Orthodoxy: Is This Really the Hill We Want to Die On?
Ideological and Theological Battlegrounds Are Claiming Lives
A Reflection on the Fear Beneath the Culture War Against LGBTQ People
By Lisa Salazar, MAPPL, SHP
One of the things that troubles me in conversations about gender identity, same-sex relationships, and scripture is the assumption that we can lift words, prohibitions, and social structures from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago and apply them directly to modern life as though nothing has changed. To me, that overlooks just how profoundly different their world was from ours. At best, it is careless history. At worst, it is cultural and intellectual arrogance.
We are not living in the same intellectual, scientific, social, medical, or cultural universe as Paul, the writers of Leviticus, or the audiences who first heard these texts read aloud. The ancient world had no framework for human sexuality, orientation, genetics, hormones, fetal development, psychology, neurology, gender dysphoria, or intersex variations as we understand them today. Chromosomal variations, androgen insensitivity, hormonal influences in development, and the complexity of how bodies and identities form were simply beyond the categories available to them..
Their world shaped what they could recognize, name, and judge.
That does not make ancient people foolish. It makes them human beings living within the limits of their time. The same is true of us.
Let’s not forget that in many ancient societies, a child born with ambiguous genitalia or visible physical differences was viewed as a curse, an omen, or an object of fear. Scholars of the ancient world point out that these communities depended on healthy offspring for agricultural labour, lineage, and sheer survival. The ability to produce healthy children often became an overwhelming social priority. Superstitions and purity codes may also have shaped how people responded when a child was born with visible differences, and mothers were often blamed, with the condition attributed to hidden sin, impurity, or divine punishment.
Some cultures abandoned or killed certain infants because they were perceived as burdensome, defective, or dangerous to the social order. Other cultures viewed such persons as spiritually significant or even sacred. In either case, these responses were shaped by fear, mythology, survival instincts, purity systems, and limited knowledge about the human body, not modern medicine or scientific understanding. That is the world from which ancient scripture emerged.[1]
The same contextual reality applies to sexuality. For example, today, when we talk about same-sex relationships, we are often talking about love, companionship, commitment, intimacy, and mutual consent. That was not usually the framework in the Greco-Roman world. There, same-sex acts were often interpreted through questions of power, status, dominance, exploitation, prostitution, pederasty, conquest, and shame. Ancient societies did not frame sexuality around orientation or loving partnership in the way we commonly do today.[2]
Words do more than describe reality. They shape what a culture is able to see. If ancient societies lacked the concepts we now use to understand orientation, gender identity, and bodily variation, then we should be cautious about assuming they were evaluating the same human experiences we are discussing today.[3]
That does not settle every theological debate, but it should humble us.
The irony is that many Christians already acknowledge this principle in countless other areas.
Most of us no longer use the Bible to defend slavery, even though slavery is regulated in the text rather than clearly abolished. Many Christians no longer require women to remain silent in church, cover their heads, or stay out of leadership, even though those passages reflect the patriarchal assumptions of their time. We no longer apply purity codes about fabrics, food, menstruation, or ritual uncleanness. We would not execute a daughter for premarital sex simply because an ancient legal text reflected that framework.
Why?
Because understanding evolves.
In practice, Christians already interpret scripture through the lens of expanded human knowledge. So it feels inconsistent when some suddenly insist that discussions around gender identity or same-sex relationships must remain frozen within ancient categories..
So it feels inconsistent when some suddenly insist that discussions around gender identity or same-sex relationships must remain frozen within ancient categories, untouched by everything humanity has learned since.
This recognition becomes even more important when we remember that most of Paul’s audiences did not have personal copies of scripture the way modern Christians do. Most people in Paul’s world could not read these texts for themselves. They heard them read aloud in community, with someone else interpreting and explaining what was being said. They did not have Bible apps, concordances, lexicons, journal articles, archaeological studies, or centuries of theological debate at their fingertips.
They could not “research the Greek” or debate linguistic nuances online the way modern apologists do today.
And yet some modern interpreters speak as though their own readings are self-evident, final, and unquestionably identical to what Paul himself “obviously meant.” That certainty is what troubles me most.
Humility should lead us to acknowledge that we are interpreting ancient texts across an enormous historical, cultural, scientific, and linguistic divide.
We are not merely reading scripture. We are translating worlds.
