Veteran award-winning gospel musician Kirk Franklin is calling out the double standards among some Christians particularly with topics pertaining to homosexuality, saying people shouldn’t use the Bible as an excuse to “cover up” their homophobic views.
The 51-year-old made those comments during a recent interview on The Clay Cane Show on SiriusXM when he was asked about his 2015 apology to the gay community for the homophobia they faced in the Black church, Faithfully Magazine reported.
“What is very important to understand is that the pulpit is not a bullying place, and that we have to also understand that no group of people are monolithic…. All black people do not think the same, do not process the same. Not all LGBTQIA+ people all think and process the same,” the musician said.
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“It’s that you have some LGBTQIA+ people that make decisions—like I have some close gay friends who make decisions based on their interpretation of the Bible, and they live out their lives based on whether celibacy, or whatever they choose to do. And they should have the right to do that just like an atheist should a right to have his view in America [and] a Muslim [should a right to] have his view in America.”
The Grammy award-winner also said Christians should not “weaponize the Bible to cover up” those discriminatory views, adding: “A lot of times, our homophobic views that have nothing to do with the Bible.”
Franklin went ahead to speak extensively on the double standards of some Christians and how some homophobic views are not even biblio-centric and are devoid of science.
“A lot of people that maybe profess Christianity, they have views that are not even biblio-centric. It’s their personal views that they do not understand, sometimes maybe the biology of homosexuality, and so they want to find a scripture to try to justify their own homophobic views,” he said.
“So if you’re going to have that energy toward that gay brother and sister, you gotta have that same energy to the heterosexual organist that’s got four and five kids with some of the choir members in the church. You gotta have that same energy.”
He continued: “You can’t abuse people from a platform. Because that ain’t love, that’s not the gospel to take a microphone and weaponize it to hurt people and to condemn people. That we are to do life with people, we are to walk out the scriptures of life with people with truth and love. Because where there is no love, there can never be any truth.”
Also in the interview, the Stomp musician touched on the unusual “angels from Africa” prayers by Paula White when she was interceding for then-candidate Donald Trump to win the 2020 presidential election in November. White, a pastor and televangelist, served as the chair of the former president’s evangelical advisory board. White’s prayers were met with ridicule on social media.
Franklin, who informed the show’s host he had initially told his social media followers angels are “spiritual” and rather not “geographical”, said the word of God should not even be politicized in the first place, Faithfully Magazine reported.
“I believe that continued level of ignorance gives us the challenges that we have right now to be able to continue to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because at the end of the day, the gospel is about Jesus Christ. It’s not about politics. It’s not about all these other sideline items that we try to make. It’s important to God as what it is.”
Franklin also spoke on the church and its ties to slavery, saying it would have probably not been promoted if the church had rebuked it.
“If every church in America during the 19th and 20th century—well, over the last 400 years—would have acknowledged that racism was a sin and that slavery was a sin, slavery could have never existed in America,” he said. “Just a biblio-centric fact that slavery and racism are sins.”
