is this the best they can do???

I can't remember how I first came on The Other Journal by Mars Hill Graduate School (which, while in Seattle, is thankfully unconnected with Driscoll's church), but it happened, and every now and again, I go there just to see how many wacked-out ideas they are floating around.

And again, I'm not disappointed.

Reconciling Sufjan Stevens: Religious Hipsters and The Inevitable Queerness Of Christian Music

Perhaps the one thing that makes this article readable is that the writers spends the first half of it going on about music. Not necessarily in a way that I agree with, but matters of taste are what they are. I have some memory of the attempts by Christian bands and singers to "cross over", with greater to lesser success. I'm not a much into CCM now, but I do remember the first couple of Jars of Clay releases, and I liked them a lot. I don't know if I've ever heard any Eddie Vedder, but if Jars sounds like Vedder, so what?

Anyway, then the writer focuses on one modern musician, whom he seems to like. Then we get to what this article is all about.

So for everyone else Sufjan’s music begs the question “Is Sufjan gay?” but I find that pursuit a bit tiring. It does, though lead to a bigger, more entertaining question, that being “Is Christianity gay?”

Everyone who is in a gay relationship or knows someone who is, knows that sex has little or nothing to do with the relationships success or failure. What makes any relationship work is commitment. Whether a man is gay or not depends on who he chooses to commit to, a man or a woman.

So, at the very least, there is something a little gay about men who love Jesus. We commit our lives to him. We submit to him. His love for us surpasses the deepest of passion between the greatest of lovers. Priests take vows of celibacy so that they can be completely devoted to him and so that women will not be in competition for their affection. Sufjan does sing love songs to a man, that is for sure, and whether they are to his friends, a lover, or to Jesus himself, that is a little gay.

This writer plays so fast-and-loose with the word "love", that I can only assume that the editor for this journal either didn't read this article before publishing it, or published it solely for the sake of controversy and pushing an agenda.

By this person's abject misinterpretation, two men who are friends are "gay", a knigh of years ago who swore allegiance to a king was "gay", when Jesus told the disciples to love Him he was telling them to be "gay".

See how bad this reasoning is?

There is nothing "homosexual" about a man loving Jesus. There is nothing "gay" about men being true friends with each other. A few weeks ago, I was in a coffee shop, and overheard a couple of people talking about the supposed homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan. It honked me off a bit, and wisely or not, I asked how they found that in the Bible. Perhaps they weren't expecting to be challenged like that, but they had no answer to it.

Last year, about May or June, I read a Sojo article where the writer at least asked the question of "what if" the relationship between Naomi and Ruth was a sexual one (he also pretty much said that Boaz and Ruth had sex when she talked with him on the threshing floor).

You can see how the argument goes, which this TOJ writer contributes to--instances of deep frienship and commitment between men or between women are spun as "homosexual". And now men loving and commiting to Jesus are being spun as being "gay". Which, of course, only serves the purpose of the progressives' attempts to normalize homosexual activity.