The Biblical Case for Gay Marriage v Tradition Teachings

19 When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”

11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

Bible Teachings

The bible's teachings were collected from a long time ago. Its words are even older within it's known stories and teachings. The views of societies have changed over the eons. Views before Christ. Views after Christ. Views of religion before Israel's covenant with God. And views of the church in a new covenant with God. Thus the question of gay marriage when several of the bible's teachings speak to one man and one woman heterosexual marriage and is mute on the question of gay marriage.

Traditional Christianity says the question of the bible's silence on gay marriage is because it is not "the ideal" of God's creation. The progressive church says its silence is there because of many other reasons and has nothing to do with God's "ideal".

As a Christian raised in traditional Christianity - as versus where I am today in my LGBTQ+ writings - my view will not come as a shock when proposing that the teachings of the bible on heterosexuality might be the "ideal" for many but it leaves plenty of room by even God's standards for allowing love to extend towards gay marriage as well. Especially so when we think of love in terms of "covenanted" (or, faithful) relationships with one's spouse, be they hetero- or homosexual.

Especially too when there are several examples in the bible of homosexual gay couples in the bible. The most prominent one which comes to mind is that of David and Jonathan (see here). Now I still think of their relationship as one between two very close friends... ut that is based on my orientation as a heterosexual... however, I must also allow as a Christian for the possibility of a close-and-healthy gay bond between David and Jonathon. In either case, the bible shares in its many stories that of a possible gay relationship between two "men of God".

And not being naive, there are as many toxic relationships between gay couples as there are between heterosexual couples; these should be abandoned unless they can be righted through love and repentance to one another.

Church Teachings and Judgments 

Traditional Christianity has also taken on a role of "sanctifying" human relationships and (mis)deeds. If reading Christian history is any kind of teacher, then one will find a wide deviation between "Christian" standards from faith-to-faith and from era-to-era - many of which are shown to be unloving, cruel, harming, and hypocritical. The church has no place in civil society in "sanctifying" anyone's relationship with anyone else. This is between the parties involved and God much like a doctor's relationship to their patients. Nor between institutions and their members. This is where the role of pastoring and counseling comes in to play. Relationships are personal and so must be the interaction of outsiders when asked in by that couple.

Which doesn't mean we might not exercise loving council to one another when situations arise; but always remember these are intensely personal matters and should be treated as such. And when offering pastoral, counseling, or friendship  advice always error on the side of wisdom and love. Exercising ethics and morality can be as beneficial as it can be harming and oppressive; making such interpersonal communications an exercise only few are qualified to enter into and make. And definitely not from the pulpit as I have observed too many times.

Further, the church itself, because of its own moving ethics and moralities, must always restrain itself from doing further damage as has been seen over the recent years in church organization's charters and policies imputed into people's lives. Not all have wisdom, and not all council is biblical, godly, or "God-ordained" as much as the church thinks it is and has instructed itself to think its own judgments into people's lives as the more righteous and holy while forgetting wisdom and love altogether.

Conclusion

Below are several articles which may help round out "biblical" approaches to human relationships. For myself, I question how-and-why people use the bible in other people's lives without looking to their own lives first. And even then, the most righteous life may be but the shallowest in comporting with those whom God dearly loves and does not judge to condemnation - as the church too many times thinks it has the right to do and preach. The God I know is a loving God and never a damning God. God is One thing and not Two things. God is love and not evil.

Blessings and Peace,

R.E. Slater

November 17, 2022

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References:

A Theology of Marriage including Same-Sex Couples:

A View from the Liberals

David and Jonathan: Same-sex love between men in the Bible

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The Bible and same sex relationships:

a review article

article link

Tim Keller,  2015

Vines, Matthew, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same Sex Relationships, Convergent Books, 2014

Wilson, Ken, A Letter to My Congregation, David Crum Media, 2014.

The relationship of homosexuality to Christianity is one of the main topics of discussion in our culture today. In the fall of last year I wrote a review of books by Wesley Hill and Sam Allberry that take the historic Christian view, in Hill’s words: “that homosexuality was not God’s original creative intention for humanity ... and therefore that homosexual practice goes against God’s express will for all human beings, especially those who trust in Christ.”

There are a number of other books that take the opposite view, namely that the Bible either allows for or supports same sex relationships. Over the last year or so I (and other pastors at Redeemer) have been regularly asked for responses to their arguments. The two most read volumes taking this position seem to be those by Matthew Vines and Ken Wilson. The review of these two books will be longer than usual because the topic is so contested today and, while I disagree with the authors’ theses, a too-brief review can’t avoid appearing cursory and dismissive. Hence the length.

I see six basic arguments that these books and others like them make.

Knowing gay people personally.

Vines and Wilson relate stories of people who were sure that the Bible condemned homosexuality. However, they were brought to a change of mind through getting to know gay people personally. It is certainly important for Christians who are not gay to hear the hearts and stories of people who are attracted to the same sex.

And when I see people discarding their older beliefs that homosexuality is sinful after engaging with loving, wise, gay people, I’m inclined to agree that those earlier views were likely defective. In fact, they must have been essentially a form of bigotry. They could not have been based on theological or ethical principles, or on an understanding of historical biblical teaching. They must have been grounded instead on a stereotype of gay people as worse sinners than others (which is itself a shallow theology of sin.) So I say good riddance to bigotry. However, the reality of bigotry cannot itself prove that the Bible never forbids homosexuality. We have to look to the text to determine that.

Consulting historical scholarship.

Vines and Wilson claim that scholarly research into the historical background show that biblical authors were not forbidding all same sex relationships, but only exploitative ones — pederasty, prostitution, and rape. Their argument is that Paul and other biblical writers had no concept of an innate homosexual orientation, that they only knew of exploitative homosexual practices, and therefore they had no concept of mutual, loving, same-sex relationships.

