From here:
RALEIGH, North Carolina — A North Carolina group said it plans to hold a public protest on Sunday to denounce a Baptist minister’s anti-gay and lesbian sermon that has drawn hundreds of thousands of views on the Internet.
Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina told his congregation during a May 13 sermon that the Bible and God opposed homosexuality and that gay and lesbian people should be put in concentration camps.
“Build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long,” Worley said according to the video posted on YouTube. “Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”
I would like to make a few points about this:
First, Pastor Charles Worley seems to have missed one of the main features of Christianity: God loves everyone so much that he sent his only Son to die on the cross to atone for our sins. That includes the sin of homosexual sex.
Second, we as Christians are called to love as God loves; that includes homosexuals who indulge in same-sex activities. Loving a person means befriending them, accepting them, caring for them, treating them with dignity and wishing the best for them. At the same time, loving a person is not to condone – or bless – something that we believe is sinful; that is because repeated sin for which there has been no repentance destroys a person. How can you claim to love someone while approving of what will be their eternal undoing?
Third, if sinners are to be corralled behind an electric fence, we will all find ourselves there since we are all sinners. This is a basic tenet of Christianity; how a pastor can miss it is beyond me. Homosexual sex may be distasteful to heterosexuals but as a sin it is no more or less abhorrent that a whole catalogue of other sins, a catalogue that includes envy, greed, idolatry, gossip, jealousy, heterosexual fornication and so on. C. S. Lewis made the point (exactly where escapes me for the moment) that the most pernicious sins are the less visible internal ones that are thoroughly ingrained in our souls – like pride. Pastor Charles Worley could benefit by ruminating on that.
Fourth, the Bible tells us that homosexual acts are sinful. It does not tell us that being attracted to someone of the same sex is sinful any more than it tells us being attracted to someone of the opposite sex to whom we are not married is. Sinfulness is existential: it all depends on what you do with the attraction, whether you resist temptation or cave in to it.
Fifth, pastors like Charles Worley give Christianity a bad name and are an embarrassment to Christians whose intellect is still intact.
Here is the clip that has caused all the fuss:
From distant memory, the C.S. Lewis quote comes from “The Screwtape Letters”. It sounds very like the advice which would be given by the main protagonist in that book.
I do agree with your post, but I think the pastor is getting a bad (but only slightly bad) rap here. Certainly his words were ill advised, and he comes across as a terrible bigot. But I don’t think he was actually recommending that what he said be done. He was using it as an illustration that gay men, if only in the company of other gay men, or lesbians, if only with other lesbians, cannot reproduce, and so would eventually die out.
I suppose it’s true, but it was a pretty crass way of putting it. And of course anyone with the agenda of showing how homophobic Christians are, will pounce on it immediately and use it to demonstrate their point.