Mark Joseph Stern made an excellent point over at Slate, Two Clerks Resigned to Avoid Issuing Gay Marriage Licenses. Good for Them! His point is that there are all kinds of homophobic bureaucrats who want the special right to not do their jobs. At least the two clerks who he talks about in the article showed integrity: they saw that their personal feelings stopped them from doing their jobs, so they quit. Although I think they are wrong about their positions on same sex marriage (so does Stern), I respect people who are willing to suffer a loss for it rather than just whine, which is the normal reaction.

But I’m struck by the fact that Christians seem to think that God cares about same sex marriage. If one is not a literalist, there is no problem at all. The discussions of homosexuality in the New Testament is mostly indirect, and when it is direct can be interpreted as discussing homosexual lust — and the whole Bible is down on lust as a general matter. Most of the Biblical arguments that people make against same sex marriage are based upon passages that actually just talk about procreation and opposite sex marriage — there is nothing explicit about same sex marriage. And if these passages mean that God doesn’t like same sex marriage they also mean that he doesn’t like marriages between old people.

But I’m more interested in the Biblical literalists. Leviticus 20:13 says, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them.” This is awkward syntax, but the point is that the men shall be put to death, not something like, “Well don’t be shocked in God strikes them dead!” The New Living Translation, for example, translates the passage, “They must both be put to death, for they are guilty of a capital offense.” The Holman Christian Standard Bible translates it, “They must be put to death; their blood is on their own hands.” The International Standard Version provides, “They are certainly to be put to death.”

So God wants homosexuals put to death long before they start marrying. Yet everywhere you go in America, you find Christian literalists — lots of them — who are not putting Neil Patrick Harris to death. In fact, they are not even calling for his death. I think these people lack integrity. But I understand. It really does go against natural human impulses to kill other people, even if your holy book says you should do it. But why is it okay to be wishy-washy about something God told you to do (killing the gays) and not about something that he was at best unclear about (stopping the gays from marrying).

According to Gallup, roughly 30% of Americans think, “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.” This must be the group that is so concerned that giving out marriage licenses to same sex couples will cause them to burn in hell. But I just don’t see God saying to these people, “Well, you didn’t do what I explicitly told you to do. You just brushed that aside because it was hard to do. But you did make a big deal about giving out marriage licenses to the people I told you to kill. I guess that’s good enough, welcome to heaven!” I don’t see it happening that way. But for all the literalists’ claims, they seem to think that they can finesse God. And that, beyond anything else, is offensive.

Matt Taibbi gets it exactly write in his recent article, Why Are So Many Pundits Trashing the Pope? This sums it up, “We’re losing the ability to imagine a dignified life without money. Which is pretty messed up.” As he noted in the article, the encyclical letter is entirely in keeping with these kinds of things. Basically, he’s saying, “Shame on you! Your greed is ruining the planet!” And popes have been saying that for almost two thousand years. It isn’t the pope who has changed; it is the people. And more to the point, it is “opinion setters” like David Brooks.

I was very interested recently to see the social conservative reaction to Laudato si’. It was more or less, “I don’t turn to the church on practical matters. The church should stick with issues of morality.” It’s fine with me: listen to the pope or ignore him. But don’t pretend that what the pope is talking about here isn’t about morality. Abortion policy is practical. Same sex marriage policy is practical. And global warming policy is practical. And they are all moral issues. And to pretend otherwise is the height of hubris. What people like Jeb Bush are really saying is, “I get to decide which issues are moral — not the pope.” Fine. Just don’t bring religion into it when it comes to the issues where you do want to wrap yourself in a cloak of morality.

The problem people of all stripes have with Pope Francis is not what he thinks. What he thinks just isn’t that different from what other popes have thought. It’s all about emphasis. And with Pope Francis, we get scolding of a different kind. Pope John Paul II seemed to spend all his time telling Africa that it shouldn’t use condoms. Well, that same idea is in Pope Francis’ newest encyclical. He just put it in the more mild way of claiming that consumerism and not overpopulation is what’s really harming the environment. (Taibbi thinks this is wrong, but I side with the pope on this.) But as is clear from Taibbi’s quote above: consumerism is the religion in modern America.

