What Am I Going to Do About Gay Christians?
By Scott Yi
Preface to "What Am I Going to Do About Gay Christians?"
By Jonathan Ho
Ever since I began editing for Project Arctos, the question of publishing articles on the topic of sexuality and gender has come up a few times. When will you publish something around sexuality? is a question I received from some readers.
At one point, I decided to initiate an edition exploring Christianity and sexuality and gender, but upon reaching out to potential writers, I ended up receiving a lot of pushback. Some people didn’t want to see another thing that could hurt their brothers and sisters in Christ who self-identified as gay. They had seen the deep pain caused to their friends and did not want to see this hurt repeated. Another friend told me that his church group had tried to straddle the line without giving a clear stance on where they stood on the topic of sexuality and gender and that this ended up leading to confusion and hurt on all sides. Unless Project Arctos was going to be clear about one stance, it was better to not publish anything at all.
Other questions also came to mind, such as, why are we singling out Christians who are gay? What if we turn this into a mental exercise that accomplishes nothing aside from puffing up one side or another on what they think is right? Are there other ways we can love our brothers and sisters who are gay without “othering” them, without turning them into a subject of gossip and mental exercises?
All of this made me hold off publishing anything on this topic. And so I didn’t. Until my prompt to the writers came back with an unexpected article.
Following this sharing from me is an article from Scott around his struggle, a struggle around how to love and include people who are gay. In his article, he hints at theological questions around the interpretation of Scripture. In the process of editing his article, I questioned whether I should include some parts due to what they might suggest: am I responsible for what others think theologically? And what if I’m wrong or misleading others by publishing those parts?
To be clear, my struggle is not in publishing an article around sexuality and gender, but around the theological views around what Scripture says about sexuality and gender. In the end, I have decided to publish this piece without pulling certain parts because Project Arctos does not exist to tell you what to think, but to give you the tools to thoughtfully work with your community to interpret and walk in light of the holy Scriptures. Scott’s struggles are real and they include questions of how we interpret Scriptures and how we treat others in the church.
There are many brothers and sisters in Christ who have suffered much due to what we have done (or not done). And there are many who are wrestling with what God says about gender and sexuality. May God use the following article to help you wrestle with what it means to love those around us faithfully, as Christ does. If you have questions around gender and sexuality, I encourage you to find trustworthy members of your community to share with. Community is important and as hard as it is, it is important to find those trustworthy people among us to share in the struggle of loving God and others well.
If you don’t feel you have such a community, then please reach out to us. We are far from perfect, but we would love to wrestle together with you on how to love those around you as Christ does. Or maybe you’d like to share your personal experiences with us around this topic. We’d love to hear from you.
To connect, email us at hello@projectarctos.com. Our team varies in our interpretations of Scripture and the best ways to love as Christ does but we are all committed to seeing Christ as Lord over our lives.
What Am I Going to Do About Gay Christians?
One of my nonprofit projects, the Youth Collaborative, trains urban teens to make and sell their own artwork. In our organization, the teens are empowered to be a part of the decision-making process, and this includes picking the locations and events where our group would sell our artwork. A few years ago, the teens expressed their enthusiasm to go to PrideFest and set up a booth at what we all thought would be the busiest festival of the summer. Although our nonprofit is not registered as a religious organization, I had some small amount of misgivings nagging at me, since at the time I was working on the pastoral staff of a local church. What if someone connected to the church community saw me? What kind of theological defense should I have prepared? Was it inappropriate for me to help my teens design pro-LGBTQ stickers and buttons? Eventually I got too busy with all the market prep to give any serious consideration to my theological quandaries, and at the very least it felt inappropriate to enforce my exclusionary Christian values onto non-Christian children who truly believed in their hearts that they were supporting a great cause.
When we arrived at PrideFest, everything was going well on the business side of things. Customers were excited about our products and were more than happy to support us as the day wore on. And just when I thought I wasn't going to see anyone I knew, someone called my name from behind me. It was a younger man who briefly attended the same church with me, who I was still friendly with. He had not come out yet when we were at the same church, but we were Facebook friends so I loosely knew his story. I knew that he had initially expressed great enthusiasm for his church family, one of those urban communities full of young professionals that like to talk about how diverse and open-minded they are. I knew that when he came out, he was shunned from the top down in a classic example of don't-ask-don't-tell church politics gone wrong. I knew that he didn't even feel welcome enough to attend service anymore, let alone lead in any capacity, so he left his so-called church family in bitterness and loneliness. From my own broken church experiences, I knew something of how that felt. I also knew that when he saw me that day at PrideFest, his face was positively beaming. I knew that at the moment he saw me, what he thought he saw was an ally… and to my sudden shame I couldn't tell him that the only reason I was at PrideFest was because these teens had dragged us out there.
What I didn't know at the time was that his story isn't as rare as so many think, once you begin to talk to queer folks and you do the research. The number of genuine Bible-believing LGBTQ Christians whose faith has been traumatically upended by the local church is in the MILLIONS.[1] It is an open wound in the church that has festered without any meaningful progress for far too long. Everyone in the world sees it and in the minds of many people, especially young people, it is the number one reason they don't go to church. For better or worse, this is the defining theological debate for most American Christians under 40. In one survey, an overwhelming 70% of millennials agreed that religious institutions are pushing away young people by being too judgmental toward LGBTQ people.[2] At one of my previous churches, the pastor offhandedly remarked during a sermon that gay people are going to hell for the sin of homosexuality – at least two people in my peer group stopped attending from that day on.