These arguments were first asserted in the 1980s by John Boswell and Robin Scroggs. Vines, Wilson and others are essentially repopularizing them. However, they do not seem to be aware that the great preponderance of the best historical scholarship since the 1980s — by the full spectrum of secular, liberal and conservative researchers — has rejected that assertion. Here are two examples.

Bernadette Brooten and William Loader have presented strong evidence that homosexual orientation was known in antiquity. Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium, for example, tells a story about how Zeus split the original human beings in half, creating both heterosexual and homosexual humans, each of which were seeking to be reunited to their “lost halves” — heterosexuals seeking the opposite sex and homosexuals the same sex. Whether Aristophanes believed this myth literally is not the point. It was an explanation of a phenomenon the ancients could definitely see — that some people are inherently attracted to the same sex rather than the opposite sex.

Contra Vines, et al, the ancients also knew about mutual, non-exploitative same sex relationships. In Romans 1, Paul describes homosexuality as men burning with passion “for one another” (verse 27). That is mutuality. Such a term could not represent rape, nor prostitution, nor pederasty (man/boy relationships). Paul could have used terms in Romans 1 that specifically designated those practices, but he did not. He categorically condemns all sexual relations between people of the same sex, both men and women. Paul knew about mutual same-sex relationships, and the ancients knew of homosexual orientation. Nonetheless “Nothing indicates that Paul is exempting some same-sex intercourse as acceptable.” (Loader, Making Sense of Sex, p.137).

I urge readers to familiarize themselves with this research. A good place to start is the Kindle book by William Loader Sexuality in the New Testament (2010) or his much larger The New Testament on Sexuality (2012). Loader is the most prominent expert on ancient and biblical views of sexuality, having written five large and two small volumes in his lifetime. It is worth noting that Loader himself does not personally see anything wrong with homosexual relationships; he just — rightly and definitively — proves that you can’t get the Bible itself to give them any support.

Re-categorizing same sex relations.

A third line of reasoning in these volumes and others like them involves recategorization. In the past, homosexuality was categorized by all Christian churches and theology as sin. However, many argue that homosexuality should be put in the same category as slavery and segregation. Vines writes, for example, that the Bible supported slavery and that most Christians used to believe that some form of slavery was condoned by the Bible, but we have now come to see that all slavery is wrong. Therefore, just as Christians interpreted the Bible to support segregation and slavery until times changed, so Christians should change their interpretations about homosexuality as history moves forward.

But historians such as Mark Noll (America’s God, 2005 and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 2006) have shown the 19th century position some people took that the Bible condoned race-based chattel slavery was highly controversial and never a consensus. Most Protestants in Canada and Britain (and many in the northern U.S. states) condemned it as being wholly against the Scripture. Rodney Stark (For the Glory of God, 2003) points out that the Catholic church also came out early against the African slave trade. David L. Chappell in his history of the Civil Rights Movement (A Stone of Hope, 2003) went further. He proves that even before the Supreme Court decisions of the mid-50s, almost no one was promoting the slender and forced biblical justifications for racial superiority and segregation. Even otherwise racist theologians and ministers could not find a basis for white supremacy in the Bible.

So we see the analogy between the church’s view of slavery and its view of homosexuality breaks down. Up until very recently, all Christian churches and theologians unanimously read the Bible as condemning homosexuality. By contrast, there was never any consensus or even a majority of churches that thought slavery and segregation were supported by the Bible. David Chappell shows that even within the segregationist South, efforts to support racial separation from the Bible collapsed within a few years. Does anyone really think that within a few years from now there will be no one willing to defend the traditional view of sexuality from biblical texts? The answer is surely no. This negates the claim that the number, strength, and clarity of those biblical texts supposedly supporting slavery and those texts condemning homosexuality are equal, and equally open to changed interpretations.

Wilson puts forward a different form of the recategorization argument when he says the issue of same-sex relations in the church is like issues of divorce and remarriage, Christian participation in war, or the use of in vitro fertilization. We can extend that list to include matters such as women’s roles in ministry and society, as well as views of baptism, charismatic gifts, and so on. These are “issues where good Christians differ.” We may believe that another Christian with a different view of divorce is seriously wrong, but we don’t say this means his or her view undermines orthodox Christian faith. Wilson, Vines, and many others argue that same-sex relations must now be put into this category. Since we see that there are sincere Christians who disagree over this, it is said, we should “agree to disagree” on this.

However history shows that same-sex relations do not belong in this category, either. Around each of the other items on Wilson’s list there are long-standing and historical divisions within the church. There have always been substantial parts of the church that came to different positions on these issues. But until very, very recently, there had been complete unanimity about homosexuality in the church across all centuries, cultures, and even across major divisions of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant traditions. So homosexuality is categorically different. One has to ask, then, why is it the case that literally no church, theologian, or Christian thinker or movement ever thought that any kind of same sex relationships was allowable until now?

One answer to the question is an ironic one. During the Civil War, British Presbyterian biblical scholars told their southern American colleagues who supported slavery that they were reading the Scriptural texts through cultural blinders. They wanted to find evidence for their views in the Bible and voila — they found it. If no Christian reading the Bible — across diverse cultures and times — ever previously discovered support for same-sex relationships in the Bible until today, it is hard not to wonder if many now have new cultural spectacles on, having a strong predisposition to find in these texts evidence for the views they already hold.

What are those cultural spectacles? The reason that homosexual relationships make so much more sense to people today than in previous times is because they have absorbed late modern western culture’s narratives about the human life. Our society presses its members to believe “you have to be yourself,” that sexual desires are crucial to personal identity, that any curbing of strong sexual desires leads to psychological damage, and that individuals should be free to live as they alone see fit.

