Theology is never just an idea.

Every theology eventually becomes behavior. Every pattern of behavior eventually bears fruit.

“By Their Fruits: Testing Theology” asks a simple question:
What if theology should be accountable for the lives it shapes?

Last time, we finally got practical. We talked about how we might actually test a theology, including a question I think is absolutely essential to Behavioral Theology:
Who gets to testify about the fruit?

My answer was pretty simple. If we're going to judge the fruit, we probably ought to talk to the people who had to eat it. So let's do that. Let's take an actual theology, follow it out into the world, and see what happens. And let's start with an easy one.

You know, LGBTQ+ inclusion.

The thing Christians hardly ever argue about.

If you're LGBTQ+, or you love somebody who is, you've almost certainly heard some version of this: “I love you. I just can't affirm your lifestyle.”

Maybe it was “choices.” Maybe “behavior.” Maybe somebody pulled out the old standby, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Or maybe it was dressed up a little more theologically:
“Sometimes telling someone the truth is the most loving thing you can do.”

Here's the thing. I don't actually disagree with that last sentence.

Sometimes telling someone the truth is loving. Sometimes love requires us to say difficult things. Sometimes it requires us to hear difficult things.

The problem is that calling something love doesn't necessarily make it loving. And calling something truth doesn't necessarily make it true.

That's where the Fruit Test gets interesting.

For a long time, much of Christian theology around LGBTQ+ people has allowed the person doing the “loving” to decide whether love happened.

I told you the truth because I love you.
I told you your relationship is sinful because I love you.
I told you God doesn't approve of this part of you because I love you.
I wouldn't attend your wedding because I love you.
I don't want you to mistake my acceptance of you for approval of your “lifestyle” because I love you.

There's a pattern there. The person doing the loving also gets to grade the love. Convenient.

Behavioral Theology introduces another witness:
The person receiving it.

You don't get to grade your own love solely on what you meant by it. The people you loved get to testify too. That doesn't mean their testimony automatically settles the theological question. We've already spent a lot of time in this series talking about why fruit isn't quite that simple.

But their experience counts. More than that, it's evidence.

So let's hear it.

Remember what we did in the last article. Take the theology and follow it.

Don't stop at Leviticus. Don't stop at Romans. Don't stop with a Greek word study or a debate about what arsenokoitai means. Those conversations may matter, but they're not where the theology stops.

Follow it home.

What happens when a gay teenager hears, week after week, that their deepest experience of love and attraction is fundamentally disordered?

What happens when parents are told that affirming their transgender child means choosing their child over God?

What happens when someone learns that they're welcome in church as long as they remain celibate for the rest of their life, while the straight couple sitting beside them gets a church potluck and a blessing when they announce their engagement?

What happens when somebody hears, “Of course God loves you,” followed immediately by a list of the ways they're expected to stop being themselves?

Here's the important part. Don't answer those questions for them. Ask them.

This is where the last article becomes more than theory.

If non-affirming theology claims to be loving toward LGBTQ+ people, then LGBTQ+ people aren't incidental to evaluating that claim. They're witnesses. And they've been telling Christianity about the fruit for a very long time.

They've talked about shame. Hiding. Fear. Families fractured in the name of faithfulness. Churches that welcomed them right up until they stopped hiding who they were. Relationships with parents that never quite recovered. Years spent praying for God to change something that wasn't changing.

And they've talked about the exhausting experience of being told, again and again, that their exclusion was actually an expression of somebody else's love.

At some point, we have to be willing to hear that. Not because every LGBTQ+ person has the same story. They don’t. Not because every non-affirming Christian is cruel. They're not. In fact, I think plenty of them genuinely believe they're being loving. And certainly not because every affirming church gets everything right. Lord knows we don't.

But we're not looking for one story. We're looking for fruit. We're looking for patterns.

And here's where somebody will object.

Of course people experience the theology negatively. Nobody likes being told they're wrong. Sometimes truth hurts. Fair enough.

We dealt with this in the last article. Discomfort isn't necessarily harm. A theology isn't false simply because somebody doesn't like it.

If my theology challenges my greed, selfishness, racism, or need to control other people, I don't get to yell “harm!” and make the challenge disappear. Sometimes truth should make us uncomfortable. But that's not the end of the conversation.

