Suffer little children

Forget who wins. Innocent bystanders always lose the war.

Within the heart of every gay kid raised in a non-affirming Christian church, there exists an inescapable conflict. A child who knows or feels he might be gay and who is told that homosexuality is a sin faces the irreconcilable dilemma of having to choose between being himself and being accepted by his community.

The Christian Reformed Church decided last year at its annual synod not only that homosexuality in all its forms is a sin, but also that to believe otherwise is contrary to the Church’s confessions. This decision—highly controversial and far from unanimous—has led both the traditional and progressive believers to double down over the past year on their positions. In preparation for this year’s synod, those who triumphed last year in ‘confessionalizing’ the sinfulness of homosexuality will ask synod to explore how soon the dissenting church officers can be punished and expelled. Meanwhile, those who still disagree with last year’s decision will move that that decision be nullified or that the consequences for not agreeing to it be lightened. Last year’s synod was tense and teary. This year’s meeting is shaping up to be downright acrimonious.

With this year’s June meeting (read: confrontation) just around the corner, the ammunition is slowly being assembled. The opposing factions have cocked back the levers of their biblically-inspired catapults. Each side is sure to have prepared—through ‘prayerful’ consideration and the assemblage of whatever scripture supports their case—for the tough battle that Synod 2023 promises to be.  All of which is to be expected, for such is the normal behavior of so-called grownups who seek to define a single agenda for a group of humans with opposing and irreconcilable perspectives of what God wants, what scripture says, who we are, and what sin is.

I am a gay man and was raised in the Christian Reformed Church. None of the above surprises me. After all, I know the Church struggled at various times with whether card-playing was evil, whether hymns violated our strict scriptural diet of sola scriptura, and whether women should be allowed to preach. Whether we queers can be Christians too is merely the conundrum du jour—something I’m sure we’ll all come to terms with, eventually. But perhaps not before another division of the Body of Christ.

What alarms me, though, is that I know that the current conflict’s greatest tragedy will be its effect on children. Nestled in one or another pew of every sanctuary is a child struggling to reconcile her desire—nay, her need—to be the person God created with the pressure she feels from her congregation not to be a person that they and God disapprove of. This child is too young to think critically, too young to know that not everything she’s told is correct. This child—who like all kids will believe what she hears—will face a thousand formative and traumatic moments in which her developing psyche will be torn between whether to indulge her sexuality and waive her right to eternal life, or whether to repress her sexuality in order not to be a) ostracized by her congregation and b) sentenced by God to eternal damnation. There is a reason that gay people raised in Christianity have higher rates of mental illness and die more often by suicide than those raised by non-believers. It’s impossible to thrive if one believes oneself to be faulty and unworthy and if one allows himself to be convinced that his innate and natural desires are perverted, disgusting, and sinful. A lifetime of doubt, guilt, and shame will have been this gay child’s unfortunate birthright.

“Suffer little children,” Jesus said. (‘Suffer’ as in allow, not torture.) Let the children come to him, “for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.”

Such as these. Such as what, Jesus? Such as whom? The little? The young? The innocent? The gullible? The immature? The blindly enthusiastic?

I learned recently that children’s minds are different from those of adults. Kids have different brainwaves, even. An adult perceives the world in order to discern, to distinguish, to judge. We grownups evaluate our surroundings in order to navigate our way through them. We sense and think and decide, because there is always something we need to accomplish. A child, on the other hand, has little experience with which to inform her evaluation of a present sensation.  For young children, every sensation is a new and transfixing opportunity—not to gather data to inform a decision, but to merely absorb the awesome and wondrous experience of whatever can be seen, felt, heard, or tasted. For children, the experience is achievement enough.

Such as those.

I am sure that Jesus meant we should open our arms, our communities, our conversations, our fellowship, and our hearts to children. I believe he also meant that the kingdom belongs to the enthusiastic, to the joyful. To those who are prone to amazement. To those who possess a sheer and uncomplicated sense of wonder and awe.

Perhaps Jesus was throwing shade at the disciples and on all of us grown-ups who, unnerved by the things we cannot know, have given up on enthusiasm and wonder, choosing instead to focus harder on our futile attempts at understanding absolutely everything.  Perhaps Jesus was reminding us that rationality and reason, the hallmarks of maturity and pinnacle of human mental capacity, are not as important to kingdom citizenship as we might believe.

A denomination, as a faith community, should serve as an arena for spiritual seeking and development. It should serve as a forum for connection, communion, and fellowship with other people, especially other believers. It should provide an environment in which its members can do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. Could the Christian Reformed Church be described this way?

From the myriad ways in which they might be inspired to heed Christ’s command that we love him fully and our neighbors as ourselves, a slim majority within the CRC have over the past few years fixed their attention and effort on one single issue: that of the inclusion (read: exclusion) of the queer community in (/from) the Church.

(Other issues, such as the unacceptability of divorce, happen to be spelled out in scripture much more clearly. But nobody suggests an ideologic cleansing of the Church’s leadership over any of those.)

Scripture is ancient; it’s unsurprising that we should struggle to apply it to today’s culture. But the laser focus on this issue and the suggestion to expel the members of the Body who understand God differently indicate to me that No, the goal is not to Abide, but rather to amputate. Neither this end nor the means employed to achieve it smack even slightly of the flavors of any of the fruits of the Spirit.  Is the CRC really providing a milieu for fellowship and a platform for spiritual development? Or has the CRC become a cage in which adults are distressed and children traumatized?

June is around the corner. Synod will be here before we know it. I see the coming war. I see the troops, angling artillery carefully into position. Well-meaning Christians, endeavoring nobly to put on the full armor of God, hoist to their shoulders the bazookas of ‘no peace without understanding’. 

I don’t know who will win this fight. But I know who will lose. I know that when the triggers are pulled, a thousand shards of shame-laced shrapnel will lodge themselves deep in the minds and hearts of another generation of queer Christian (Reformed) children. Even as they notice that some adults fight for their inclusion, queer kids raised amidst this controversy will hear the derision. They may blame themselves for causing this war and for its inevitable fallout. The seeds of guilt and shame planted in children’s hearts during these formative years will germinate uncontrollably over the coming decades. The children, your children—children such as these—will not feel welcomed to Christ’s lap nor surrounded by love, whether God’s or that of his followers. Children such as these will be deprived of the awe and wonder that is intended for them. Children such as these—collateral damage in their parents’ war—will struggle forever to believe they can be themselves and still be loved by God.