The Pharisees misuse a reference to a very limited type of divorce in the Mosaic Law as evidence for a blanket moral permission for lawful divorce more broadly. Likewise, conservative evangelicals misuse Jesus’ references to Genesis 1 and 2 as evidence for a blanket moral prohibition against same sex marriage, despite the fact that this isn’t justified by either the words of Jesus or the context of his citation.
In Mark 10, Jesus references some quotes from Genesis 1 and 2: “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female’[Gen 1:27] ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh.’”[Gen 2:24]
Conservative evangelicals conflate Jesus’ reference to the language of biological sex in the Genesis text (‘male’ and ‘female’) with an entailment about sexual orientation. That conflation is textually, conceptually, and evidentially false. One reason a conceptual category of ‘sexual orientation’ even exists is because it can evidentially differ independently from biological sex.
Yet conservative evangelicals will often appeal to some other authority to justify conflating the two. The pastor on Sunday appealed to ‘the heart of God’ as justification for conflating biological sex with sexual orientation. Without evidence, the claim seems to be that God’s inferred intent is that all actionable sexual orientation should be only heterosexual orientation.
First, we might question what kind of revelation ‘the heart of God’ is. I don’t disagree that we might infer a collection of plausibly true beliefs about what defines ‘the heart of God’. When we do attempt such an inference, we find a rich tapestry of qualities – love, compassion, mercy, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, forgiveness, etc. But none of these are in any way dependent on or determinative of either human biological sex or heterosexual orientation.
Even if we include ‘sexual morality’ in the list of things that define ‘the heart of God’, that itself doesn’t entail specific commitments regarding biological sex and heterosexual orientation without further explanation.
Which leads to a second point, that even if we believe that something called ‘sexual morality’ is included in ‘the heart of God’, we still have to supply the content of ‘sexual morality’ before we can claim to know how it relates to biological sex and sexual orientation. Some Bible verses address those issues in some ways, but it is an open question whether a Gospel reading of those verses requires us to interpret them the way conservative evangelicals most often do. I’m going to stick with Mark 10 for now, but we’ll come back to those Bible verses later.
Conservative evangelicals often use a kind of ‘gender essentialist’ interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 to justify the conflation of biological sex and sexual orientation. Then they assume that because Jesus references Genesis 1 and 2, Jesus endorses the conservative’s ‘gender essentialist’ interpretation.
The conservative argument goes something like this: anything God creates must have some essential nature as defined by God’s intent in creating it. So, if we know God’s intent, then we know that essential nature. Conservative evangelicals then claim to know that God intended biological sex to entail heterosexual orientation for the purpose of reproduction, and therefore heterosexual orientation is essential to the nature of biological sex.
The argument is not usually stated directly, which is why pleasant euphemisms like ‘the heart of God’ are spoken up front, to distract from the ideological heavy lifting going on behind the scenes.
First of all, I’m skeptical of any claim to know God’s intent with respect to qualities we do not observe in the life of Jesus. Jesus is, for us followers, the greatest possible revelation or representation of God in an individual human life. And yet, in that capacity, Jesus says and does many things which I’ve already referred to as radically revolutionizing the ‘normal’ evolutionary priority of reproductive success, and thereby contradicting one of the main justifications for the conservative prioritization of heterosexual orientation.
There is evidence of Jesus doing this revolutionary redefinition in the Mark 10 passage itself. For example, when Jesus discusses divorce, he makes no reference to sexual reproduction or to children, either in or out of marriage. Yet, when conservative evangelical pastors speak on the subject of same sex marriage, they will often ascribe (usually without evidence) putative harm to children as a reason against it. Again, my pastor did this in his sermon last Sunday.
To be clear, I’m not making a claim about whether children are harmed or not. Nor am I arguing that it doesn’t matter to Jesus or to me whether children are harmed or not. It absolutely does matter! All I’m noting is that Jesus does not refer to children at all (let alone to children being harmed) in the context of discussing marriage, and, by extension in this particular passage, divorce. That omission is consistent with other contexts in which Jesus does not prioritize sexually reproductive functions as essential, even in heterosexual marriages.