These narratives have been well analyzed by scholars such as Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor. They are beliefs about the nature of reality that are not self-evident to most societies and they carry no more empirical proof than any other religious beliefs. They are also filled with inconsistencies and problems. Both Vines and Wilson largely assume these cultural narratives. It is these faith assumptions about identity and freedom that make the straightforward reading of the biblical texts seem so wrong to them. They are the underlying reason for their views, but they are never identified or discussed.

Revising biblical authority.

Vines and Wilson claim that they continue to hold to a high view of biblical authority, and that they believe the Bible is completely true, but that they don’t think it teaches all same-sex relations are wrong. Vines argues that while the Levitical code forbids homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22) it also forbids eating shellfish (Leviticus 11:9-12). Yet, he says, Christians no longer regard eating shellfish as wrong — so why can’t we change our minds on homosexuality? Here Vines is rejecting the New Testament understanding that the ceremonial laws of Moses around the sacrificial system and ritual purity were fulfilled in Christ and no longer binding, but that the moral law of the Old Testament is still in force. Hebrews 10:16, for example, tells us that the Holy Spirit writes “God’s laws” on Christians’ hearts (so they are obviously still in force), even though that same book of the Bible tells us that some of those Mosaic laws — the ceremonial — are no longer in binding on us. This view has been accepted by all branches of the church since New Testament times.

When Vines refuses to accept this ancient distinction between the ceremonial and moral law, he is doing much more than simply giving us an alternative interpretation of the Old Testament — he is radically revising what biblical authority means. When he says “Christians no longer regard eating shellfish as wrong,” and then applies this to homosexuality (though assuming that Leviticus 19:18 — the Golden Rule — is still in force), he is assuming that it is Christians themselves, not the Bible, who have the right to decide which parts of the Bible are essentially now out of date. That decisively shifts the ultimate authority to define right and wrong onto the individual Christian and away from the biblical text.

The traditional view is this: Yes, there are things in the Bible that Christians no longer have to follow but, if the Scripture is our final authority, it is only the Bible itself that can tell us what those things are. The prohibitions against homosexuality are re-stated in the New Testament (Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1) but Jesus himself (Mark 7), as well as the rest of the New Testament, tells us that the clean laws and ceremonial code is no longer in force.

Vines asserts that he maintains a belief in biblical authority, but with arguments like this one he is actually undermining it. This represents a massive shift in historic Christian theology and life.

Being on the wrong side of history.

More explicit in Wilson’s volume than Vines' is the common argument that history is moving toward greater freedom and equality for individuals, and so refusing to accept same-sex relationships is a futile attempt to stop inevitable historical development. Wilson says that the “complex forces” of history showed Christians that they were wrong about slavery and something like that is happening now with homosexuality.

Charles Taylor, however, explains how this idea of inevitable historical progress developed out of the Enlightenment optimism about human nature and reason. It is another place where these writers seem to uncritically adopt background understandings that are foreign to the Bible. If we believe in the Bible’s authority, then shifts in public opinion should not matter. The Christian faith will always be offensive to every culture at some points.

And besides, if you read Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010) and follow the latest demographic research, you will know that the world is not inevitably becoming more secular. The percentage of the world’s population that are non-religious, and that put emphasis on individuals determining their own moral values, is shrinking. The more conservative religious faiths are growing very fast. No one studying these trends believes that history is moving in the direction of more secular societies.

Missing the biblical vision.

The saddest thing for me as a reader was how, in books on the Bible and sex, Vines and Wilson concentrated almost wholly on the biblical negatives, the prohibitions against homosexual practice, instead of giving sustained attention to the high, (yes) glorious Scriptural vision of sexuality. Both authors rightly say that the Bible calls for mutual loving relationships in marriage, but it points to far more than that.

In Genesis 1 you see pairs of different but complementary things made to work together: heaven and earth, sea and land, even God and humanity. It is part of the brilliance of God’s creation that diverse, unlike things are made to unite and create dynamic wholes which generate more and more life and beauty through their relationships. As N.T. Wright points out, the creation and uniting of male and female at the end of Genesis 2 is the climax of all this.

That means that male and female have unique, non-interchangeable glories — they each see and do things that the other cannot. Sex was created by God to be a way to mingle these strengths and glories within a life-long covenant of marriage. Marriage is the most intense (though not the only) place where this reunion of male and female takes place in human life. Male and female reshape, learn from, and work together.

Therefore, in one of the great ironies of late modern times, when we celebrate diversity in so many other cultural sectors, we have truncated the ultimate unity-in-diversity: inter-gendered marriage.

Without understanding this vision, the sexual prohibitions in the Bible make no sense. Homosexuality does not honor the need for this rich diversity of perspective and gendered humanity in sexual relationships. Same-sex relationships not only cannot provide this for each spouse, they can’t provide children with a deep connection to each half of humanity through a parent of each gender.

This review has been too brief to give these authors the credit they are due for maintaining a respectful and gracious tone throughout. We live in a time in which civility and love in these discussions is fast going away, and I am thankful the authors are not part of the angry, caustic flow. In this regard they are being good examples, but because I think their main points are wrong, I have had to concentrate on them as I have in this review. I hope I have done so with equal civility.

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How I Was Moved To Support Same-Sex

Marriage In The Church

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by Julie Rodgers | Feb 4, 2016

Your beliefs don’t shift in an instant. We research and agonize, bouncing between hope and despair, until one day we hear ourselves say something a former version of ourselves never would have said. That’s how I came to support same-sex marriage in the church. When I came out as a teenager in Baptist circles in the Bible Belt, I never would’ve imagined God would still like me if I married a woman one day. And I want to try to explain, in theological(ish) terms, how I ended up here.