Maybe the question is not whether ancient people categorized humanity in rigid binaries. Of course they often did. Ancient societies categorized many things simplistically because they lacked the tools to perceive greater complexity.
But the harder question is whether truth itself becomes clearer as human understanding expands.
Modern medicine helps us understand epilepsy differently, so we no longer describe seizures as demonic possession. Psychology helps us better understand trauma, depression, and neurodivergence, so we no longer simply condemn suffering people as morally weak or spiritually defective. If science helps us better understand the development of sex characteristics and gender identity, perhaps wisdom requires more than simply repeating ancient assumptions louder.
I do not see that as rebellion against truth. I see it as part of humanity’s long, unfinished journey toward it.
I suspect much of the backlash against LGBTQ people is rooted in fear: fear of social change, fear of uncertainty, fear that long-standing assumptions about identity, family, gender, and morality are dissolving beneath people’s feet. For some, these debates are not merely theological. They are existential.
For many people, these debates reach deep into identity, belonging, and the need to feel that the world still has some moral shape to it. But making room for complexity does not have to weaken faith. It may be one of the ways faith grows up.
And this is where the argument stops being theoretical.
When, in 2026, a gubernatorial candidate in Tennessee can openly propose that parents of transgender children should face execution for supporting their own kids, we are no longer dealing with abstract theology.[4] We are witnessing what happens when rigid certainty, fear, and political ideology fuse into moral panic.
That should stop us cold.
You may have guessed it by now: I have a problem with orthodoxy, at least when orthodoxy hardens into the certainty that one group of human beings possesses the final and complete understanding of truth.
The word “orthodoxy” originally had to do with “right opinion.” Over time, especially within Christianity, it became a way of drawing boundaries between accepted belief and what was labelled heresy. But even within Christianity, what counted as orthodox has never been static. Theology has always involved disagreement, councils, schisms, reformations, revisions, and changing understandings.
That alone gives me pause.
One of my professors at the Vancouver School of Theology once said the healthiest way to engage theology is not as a rigid system of fixed answers, but as an invitation to have a conversation about God.
I love that approach because it leaves room for humility.
It recognizes that two sincere people can read the same passage and arrive at different conclusions. With humility, we make ourselves open to the text meeting us differently years later, when life has changed us enough to notice something we missed before. It also recognizes that none of us comes to a text as a blank slate. We all bring our language, culture, history, fears, hopes, wounds, knowledge, and experience with us.
To me, that feels far healthier than the certainty that often accompanies declarations of “biblical orthodoxy,” especially when those declarations are used to police, condemn, or marginalize other human beings.
What concerns me is the subtle arrogance that can emerge whenever someone says, in effect, “We now possess the final and complete understanding of truth.”
History gives us plenty of reasons to be careful when people claim to possess truth with absolute certainty. People were once quite sure about slavery, monarchy, racial hierarchy, left-handedness, women’s supposed inferiority, and the structure of the cosmos. Some of those ideas even had theological scaffolding. Galileo and Copernicus come to mind here. The church did not exactly cover itself in glory when new knowledge challenged an older worldview.[5]
So perhaps wisdom is not found in rigid certainty, but in remaining open to deeper understanding. That does not mean abandoning conviction. It means holding conviction with humility.
Theology is an ongoing human attempt to grapple with mystery, meaning, ethics, suffering, transcendence, and what it means to live well together.
And maybe that is why Jesus seemed far more concerned with how people treated one another than with constructing airtight systems of doctrinal certainty. Again and again, he disrupted religious frameworks that elevated law over compassion, purity over mercy, and certainty over love.
Maybe the truest form of orthodoxy is not right thinking at all, but right relating.
That is why I keep coming back to justice, compassion, empathy, and human dignity. Those are the things that still hold when our interpretations fail us. And they do fail us. History has shown us that people can defend almost anything once they convince themselves God is unquestionably on their side.
Maybe what some people are defending is not God at all, but their own need for certainty, a God who keeps the world feeling settled, ordered, and safe.
So I keep thinking about Jesus saying, “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did unto me.” Because in the end, he did not seem nearly as concerned with doctrinal certainty as with how people treated vulnerable human beings.
The real danger of rigid orthodoxy is not that it seeks truth, but that it sometimes mistakes certainty for truth itself.
And humility may be the holiest posture available to us.
