A black heart
The homophobic attitude of evangelical movements is directly linked to the anthropology of the church. Fundamental Christians do not see humanness in the LGBTQ+ movement, but essential depravity.
Musicvideo Not Without You
My earlier worldview is well illustrated in the song Not Without You that I wrote back in 2014 for my colleagues:
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When I was a little boy at the beginning of my school years and learned that the father of a schoolboy had died in an accident at work, I was very scared. As far as we knew, this boy's family did not go to any church. That this father should now be in hell worried me for years. 'Maybe Jesus appeared to him when he fell from the roof and he made a decision for Christ in the last millisecond,' my parents tried to reassure me at the time. 'But ... what if Jesus did not appear to him when he fell?'
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The Apple Story
Commentary to my music video Not Without You
I grew up with the teaching that man is born with a black heart, i.e. corrupted. After several years of study, I came to the conclusion that man does not make mistakes because he is evil, but because he is human, i.e. limited. To someone who does not attend the Free Church regularly, this truism must seem ridiculous. But for me, since I left the evangelical movement, I see the world for the very first time in my life not on a grey scale between black and white, but in colour.
In my book I will illustrate this with many examples, beginning with a study of what the church calls the 'Fall' (Genesis 3). To illustrate, here is just one example: According to the Mosaic Law, a woman had to offer a monthly sin offering to atone for her menstruation (purification rituals had an important hygienic dimension that many Christian commentators seem to overlook). You don't have to be a scholar to know that women don't have periods because they are evil, but because they are human. The only thing that is bad is the church's understanding of the term 'sin'. Of course, the term ‘sin’ can also include an unkind act, but only to a limited extent. Because an evil person who intentionally committed evil acts could not be forgiven from a legal point of view. In Hebrew, this is repeated many times in the Torah by the expression (literally translated) ‘with a raised hand’, i.e. ‘deliberately’; for example, there was no sin offering to atone for murder or for rape. A murderer or a rapist had to be sentenced to death.
In my book I will illustrate this with many examples, beginning with a study of what the church calls the 'Fall' (Genesis 3). To illustrate, here is just one example: According to the Mosaic Law, a woman had to offer a monthly sin offering to atone for her menstruation (purification rituals had an important hygienic dimension that many Christian commentators seem to overlook). You don't have to be a scholar to know that women don't have periods because they are evil, but because they are human. The only thing that is bad is the church's understanding of the term 'sin'. Of course, the term ‘sin’ can also include an unkind act, but only to a limited extent. Because an evil person who intentionally committed evil acts could not be forgiven from a legal point of view. In Hebrew, this is repeated many times in the Torah by the expression (literally translated) ‘with a raised hand’, i.e. ‘deliberately’; for example, there was no sin offering to atone for murder or for rape. A murderer or a rapist had to be sentenced to death.
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The most extreme evangelical line goes so far as to conclude that a gay Christian is possessed by a demon. Consequently, a gay person has never truly converted (just as a true Christian does not divorce), hence the infamous conversion therapies. One cannot understand the extreme right wing of the evangelical movement without understanding their anthropology (the black heart). This insight may seem ridiculous, but it explains why free churches have such trouble with the LGBTQ+ movement. In my old worldview, I was quick to associate pleasure, especially of a sexual nature, with impurity and sin because I believed that the human heart was corrupted from birth.
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The homophobic attitude of the evangelical movements is directly linked to the anthropology of the church. Fundamental Christians do not see humanness in the LGBTQ+ movement, but essential depravity. A comparison of the creation story according to Mani with that of the Bible brings this to a bright light (cf. the link at the bottom of the page).
Read more about Mani, Manicheism and St. Augustine (under the section 'Historical and theological pages') here:
By Chris Zürcher. Page updated on 7 Octobre 2025
