"Sometimes," as I said at the start of a column a few months back, "a writer just knows he's going to get a lot of impassioned mail." On those occasions, you usually have a pretty fair idea what people are going to say.

Other times, though, you can be surprised. And so I was, at least a little, by what I heard after my last column, Gays vs. the Garden Guy.

To recap quickly, the column dealt with the trials of a Christian couple, Todd and Sabrina Farber, who run a landscaping company (Garden Guy, Inc.) The Farbers had decided not to work for a homosexual couple, and Mrs. Farber wrote them a polite but straightforward e-mail briefly explaining why ("I need to tell you that we cannot meet with you because we choose not to work with homosexuals. Best of luck in finding someone else to fill your landscaping needs. All my best, Sabrina"). Whereupon the homosexual couple declared their outrage, circulated the e-mail to hundreds of people, and the Farbers were deluged with hostile mail, including threats to kill them and rape their loved ones ("I will sodomize your children").

Then I got my mail.

To be sure, my mail was different: It came from Christians who all believed homosexuality is wrong. Some messages were well written and calm, others emotionally charged (one writer said she was "sobbing" as she wrote). But all of them let me know they were upset — with the Farbers, and with me. The Farbers, writers said, were guilty of presenting "a hateful face of Christianity" and of "refusing to interact with homosexuals" at all; I was accused of "glorification of the Farbers," and of an "assumption" that their approach is "the [sole] way for the church to uphold God's truth and witness to homosexuals and our culture" (emphasis added). One writer asked, "Do you even know Jesus?"

Now I wasn't surprised that some Christians would take a different approach than the Farbers. After all, I said so in the column. And that was part of what surprised me, at least somewhat: that many of them had ignored what I'd written.

Early in the column, I said that in a free society (the sort we're supposed to have in this country) there wouldn't have been a huge controversy: The Farbers' decision would have been understood as "perfectly legitimate" — that is, an option (not a mandate) that free people might legitimately choose. Then I added:

That doesn't mean it was the only choice Christians might make in good conscience. Other believers might have taken the job and build a relationship with the clients in hopes that they might minister to them. In fact, Todd had worked for homosexual clients in the past. He stopped, his wife said, because he had grown increasingly "grieved" to see the lives they were living.

Believers can debate among themselves which course they would have taken in the same position. But the Farbers not only had a right to do as they did, they had a serious moral reason: They were trying not to confer acceptance on an inherently illegitimate relationship. For Christians, that's a responsibility — a matter of simple duty.

The duty, of course, was not to avoid any contact with people practicing homosexuality, much less to avoid doing a particular kind of work for them. It was to reject their behavior. While that's a distinction many people stubbornly refuse to make, I didn't think Christian readers would miss it — any more than I thought they'd miss it when I said that some believers might minister more extensively to such men. (For the record, I've praised groups that do just that in several columns, including one of the first ones I wrote for Boundless. And various articles on this site have explored the struggles of homosexuals with unmistakable compassion, most recently here.)

But the truth is, this notion is founded in contemporary culture, not in the Bible. If you check Scripture, you'll find plenty of times where everyone from the Old Testament prophets to the Apostles to Christ Himself blasted manifestly unrepentant sinners without stopping to say "I love you." Words like (say) "brood of vipers" (Luke 3:7) and "wicked and adulterous generation" (Matthew 12:39) are decidedly stronger language than "we choose not to do business with homosexuals."

This, obviously, does not diminish by one iota the importance of love in the Christian faith. God's "I love you" is the ultimate message to sinful men. But it generally comes to them when they're humble and repentant, not when they're proudly flouting His Word. Moreover, His love is not identical to the modern American culture's concept of love — a concept many evangelicals (even some who think of themselves as countercultural) have soaked up far more than they realize. God's love isn't necessarily sentimental and gushing. He doesn't always coddle people, and He's willing to offend them, without rushing to reassure them of his affection at every turn.

As I say, many Christians don't get this any more, and they can be downright rough on Christians who do things differently — like the Farbers. We all like to slam people for being "holier than thou." (The Pharisees make easy targets, don't they?) But today it's more tempting for believers to be "more loving than thou" — to see (and show) themselves as more compassionate, more caring, more emotionally demonstrative. In fact, it may be especially tempting for people who work in ministries. The devil's most insidious traps involve the kind of vices that seem, on the surface, like virtues. And no vice lends itself to that guise more easily than pride.

Few people recognized such traps better than C.S. Lewis. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis has the devil gloat that "we direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to the vice which we are trying to make endemic."

If Lewis were alive today, he might not have chosen the same approach as the Farbers. But it's safe to say he wouldn't have slammed them. And that he wouldn't have wanted others in the household of faith to do that either.