It seemed reasonable to be taken to an ex-gay ministry within days of coming out to my family my junior year in high school. At that point, gay people were hardly mentioned in the church, and when we were, we were told God thought gay people were gross. The main message from conservative Christians was that the Gospel would transform sexual minorities who sought the face of God, washing us, sanctifying us, and eventually making us straight.

A little lesbian who wanted so badly to be good, I abandoned my skepticism and latched onto the hope for “freedom from homosexuality.” I stuck around for almost a decade, hopeful that God would show up and surprise me if I remained committed to the process. When Exodus International asked if I would join their speaking team, I jumped in with a message of hope in what God would likely do in the future.

Eventually, we learned that even the most dedicated wouldn’t be able to change their orientation. Evangelical Christians shifted their theology a little at that point. Pastors and leaders decided that perhaps God’s transforming work would not result in orientation change, but it would result in the grace to pursue lifelong celibacy. Initially, Christian leaders were troubled when those of us committed to lifelong celibacy referred to ourselves as gay. They insisted we refer to ourselves as “same-sex attracted,” which implied we were basically straight people whose attractions happened to misfire from time to time. Then they realized it’s a bit much to demand lifelong celibacy from this one group of people and to define the terms of how we were allowed to talk about it, so it became more acceptable for us to say we were gay.

Some of this made me uneasy but I tried to be a sport about it, assuming those in leadership were more theologically sound than me and that their intentions were likely holier than mine. When Evangelical leaders said their views were rooted in sincere theological beliefs rather than homophobia, I believed them. In their minds, that is true. In my mind, that was true.

Thoughtful Christians have taught that all of Scripture points to a theology of marriage that involves one man and one woman in a lifelong commitment with a green light for sex in that context alone. This is based on the idea that the Bible is our ultimate authority, but it’s complicated by the fact that we bring an interpretive lens to the Bible. When we support women’s equality in all areas of leadership in the church, we trust one interpretive lens over another. Both sides are sincere Christians and both view the Bible as authoritative––they just differ on how the Bible, which was written in a patriarchal context in the 1st century, should apply to empowered women in the 21st century.

Since we interpret in community, we ultimately choose to trust one group of leaders in their interpretive endeavor over another. There’s safety in numbers, right? So I stuck with the crowd and assumed conservative pastors and Christian leaders probably brought a trustworthy lens to Scripture. Throughout my twenties I was committed to lifelong celibacy.

As the debate raged, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the way the arguments shifted. Initially we were told we should become straight, so I tried to become straight. Then we were told a traditional theology meant lifelong celibacy, so I was on the celibate track. We were taught that a marriage between a man and a woman is primarily about sanctification: a place to learn how selfish we are in a sort of lifelong mini-monastery. We were taught that marriage is also about companionship because God said it’s not good for humans to be alone. We heard that the marital bond creates an energizing love that overflows into the kind of hospitality that helps us to welcome the hurting into our homes.

As more LGBT people came out and more theologians said a Christian marriage could actually extend to same-sex couples, traditionalists grew anxious. Pastors realized there is no reason two gay or lesbian Christians could not live into the kind of marriage they’ve taught all along: one that’s about sacrifice, sanctification, companionship, and reflecting God’s faithful commitment to the church. So they scrambled for some sort of explanation for why we should continue to apply the text in a way that excludes same-sex couples from marriage, and many now say it’s because the capacity for procreation is central to a traditional understanding of marriage.

The problem is that Protestants have never taught that procreation is central to marriage and we don’t actually believe that or we wouldn’t be cool with birth control. We suddenly adopted a quasi-Catholic view of sex and marriage but only when it comes to gay people––not when it might burden straight people.

For 13 years I was mostly on board with leaders who maintained that marriage was between a man and a woman, assuming they were onto something I was missing. I’ve been on board with this at a great cost––a cost that’s been worth it because I deeply love the community I’ve come from, the community that I still consider my family. But I watched many people use their power to protect themselves rather than using it to protect the most vulnerable. I saw them make decisions about LGBT people while excluding us from the community of interpretation. Over the course of hundreds of conversations, with tears and prayers and vulnerable pleas, my heart was broken. Many Christian leaders have scrutinized the people they could’ve learned from all along, anxiously creating new arguments that kept sexual minorities from pursuing calls to ministry, playing the piano in the church, or building a home with someone they loved.

When you put that example next to someone like Eugene Rogers, you start to feel like there’s something very life-giving and very Christian in the affirming view of marriage. He sees marriage as a school of virtue that nurtures generosity in gay and straight couples alike: “For marriage is an example of the concrete discipline that most of us (liberal and conservative) lack: in marriage we practice common discernment over self-interest. Marriage cultivates concern for one another: it offers lifelong hospitality; it enacts love; and it exposes our faults in order to heal them. It is the marital virtues that the church need, not only with respect to the Bridegroom, but with respect to one another.”

He goes on to say: “The married know that they have learned moral virtues––patience or temperance or courage, fidelity, hopefulness, and charity­––because of a vulnerability to their spouse that they could not learn from any other person. Eros makes a way to the heart; without the vulnerability it brings, charity grows cold. This is not a lesson of “sexual liberation,” if sexual liberation involves evading commitment and discipline. This is a lesson of the incarnation.”

He says marriage exposes our faults in order to heal them and the grace cultivated in a lifelong commitment nurtures moral growth. When I considered the fruit of that kind of teaching over and against the fruit of one that views LGBT people with suspicion, relegating us to lifelong singleness with very little tenderness, I came to believe that we should celebrate same-sex marriage. It became hard for me to understand what exactly was driving traditional teaching on marriage if it was not fear of change––a very particular kind of fear that’s often expressed through homophobia.

