Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, shared his view on whether a Christian should attend a LGBTQ+ wedding ceremony, even if it’s the ceremony of a family member, during “The Briefing” last Friday (Feb. 2).
The prompting to share came after Mohler acknowledged he’s received an “avalanche of questions” from listeners about an “unexpectedly kind of hot debate among conservative evangelical Christians in recent days.” Mohler didn’t mention Alistair Begg but explained that he’s been discussing this topic in various forums for the last 20 years.
“Focusing on the question [now] becomes all the more urgent. Once you had the formalization of same-sex ceremonies and then the covenant services as they were called,” Mohler said, “and then same-sex marriage in some places, and then after the Obergefell decision in 2015, same-sex marriages as they are called, being declared legal, and same-sex weddings becoming more routinized.”
When one of his students asked him a similar question 20 years ago, Mohler explained that his first thought was, “This isn’t hard. This isn’t really hard at all.”
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A wedding, Mohler said, is a “celebration” or, more specifically, “a wedding is a covenant ceremony of one sort or another.”
Some may confuse what a wedding really is, “but it’s a covenant ceremony,” he added. “It’s being declared as the formal public declaration of a thing, and that thing is a marriage or a union.”
“That’s where Christians understand that it’s not just that we think the same-sex marriages are wrong, it’s that we don’t think same-sex marriages are marriages—we actually don’t think it is. It doesn’t fit the biblical criterion. It doesn’t fit creation order,” Mohler said.
Mohler shared that he remembers specifically addressing this issue in 2011 after Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston made public comments about whether Christians should attend same-sex weddings.
Due to Osteen’s influence and response, which Mohler said “failed” to give an answer, the question became a matter of public conversation, and reporters asked Mohler his position on the matter.
Mohler said that he argued the time that attending “a wedding is not” the same thing as sharing a meal or having a conversation with someone.
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