Did Andrew Wilson’s parody misrepresent Matthew Vines?
Last week Andrew Wilson posted a brilliant and (in many minds) effective satire called “The Case for Idolatry.” The piece parodied many of the arguments used by progressive evangelicals advocating for a departure from traditional Christian teaching about homosexuality. Wilson opened his piece this way:
For many years, I was taught that idolatry was sinful. As a good Christian, I fought the desire to commit idolatry, and repented when I got it wrong. But the desire to worship idols never went away.
I wanted it to, but it didn’t.
So it has been such a blessing to discover that worshipping one God, and him alone, isn’t for everyone. There are thousands of Christians out there who have found faithful, loving ways of expressing worship both to God and to idols, without compromising either their faith or their view of Scripture.
Matthew Vines, the author of God and the Gay Christian, disagrees. In fact, he disagrees so much that he thinks Wilson is “profoundly disrespectful and degrading to LGBT people,” and that his “mockery isn’t Christ-like.”
https://twitter.com/VinesMatthew/status/532997646664105985
https://twitter.com/VinesMatthew/status/533004239157886976
Vines went further, saying that the piece was a “caricature” that didn’t accurately represent the arguments he has made in God and the Gay Christian.
https://twitter.com/VinesMatthew/status/533003831928705024
Now, Vines is welcome to believe that Wilson is mean and hates LGBT people and wants to demean them. That seems to be an uncharitable and demonstrably false claim, but Vines is entitled to that view. What Vines isn’t welcome to, however, is the statement that Wilson’s satire misrepresents Vines’s arguments. He isn’t welcome to that opinion for one very simple reason: He’s factually wrong.
Vines complains that Wilson is not qualified to write such a piece because he hasn’t read God and the Gay Christian. That’s a dubious claim at best, but let’s roll with it. As it happens, yours truly has in fact read and owns a copy of Vines’s book. Taking a very brief foray into the depths of God and the Gay Christian reveals almost immediately that Wilson’s satire was indeed accurate.
Before I dive into the quotes, a couple comments about parody are in order. The point of parody is not to produce a point-by-point rebuttal of someone’s claims. Instead of explicitly refuting the arguments of LGBT-affirming evangelicals, Wilson’s parody intends to expose the fragile underlying logical framework of LGBT-affirming rhetoric. If an absurd claim (in this case, that open idolatry is consistent with Christian belief and practice) can be supported using the same logical progression used by LGBT-affirming evangelicals like Vines, it is fair to question whether that logical progression is valid.
Secondly, let’s get the elephant out of the room: Yes, homosexuality and idolatry are different things that require particular responses. To understand Wilson’s piece we have to grasp what parody is: A genre that illustrates rather than explicates. Wilson is not saying that idolatry and homosexuality are basically interchangeable and whatever can be said of the one can be said of the other (at least, I don’t read him as saying that). The point of using “idolatry” in this case is that it is a practice that both Wilson and Vines would agree is sinful for essentially the same reasons (testimony of Scripture). If we agree with Wilson about the sinfulness of idolatry, and we find that applying the language of God and the Gay Christian to idolatry creates an argument very similar to what we have heard from Vines, we should pause and ask if Vines is using a valid theological approach.
Without further ado, let’s compare passages from Wilson’s piece to those from Vines’s book, and see if the two sound alike:
#1. Wilson writes:
But from childhood until today, my heart has been drawn to idolatry. In fact, if I’m honest, one of the defining features of my identity has been my desire to put something else – popularity, money, influence, sex, success – in place of God.
That’s just who I am.
The integration of idolatry into a person’s fundamental, unchangeable identity is obviously parodical to us because we identify the act of idolatry as necessarily sinful. Idolatry, we would say, is surely something we are drawn to in our sinful state, but nowhere does Scripture endorse our idolatrous feelings based on their integration into our identities.
