Cardinal McElroy recently claimed that the Church needed to pay more attention to “the lived experience” of LGBTQIA2S+ people, and be accepting of who they are, and therefore, of what they do.

I disagree.

I have spent a considerable amount of time in prison ministry. Much of this has been spent in protection prisons. The largest cohort in those prisons is sex offenders. Many of the claims for tolerance, support and celebration made by LGBTQIA2S+ people are also made by paedophiles. I use that term in its technical meaning, which refers to persons whose primary or only sex drive is towards pre-adolescent children.

Some child sex offenders are very much aware of the abhorrent and immoral nature of adult-child sexual interaction, and the long-term harm it can do. They struggle constantly with feelings and urges which they did not choose, and over which they have no control. Many of those I spoke to had offended only once, and felt deep and genuine shame. Many of them had repeated bouts of suicidality. Paedophiles have a suicide rate fifteen times higher than the general population.

I was never judgemental of them as people. If my only sexual drive was in a direction forbidden by society, would I be strong enough to go my entire life without any expression of that sexuality? I hope so. I’d like to think so. But I know myself well enough to know that it would be a constant and painful struggle.

But understanding, or trying to understand, their struggle, and even their failures, and bringing hope of healing and redemption in Christ did not, does not, and cannot mean accepting or affirming their right to act on their impulses, no matter how strong or how natural or how innate those impulses seem to them to be.

Others with that same attraction do not apologise for their feelings, or for “who they are.” They were made this way, they claim, so this is the way they are meant to be. This is their lived experience. In Australia, this advocacy has taken the form of groups like BLAZE and Child Liberation. Children, they claim, are sexual beings, and exploring that sexuality is an important part of discovering who they are and how they relate to the world. Refusing to allow children to explore that sexuality in a safe way, perhaps with caring and responsible adults, is not about protecting children, but about protecting our ideation of childhood as innocent and asexual. It is modern society, not paedophiles, who objectify and abuse children by denying them the right to be who they are, and to explore who they are in a safe and inclusive way.

Those who take that point of view draw on the work of academics like Edward Brongersma, who argued that adult-child sexual interaction had no intrinsic long-term negative outcomes and that it was almost inevitably the secondary intervention by alarmist and judgemental parents, police, and social workers which caused the harm.

Theological arguments have also been drawn in support. Peter Lineham is a New Zealand historian and theologian who has been vocal in support of LGBTQIA2S+ people. His argument is that people on those spectrums did not choose to be who they are. Whether they were “born that way” or their sexuality developed over a period of time is irrelevant. The direction of their sexuality was not chosen; it is intrinsic, experienced as a given.

Mr Lineham goes on to say that Christians believe in an infinitely loving, infinitely inclusive God. It is simply not possible, he says, for Christians to believe that such a God would create people with these deeply felt urges, which they experience as part of their identity, and then condemn them for acting on those urges. We must, he says, listen and learn from their lived experience. We must accept them, and celebrate their givenness as we do our own.

Such arguments are immensely appealing to paedophiles, who also experience their sexuality as something they did not choose, as part of their givenness, as part of who they are. A just and listening society, they claim, would join with them in celebrating their identity.

We do not accept this in relation to that cohort. We should be cautious in accepting it in relation to others. An essential part of Christian theology is the Fall. The world is not the way God intended. Sin undermines, infects, and affects all of creation, everything we do, and how we perceive ourselves.

It is true, as Cardinal McElroy points out, that sexual sins seem to receive a disproportionate amount of attention from the Church, although the extent of this attention is often exaggerated. The Church’s demands for peace and justice and care for the environment are less controversial, and therefore less newsworthy.

There are two reasons for this attention to sexual sin that the Cardinal does not mention.

Firstly, there is no other group of sins which we are lobbied to accept and even celebrate. We do not have a month to celebrate envy, although it could be argued that TV advertising has made this a permanent celebration. We do not have campaigns to normalise abuse of parents, or demands that theft be recognised as a normal part of human nature.

Where a society has gone deeply astray from life and does not recognise that fault, that is where it will most feel the Church’s demands for truth and virtue as oppression and injustice. Of course, the Church’s teachings on morality apply only to Christians, who have a new identity in Jesus, and who above all should be seeking to live humbly, justly, and in accordance with God’s will.

Secondly, the Church spends some time on sexual sins because there is no other family of sinfulness that is so deeply embedded in us that it is perceived as part of who we are. I suffer the same besetting or habitual sin as St Jerome, although I do not go as far as hitting myself on the head with a rock every time I fail. We perceive other sins as something to be acknowledged and resisted, even if we fall regularly. It is only in the area of sexual sins that society encourages us to be free, to express ourselves as we truly are, to see that sin not as sin but as an inescapable and given part of our identity. This is a view the Church, and we as individual Christians, must persist in rejecting.

Careful listening and compassionate acceptance of people’s lived experiences will take us towards understanding, forgiveness, and acceptance of ourselves and of others whose sins we do not understand. It will even lead us to love for people regarded as unlovable, as beyond the pale of forgiveness and acceptance, because we are called to love as Jesus loves.

What deep listening to lived experience cannot do, and must not do, is lead to acceptance of sin itself, to acceptance of the idea that any sinfulness, including my bad-temperedness, is to be celebrated, lived with, and accepted.