Without Excuse: LGBT Advocacy In the LCMS

The existence of social media must be endlessly frustrating for the leadership of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Among the elderly in the pews, their reputation as a steadfast and conservative denomination is pretty much without blemish. The internet, however, has given legs to a number of stories which otherwise would have quickly died out. One of the latest of these is the revelation that some of our Registered Service Organizations have been involved in LGBT advocacy in the LCMS. This not only includes marching in pride parades (with children) but also seeking out sodomites at pride events to whom they can foster children. These joint ventures with the ELCA are carried out with support from the LCMS (such as LCMS members serving on their boards and the option of financing from our Lutheran Church Extension Fund,) and they are branded with our RSO promise that it’s “in harmony with LCMS doctrine and practice.”

At the time of writing, I still haven’t heard any official statement from Synod on this abominable scandal. However, I have seen LCMS pastors and laity making excuses on social media for the silence. Some have been spreading unsubstantiated rumors that the situation has already been dealt with. But the closest thing I’ve seen to this is a proposed resolution at only one district convention to condemn their errant RSO which, after revisions, resulted in merely letting their status go quietly unrenewed while LCMS members continue to serve on their boards and make donations. And it’s not clear to me whether even this pusillanimous action was ratified in the end.

Secret Action

Others, however, have been trying to explain that action is being taken behind the scenes which the public is unaware of. Such action, they say, needs to be done with patience, grace, and all due respect for Synod processes and polity. After all, the LCMS helping to foster children to sodomites is a very nuanced issue. Besides which, we should be seeking to save as many of these RSO’s as possible rather than burning it all down. In short, they want slow, deliberate, gentle action which can only be done out-of-sight of church-goers who are so easily riled up through social media, common sense, or God’s Word. Cooler heads must prevail.

I can understand why such contentions would be compelling. A decade or so ago, I would have even been grudgingly nodding along. It’s easy to desire quick, bold, and decisive action as a spectator, but responsibility for a large organization tends to temper such desire. I’m quite aware that since I bear no such responsibility myself, it’s far easier for me to call for action than it is for our leadership to deliver it. “Big ships turn slowly” is a reasonable proverb, and there was a time when I would have applied it in this case and left it at that.

But a lot has happened in the last decade. The LCACA controversy and President Harrison’s infernal letter calling for the excommunication of the “alt-right” has amply demonstrated how quickly, boldly, and decisively Synod is willing to act on an issue it actually cares about. Its handling of that controversy has stripped away any excuse it might offer for its indifference to this new scandal.

They Are Without Excuse

They can’t simply call dealing with LGBT advocacy in the LCMS a complex or nuanced issue that requires patience. When it came to people being racist on X, Synod bypassed nuance altogether and bluntly condemned it in the name of Christ. Patience also went straight out the window as they immediately escalated to “repent or be excommunicated.” While they make an offering of nuance to the abomination of sodomy, they had none for Harrison’s long list of accusations which weren’t even sins. They can no longer claim their longsuffering patience as an excuse for their current inaction.

Neither can they appeal to the high value they place on long-standing polity and procedures. Despite acknowledging that the LCMS is not an organization that can simply excommunicate from the top-down, President Harrison committed Synod to doing so anyway. They organized congregations into a Synod-wide witch-hunt to root out those they deemed “sinners.” The excommunication processes which those congregations carried out were often fraught with lapses in due process and even basic decency. It’s clear, therefore, that polity does not actually hold them back on issues that really matter to them.

Trying to recover as many of our institutions as possible could have been a noble goal to which they laid claim. But in their pursuit of racists, no more than lip service was given to “saving” any of those they subjected to Maoist struggle sessions or forbade from entering their sanctuary. The pretense of deep concern evaporated amidst the recorded abuses of persons and process alike. The rush to excommunication left any concern for the souls involved by the wayside. Today, if they claim “saving as much as possible” as their excuse, it only means they care more for saving corporations than for saving souls.

In other circumstances, they could have claimed that while they disagree with their RSOs’ involvement with Pride, they don’t want to condemn the entire organization. In other words, they could go with the lame “celebrating degeneracy is only 3% of what our RSO’s do” excuse. But they sing a very different tune when they go after the hosts of Stone Choir. In that case, it’s not permissible to simply disagree with them on pertinent issues. Instead, Synod has been demanding that people disavow their entire persons. They have therefore already rejected the pick & choose strategy for scandal.

Could they accept a small mea culpa and contend that their inaction against LGBT advocacy in the LCMS is a matter of simple human weakness? We can never fully escape such frailty in this life, after all. Slow bureaucracies, political realities, or insufficient nerve will always tempt us towards passivity. And yet, none of these things inhibited LCMS leadership from swiftly condemning the “alt-right” in the name of Christ. They cannot hide behind weakness now that we’ve seen them acting out in strength on the world’s behalf.

But perhaps one could ascribe all of this to a few bad apples at the top. Despite our best efforts, every large organization will inevitably have a few of those. Unfortunately for Synod (and for all of us), President Harrison’s call for excommunication was attributed to “its president, vice-presidents and all 35 district presidents, along with its ministerium and congregations.” Literally the entire LCMS hierarchy signed off on that bold and decisive action against mean tweets, but not one of them can do so for consigning children to those from whom we once protected them? Bad actors or transitory leadership are therefore no longer excuses either.

The Nature of Trust

The wide discrepancy between Synod’s response to official LGBT advocacy in the LCMS (a clear and unambiguous sin against God) and mere political “sins” like racism, sexism, or simply “being mean” among random laypeople has left our leadership without excuse. They have pre-emptively demolished any best construction which could have been built upon their inaction. There is no positive conclusion which could be drawn that doesn’t ignore reality. They have proven themselves willing and able to decisively deal with behavior they find scandalous. They either don’t find sodomy or the celebration thereof scandalous in the first place or they fear man rather than God. Either way, the implication is that they take their marching orders from the world rather than from the Word.