But we don’t have to live in fear any longer. Same-sex couples are getting married, and many of these couples are decisively Christian, and these Christian couples are a witness to a watching world that’s been disillusioned by the hypocrisy they’ve seen in the church. No amount of disagreement with these marriages will invalidate their Christ-like example of love and faithfulness. It will not diminish the power of their testimony when their love creates an energy that welcomes in the hurting, the lonely, and the forgotten. These couples exemplify a vibrant faith fueled by a man from Nazareth who embodied love and forgiveness in the way He lived and died. That is, after all, what a Christian marriage is all about.

Marcel, the Shell with Shoes - 2022 Reviews & Quotes + Early Marcel Vids 2010,2011,2014

amazon link

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

Official Trailer HD | A24

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Part 1

2010

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Part 2

2011

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Part 3

2014

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The Reason ‘Marcel the Shell With

Shoes On’ Will Absolutely Destroy You

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NO, NOW YOU’RE CRYING: When our beloved wise-cracking mollusk first went viral, we were at an internet crossroads. We clearly chose the wrong path. The glorious (devastating) new film shows us why.

Justin Kirkland

Published Jul. 01, 2022

Marcel (the Shell (with Shoes On)) found his way to me during sophomore year of college, back when being online didn’t feel like such a chore.

I think it was around 2011. My friend pulled up this video featuring a stop-motion shell equipped with one large googly eye and, naturally, shoes. We watched the video, commented on how many people had seen it, and wrote it off. But throughout the rest of that spring–which turned out to be one hell of a terrible semester–I kept going back to it. Life sucked in that specific way that life is terrible for a 20-year-old, and as it turned out, the remedy was always more shell. So on nights where I’d decided to simply blow off homework, I’d dive into YouTube, eat Domino’s pizza and drink whiskey from a plastic bottle, and find my way, eventually, to Marcel.

I feel like over the years people have told me that’s what Marcel became for them, too: a palm-sized, quirky salve whose debut marked this peculiar crux of the internet’s history before the World Wide Web felt so perpetually toxic.

The original short film-turned-YouTube video from Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate amassed over 32 million views–a bona fide viral video when that kind of thing was still impressive. It spawned two short sequels, and then eventually, we didn’t hear from Marcel anymore. Twelve years went by. 4chan devolved into 8chan (yikes) and TikTok replaced Vine. Social media became an opinion cesspool and the likes of Marcel didn’t seem to have much of a place in the culture anymore, relegated to wherever Charlie the Unicorn and Philosoraptor exist.

Then, in the chaos of 2022, A24 announced that it would be releasing a feature-length mockumentary titled Marcel the Shell with Shoes On from Fleischer-Camp. For the die-hard fans, that was terrible news because there’s a certain cringe that often comes along with pulling the past into the present (see: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Will & Grace, Fear Factor’s Joe Rogan). If anyone should avoid 2022, it’s the perpetually earnest and optimistic Marcel the Shell.

The original Marcel the Shell video appeared online at a time that felt like a fork in the road. Marcel is the road we did not travel. We opted instead for something harsher and vitriolic. We lost the good faith that Marcel encapsulated.

In a bittersweet twist, Marcel the Shell, as we know him, does not come back. Or rather, it’s not all we see of him. Instead of recreating the past, the film recognizes that no matter which viral fame you’ve achieved–the pure one of 2010 or the infamous one of 2022–there’s a life that’s happening on the other side of the screen.

In the 10 years or so since we last saw Marcel, we discover that the two people whose house he lives in have since separated (a presumed nod to the 2016 divorce between Fleischer-Camp and Slate, both of whom, excitedly, returned for the film). In the wake of their departure, Marcel’s shell family has disappeared as well, except for his Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini).

In the film’s earlier scenes, we get callbacks and quotables from the original short film, but then the movie pivots. Nana Connie has what appears to be signs of dementia. On good days, she gets a bit lost. On bad ones, she gets hurt. Marcel, still squeaky and youthful, has fallen into the role of caregiver. She is insistent that he continues to live his life and find his missing family; he’s determined to stick by her side.

In the excitement of gaining internet fame, Marcel and Fleischer-Camp (who cameos in the film as the documentarian) go on a day-long search for Marcel’s family, but when they return, Marcel finds that all the fans who were inspired to help him are mostly interested in grabbing a selfie in front of the house. Dancing on TikTok. Posting something online as a braggy souvenir from when they doxxed Marcel. Worse, inside the house, the commotion has caused Nana Connie to fall and injure herself.

The short of it is that Marcel’s life isn’t quite as easy as it once looked online either. Like a lot of us, we look incredible via what we choose to share online. But when Marcel–and again, I’d like to recognize that we’re discussing a shell with a googly eye–is offered to us over the course of 98 minutes, life isn’t easy as it seemed to be in those three minute clips.

The film gets at the struggle that comes with grief, but more importantly, how easy it is to get trapped in the incompatible online version of ourselves. At one point in the film, Marcel questions Fleischer-Camp for not sharing any personal details about his life, saying, “You can connect with people when you’re not filming them.”

The moment underlines the entirety of the film–regardless of viral fame or the personas we build online, there’s always more going on than the internet suggests. And maybe the reason we lie about it all is because it feels like that’s our own escape. Or that we can create something better than what we’re living. Like Fleischer-Camp, it’s easier to post about what we’re seeing than it is to get into what plagues our day to day. But Marcel the Shell pushes past that. Marcel of 2010 showed us how pure life can be on the Internet. Marcel of 2022 shows us how pure it can be when you log off.

For those who’ve seen the film, you know that the whole story culminates in an interview with the fearless Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes–an offer Marcel initially declines for fear of drawing more attention to himself and endangering Nana Connie. Frustrated at Marcel for turning it down and refusing to accept the opportunity in front of him, she feigns a sudden reversal in health so that Marcel will do the interview. As he and Fleischer-Camp sit before Stahl and do their interview, Nana Connie sits in the window sill, recites “The Trees,” a poem by Philip Larkin, and then when the film cuts back, she is gone.

