"How can you be gay and Christian?"
I have heard and asked this question of myself by others more times than I can count.
I have been trying to answer this question for about as long as I can remember, first to myself and then to those who have been closest to me or who seemed to be asking the question themselves. There are, of course, lots of ways to answer the question of How—perhaps as many as there are gay1 Christians (and there are a lot of us).
While this is the question that is often asked, it is a question of praxis, rather than a question of belief. For the vast majority of people—indeed, for everyone who is not gay—the question of praxis is all but irrelevant. In any case, Christian people tend to actually be focused on the question of belief, something like "What does Christianity have to say about gender and human sexuality?"
In addition to the How of praxis and the What of belief, there is also Why. There are actually a whole lot of Whys. These Whats and Hows and Whys are the questions that LGBT+ Christians either ask or avoid asking for most of our lives. They are the questions that are answered for us before we can even begin to ask them ourselves. They are questions often posed from places of fear and control, but whose answers point powerfully in the direction of freedom and love.
These have been the questions of my life. Asking them has transformed me in myriad and inscrutable ways, and this I think and hope for the better.
This blog series is my attempt to consider questions like these in a more public format through an extended engagement of sexuality, gender, and the Christian faith. It is an invitation for myself and for you to ask these questions and to try to ask them well.
Perhaps you will be changed in the asking too.
Why am I doing this?
In my head, this series of posts is the reason that I decided to begin blogging in the first place. Yet I have found it incredibly difficult to get it started. Part of this is certainly that writing well—about anything —is difficult, emotional work. The work only gets harder when the topic is something that is publicly controversial and personally intimate. So the vulnerability of this project has contributed to its delay.
But more than this, despite how important I believe this conversation is, I confess there is also something like apathy on my part. The reality is that many blogs, many books, many sermons, many podcasts, and many people have already done this work in some way or another. It is hard to believe that one more voice in the conversation will make a difference. At our current location in the history of ideas, it can seem like anyone who still does not affirm LGBT+ people has chosen this consciously and is unlikely to change. (I do not actually believe either of these things are necessarily true.)
All being said, this is a daunting task. So why am I doing it?
First, because I believe that the work of it is necessary and good, even though I cannot determine its outcome. Sometimes our labor does not produce the fruit that we would like it to, but this does not diminish the value of the work or our obligation to do it. Sometimes we must speak regardless of who is willing to hear us.
Second, I am doing this because I can no longer keep track of the number of people in my life who have asked the eponymous question—“How can you be gay and Christian?”—in some form or another. This question has come to me, specifically, from all over the place: from friends, from skeptics (of being gay, being Christian, or both), from family, from relative strangers. At this point, there are more people in my life I would like to have this conversation with than I reasonably can.
Despite the fact that many resources for answering this and related questions already exist, I think a lot of people do not know where to get started. Some are asking little-old-me, after all. Clearly they don’t know where else to go! Of course, sometimes it is easier to engage the thinking of people we know than that of strangers. So, for those who know me and are looking for an invitation to enter the conversation, this is it. Hopefully, this series can provide a survey of the ideological landscape for you, especially if you are just getting started on the journey.
Who is this for?
There is a sense in which the fundamental answer to this question is “me.” These blog posts are for me. I have read a lot of books, prayed a lot of prayers, thought a lot of thoughts, and experienced a lot of things over the years of my admittedly short life so far. I think the process of organizing these into a (hopefully!) coherent whole will be good for me.
But more than this, it is for my friends and for my family. It is for my LGBT+ friends who are struggling to love themselves fully and well in the face of internal and external questions about the overlap of their various identities. It is for my LGBT+ friends who already do love themselves in this way but have shelved thinking about these questions in order to protect their own emotional safety. It is for my LGBT+ friends who are tired of feeling the burden to answer these questions alone. It is for parents of LGBT+ Christians–mine included–who want to love their children well but who find themselves unable to read Christian Scripture and Tradition in a way that affirms who their children are. It is for allies of LGBT+ people who find themselves in a similar situation.
Finally—and this is the trickiest one—it is for the skeptics. It is for friends and family and strangers who believe that what I am doing in writing this series is, quite literally, damnable. If you find yourself here, know that I am not primarily working to construct an apology or a defense. Instead, as I have said above, this work is an invitation to consider a new, Christian vision of humanity, one that I have found to be more beautiful than the one that I inherited and maybe you did too.
If you do not fit any of these categories and somehow, someway you find yourself here anyhow: then it is also for you. Welcome.
What (not) to expect?