The Fruit Test pushes us to ask another question:
What kind of discomfort are we talking about?

Is this the discomfort of being challenged to treat other people more justly? Or is it the pain of being told that something fundamental about your capacity to love and be loved makes you unacceptable unless you suppress it?

Those aren't automatically the same thing. And simply putting the word “truth” in front of the second one doesn't settle the question.

That's exactly what we're trying to test.

Then we ask another question from our test:
Who benefits?

Who gets to define faithful sexuality?
Who gets to marry?
Who gets their family celebrated by the church?
Who gets to preach, lead, baptize, serve Communion, teach children, or have their relationship recognized?
And who gets told that wanting those same things represents rebellion against God?

Again, power doesn't automatically tell us whether a theology is true or false. But it tells us something worth noticing. Especially when the people with the power to define the theology aren't the people who have to live with its consequences.

That's one reason listening to the people who had to eat the fruit matters so much.

And eventually, of course, we get here. “But the Bible says...”

Good.

Then let's go back to the Bible. Behavioral Theology doesn't say fruit replaces Scripture. It says fruit becomes evidence that sends us back into the theological conversation.

So if our interpretation of Scripture repeatedly produces shame, exclusion, broken relationships, fear, and diminished lives among LGBTQ+ people, the Fruit Test doesn't automatically declare our interpretation wrong.

But it does give us a damn good reason to look at it again.

Maybe we ask whether the handful of biblical texts typically used in these conversations are actually addressing the kinds of relationships we're applying them to.

Maybe we look more closely at the historical and cultural assumptions underneath them.

Maybe we ask why certain biblical teachings about gender and sexuality became timeless moral absolutes while others somehow found their way into the “that was a different culture” file.

Maybe we notice who has traditionally been allowed to interpret these passages and who hasn't.

And maybe, after doing all of that, somebody still arrives at the same conclusion.

Fine. But they don't get to pretend the fruit isn't part of the evidence simply because they've found a verse.

That's the whole point.

I think this may be where the conversation about “loving” LGBTQ+ people most often gets stuck.

I believe many non-affirming Christians when they say they're motivated by love.

I really do.

I don't think they're all secretly hateful people looking for a theological excuse to hurt somebody. Plenty of them are sincerely trying to be faithful to what they believe God requires of them.

That matters.

But intentions aren't magic. They don't make consequences disappear. Most of us have hurt somebody while trying to do something good. We've said something with the best intentions and discovered later that it landed very differently than we expected.

When that happens, the healthy response isn't:
“But I meant well, so you weren't hurt.”

That's ridiculous.

The healthy response is something closer to:
“I meant well. But apparently something happened here that I need to understand.”

Why should theology be any different?

Jesus didn't say we'd recognize good trees by how sincerely they believed they were producing good fruit. He said we'd recognize them by their fruit. So if we claim a theology is loving, eventually we have to ask what kind of love it actually produces.

Does it make people more whole?
Does it create relationships marked by dignity and mutuality?
Does it help people thrive?
Does it make room for people to be honest about who they are?
Does it produce compassion, justice, mercy, courage, and joy?

Or does it require the people receiving our “love” to become smaller so our theology can remain unchanged? Because at some point, saying “I love you” isn't enough.

Love has fruit too.

So let's run the questions.

What kind of people does this theology produce?
What kind of communities does it create?
Who benefits?
Who is harmed?
Whose voices are being treated as evidence?
Whose voices are being ignored?
What patterns appear when the theology is lived over time?
When bad fruit appears, is the theology itself allowed to come back under examination?
Does it bear the fruit of love, justice, mercy, and human flourishing?

A theology that consistently harms people deserves to be questioned.

A theology that consistently helps people deserves our attention.

Think about a time when you were certain you were acting out of love and someone told you that what you were doing was hurting them.

What happened next?
Did you explain why they shouldn't be hurt?
Did you defend your intentions?
Did you tell them they misunderstood you?
Or did you listen?

That's not just a relationship question. It's a theological one. Because Christians have spent an awful lot of time telling LGBTQ+ people that what we're doing to them is love.

Maybe it's time we let them testify about the fruit.

You don't get to grade your own love solely on what you meant by it. The people you loved get to testify too.