In chapter 4, the polemical nature of this book becomes most evident. In tracing the development of Christian attitudes toward--and forms of--marriage, Boswell’s through-line is that there is no logical way to integrate Christian approaches to heterosexual marriage with a blanket prohibition on same-sex marriage. Some of the criticism of both this book and CST&H are that both books feel too much like a supplicant begging for acceptance, thinking that if only the right logical argument were offered, Christianity would suddenly realize, “OMG, we’ve been wrong all along! We’re so sorry! We’ll stop persecuting gays now!” But religious doctrine has never been logically consistent, even when it uses the trappings of logic and philosophy. Similar criticisms were made of Bernadette Brooten’s work on female same-sex love in the early Christian era, with the additional critique that Brooten sometimes seems to throw gay men under the bus in arguing that scripture-based arguments really only applied to exploitive age-differentiated male-male relations and not to cozy, love-based female-female ones. I exaggerate, of course. But both authors were working from a place of desiring acceptance within a religious context that they were deeply emotionally invested in. And that colored how they presented their arguments.
Comments