How a Very Straight White Conservative Evangelical Christian Man Became Affirming

I’ve been thinking for a while that I want to explain my journey from anti-LGBTQ to affirming.

At the outset, perhaps I should explain why I’m explaining this. Or, more precisely, I should explain why I’m NOT explaining this. It’s not to convince you, and it’s not to get you to say “well done.” I don’t really need anyone’s approval in this matter; I’m quite satisfied that I’m accepted and approved by God, and that God was the one that required me to change my mind and heart on this topic, and furthermore I really do believe that it’s truly only God’s approval that matters to me on this topic.

Not many years ago, I would have said the same thing, but I would have been unable to see how false that assertion was. For many years, out of my personal brokenness, I operated in an approval-seeking mode. I deeply but unconsciously needed those in authority in my life, and those in close relationship to me, to approve of me and my positions and values. But I find myself in a different place in my life in this season, much more confident in my personal walk with God, much less looking to others for approval. I still WANT that approval, and enjoy and appreciate it when I get it, but I don’t live for it like I used to. Approval no longer drives me.

Now, that may sound like some triggered denial, some objection to pushback, but actually it’s pretty relevant to this story.

I say that because at the core it was healing from brokenness that opened the way for me to rethink some fundamental things in my politics and religion.

As I’ve written previously on my blog, in
https://crucibleofthought.com/how-i-learned-empathy/
and
https://crucibleofthought.com/shedding-my-dragon-skin/
and
https://crucibleofthought.com/what-i-feared-did-happen-and-thats-good/
the year 2019 was a watershed for me. To keep this telling short, I went through many months of counseling, and God healed a number of deep wounds in my heart that blinded me to empathy. Coming out of that season, with the eyes of my heart freshly open to how others are affected by their world, I slammed face first into COVID and George Floyd in short order. I saw things I’d never seen before, never even believed to be possible, and was forced to discover that a lot of my assumptions about the people I had previously “othered” and feared and shunned were completely wrong.

At the time, that discovery process was largely about racism – not surprising since George Floyd was a trigger. As 2020 crawled along into the COVID pandemic, I watched and helped my church make some decisions about how to love others who were at risk, and I watched a number of people and organizations that I had long trusted make such decisions. Suddenly I realized that there were some deeply broken ways of treating the marginalized that were baked into our conservative evangelical thinking. I began to see the harm baked into these systems and organizations. The things I’d always trusted looked very broken.

For example, I abruptly realized one day in early 2021 that the way my local church was beginning to treat the COVID issue was deeply unloving to some people, even though it seemingly served the rest. It was willing to sideline and marginalize my wife and daughter and a lot of older people in the church who had immune system issues, just so that it could go back to business as usual. That whole “leave the 99 to go seek and save the one” simply wasn’t exhibited in our church. It wasn’t as bad as some right-wing churches who refused to stop holding services – we did a solid year of online-only worship, and I was a key player in making it work – but in its own way, after that first year our local church response suddenly looked very unlike how I thought Jesus would have addressed it. And my concerns were ignored, and we were told “well, you can just watch from home from now on.”

And as another example, after George Floyd was killed, for two weeks I watched my conservative evangelical church initially respond with deep compassion for the Black community – only, a couple weeks later, to utterly reverse course and say that BLM was demonic, and social justice was unrighteous. But the first two weeks deeply moved my freshly-awakened heart, and I knew to the depth of my soul that the first response was the true one. And so the reversal stunned me – and many others – even as it satisfied a number of very outspoken and very conservative old guard at the church.

And I began to realize that those two issues were deeply related, and the same people who were pushing to return to business as usual, despite people still dying from COVID IN OUR OWN CHURCH, were the same ones who were decrying BLM and threatening to leave and stop tithing if another anti-racism word came out of the pastor’s mouth.

And in that moment, I began to realize that this organization I’d supported for literally decades, and assigned the highest motives, and considered a voice of God in our community, was hypocritical to its core. It cared more about the rich white conservative tithes than the marginalized among us.

And along with that realization, although it took rather longer to gel, came the glimmers of doubt about the truth of the underlying dogmas at the core of this evangelical Christianity that I’d swam in for 45 years.

And along with THAT revelation, I began to doubt the strength of my political stance – which naturally was tightly tied to my religious ideologies.

