FOX NEWS STAR JUMPS INTO 'GAY' CHRISTIANITY
Kirsten Powers
The Fox News analyst who made headlines last December for saying she personally met Jesus is now entering the battle over homosexual relationships, suggesting U.S. Christians could support the concept.
“Could there be a future where most American Christians support same-sex relationships?” asks Kirsten Powers, a former atheist who went public with her conversion to Christianity last year.
“If so, it will be due to the emergence of conservative Christians who say orthodox believers can support life-long, monogamous gay relationships without undermining their commitment to biblical authority.”
In her column in USA Today, Powers mentions by name evangelical Matthew Vines, the homosexual author of the new book, “God and the Gay Christian,” as well as New Testament scholar James Brownson, who wrote the 2013 book “Bible, Gender, Sexuality.”
Powers says Brownson told her: “Male-male sex in the ancient world was episodic. It was mainly young boys with older men or male slaves and masters. It was not mutual. These were not relationships, they were not marriage and they were not meant to turn into marriage.”
Powers says the issue is not molding biblical teaching to satisfy a personal belief.
“Both Vines and Brownson hold a ‘high view’ of Scripture, meaning it is the final authority on all matters of faith and life,” she explains. “They oppose unbiblical divorce and premarital sex, for example.”
She noted that Brownson says, “The issue of sexual orientation represents new data that the church needs to ask itself, ‘Should this change the way we look at this?’”
Powers writes, “The church has done this before on issues ranging from slavery to the solar system.”
She says both authors argue “there is plenty of new evidence to consider, including the fact that same-sex orientation is not a choice.”
Powers cited Christian theologian Lewis Smedes, “who wrote in 1999 that the closest parallel to this debate is the church’s former opposition to nearly all remarriage after divorce. Scripture states that remarriage after an unbiblical divorce is adultery. To gain good standing in God’s eyes, those who had remarried were told to divorce their new spouses and either remarry the first or remain celibate for the rest of their lives.”
Smedes noted, “as long as (the church) read Jesus’ words with no regard for the devastation that its policy inflicted on the human families involved … the church could go on believing that it was only following Jesus’ own instructions. But once it factored human reality into its reading of the Lord’s words, it was bound to ask: Could Jesus actually have meant the church to cast away people?”
Powers concludes by stating, “The answer was no. Perhaps the same question should be asked about gay Christians.”
As far as Scripture is concerned, the Bible labels same-sex relationships as “abomination” in more than one place, including:
- “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22)
- “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:13)
In Genesis 19, homosexual men in the ancient city of Sodom sought to have sex with two angels who were appearing as men, and God subsequently firebombed the city.
In the New Testament, the apostle Paul strongly condemned homosexuality, saying, “God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.” (Romans 1:26-27)
Powers, a Democratic commentator at Fox News, was an atheist for much of her life until she says she had a personal encounter with Jesus, as WND reported in December.
It was in 2006 during an overseas trip that Powers says, “I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, ‘Here I am.’”
“It felt so real. I didn’t know what to make of it,” Powers explained in Christianity Today. “I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.
“I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn’t shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.”
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