As Marcel tries to make sense of her death a few scenes later, he finds himself drawn to a cracked window. He turns to the camera and explains that he comes there to speak to Nana Connie. The air moving through the crack hits his shell and makes a dull whistle, and he says with a smile, “Suddenly we’re one large instrument.”

You’d think, 12 years into the future and squarely in my thirties, this wouldn’t hit me as hard as it might have in my plastic-bottled whiskey drinking days, but I was in the back of the theater, releasing those little mini breaths you run into when you’re trying not to emotionally explode in public. Between sniffs, I heard the fully adult man beside me choking back the same breaths. When the lights came up, I laughed and said, “I’m glad you were the one sitting beside me because I know that you got it,” and he said, “I thought the same thing about you, too.”

I’m not entirely sure what I meant by that–maybe that we were two grown men crying at a stop motion shell from the internet. Or that in the era of cynicism and skepticism, we allowed ourselves to cry at this earnest message about grief and life. I suspect it’s probably more in line with why I finally decided I was crying. A special piece of my life found a way to circle back to me a decade later. Not to wax nostalgic about the past but to find me where I needed it, at the same place I was.

And yeah, none of this would have come to be had Marcel not been extremely online. But the best part of Marcel’s story–the purest piece that I’ll carry with me–happened when he logged off.

* * * * * * *

The Trees

by Philip Larkin


The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

In Praise of the Simple Beauties

of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

article link

Olivia Rutigliano on the New Movie

about the Internet's Favorite Anthropomorphic Mollusk

by Olivia Rutigliano

July 1, 2022

This week, I saw a dear old friend at the movies and I am pleased to say that he seems better than ever.

I first became acquainted with the character known as “Marcel the Shell” in my college dorm room nearly a decade ago. My sister had sent me a link to a popular YouTube video, a short stop-motion film in which a tiny seashell with a googly eye and a pair of pink plastic sneakers takes a cameraman around the house where he resides—a giant house, a human’s house—and explains how he lives his miniature life.

He exists inventively, resourcefully. He scrounges for things that he might turn into tools and gadgets and furniture. “Guess what I use as a beanbag chair?” he asks the filmmaker capturing him. “A raisin.” He uses stray hairs as string, pretends a ball of lint is his pet dog. Most of the film is like this: a little vérité-style preview into this charming lifestyle which is a dilated, cobbled-together version of our own.

Crucially, this short—entitled Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and made by Dean Fleisher-Camp and Jenny Slate—is not about a little world as much as it is about a little life. The immense charms of Marcel’s handmade (shellmade?) surroundings are surpassed by the palpable spunk of its resident. Marcel is curious, sentimental, indefatigable, and a little bit sassy. He informs the camera, “Some people say my head is too big for my body… and I say… ‘compared to what?'”

Marcel is able to produce beauty in his world by seeing everyday objects in a different way, and so too does the film.

The original Marcel the Shell short, posted to YouTube in 2010, became a phenomenon. The lore is that Slate and Fleisher-Camp had created him accidentally—she produced the funny voice, and he built a model to match. Indeed, Slate speaks about the character not as something she and Fleisher-Camp created, but as a whole identity who was inside both of them and managed to manifest from them, like Athena climbing out fully grown from Zeus’s head or Aphrodite emerging as her adult self from, well, a shell. Marcel is his own person, a fully coherent individual, even to his creators.

In real life, Marcel drew crowds and fans for his cuteness but held onto them because of his unique perspective. The popularity of the initial short video generated several sequels and two children’s books. And now, 12 years later, he has finally made his feature film debut.

Directed by Dean-Fleisher Camp, co-written by Jenny Slate and Nick Paley, and produced by A24, this feature version, also entitled Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, revisits the last few years of Marcel content while also reworking it. The story is about Dean, a filmmaker, who finds a tiny sentient shell living in the Los Angeles Airbnb he’s staying in, and gets the idea to film his daily routine. Marcel lives with his loving grandmother, Nana Connie (Isabella Rosselini), and they spend their days gardening, talking, watching 60 Minutes on Sundays, and rigging contraptions to get basic things done. “It’s pretty much common knowledge that it takes at least 20 shells to have a community,” Marcel informs Dean. But it’s just him and Nana Connie in the house—the rest of their giant group has vanished (probably accidentally packed in a suitcase and taken away by the last couple to stay there).What results is a tender 89-minute film about the bonds that fortify our lives, from new friendships to intergenerational care.

In the film, the shorts that Dean has posted to YouTube make Marcel a kind of celebrity, and he decides to try to use his newfound notoriety to find his missing family. But his attentions are split between the longing to find his community and the desire to care for the one he already has: Nana Connie seems to be experiencing a kind of dementia, and Marcel, ever-loving, wants to use all his energy caring for her and keeping her safe. The life they live together is special and beautiful, and he doesn’t want to miss a minute of that.

What results is a tender 89-minute film about the bonds that fortify our lives, from new friendships to intergenerational care. 

Marcel wonders a lot about the different ways we connect to people; the discovery of the internet has him negotiating the difference between a community and an audience. Narratively, it is about what it means to build a life with someone, but it’s peppered with questions like these.

And thematically, of course, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On cannot help but be about our relationships to objects, too. So much of the film is about Marcel’s material life and his practical mindset: how he uses objects to make his life easier (for example, he climbs inside a tennis ball and uses it to traverse the house).

