Faith Does Not Fear Context
One of the most dangerous things we can do with the Bible is pretend that reading it faithfully means reading it without thought, context, history, curiosity, or compassion. Rachel Held Evans once asked, “How could I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength while disengaging those very faculties every time I read the Bible?” That question matters deeply because faith has never required us to turn off our brains, silence our questions, or check our lived experience at the door. Faith invites us to bring our whole selves to the sacred text, including our hearts, our minds, our histories, our doubts, and the parts of us that have been wounded by the way Scripture has been used against us.
The Church has been wrong before. That should not be controversial, though somehow saying it out loud still makes some people clutch their pearls so hard you can hear it in the next county. There was a time when the Church used Scripture to insist that the earth was the center of the universe. Passages about the sun standing still, the sun turning back, and the sun rising were read as proof that everything revolved around the earth. Then Galileo came along and said, “Actually...” and the Church responded by calling him a heretic and placing him under house arrest. Eventually, of course, the Church had to admit Galileo was right. Scripture had not changed, but the Church’s interpretation had.
That matters when we talk about the passages often used to condemn LGBTQIA+ people, especially Romans 1. Too often, people drag ancient words into modern conversations without doing the hard work of understanding the world behind the text. Paul was not writing about modern, mutual, loving, covenantal same-gender relationships. He was writing in a particular cultural moment, to a particular community, dealing with idolatry, exploitation, power, prejudice, and religious superiority. When Paul talks about what is “unnatural,” he is not using modern categories of genetics, biology, or sexual orientation. He is speaking through the conventional, cultural, and religious assumptions of his own time.
And here is where we have to be honest: many people have been taught to read Romans 1 as though Paul’s main point is, “Look how terrible those people are.” But when we keep reading into Romans 2, we discover that Paul is doing something much more complicated and much more convicting. He is setting a trap for the self-righteous. He lets the audience nod along, judge others, feel superior, and assume they are on the right side of holiness. Then he turns the whole thing around and says, in essence, “Careful now. When you condemn them, you condemn yourself.”
That is the part so many people conveniently leave out. Paul’s larger point is not to hand religious people a weapon so they can harm marginalized people. His point is to dismantle spiritual arrogance. His point is to remind the community that no one gets to stand above another and claim moral superiority while forgetting their own need for grace. If anything, Romans is not an invitation to condemnation; it is a warning against it.
So perhaps the more faithful question is not, “How can I use this passage to prove I am right?” Maybe the more faithful question is, “Who has been harmed by the way this passage has been interpreted, and what would love require of us now?” Because if our interpretation produces shame, exclusion, spiritual abuse, and despair, especially among LGBTQIA+ people who are already beloved by God, then maybe the problem is not with them. Maybe the problem is with the lens we were handed.
And just in case we forget where Paul is headed, later in Romans, he reminds us that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God. Not bad theology. Not cultural bias. Not church hurt. Not clobber passages. Not even the people who have misused them. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, and that includes our LGBTQIA+ siblings, who have always been held in that love, whether the Church recognized it or not.