January 6th, 2021, kicked out the bottom tile in my Jenga stack. It was already weakened by all those revelations about church and doctrine, but then I was stunned to sit watching my Republican party attack the Capitol Building, and threaten to hang Vice President Pence, and sit in the Speaker’s chair and spout evangelical-sounding language that was vile and hateful and unpatriotic. And in that moment any connection I still had with the Republican Party evaporated.

So…

It might seem that I’m a long, long way from LGBTQ matters here, but perhaps you already see what’s coming.

For as long as I remember, I’d been opposed to gay rights. When I was a teenager the AIDS epidemic exploded, and gays were the scapegoats, perhaps rightly so, for a wave of fear that swept across the world. In high school, which is already hard enough, even wearing his backpack the wrong way or having the wrong hairstyle or clothing would get a boy accused of being a fag, if not beaten up. And the church happily participated in the panic, blaming anyone and anything that even slightly smacked of homosexuality for all the evils in the world – even going so far as to blame the collapse of every former great empire on a descent into homosexual sin. So naturally, as a good Christian, I adopted those values, and spent the next 30 years sharing in the hateful language. Maybe not Westboro Baptist Church levels of hate, but still hate.

Very much as I had (as a good faithful Republican) never spent any time talking with a Black person to hear their understanding of racism and welfare and how the Republican Party platform was affecting them, what I never stopped to do in the matter of queer rights was to listen to anyone in that community.

Because, of course, I KNEW what was true and right. After all, the church agreed with me. I knew all those Bible verses about gays, and exactly why it was unbiblical. And like a faithful Christian, or so I thought, I refused to read anything apologetic for the queer experience. I refused to pollute my mind with any arguments on their behalf. I wouldn’t dare sit down with one of them to talk – they were so personally disgusting to me that I didn’t want to even be around them.

But here I was, in 2021, realizing bit by bit that my doctrinal and dogmatic foundations of politics and religion were rapidly eroding out from under me. As I wrote in
https://crucibleofthought.com/cinderblocks-of-faith/
I was realizing that major parts of my dwelling of faith were built on partial or complete untruths.

For a long time, I felt nervous about my ideas about gay human rights, not to mention the morality of being queer. I had a gut sense that I was going to need to change, but I resisted even thinking about the matter for many months. I was pretty certain that I was going to be required to repent, and so I simply avoided the topic.

And then Thelma died.

From COVID.

Thelma was a wonderful and universally-beloved lady in our church, absolutely central to our children’s ministry, a longtime widow with one grown son who lived overseas. Thanks to a lousy decision by the church to resume in-person small group meetings, she and two other members caught COVID, and thanks to some preexisting health concerns, the disease was devastating to her system and she was dead in just five days.

So what? Well, her son was an… interesting person. Flamboyant, was the word I’d used to describe him in my pre-2019 days. He always had wildly colored hair. His mannerisms reminded me way too much of gay people. He made me deeply uncomfortable. You’re probably already seeing where this is going, but in short, yeah, he was very gay. And quite a few people in his close acquaintance knew it, but everyone else… chose not to see it.

But at his mom’s memorial service, held a week or so later, there was a very carefully but unambiguously worded acknowledgement that he was gay. Well, fine – I could ignore that, right?

Not so much.

As part of the aftermath of her death, many of our church family gathered to help clean out her house – with no other living relatives, and her son only in town from overseas for a few days, there was a ton of work to do.

And part of that work was solely his to do – going through her most intimate personal effects, the bank paperwork, the bills, the photos. And I happened to take a shift one evening that week to work directly with him, mainly because I knew something about her computer system to which he needed access. And it just so happened that it was only he and I in Thelma’s house, going through this grieving process together. For two hours, we talked while we sorted papers and cleaned out the remains of a widow’s life.

And it was deep talk.

And I discovered, much to my shock, that this gay man – married for seven years, years before shunned by the church and kicked out of children’s ministry when he admitted his orientation to one youth leader – despite his betrayal and shunning by the church he loved, was a stronger, more Biblically-literate, more compassionate, more compelling young man of deep abiding faith in Christ than most of the straight people in our church.

And that forced me to confront something critical: for decades, literally decades, I’d been told that gays couldn’t be Christian.

And that was CLEARLY a complete falsehood.