If we follow Jesus in not essentially defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ by sexually reproductive functions, then we can see how inappropriate it is to then conflate biological sex with sexual orientation, and to further assume an essential identity between biological sex and heterosexual, reproductive, orientation. Since Jesus does not assume that biological sex entails a reproductive heterosexual orientation, then neither should we who follow him.
Conservative evangelicals often contend that by quoting “and the two will become one flesh” Jesus reaffirms heterosexual essentialism. This is a tricky claim to defend without relegating singleness to a kind of lesser status than married-ness, so it is often stated somewhat euphemistically. But in its baldest expression, the idea is that 1) ‘male flesh’ and ‘female flesh’ are fundamentally different, and/or 2) that male and female are both a fundamentally deficient flesh absent unification (or ‘complementarity’) with the other.
Regarding 1) it is obvious that there are biological differences between male and female, although it is important to appreciate that there are also biological differences among males and among females. But those differences are not because they are different ‘flesh’. With respect to ‘flesh’ male and female are absolutely and unequivocally identical: human flesh.
Like many conservative evangelicals, our pastor in his sermon on Sunday glossed the conservative view by emphasizing that in making ‘one flesh’ of the two, the more ‘different’ the two are, the more significant the union into one. Thus, a marriage between male and female represents the greatest form of unification vis a vis the greatest form of difference: biological sexual difference.
But none of that is present in the text itself and is not even relevant without begging the question that the key ‘difference’ to be addressed in marriage is the difference of biological sex. The text itself explicitly excludes identifying the ‘two’ as two different types of ‘flesh’. Thus the emphasis of making ‘one flesh’ of the two individuals of identical human flesh is on the numerical transformation from two to one, not the combination of two different kinds of flesh. The numerical emphasis of two-become-one is the key ‘difference’ and is fully independent of any reproductive biology.
In this same vein, conservative evangelicals often, intentionally or not, communicate the impression that, absent the unification of marriage, male and female are somehow incomplete. Nobody wants to say this out loud because it would entail that Jesus was deficient because he was unmarried. So instead they refer to another verse from Genesis 2 (which, significantly, Jesus could have quoted had he chosen to do so, but because he deliberately did not ought to be treated as intentionally omitted on purpose) – “it is not good for the man to be alone.”
I suppose one could argue that ‘not good to be alone’ does not imply a kind of lesser status to singleness, but thankfully that’s not a case I need to make. Our pastor in his sermon on Sunday, however, did use this verse to argue that heterosexual marriage is good for this very reason, which logically implies by converse that singleness is somehow less good.
What is especially odd about this particular argument in the context of marriage is that in Genesis 2, to address his ‘alone-ness’ Adam looks for a ‘suitable helper’ from among the animals. If this ‘alone-ness’ was about biological sex and sexual reproduction, the implication is that Adam (at God’s behest!) is considering cross-species bestiality in a futile search for a ‘suitable helper’ from among non-human animals.
Even more significant than that creepy implication, when Eve is introduced to Adam as ‘suitable helper’ there is no mention of sexual difference but rather a full expression of identity and equality: “This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
This is not a throwaway line. At this point in Genesis, Adam is a giver of names, and “whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” So when the only substantive content in Adam’s ‘name’ for woman is unreserved equality to man, then those who see in Genesis the ‘heart of God’ and his intent for male-female relations have no textual basis for denying full equality to men and women. On the contrary, they have explicit textual justification for full equality.
Now I’m beginning to stray into arguments against ‘complementarianism’ and that should probably be its own separate – but obviously related – post.
Returning to reproduction specifically, if we follow the Genesis narrative even further, sexual reproduction doesn’t even occur until after the Fall, which I consider to be consistent with Jesus’ other Gospel assertions that decentralize both marriage and sexual reproduction in the kingdom of God. But this post has gotten far too long already, so that will be for another time.
Thanks for staying tuned!
Dim Reflections 
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