It is inappropriate to even call it "the LGBTQ issue" because it dehumanizes the fact that what we're talking about is the personhood and livelihood of millions of God's children, who have been systematically abused, mistreated, and even murdered. Almost half of all transgender people have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives.[3] Some studies have shown that "LGBTQ young adults had a 120 percent higher risk of reporting homelessness compared to youth who identified as heterosexual"[4] (68% of LGBTQ teens who are homeless have engaged in self-harm, including attempted suicide[5]). Passages like 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul lists all the vices that disinherit someone from entering God's kingdom, have been used as proof texts by churches to depict gay sexual orientation as a kind of unforgivable sin. But those same teachers of the law have failed to reconcile Paul's words with Jesus' own rebuke of religious teachers in Matthew 23:13 -"You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces."
For most of my life I was a proponent of the scientifically-leaning traditionalist position: that gay and lesbian sexual orientation is inarguably a natural phenomenon witnessed in both the human and animal world, i.e. gay Christians naturally exist. However, because marriage has always been defined as a lifelong bond between one man and one woman, queer individuals should live a life of celibacy if they are unable to have attraction for the opposite sex. I was accepting of same-sex civil marriages pretty quickly, since that has nothing to do with biblical theology. And yet despite what seemed like a logical position, what I couldn't get over was just how un-Christlike the traditionalist approach was in the way that it excludes people from the Gospel and just abandons them to the wilderness (whether intentional or not). So for a long time I struggled to find my own footing in this crisis. It is something I personally wrestled with because I believe in the authority of Scripture, and I believe in the credentials of professional biblical scholars whose systematic rigor is the standard for my own analytical process. I have no patience for postmodernist readers of the Bible who try to tell me with a straight face that David and Jonathan were gay lovers (misinterpreting 1 Samuel 18), or ultra-liberal Christians who selectively disqualify portions of the Bible because "it was written by straight white males" (there are no white people in the Bible, fyi). On the other hand, we need to be very wary of leaning so heavily on “obvious” proof texts that are actually much more complex in their cultural and lexical background than most religious teachers are willing to admit. For over a thousand years, it was “obvious” to the church that every single Jewish person is condemned to hell for killing Jesus (based on the most literal reading of Matthew 27:25). For over a thousand years, it was “obvious” to the church that the sun rotates around the earth (based on the most literal reading of Joshua 10). I believe God's Word is divinely inspired and that the Holy Spirit can help us through our current crisis as He has done countless times throughout the history of the church.
What I've come to realize is that building relationships with the LGBTQ community is not so much about changing doctrine, but reapplying the actions of Jesus more authentically. If Jesus loved the marginalized and despised in His time such as sex workers and eunuchs, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that He loves the sexual minorities among us today. It's very apparent that one of the main reasons traditionalists are holding onto their fundamentalist line so staunchly is because they equate LGBTQ people with an erosion of orthodox belief and a breakdown of systematic theology. But for the most part, if we actually listen to queer people who grew up in the church and miss their spiritual community, they are not demanding the destruction of biblical foundations or Gospel truths. They want what all of us have: God’s love. I look at some of these LGBTQ folks who keep searching for a people of God that will embrace them, and it absolutely amazes me to my core. Because I know a lot of believers who have stopped going to church in recent years, who have been driven away due to all kinds of theological, political, and racial issues. Many of them have even given up on church altogether. But then there are the LGBTQ communities who still have hope, who still believe and who still want to belong. Instead of disillusionment, they are the ones hoping and praying for the revival of the house of God. That’s not something we should take for granted.
Reflection Questions:
1. Has anyone in your church group ever come out as gay? How did your church group respond? How did Jesus treat the marginalized in His time?
2. Does your church community have an aim for a culture of proactive love in Christ towards everyone in the congregation regardless of ideological affiliation? Are there people in your congregation who might be isolated or kept at arm’s length due to some kind of unspoken shame?
3. Tim Ouyang, musician and designer, once shared that “we all have an excess of allies and not enough real community and friends and a tribe that we can call our own because we have divided ourselves across ideological lines.”[6] Many think of theological rightness before seeing people as people. We might often see queer[7] people only by their sexual identity, not just as people. Before jumping into theological debate, have you considered how you may love those in the congregation without burdening them with loads of guilt and shame, loads that many often will not even lift a finger to help them with?
4. Is there a place for Christians who are gay to meaningfully participate in ministries in your church group? If not, why not?
For Listening:
To get a glimpse of the struggles someone who is gay might have in the church, check out https://timbetold.bandcamp.com/album/love-and-happiness.
Footnotes
[1] Gushee, David. Changing Our Mind, 3rd edn. (Canton, MI: Read the Spirit Books, 2019), 57.
[2] https://www.glaad.org/blog/churches-are-losing-generation-over-poor-treatment-lgbt-people.
[4] https://www.hrc.org/news/new-report-on-youth-homeless-affirms-that-lgbtq-youth-disproportionately-ex.
[6] Tim Ouyang, interview with DJ Chuang, Hannah Lee, Leah Abraham, Erasing Shame, podcast audio, June 16, 2021, https://erasingshame.com/tim-ouyang-of-tim-be-told-uncensored-s5e07/4 https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49150753
[7] Queer is a term that can be used to describe someone who does not identify within established ideas of traditional sexuality
Scott Yi lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he writes and teaches literacy to underserved populations. Scott is a former medical student, former pastor, and current cat dad.
You can read more of his articles here.