Review: Love is an Orientation

I just got around to reading Andrew Marin's book, Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community. I highly recommend it. I believe it does elevate the conversation. For many years, I was a conservative evangelical--especially the area of sexuality. No wiggle room.  No room for gray areas. Black-and-white. Chances are if you are a conservative evangelical, this book will make you uncomfortable. It could stir fears. It could provoke anger. Or it could challenge one to rethink their views of Jesus and sexuality. You may not end up agreeing with Marin or support the GLBT community, but you may come away with a deeper appreciation for friendship and love.

One of the most striking things about Marin's book is his high view of friendship love. In some ways, I can easily identify with Marin for we have both have advanced a view of friendship and sexuality that goes beyond deeply ingrained conservative evangelical sexuality.  He observes, "Bridge building is a sustainable friendship, a relationship, a bond, camaraderie, closeness and strong confidence. Truly knowing a gay or lesbian person is learning to discover their social and spiritual selves through mutual respect and trust."

This book gets a five star rating from me because Marin not only elevates the conversation between evangelicals and the GLBT community, he elevates Christian friendship. So, I have a few brief observations that cover sexuality and friendship. I hope to write another book on sexuality and friendship.

1. I truly think that Christians will engage in an ongoing, deeper conversation about sexuality and friendship in the twenty-first century.

For most of last century, evangelicals poured their energy and passion into one special friendship: romantic love between a man and woman. What moved me as I read Marin's book was that as an evangelical, he didn't treat his gay friends as evangelistic projects with a cold, calculated distance. What's so fascinating to me (and if you are a regular reader of this blog you'll understand why) is that he begins his book with his "best friend" who is female disclosing to him that she is a lesbian. You may always be at a place where gays and lesbians are in need of full sexual redemption. But what does it mean to love your neighbor who is gay?

2. Sexuality and friendship resist reductionist social and sexual scripts.

I came to see this as my friendships with women beyond my wife enlarged my vision of  sexuality and friendship in community, simultaneously. Marin learned this also in his friendships with gays and lesbians. One thing I have seen in my research is the growing acceptance in this post-Freud world is the richness and depth of sexuality and friendship. Both are complex social realities that resist black-and-white reduction. Pre-Freud, passionate love, emotional depth, and attraction in friendship could exist between genders or within the same gender without subconscious libidinous impulses irresistibly directing the relationship. To read all passionate friendships as homoerotic as we understand the meaning today, is reductionistic. On this side of Freud, it is too narrow to frame all deep emotional commitments and passion to sexual drive. But complexity and depth also mean a more compassionate, intelligent and loving response to orientation. Marin immersed himself into the GLBT community and culture.  I don't think everyone is called to do that. But I do think that friendship with gays enlarges our views of the GLBT community and orientation.

 

3. Sexuality and friendship call us to a passionate and appropriate vulnerability with the other.

Vulnerability is at the heart of a robust sexuality. More and more contemporary Christians are seeing vulnerability--appropriate and passionate vulnerability--at the heart of marital sexuality between husband and wife. It is also at the heart of robust and authentic friendship as Marin so powerfully depicts in his book. For Marin, the sexual orientation was abstract; it was "out there." Then, it hit close to home through a couple of close friends becoming transparent and vulnerable. Both sexuality and friendship call us to a posture of passionate and appropriate vulnerability. Jesus himself opened himself up to a woman (who by all traditional accounts and understanding was a sexual sinner) when she lavished physical affection on him (Luke 7).

Comments

[Julie]

I commend Andy for his desire to build bridges, but some of the ideas in his book simply don't square with Scripture. I encourage you to read:
http://www.robgagnon.net/articles/homosexMarinLoveIsOrientation.pdf

[Jennifer]

Julie,

I only skimmed through the article you posted, so I could be missing deeper layers...

But it seems like that if Marin's point is that we should love and befriend the homosexual community, Gagnon's point is, "but they're wrong!" Shouldn't Gagnon's point lead back to Marin's point? I'm thinking of Jesus drinking with sinners and all that. Or, maybe I'm missing something?

Either way, I do appreciate that Marin seems to have the sense to say that friendship is powerful and it changes people.

[Dan Brennan]

Julie, thanks for this. I was aware of Gagnon's article before I posted this.

Jesus was criticized on several occasions for befriending sinners, outcasts, etc. Especially sexual sinners (see the context of Luke 7) like the unnamed woman who kissed Jesus' feet repeatedly--and Simon the Pharisee having great difficulty believing Jesus would let such a woman touch him--in that way, too. The Pharisees had deep problems with Jesus and one of the reasons why was because he was a friend to sinners. He got close to them. Ate with them. In this woman's case, even allowed a woman to sensuously touch him in front of Simon.

So, I appreciate that rather than sitting in a theological classroom quoting verses about correct behavior and such, Marin has seriously decided to engage the GLBT culture through authentic friendship and love.