But it is also about how Marcel’s inch-tall perspective opens up the potential of objects and materials—not just pragmatically but aesthetically. Marcel is able to produce beauty in his world by seeing everyday objects in a different way, and so too does the film. Some of the most beautiful moments are simple, silent camera shots over the tiny treehouses built in the Airbnb’s planters, or a pattern (made with arugula leaves, flower buds, and green peas) Marcel arranges into the dirt in a window box outside. And then there is Marcel himself, this little anthropomorphic mollusk (I guess?) with his own special kind of wisdom, reminding us the ways in which even things around us are all creatures, great and small.

I find myself, after this particularly trying week in America, grateful to be seeing Marcel again.

One of the film’s many, many motifs is a reminder to pause and notice the beauty of the world around us—to live slowly and receptively, to stop and realize that we are all, in our ways, so small, and to remember the ways our lives can still make big impacts. But more than this, the film is clear that we are all (in a way) objects, all instruments. We are vehicles for beauty and love, if we only open ourselves up and let them flow through us.

This might seem trite, but if it does, that is my fault. I find myself, after this particularly trying week in America, grateful to be seeing Marcel again, shining in all his sincere glory from inside the most profound iteration of his chronicle yet. I am desperate to impart the splendidness and the earnestness of this achievement, committed to illuminating others to the wonders of this movie, candid about his ever-present perch in my heart but adamant that this film will appeal even to those who have never seen him before.

The film is genuine, never-cloying, always poignant. Nearly every shot is suffused with soft, golden sunshine and an ever so hazy, dreamlike grain. It is a warm, delicate, perfect project—a beautiful revisitation of and tribute to a character so surprisingly special and plucky that his relevance has outlasted a decade of changing popular cultural norms. Through everything, no matter what else there is, we are reminded that there is Marcel, there is Marcel, and there will always be Marcel.

* * * * * * *

Dean Fleischer Camp, director for “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,”
holds Marcel in his hands. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times

How ‘Marcel the Shell’ went from viral sensation

to 2022’s most adorable movie star

article link

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

by Carlos Aguilar

June 24, 2022

Minuscule in mass but colossal in charm, Marcel, a one-eyed mollusk with a pair of pink sneakers attached to his exoskeleton, became an online sensation in late 2010. That’s when filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp and comedian and actor Jenny Slate, then a couple, unleashed his irresistible persona in a stop-motion short film on YouTube.

Over a decade later, following two more viral videos, their adorable brainchild now stars in the full-length mockumentary “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” which A24 is releasing exclusively in theaters this weekend. But the journey from the no-budget original shorts to the feature adventure, which premiered at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival, involved plenty of tiny but assertive steps.

The origins

Marcel’s childlike voice, where his heart-melting power resides, is Slate’s creation. She first summoned the soft-spoken tone during a trip for a friend’s wedding 12 years ago. To save money, she and Camp were sharing a hotel room with several people.

“I was feeling really cramped and I just started talking in this little voice, and we all thought it was funny,” Slate told The Times ahead of the film’s release. That playful impulse would soon take the shape of the now-beloved character known for sharing unexpectedly profound existential observations from a refreshingly clear-sighted perspective.

Jenny Slate conceived the voice of

Marcel over a decade ago.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

When the weekend was over, a panicked Camp remembered a promise to make a video for a friend’s stand-up comedy show. He immediately thought of interviewing Slate in that new voice and began building an idea around it. After recording the lines, he proceeded to handcraft a figure to personify them.

“Dean did such beautiful character design. When I saw Marcel standing on the kitchen table, I just felt so sure that that was him, like how people feel when they are in love at first sight,” noted Slate. “That’s how I felt about Marcel.”

Without previous knowledge of the stop-motion animation process, the director created the character, animated it, edited the scenes and screened Marcel’s first-ever appearance — all within 48 hours. At the time a self-proclaimed perfectionist, Camp had no intention to upload the short piece online until someone at the show inquired about the possibility of showing the wondrous sea creature to their grandmother.

“Now I derive a lot of meaning from the fact that he’s a shell, but back then, I was just trying to make a small, cute character out of found objects,” he said. “There’s an emotionality to that voice that I think I was trying to embody by using objects that you might find under your couch or in the back of a drawer. That was the impetus for it creatively.”

Slate can trace that interest in the inner lives of inanimate objects to a series of comedic videos, made long before Marcel came to be, where a variety of items narrate their lives or sing about their feelings. “One that I still love is of a container of powdered milk singing a tragic song about how nobody wants to use it because it’s not real milk. And that it’s very lonely,” she said with a laugh.

Since Marcel lives in the human world, Slate said that one of the major joys of creating his microcosms lies in repurposing household items from their intended use for his everyday activities. “I love figuring out how Marcel does things or what he wears for what. Suddenly all the objects around me are imbued with such possibility,” she said.

In “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” Marcel watches

as he becomes an internet sensation. (Courtesy of A24)

How ‘Marcel’ became a movie

As Marcel’s short films went viral online, Hollywood studios and networks approached Camp and Slate. The duo took the meetings, but were wary of attempts to attach Marcel to a more familiar tentpole template.

“I remember somebody suggested that we partner Marcel with Ryan Reynolds so they could fight crime. I’m not saying I wouldn’t watch that movie, but I just knew that was not the right avenue to pursue for him,” he recalled. “I wanted to make a movie that was personal and did justice to the internet love for this character. We knew after that round of meetings, ‘If we’re going to expand Marcel, it needs to be made independently.’”

Even before a movie was on the horizon, the co-creators published two books illustrated by artist Amy Lind: “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On: Things About Me” in 2011 and “Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been” in 2014. For Slate, the second tome represented a breakthrough in the development of the character’s emotional complexity.

“That one not only goes deeper into exploring Marcel’s perspective as a very small creature, but also begins to show his philosophy on life and what his preferences are,” said Slate. “We really get to know him and there are sweet little musings in there.”

Through it all, Camp and Slate continued collecting ideas and jokes for a possible feature film, without any specific story angle.

