After World Vision reversed its policy on allowing same-sex married Christians to be employees, Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald newspaper wrote an article criticizing them and the Evangelical movement in general.
World Vision is a huge Evangelical relief agency. They help with famines and disasters around the world. They only hire people who claim to be Christian. They are an equal-opportunity employer, but as a faith-based mission they are allowed to disqualify people who don’t agree with their statement of faith.
On March 24, World Vision announced it would no longer bar Christians in same-sex marriages from working there. Two days later, almost 5,000 sponsors abandoned World Vision. Their director reversed the new policy, saying it was a “bad decision” but made from “the right motivations.”
Leonard Pitts predicts the director will change his tune in ten years. Because eleven years ago this same director changed his view toward AIDS. He admitted that Christians perceived AIDS as a disease of homosexuals and drug users and so, “had less compassion for the victims.”
To Leonard Pitts, this didn’t sound like people who claimed to follow a first-century rabbi who said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened …” Pitts concludes:
“On issues where it should take the lead, where it should be advocating for human dignity, the great body of Christendom always seems to bring up the rear, arriving decades late to the place the rest of the nation has already reached.”
He says it is not just on homosexuality or AIDS, but feminism and Civil Rights. Christians are slow to get it right.
Mr. Pitts attributes it to the American equation of Christianity with conservatism. He says we shrink the gospel of Christ to a narrow and exclusionary faith of narrow and exclusionary concerns: we criminalize abortions, demonize homosexuals and that’s pretty much it. All we do is condemn. Yet in 20 years we will agree with everyone else. We should be first, but we are always last.
Is he right?
________
Adapted by David Holwick from the article “Christianity Slow To Get It Right,” Leonard Pitts, April 6, 2014. < http://savannahnow.com/column/2014-04-06/leonard-pitts-christianity-slow-get-it-right >