I am aiming to make this series as comprehensive as I reasonably can. It will cover what I consider to be the most significant topics in Christianity, sexuality, and gender. If you know me well, you know this means that you should expect a lot of posts. If you know me really well, you know this also means you should expect them to come slowly. We’ll just have to see on both points.
The style of the posts in this series will change with the topics. Some posts will read more like personal reflections, others like essays. Some will rely mostly on my own experience and expertise, others almost entirely on that of other people. In all cases, but especially the latter ones, I’ll do my best to point you to other resources for further reflection and study, should you be interested.
In all of this, you should not expect a magic formula, or a logically linear A to B to C progression from one way of thinking to another. I am not convinced this is how reason works, so I will not be writing this way.
Instead, bring to your mind the famous images from gestalt psychology:2 maybe the duck–rabbit, the candlestick–faces, or the old–young woman. At first you see one thing, but as you continue to look at the picture, you see something else, often suddenly and inexplicably. It turns out that our minds can construct the meaning of multiple pictures from the same lines on the page or, these days, the screen.
More often than not, something like this gestalt or paradigm switch is how we come to think differently about all manner of things. When we first consider some topic, a particular way of making sense of things is more natural for whatever reason. Regardless of why we start where we do, we start somewhere. We make some meaning out of the data—the lines on the page—in front of us. But sometimes, as we examine these lines more closely, a new picture emerges. In the landscape of real ideas rather than contrived images, it is rarely the case that we are able to hold onto both meanings as we move forward. We ultimately decide or realize that one picture is a better—more authentic, more beautiful—way to make meaning out of the data than another. At this point, we can no longer find the other image to be compelling.3
This series of blog posts will be about looking at the lines in the picture drawn by Christian Scripture and Tradition as it relates to contemporary questions of sexuality and gender. It will also be about asking how Christians choose and ought to choose between two (or more!) competing pictures in the face of data that is in some sense underdetermined for the questions that we want to ask in the modern world.
My primary goal in all of this is not to convince anyone to see the same picture that I see, even though I do (naturally) believe that the picture I see is the "correct" one. My goal is less ambitious: it is to legitimze the inherent compatability of Christianity with LGBT+ identities and experience in the minds of those who cannot yet see this compatibility, either for themselves or for others. Rather than attempt to achieve conformity, part of my aim is, instead, to question our very attempts to achieve conformity, advocating instead for ethics that create genuine space for the plurality of human belief and experience. It is to promote a posture conducive to the flourishing of all LGBT+ people, particularly those who find themselves in and continue to choose Christian contexts.
Because, at the end of it all, that's what this project is about: the flourishing of LGBT+ people.
How to engage?
One unfortunate reality of our times is that everyone has an opinion about what it means for LGBT+ people to flourish. Another is that this conversation impacts LGBT+ people in a way that it simply cannot affect straight (cisgender, heterosexual) people. This asymmetry cannot be avoided, and we should not pretend that it can be.
My request, in light of this, is simple: remember who you are when you listen to and participate in conversations about sexuality and gender, whether it be this one or others. For me, this means recognizing the ways that my experience as a white, cisgender, gay man gives me some insights that other people will not have while also keeping me from seeing naturally things that other people will see more easily. I will be doing my best to remember this as I’m writing, and I ask that you do the same as you are reading and potentially responding.
With this, I have one final caution, which I will return to at length in a later post. It comes from Jesus’ polemic against the religious leadership of his context:
“[The religious leaders and scholars] tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them…Woe to you…for you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.”4
So my caution as you engage is this: be careful in the meditations of your heart and in the words of your mouth that you are not tying up heavy burdens that others must bear and you must not. Be careful not to lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.
Be careful, too, not to miss the kingdom of heaven yourself. It is often found where we least expect it.
Notes
Here and throughout, I use the word “gay” as a catchall to include all LGBT+ people. Sometimes I’ll say “gay,” and sometimes I’ll say “LGBT+.” This stylistic choice is not without its problems, though it is fairly common in the popular discourse of human sexuality and gender. To make things even more confusing, there will almost certainly be other times I use “gay” in its more specific sense to refer to a man who experiences romantic/aesthetic/sexual attraction to other men. I’ll be doing my best to avoid ambiguities, and hopefully it will be clear in context.
I am relying heavily on insights into the sociology of knowledge from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2012) in my thinking here. See, especially, chapters 10 and 12. I find the kernel of Kuhn’s perspective to be incredibly compelling, if not incontrovertible, contemporary criticisms of specific aspects of his paradigm notwithstanding.
Kuhn, Structure, 113-115.