This parody works because it is exactly the approach to sexuality that Vines exhibits in God and the Gay Christian. On page 5, Vines begins his personal narrative with two things: The realization that he is gay, and the effort he makes afterwards to convert his parents to his theology. At no point in God and the Gay Christian does Vines record a sort of questioning of his own feelings. He knows he is gay and has known for a long time. It’s who he is. On page 8, Vines says:
My parents nurtured a faith in Jesus in me and my sister, give us a moral and spiritual anchor as we grew up. Just as importantly, Mom and Dad lived out their faith in loving and authentic ways, daily confirming for us the value of placing Christ at the center of our lives. So even though I was now facing up to the fact of my sexual orientation, my faith in God was not in jeopardy. (emphasis added)
Vines refers to his “faith” in God and the “fact” of his sexual orientation. His feelings and desires are absolute and settled, and not once does he record any challenge to them. It’s part of his identity, and that is an unquestionable tenet of his theology.
VERDICT: Parody is fair.
#2. Wilson writes:
So it has been such a blessing to discover that worshipping one God, and him alone, isn’t for everyone. There are thousands of Christians out there who have found faithful, loving ways of expressing worship both to God and to idols, without compromising either their faith or their view of Scripture. In recent years, I have finally summoned the courage to admit that I am one of them. Let me give you a few reasons why I believe that idolatry and Christianity are compatible.
Wilson parodies the arguments of affirming evangelicals by using the same kind of ethical pragmatism to talk about idolatry. Idolatry may sound like it is sinful, Wilson says, but actually there are many Christians who have discovered the love and joy of an idolatrous life. Wilson here intends to parody the approach used by many pro-homosexuality Christians: We should never condemn sexual behavior that is mutual, loving, and committed, no matter how much church teaching or Scripture might suggest otherwise.
Is this similar to what Vines does in God and the Gay Christian? Yes it is. For example:
But as I became more aware of same-sex relationships, I couldn’t understand why they were supposed to be sinful, or why the Bible apparently condemned them. With most sins, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint the damage they cause. Adultery violates a commitment to your spouse. Lust objectifies others. Gossip degrades people. But committed same-sex relationships didn’t fit this pattern. Not only were they not harmful to anyone, they were characterized by positive motives and traits instead, like faithfulness, commitment, mutual love, and self-sacrifice. (pg. 12)
Later on, Vines rips several biblical narratives out of their contexts in order to argue for an outcome-based metric of theology. His argument reaches a crescendo on pages 15 and 16: “Today, we are still responsible for testing our beliefs in light of their outcomes—a duty in line with Jesus’s teaching about trees and fruit.”
This is a particularly devastating parody by Wilson. It exposes the pandora’s box created by Vines’s theology of outcome. Because no earthly evidence of harm can be seen from either idolatry or homosexuality, the church should strongly reconsider its teachings on both. If people can bear the “good fruit” of faithfulness, love, mutuality and friendship while they are worshiping idols, then surely Jesus would have us encourage this good fruit, wouldn’t he?
VERDICT: Parody is fair.
#3. Wilson writes:
Firstly, the vast majority of references to idols and idolatry in the Bible come in the Old Testament – the same Old Testament that tells us we can’t eat shellfish or gather sticks on Saturdays. When advocates of monolatry eat bacon sandwiches and drive cars at the weekend, they indicate that we should move beyond Old Testament commandments in the new covenant, and rightly so.
To its credit, God and the Gay Christian isn’t this abrupt in dismissing the witness of the Old Testament. However, Wilson’s parody here is fair. On page 11, Vines writes:
Even become coming to terms with my sexual orientation, I had been studying the Bible’s references to same-sex behavior and discussing the issue with Christian friends. Some of what I learned seemed to undermine the traditional interpretation of those passages. For instance, Leviticus prohibits male same-sex relations, but it uses similar language to prohibit the eating of shellfish. And while Paul did describe same-sex relations as “unnatural,” he also wrote that for men to wear their hair long was contrary to “nature.” Yet Christians no longer regard eating shellfish or men having long hair as sinful. A more comprehensive exploration of Scripture was in order.
Vines continues this strategy later on. On page 83, he argues that since Christians don’t practice levirate marriage or see sexual intercourse during menstruation as sinful, it is unlikely that the sexual laws of the Old Testament should be seen as qualitatively more serious than the ceremonial laws. “All this is to say that not all Old Testament sexual norms carry over to Christians,” he concludes on page 84. Vines argument is again essentially pragmatic: Since Christians don’t practice laws B and C, the odds that law A is binding are pretty low.