This is why the various calls for trust and patience are falling on deaf ears. It’s not because Synod’s critics are being unreasonable or that we’re so enraged that we can do nothing but burn it all down. It is because Synod has betrayed the trust of the people God had placed into her care. They have proven themselves untrustworthy and hence can no longer be trusted without evidence. “Things are moving behind the scenes” is not a credible claim. There can be no benefit of the doubt when doubt has been dissolved.

The worst thing leaders can do when trust has been broken is to try and reestablish it by fiat. And yet I have seen Synod’s defenders claim that trusting our leadership to handle it is a moral obligation or that lack of trust is a moral failing. For example, some (abusively) try to root this demand in the office of the ministry–as though the respect we owe to shepherds extends to their malfeasance. If such were the case, we would have no business being Lutheran, for Rome would gladly accept our submission to the Pope.

Others root their demands for trust in accusation of sin. They attempt to gaslight critics into thinking their mistrust can only be due to some fault within themselves (rage, impatience, faithlessness, etc.) as though Synod were beyond reproach. They use a perverse misunderstanding of “best construction” to bludgeon critics into silence. But all of this only adds arrogance and false witness to their already long list of failings. Heaping wrong upon wrong in such a manner can undermine trust further, but it can never rebuild it.

If Synod has any aspirations towards rebuilding the trust they’ve destroyed, they really have only one viable course of action: repentance. They must openly and deliberately change course from their rank hypocrisy if they want to rebuild trust with anyone. What’s more, this repentance cannot be private. Their hypocrisy is plainly seen in open letters signed by our entire leadership and literal parades down the street. As Luther says, “Where the sin is public, the rebuke also must be public that everyone may learn to guard against it.” Repentance must therefore also be public so that everyone might recognize it.

Repentance must also consist of more than mere words. Any and every leader makes mistakes in carrying out their duties. That is normal and inescapable. Not every leader is capable of being so zealous for the sake of the postwar consensus but so indifferent about the Word of God. This speaks to character problems which cannot be changed overnight even in repentance. Leadership should therefore be passed to men who have not already proven themselves unequal to the task.

Likewise, zealous action must be taken to right these wrongs–both against the RSO’s which promote sodomy and subject children to it and on behalf of the men who were wrongfully excommunicated in Harrison’s witch hunt. Nobody who mistrusts Synod will discover any new reasons to trust it until it takes new actions to prove itself trustworthy.

A Divided Synod

Now, do I expect such action to be taken? No, and it’s not simply a matter of distrust. The LCMS is not nearly as united in doctrine or practice as we would like or as we pretend. We’re used to the division between the good, solid confessional guys who love the historic liturgy and the liberal-but-not-as-liberal-as-the-ELCA guys who want contemporary worship. But that’s hardly the only or the most important division among us.

There’s also the division between our soft antinomians who despise teaching God’s Law and those of us who love God’s Law and meditate on it day and night. There’s also a division between those who practice syncretism with Critical Theory (and therefore treat racism, sexism, etc. as grievous sins against God) and those of us who do not. These divisions are much closer to the heart of Synod’s hypocrisy, but most people in the pews aren’t even aware of them.

The primary reason for this lack of awareness is the age of Synod in general. For the most part, Boomers have not had to grapple with these issues the same way the younger crowd has. To them, Radical Lutheranism (a term they usually don’t even know) just seems like an emphasis on the Gospel because they’re from the generation that took God’s Law for granted rather than the generation among whom it’s now been forgotten. And while all living generations have been indoctrinated in Critical Theory, only the younger generations are having to deal with it being taken to its logical conclusion all around them. We experience the problems viscerally and therefore react more stridently.

Since our leadership reflects the age of the Synod as a whole, they don’t recognize these things as big problems and reflexively consider them overreactions. They are content with life together despite Synod’s fissures and think it’s possible as long as they can just throw out the rabble-rousers who make a big deal out of them.

But unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, Synod’s unity will die with them. The younger generations tend to either be fully invested in Critical Theory or vehemently opposed. They either love God’s Law or the world’s law, but neither finds “the Gospel” a reasonable excuse for disregarding whichever law they favor. Our leftists might use antinomianism as a tool to eject parts of the Bible, but they won’t hesitate to hold others accountable to the traditions of men.

Likewise, one side agrees with Scripture that fornicators, idolators, homosexuals, etc. won’t enter the Kingdom. The other side believes that only racists, sexists, and homophobes will fail to enter it. That side will never give up LGBT advocacy in the LCMS because their false god demands it. There’s not enough common ground there to sufficiently cooperate in running a large church body.

How that will play out is still up for grabs, and that’s why I’m writing this. I don’t expect our leadership to retract their evil letter or expel Synod’s sodomites. But the next generation will have an opportunity to do better with at least some portions of Synod’s remains. Whichever leaders have not soiled their garments can stand up now to be counted, to be trusted, and to ultimately help their successors.

We can be firm now about what is right and wrong according to God’s Word. We can decide now not to yoke ourselves to the false religion of Critical Theory. We can take the Lutheran heritage which was entrusted to us, clean up the errors and confusions that Synod has added, and pass it down to our children. But none of these things can happen if we lie to ourselves about the sorry state of the LCMS.

It’s time to return to God’s Word and hold it more sacred than Synod polity. May God in His mercy grant us repentance for what we’ve gone along with, the wisdom to see His path, and the patience to bring as many of His children with us as possible.