Phil Robertson: It’s Not An “Issue,” It’s About People

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, then you ought to care about the pain of other people.  This is not a complicated truth, but it is, apparently, a truth that needs to be reiterated.  And I think that one of the sharpest barriers to caring about the pain of others is the simple inability to see that pain – to become so focused on ideas or philosophies or agendas that we lose sight of what matters most – the actual experiences of real, live human beings.  We need an empathetic imagination.  We need the ability to understand what life is like for other people, and to recognize how our own words or actions affect their life.  This has been illustrated dramatically by the Phil Robertson incident.

I have been disappointed in the way many Christians have responded to the situation; not because I disagree with their views, but because I see them failing to ask a simple question: what is it like for a gay or lesbian person to hear words like Robertson’s?  At the center of this controversy is a basic truth: Robertson’s words about homosexuality (and race) were hurtful to many people.  I beg you to note that this is open to debate.  Many issues related to this topic are open for debate.  Reasonably good and intelligent people can debate the rightness of homosexuality, the wisdom of allowing same-sex unions, the correct outworking of freedom of speech, and so on.  But that people were hurt by Robertson’s words is an objective fact.  You may think them it misguided of them to have been hurt, but even if you are correct, that does not un-hurt them.  And that means that behind all the talk about agendas and beliefs and worldviews there is a group of actual human beings who have experienced pain.  It is binding on us to be sensitive to that pain.

It seems that many Christians have gotten the idea that it doesn’t matter how mean you are, as long as you are telling the truth.  This is not the case.  Yes, there are times when unpleasant truths are bound to ruffle some feathers, but that is not a license to be a jerk.  If I see a 300 pound woman walking down the street and scream at her that she is fat, my words might be defensible as a statement of fact, but they are completely indefensible as the behavior of a moral human being.  If I backpedal and say that I was lovingly trying to warn her about the dangers of heart disease and type II diabetes, I am playing around with true medical facts, but I am still not acting like a morally responsible human being.  It doesn’t matter how right or wrong you are – we are all responsible for saying things in a way that does not hurt, if at all possible.

So it is here.  The central truth is that when people talk as Robertson did, other people get hurt.  Unfortunately, it is not only during the Duck Dynasty debacle that this truth gets ignored.  The same blindness to the reality that there are other people out there and it matters whether we hurt them is present whenever someone expresses frustration with “political correctness.”  I have thought for a long time that we would be well served to do away with the expression “politically correct,” because it so poorly describes why these things matter.  It’s pretty simple.  If words come out of your mouth, and those words are sexist, racist, bigoted, mocking, demeaning, or insensitive, and those words cause pain to someone, then you have not transgressed against politics, you have transgressed against another human being, someone with thoughts and feelings, someone made in the image of their Creator, someone for whom Christ died.  It is that person, not adherence to some arbitrary standard, that is the point.  A person who tells you not to make racist jokes is not comparable to a pedant who tells you not to end a sentence with a preposition.  We don’t need to be “politically correct,” we need to care about whether we hurt one another.  Why so many people find it surprising that others do, in fact, feel pain when their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or culture is mocked is something I really do not understand.

And lest we should think that kindness of speech is some modern affectation, let me point you to one of the strongest statements ever made by Jesus Christ: “Anyone who says to a brother or a sister ‘Raca,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin.  And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell” (Matthew 5:22).  Notice, again, that Jesus did not leave correctness as an excuse.  He did not say, “Don’t call your brother a fool, unless he did something stupid, in which case he demonstrably is a fool, so you are free to insult him.”  The rule is simple: do not use your words to hurt people.  Period.