VERDICT: Parody is fair.
#4 Wilson writes:
With all of these preliminary ideas in place, we can finally turn to Paul, who has sadly been used as a judgmental battering ram by monolaters for centuries. When we do, what immediately strikes us is that in the ultimate “clobber passage”, namely Romans 1, the problem isn’t really idol-worship at all! The problem, as Paul puts it, is not that people worship idols, but that they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (1:23). Paul isn’t talking about people who are idolatrous by nature. He is talking about people who were naturally worshippers of Israel’s God, and exchanged it for the worship of idols. What else could the word “exchange” here possibly mean?
Not only that, but none of his references apply to idolatry as we know it today: putting something above God in our affections. Paul, as a Hellenistic Roman citizen, simply would not have had a category for that kind of thing. In his world, idolatry meant physically bowing down to tribal or household deities – statues and images made of bronze or wood or stone – and as such, the worship of power or money or sex or popularity had nothing to do with his prohibitions…
In other words, when Paul talks about idolatry, he is not talking about the worship of idols as we know it today. As a Christ-follower, he would be just as horrified as Jesus if he saw the way his words have been twisted to exclude modern idolaters like me, and like many friends of mine. For centuries, the church has silenced the voice of idolaters (just like it has silenced the voice of slaves, and women), and it is about time we recognised that neither Jesus, nor Paul, had any problem with idolatry.
I have saved this passage for last because those who have read Vines’s book will recognize it most clearly here. Wilson’s parody employs a simple argument: The idolatry prohibited by the Bible is of such a particular kind that that the authors of the Bible merely intended to address a species of it that was common in biblical culture. Therefore, not only is the Bible indefinite about idolatrous actions, it cannot possibly be talking about what we are talking about when we mention idolatry today.
I am truly clueless how Vines can claim with a straight face that Wilson’s parody misrepresents God and the Gay Christian. Not only is this exactly the argument that Vines makes, it is the central assertion on which his thesis hangs. It’s so central that Vines asserts it in multiple locations, such as:
Page 43: “The understanding that homosexuality is a fixed sexual orientation is a recent development. Prior the twentieth century, Christians didn’t write about same-sex orientation, so we don’ thave longstanding church tradition to guide us in this matter.”
Page 103: “Gay people cannot chose to follow opposite-sex attractions, because they have no opposite-sex attractions to follow…So, some might ask, does that mean Paul was wrong and the Bible is in error? No. We have to remember: what Paul was describing is fundamentally different from what we are discussing.”
Page 114: “For Paul, same-sex desire did not characterize a small minority of people who were subject to special classification—and condemnation—on that basis. Rather, it represented an innate potential for excess within all of fallen humanity. When that potential was acted upon, it became “unnatural” in the sense that it subverted conventional, patriachial gender norms.”
Page 130: “The bottom line is this: The Bible doesn’t directly address the issue of same-sex orientation—or the expression of that orientation. While its six references to same-sex behavior are negative, the concept of same-sex behavior in the Bible is sexual excess, not sexual orientation.”
What makes Wilson’s parody effective is that it exposes the hermeneutical sleight-of-hand that Vines executes in order to make his point. How would Vines respond to Wilson’s parody? Given the fact that Vines has established in his discussion of homosexuality that the authors of Scripture wrote misleadingly about topics beyond their intellectual caliber, how could Vines object to an argument for idolatry based on the cultural distance between the idols of the biblical culture, and the ones of 21st century Western culture? On Vines’s own standards, he must prove—without using Scripture, since the authors were pre-modern—that idolatry is sinful even if it looks nothing like what the Bible prohibits.
VERDICT: Parody is fair.
As I mentioned at the outset, Wilson’s parody is not a comprehensive rebuttal to Vines or any other author’s arguments in favor of homosexuality. Rather, it simply uses the same arguments to create a reduction ad absurdum, in which something that is obviously wrong actually fits the theological framework created by Vines’s arguments. When falsity can be supported so well by a hermeneutical approach, the merits of that approach should be called into question.
Vines is welcome to his personal opinion on Wilson or others who disagree with him. He is not, however, entitled to falsely accuse anyone of misrepresenting him.