Here was a man who exuded the Holy Spirit and Christlikeness, in a way directly in opposition to these racist COVID-denying bigots I’d been wrestling with for months, who the church exalted as paragons of Christianity.

Thelma’s son was shunned even though he could have been giving better sermons than them.

And it made NO sense.

Something was very wrong with my theology.

Well, that was October 2021. I continued to wrestle with the topic, but with now-opened eyes. It took me six months before I was willing to begin actually studying the matter, but I started to read everything I could find about sexuality that seemed to be open to the idea that maybe, just maybe, being gay wasn’t a sin, and wouldn’t exclude someone from the Body of Christ and wouldn’t keep them out of an eternity with God.

If you’d like to follow my reading pathway, I’ll point you to my Sexuality and Gender book reviews page at
https://crucibleofthought.com/book-reviews-sexuality-and-gender/
and you can make your own assessment. For my part, I put in several months of detailed study and wrote a lengthy and detailed paper explaining why I felt like I must publicly repent of my former anti-queer bigotry. You can find that paper at
https://crucibleofthought.com/becoming_affirming

At the end of all that, in October 2022 on National Coming Out Day, I published that paper to my blog, and made it clear on my social media that I was no longer opposed to gay rights or gay orientation or gay practices.

One step I took immediately was to turn to some people in my social media circles, and begin actively following some queer people of all stripes, including several pastors who were either affirming or queer themselves. I joined a queer and affirming contemplative spirituality group, and discovered that they were not only faithful Christians, but that they had a level of faith that many American Christians lack because of the persecution they continually face. I found, and I continue to find, great blessing from these relationships, which has only cemented my confidence that I have made the right choice to repent of my former bigotry.

My journey has continued.

This past Christmas, one family member took me aside to express concern “for my soul,” as if affirming sin (as they understand it) will keep me from heaven. That family member has a gay parent, but they’re vehemently opposed to homosexuality, making it a particularly pointed and personal topic for them. So I’ve had to learn to navigate family relationships while differing on such a sensitive topic of such deep importance.

Since becoming publicly affirming, I have learned that several friends and family members are queer and more than a few youth I know are privately affirming. At this point they’re not “out” to their immediate families, because they’re well aware of how that would affect their own family dynamics. But I realize that I never would have found these things out without being public with my position. They know I’m safe. But it taught me that too many Christians believe that being queer is quite rare – when in fact, there are plenty of queer people around them who are far too savvy to admit it, because their non-affirming friends and families are NOT safe for them. In other words, I realize I had been blind to things that were right in front of me for a long time, and it was my own bigotry that kept me blinded and cut off from an important area of their lives.

And now I’m watching our society debate how it’s going to treat queerness in the future. Will we go the way of thirteen nations and make queerness a matter of capital punishment? Will we not go so far, yet create policies that result in needless death and suffering because of persecution? Will we insist on basic human rights for ALL people, even those who act in ways contrary to how others believe? Or will we buckle to the vocal small minority who want to turn to religious fascism and try to legislate morality?

I’m also realizing that being affirming may yet come with personal costs to me, too. So I have to think carefully about the matter. To what extent am I willing to stand up for the human rights of Thelma’s son, my queer friends and family members, the wonderful people in the contemplative spirituality group, and others who I don’t even know but for whom I could advocate?

So there you have it. Sometimes a very long and arduous journey starts with just a small step. An landslide starts with just a pebble. An avalanche starts with just one misplaced step in the snow.

And I’ve lived through a massive landslide or avalanche or journey in my theology. And I’m still living there – I find there are still many topics I need to rethink in this season. But I’m up for it, and God still has my “yes” to call me to repentance on anything that God needs me to change.

And going back to the beginning of these thoughts: I really do find that I don’t need any human approval for these convictions. They’re very hard-fought and hard-won, and I’m completely confident in them. But with that said, I do hope you find value in what I’ve shared here. My point is to give others a reason to give themselves permission to take a journey like mine. It’s to find hope in the avalanche, to keep their head up and ride it out, because it feels wild and crazy but it has deep and abiding value. I don’t intend to persuade anyone with this story – I don’t think it will, anyway – but if my story helps just one person to say to God, “yes, You can change my heart if You wish” then I’ll consider this a success.

Thanks for your time, and for sharing this journey with me. We’ll talk again soon.