such a commission that would not make him appear closed-minded and reactionary. And after all, Osgood and his colleagues were among the best-known free thinkers in the church—the kind of people who were always grabbing media attention.
So Benchley agreed to appoint the commission to study Christian charity. That was 20 years ago. The first commission included Osgood and several of his friends, along with some church traditionalists and, as you would expect, it was unable to reach any kind of consensus. So another commission was appointed, and then another and another. Regional groups were appointed to study the subject, and eventually the church asked every local parish to enter into dialogue on it.
Some profound changes happened in the church during those 20 years. Somehow, an idea that at first had seemed absurd—abolishing Christian charity—gradually became an option, something to be considered. At the prompting of their leaders, many laymen started to question certain Scripture passages such as the one in which Jesus said that whenever we did it to one of the least of these. . . . Perhaps they shouldn’t take the Bible so literally. After all, they weren’t fundamentalists, were they?
During this process, starting slowly, but with increasing frequency, the church’s soup kitchens and homeless shelters started closing down. Programs for the physically handicapped and for the addicted ceased operations. While one faction in the church was fighting for their closure, another fought as strenuously to keep them open, but the great mass of people in the denomination—those in the middle—were just confused by it all and gradually lost any enthusiasm for keeping programs open. Making matters worse for the advocates of Christian charity, the people who ran the soup kitchens, the shelters, and the support groups found all of their time being taken fighting out the battles on the commissions, and their ministries floundered.
Eventually, Osgood and his group prevailed. Many of the charity-minded people couldn’t take it any longer and had left the denomination. Others were worn out and simply capitulated.
An absurd story? Of course. Realistic? Absolutely.
Some years ago people started to come before the mainline denominations to suggest that we ought to question and to study some of our most fundamental beliefs about morality, about marriage, and about ordination. Of course they did not word their proposals this way; they phrased their suggestion much as Osgood did his. They maintained that they merely wanted open discussion and inquiry. But they were lying; their agenda had already been clearly set: to change the church’s teaching on human sexuality.
These factions, like Osgood’s, did not come with a strong case in support of their proposals but merely offered some suggestions that might cause anyone who prided himself with having an open mind to feel he had to agree to study the matter. In most of the mainline denominations, there were Benchleys who would ride with any current tide and who were beset with an almost pathological need to appear “reasonable.” And so most of the mainline denominations embarked on their decades-long quest to “study” human sexuality—especially homosexuality.
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more on sex from the online archives
27.3—May/June 2014
Facts versus Stereotypes About Love & Marriage in the Land of the Free by Allan C. Carlson
27.6—Nov/Dec 2014
Tales of Forbidden Stereotypes
Real-Life Men & Women & the Tragic Loss of Human Comedy by Anthony Esolen
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
more from the online archives
16.5—June 2003
on the Importance of Fathers to Churchgoing by Robbie Low
29.3—May/June 2016
Our Choice Is Obedience or Jesus as Anti-Christ by Anthony Esolen
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