So we have a bit of a problem. But it has been with us for a long time. It’s been at least two decades since I first noticed that conservative Christians had started to distort the traditional teachings of Christianity. As unpleasant as the history of the religion has most often been, it has always given lip service to higher ideals than the comforts of life. That has long been its biggest selling point to the poor. But it isn’t just the “prosperity cults” that now claim that Jesus wants you to be rich (even though it will require being squeezed through the eye of a needle).

God’s elder brother David Brooks wrote last week, “Hardest to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love…” Lindsay Abrams at Slate responded, “And just to be sure that we aren’t overlooking the irony, this is David Brooks, the anointed preacher of How to Live and How to Think, telling you not to speak from an exclusively moralistic standpoint…” But David Brooks’ idea of morality is that it is a club to be used to hit the poor over the head for being poor. The wealthy — and by extension, wealthy countries — are necessarily moral. They have money, and as all Americans are supposed to know, Jesus, Allah, and Yahweh want you to be rich. They wouldn’t have allowed you to be rich in this world if you weren’t pleasing them!

Graham Greene’s excellent Monsignor Quixote is mostly one big excuse to discuss the overlap between religious and political faith. A one point, Quixote relates a story about a saint from La Mancha who was being raped by a Moor in her kitchen. She had a knife, and the man had nothing. Yet she allowed him to rape her. Sancho responded sarcastically, “She wanted to be raped, I suppose.” And Quixote counters, “No, no, her thought was quite logical. Her virginity was less important than the salvation of the Moor. By killing him at that moment she was robbing him of any chance of salvation. An absurd and yet, when one thinks of it, a beautiful story.”

The point of the story is about God’s love and redemption and all that Christian stuff. I don’t find it compelling, but then I’m not a Christian. Just the same, I find it impressive. And it certainly has theology to back it up. But most Christians in America would have the same reaction to it that the atheist Sancho has, but without the sarcasm, “She wanted to be raped…” But she didn’t. She just took her religion really seriously. It would be asking too much to expect Christians to live by this. But it isn’t asking too much to expect them to understand and appreciate this.

But far too many, I’m afraid, are like Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church. When faced with Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover, his reaction was that he was looking at a “filthy sodomite.” Okay. I guess that opinion is consistent with the Bible. It’s not exactly clear because I don’t remember anything about dress codes in the Bible. But being against transgenderism has got to be more supported by that Iron Age dogma than being against abortion. And being supremely judgmental is fully within the Christian tradition.

But Anderson went much further than “hating the sin.” He said, “This person is just the evangelist of sodomy and filth to the world, and people are like, ‘Oh, we need to pray for him so that he finds Jesus.’ I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to Hell.” This is exactly the opposite response as we saw from the saint from La Mancha. He also said, “I hate him with a perfect hatred.” According to Raw Story, he said this “as congregants murmured amen.” Truly vile preaching like this does not exist in a vacuum. It exists because it sells.

Anderson and his church have quite a colorful history. In 2009, Anderson announced that he was praying for the death of Barack Obama. And not surprisingly, the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the church as a hate group. But I haven’t been able to get much of an idea about how big the congregation is. The church’s website has very few picture of the members. But their Facebook page has almost 4,000 likes. And the place where Anderson rants looks like it holds a few hundred people. It sounds like there are as many as a couple hundred people at his most recent sermon. I know that doesn’t sound like that much, but go to a Baptist church in your town next Sunday and I doubt you will see any more than that — and you are likely to see a lot less.

Anderson’s argument in this case is that “turning the other cheek” can only be taken so far. He mentions serial killers. But isn’t the idea that anyone can be saved through God’s love? Looking at the guy, I have a feeling that he isn’t so big on turning the other cheek when it comes to more minor sins. Regardless, I also wonder if he doesn’t have homosexual thoughts. It’s always hard to escape that conclusion when people lose all composure regarding the sex lives of the LGBT community. Of course, Anderson seems to have a more general hatred, so who can say?

One thing is for sure: God’s love does not seem to be flowing out of the Faithful Word Baptist Church. It seems to be one big excuse to justify whatever its pastor hates. If I were a Christian, I would pray that they all find God’s love. But I’m not, so I’ll just write them off as another hate group that uses the Bible to justify themselves.