But let’s get back to the Phil Robertson thing.  I have been using the word “pain” a lot, and I want to say that is exactly the word I meant to use.  I was not exaggerating.  Friends, there are gay and lesbian teenagers who have killed themselves over the things said to them by parents, by peers, by bullies, and – I am sorry to say – by ministers.  When we talk about the pain experienced by the LGBT community, we are not talking about people who are merely “offended,” as someone is offended by a four-letter word at a dinner party.  We are talking about real, serious,  even life or death emotional trauma.  This is the pain that we must see.  I don’t have a problem with Christians ardently believing that homosexuality is a sin – the verses are right there in the Bible.  But anyone whose heart does not break at the thought that right now there are young men and women contemplating suicide over their orientation has completely lost touch with the compassion embodied in Jesus Christ.

My plea is that the church will learn to see people before we see issues or worldviews or agendas.  Those things are abstractions, but people are not.  And Jesus did not die for an abstraction – for an idea or for a cause.  It was for real, live, flesh and blood people, capable of suffering pain, that Jesus Christ gave his life.  Those people are what matters.  And let me say, by the way, that I feel a little bad for Phil as well.  Yes, I think he was kind of a jerk.  I think his words were pretty vulgar, and I think his comparison to bestiality was pretty silly.  But I may as well be honest – if I had to have my name dragged through the mud in the media and the blogosphere every time I said something dumb, I’d be a miserable person.  So I feel bad for Phil Robertson – I am not interested in demonizing him.  And, I care about the people he probably hurt.  May we all learn to value others more than we value the correctness of our opinions.

Thy Will Be Done

Sometimes a phrase can take on a completely different meaning depending on how it’s said.  That’s certainly true of the phrase “thy will be done,” words I fear we often say like a sigh of resignation, with an attitude of apathy.  Confronted with a situation of seemingly certain tragedy – a loved one dying of cancer, a typhoon smashing the Philippines – we hollowly mumble a request for deliverance and amend it by saying, “But if now, well, then just let your will be done.”  I’ve heard that said at a few prayer meetings.

Let me hasten to add that there are situations where pain is so immense and God so seemingly absent that all we can really do is hope against hope that God’s ends are somehow still going to be served.  There are times when all explanations fall flat.  And there is something to be said for having faith, even peace, in spite of circumstances and setbacks.  There is also something to be said for opening ourselves to the possibility that God’s idea of what needs to happen is different than our own.  These things being said, I don’t think we should think of the will of God as being only or even mostly equivalent to the strange ups and downs of life.

Jesus taught us to pray “Thy will be done” as part of the Lord’s Prayer.  But it’s part of a series of requests: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  These two requests feed off each other.  In fact, one might say that are three requests all helping define on another, because (if you’ll forgive me for being a theology geek) in Greek “hallowed be thy name” is also an imperative (let thy name be hallowed), and it actually rhymes with the lines about kingdom coming and will doing.  This is totally different than a sigh of resignation.  This is saying that God’s will is something, and that something is not anything.  God’s will is for his kingdom to come.  God’s will is for his name to be honored.  God’s will is for these things to happen so perfectly that earth is transformed into a new heaven.

The trouble with saying “Let your will be done” in apathy is that it let’s us baptize any state of affairs as God’s will.  It lets us give up on trying to change things and pretend that God is OK with that.  But if we really believe in the gospel of a Christ who healed the sick, who preached the sermon on the mount, who rebelliously kicked over the tables of the money changers, who promised us abundant life, who transgressed against every kind of barrier in the name of love, and who did many other wonderful things besides, then we must believe that God’s will is something specific and that much of what goes on in this world is not it.  God’s will is life.  God’s will is justice.  God’s will is love.  God’s will is healing.  God’s will is peace.  But pain, despair, brokenness, alienation, exploitation, dehumanization, want?  By what ridiculous logic could these ever be called God’s will?

I believe that if we could have even the tiniest part of God’s burning desire for the redemption of this world, “Thy will be done” would become in our mouths of slogan of protest.  To be kingdom people is to step in wherever evil is happening and say, “Instead of this, let God’s will be done.”  It is to get fully behind the project of seeing his kingdom come until earth is as much like heaven as possible.  God’s will; nothing less.  Let that be our battle cry.