Unmasking Mel White, Part II

 

          THE SECOND PREMISE: THE EMOTIONAL PLEA

         White has finished delivering the low-brow arguments that advance a trivial view of homosexuality, and he now goes for the heart-rending and the purely emotional. Since these kinds of arguments do not intend to make you think – but only feel — I won’t spend a great deal of time on it.

          White’s logic can be summarized as follows:

1.  Nazis, slave holders, and other unsavory characters in history have misinterpreted the Bible therefore,
2.  People have killed others because of Bible misinterpretations therefore,
3. Homosexuals are dying from equally unjust Bible misinterpretations.

      There are several problems with this logic and the overall approach White employs here. First and most glaring is the fact that White has yet to explain how the Church has historically misinterpreted the Bible by condemning homosexuality for almost 2,000 years. He makes better arguments much later, citing specific passages but he strangely doesn’t feel the necessity to do that yet. Instead he includes massive detail about the deaths of victims that were brutalized because they were homosexual.

     The second problem is that White’s comparison of “homophobes” to Nazis, slave owners, and Klansmen just comes off as shrill. The reality is that none of these movements were actually borne out of a misinterpretation of the Bible. They were political or social phenomena that simply utilized Scripture as an afterthought. But the Bible was not formative in the thinking of any of these groups. They simply exploited Scripture when it was convenient to the cause they had already determined was correct. In this way, Mel White and Soulforce actually resemble these terrible groups more than those holding the biblical stance against homosexual perversion. Later when White explains why the Bible should be carefully filtered through the lenses of popular social trends and current opinion, it will become clear that his theology has its taproots in modern notions about civil rights and American ideals, not the Bible.

        The remainder of this premise is an emotional plea regarding the violent deaths of certain homosexuals. While a reasoning person must agree that the circumstances these people died in were tragic and unfortunate, they provide no substantive value in advancing a biblical case for homosexuality.  White has yet in this booklet to grapple with a single verse of Scripture that articulates the divine displeasure revealed against homosexual behavior. And he won’t do that until page 10. We now are only on page 3.