With time, the two realized that what they found compelling about Marcel directly related to their own preoccupations, such as the internet fame that their creation had amassed. That’s when Marcel’s journey to the big screen began to crystallize.

Dean Fleischer Camp, director & writer

of “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.”

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Joining creative forces with co-writer Nick Paley, the team wrote a long treatment and started hosting recording sessions where Slate would give form to Marcel’s dialogue with spur of the moment ingenuity. Based on what those improvisation meetings yielded, Camp and Paley slowly polished and rerouted the plot.

“They would put together a patchwork of transcription of recorded audio and then write new scenes. Then we would record off of those written new scenes and improvise off of them too,” said Slate. “Most of the film is highly improvised, while some parts were word-for-word written out, depending on what Dean and Nick decided to do.”

“We were writing and recording for two and a half years, but probably 10 to 12 days of that we were recording audio periodically,” added Camp. “We’d record with Jenny again, she’d give us all this new, great material, and then we would incorporate it into the script.”

During this process, renowned actress and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini came aboard to voice Marcel’s wise and cheeky grandmother, Nana Connie. Fleischer-Camp had been fascinated with the series of peculiar short films Rossellini created for the Sundance Channel in the late 2000s titled “Green Porno,” focused on animal behavior and mating rituals.

“She’s more like Nana Connie than I think any other role she’s played. She has an inner strength and a real mettle to her,” he said. “She also knows a ton about farming. She lives on a farm that she works with several other people.” (Some of the audio of Nana Connie talking about her strawberries in the finished film comes from the director’s interview with Rossellini about her real-life crops.)

Dean and Marcel the Shell | (Courtesy of A24)

Dean plays himself

As with the short films, which were framed as nonfiction shorts about Marcel made by a filmmaker named Dean, Camp knew his voice would also feature in the larger project. But he wasn’t keen on appearing in front of the camera as a somewhat fictionalized version of himself.

“It wasn’t part of the original pitch. Although going in, we did have the idea that Dean would evolve in this way and that Marcel would sort of push him out of his comfort zone,” he said. “Dean would have to confront artistic, but also personal questions on role of the director. ‘How much do you help a documentary subject when they’re in need?’ ‘What does that relationship consist of?’ Those got explored as a result of making the film.”

As Slate notes, Marcel also ponders the cause and effect of what it means to be filmed. The short films that made him famous in our reality also exist in the feature as documentaries, and Marcel is aware of them and affected by their success and fandom.

“He had thought he was just in conversation. But then, the short films that the filmmaker Dean puts online end up affecting him. They affect his point of view,” said Slate. “They affect what he thinks is possible. They cause him to hope when hope is often painful. We see all of that because Marcel continues to engage.”

Eventually the director gave in to playing Dean on camera — and the character has a fuller arc examining the ethics of his relationship with the endearing shell. Camp even factors into an interview with Lesley Stahl and the “60 Minutes” crew — Marcel and Nana Connie are devoted fans of the investigative show.

The movie’s Dean is also processing a recent romantic breakup. That this separation was written as part of the tale even before Camp and Slate divorced in 2016, seemed curiously prophetic to the filmmaker.

“I love how much I find in the film and in the story and in the character that feels somewhat unintentional or at least feels subconscious,” he said. “I’m an idiot because I always think that whatever I’m making is just total fiction. Then years later I’m always surprised at how personal my movies end up, and this one is no exception.”

Marcel and his Nana Connie in "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On." (Courtesy of A24)

What comes next

With Marcel now warming souls in movie theaters, Slate feels confident that this ever-deepening character has a promising, if still undecided, future.

“As long as I’m a living person there will be more to explore about Marcel because there’s a big part of him that really lives in my psyche,” she said. “He’s exactly the same as when we first met him. He’s just revealed himself more. The best thing about Marcel is that he very rarely says he doesn’t want to answer a question. That’s why we keep getting to know him.”

Slate and Camp agree that the years alongside their lovably witty artistic offspring has elucidated significant truths about themselves, all while teaching them invaluable lessons in tackling adversity.

“I find Marcel truly inspiring, especially the way that he never feels small, even if he is. He never feels overlooked. He never feels like the world is unfair. Most people can relate to feeling like they are in a world that wasn’t made for them,” said Camp. “But he doesn’t see his differences. When he runs into an obstacle, he doesn’t see impossibility. He’ll find a way around it just like yesterday and just like tomorrow.”

 Dean Fleischer-Camp & Jenny Slater

Rosa Salazar, Dean Fleisher-Camp, Jenny Slater

Cast of Marcel the Shell

Guess why I smile? Uh, because it's worth it.

- Marcel the Shell

Jenny Slate

Marcel

Guess what I do for adventure... I hang glide on a Dorito.

- Marcel the Shell

Dean Fleischer-Camp

Dean

But sometimes I tie a hair to a piece of lint and I drag it around.

His name is Alan. He doesn't know tricks or anything.

- Marcel the Shell

Isabella Rossellini

Connie

Life's a party. Rock your body."

-Marcel the Shell

Nathan Fielder

Justin

You can't make yourself a nickname,

like you can make yourself a new hairstyle.

- Marcel the Shell

Rosa Salazar

Larissa

One time I nibbled on a piece of cheese

and my cholesterol went up to 900.

- Marcel the Shell

Thomas Mann

Mark

Do you want to watch me try to lift this?

Alright... ehheh, ehh, ughh...

Nah, I can't. I can't' life anything up at all.

- Marcel the Shell

Lesley Stahl

herself

My one regret in life is that I'll never have a dog.

-Marcel the Shell

Jessi Klein

Judy

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

Official Trailer (2022) Jenny Slate, Rosa Salazar

Addition Video Interviews & Shorts