Slaveholding was just such a practice. Slavery was an accepted practice throughout the Bible and was common custom for over 1800 years of the Christian era.

Gregory the Great owned slaves. Thomas Acquinas defended slavery. John Calvin, commenting on St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon regarding Philemon’s slave, Useful, wrote: “we learn that the political order is not overturned by the faith of the Gospel, nor is the right or rule over slaves taken from their masters.”

In 1862, amidst the bloodbath of our Civil War, a Methodist minister, J.W. Tucker, told a southern congregation: “Your cause is the cause of God, the cause of Christ, of humanity. It is a conflict of truth with error -–of Bible with Northern infidelity – of pure Christianity with Northern fanaticism.”

An unwarranted reliance upon Scriptural authority and the prevailing practice of Church and society split the churches and helped to consume our nation in savage warfare.

Today we are involved in a conflict in our society and in our churches that has many similar dimensions.

Based upon comparable appeals to the authority of the Bible and upon the ingrained habits of the churches and of our society, a whole group of persons, by virtue of their very nature, are treated as inferior and undeserving of the full rights of citizenship and the full security of civic acceptance.

As in the run-up to the Civil War, no amount of debate over the true meaning of Scripture has resolved this conflict, nor will it in the future. Churches are once again being divided by intractable conflict.

When I think of gays and homosexuals I think of people I know. I think of the sons and daughters of life-long friends. I think of trusted colleagues, highly respected mentors, and close friends. I also think of the fear, scorn, rejection, humiliation, and contempt that they continue to have to endure.

Nothing could make me change my mind that the Church and society have been wrong and that these friends and colleagues deserve the same love and respect as my own family.

Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the early 1850’s. In this novel, which had such a catalytic impact upon the abolition movement, a politician and his wife argue over what to do about the slave, Eliza, who appears exhausted with her son on their doorstep, after escaping across the Ohio River.

The husband, Senator Bird, tells his wife, Mary, not to let her feelings remove her judgment. Mary leaps beyond the chapter-and-verse Scriptural arguments of the day and says: “Now, John, I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.”

Augustine said that if anyone understands Scripture in such a way that it does not increase the love of God and neighbor then that individual does not yet grasp the true meaning.

I believe Harriet Beecher Stowe put the true meaning of the central commandment to love God and neighbor upon the lips of Mary Bird.