At first I thought I lost my friend because of evolution.

We had gone to the same middle school and were confirmed together, but we went to different high schools. The summer between freshman and sophomore year, I noticed that he hadn’t been in church, so I went over to his house. He told me that he could not go to church anymore because he had learned in high school that evolution, not creation, was true. In our liturgy we sang, “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth,” and he couldn’t sing that anymore in good conscience.

My grandpa had given me a book called The Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter, and I went through every point in it with my friend. I brought up the Bible passages I had learned in my high school religion class, passages that showed that Genesis 1 was not a myth or a poem but real history. My friend had to admit that there were a lot of holes in the theory of evolution.

And then, after a while, he also had to admit the real reason he did not want to go to church. Going to church made him feel guilty because he was messing around with his girlfriend.

I learned a valuable lesson that summer. The average person who objects to a doctrine in the Bible doesn’t do it for purely intellectual reasons. The average person who objects to the Bible does it because he thinks that the Bible does not allow him to do what he wants.

That principle seemed to be true as I grew up and heard people talking about the roles of men and women. I had learned in middle school that to have separate restrooms for men and women was just as bad as having separate restrooms for black people and white people. We learned that the only difference between boys and girls was how they were raised. But the Bible distinguished between men and women especially when it came to their roles in life. Our middle school teachers did not want us to live in that kind of “ignorance.” So I heard them say that the Bible, or at least that part of it, must be wrong.

I’ve noticed that principle in the great sexuality debates going on in some Christian denominations. People want to live the way they want to live, and if the Bible says something different, they say it must not be true, or at least that part of it must not be true.

Sometimes, as in the case of my friend, the objection is not so direct. People feel guilty, so they find some part of the Bible to complain about, particularly if the doctrine is not perfectly logical.