Reaffirming in 2025

Two and a half years ago, I realized I had been incredibly wrong about gay and queer people and their acceptability to God. So I publicly and clearly repented. This Pride Month, I’d like to spend a few minutes retelling and expanding on some of my history that led to that decision.

I grew up in a very conservative, evangelical Christian, Republican household. I was so deeply embedded in that subculture that I do not remember meeting a single person that self-identified as a Democrat Christian until I was halfway through college, and when a professor I deeply respected as a man of faith told me that he was a Democrat, I was shocked and incredibly dismayed; I remember actually feeling betrayed. Nobody in the churches that I had ever attended talked about being a Republican, but the values and the focus on anti-abortion and anti-gay values filled the election-season sermonizing, and if anyone wasn’t Republican, they sure kept quiet about it. So I naively assumed that every Christian must of course be a Republican too.

Naturally, part of this package of beliefs was anti-homosexuality. The Democrat Party adopted a gay-friendly platform in July 1980, and my first political memory was attending a Ronald Reagan campaign event that fall. While Reagan doesn’t seem to have said much about the matter himself, his evangelical supporters provided plenty of invective against the gay agenda that year as they attacked Jimmy Carter. Then AIDS slammed into our national consciousness about a year later. Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova came out as gay in 1981, and in 1982 the first Gay Olympic Games were held in San Francisco, a city which quickly acquired a reputation as gay-friendly. So by the time I entered high school a few years later, homosexuality was a significant topic of conversation – and fear – among conservatives.

Schoolboys being what they are, and always looking for opportunities to belittle other boys to solidify their own status on top of the social heap, it’s no surprise that the worst thing you could be accused of as a schoolboy those days was being insufficiently straight. Simply wearing your backpack on the wrong shoulder was enough to be accused of being gay – along with a dozen other trivialities like carrying your books in the crook of your arm “like the girls,” or having your hair combed wrong, or wearing any kind of jewelry. Heaven forbid a boy wore an earring in the wrong ear. So high school – especially for a socially-awkward boy like myself – was a constant miasma of fear of being called gay.

Naturally, church and youth group were another area where the evils of homosexuality were ever-present. I don’t remember any specific lessons on the topic, just like I don’t recall any other specific sermons or group discussion topics, but I do know that homosexuality was just as present a topic as discussions of abortion, adultery, masturbation, and any other sexual-related “sins.”

My college experience wasn’t much different, really. My large college was fairly conservative in a conservative state, and (as a good Christian young man) I was deeply involved in Christian groups like Campus Crusade for Christ and the Baptist Student Union, as well as being quite active in a local fundamentalist evangelical church, with weekly loud and enthusiastic – and frequently hellfire-and-brimstone – sermons from a former druggie gang member pastor who saw very clear distinctions between right and wrong, and loudly proclaimed The Truth as he saw it.

Naturally, in an environment like I was raised, one reads the Bible exactly and only the way one is taught to read the Bible. Anything that is open to interpretation – as I have since learned that most of the Bible is, really – must be interpreted the way you’re taught to interpret it. So the handful of “clobber verses” of course only had one way of being interpreted: that being gay is a damnable abomination. And of course, anything that you feel in your heart which might be the Holy Spirit nudging you? Naturally it had to line up with the Bible. Or more precisely, it had to line up with how your religious community has been taught to interpret the Bible. There wasn’t any room for Jesus’ favorite saying of “you have heard it said, but I say to you”, because by this point in church history, my community fully believed that we’d already figured everything out, and there was precisely zero chance in our minds that the Holy Spirit would ever confound our interpretations. And not surprisingly, it never occurred to me that the interpretations I was being fed were only that – interpretations. I literally never heard any alternative ways of reading the Bible – not about salvation, not about atonement theology, not about eschatology, not about heaven and hell, and certainly not about homosexuality.

A big part of the messaging about homosexuality, too, was the “gay agenda,” the idea that every gay person was on a personal mission to convert other straight people to being gay. It never occurred to me that maybe the real gay agenda was “just please leave us alone” instead. I never stopped to think that, given the pain and rejection and abuse they suffered daily, any reasonable and compassionate and self-aware human wouldn’t want to make someone else suffer the same fate. No, I was taught to think that gayness was infectious and virulent.

That belief was so strong in me that I realize now I was literally afraid of gay people, that being around them, hearing them talk, interacting with them in any way would make me gay too. So it wasn’t enough to simply be straight myself; I had to actively avoid gays. And by extension, I needed to help wall them off from others too, lest their contamination spread to other straight people who weren’t as diligent about avoiding them as I was. So everything in my awareness of homosexuality was about othering and marginalizing and avoiding gay people.

At one point in mid college while on summer break, having recently rededicated my life to Jesus, full of evangelistic passion, I remember heading down to a nearby beach to evangelize people. Holding a brand-new Bible I was in love with, I sat down next to a grungy-looking, apparently homeless guy and started talking to him, asking him if he knew Jesus. He started talking about his groin itching and pulling up the hem of his very short shorts, and I suddenly realized was trying to show me his genitals enough to get me interested in gay sex. I was totally disgusted by his behavior, because of course this played right into all of my assumptions about gayness, which only made me all the more passionate about converting him. Of course, it never occurred to me to simply love him, to have empathy, to see the world and his pain from his perspective, and to ask how I could help him instead of “converting” him. It never occurred to me how I looked to him, some clean-cut kid coming at him with a Bible and an agenda, instead of compassion and care. I was just interested in scoring a salvation.

Soon enough, college ended and I took a job and joined a strongly evangelical church in a small and very conservative town, and the issue of homosexuality largely faded into my background, as it was far too dangerous for gay people to exist openly in the social circles I inhabited. Of course, plenty of political talk continued over the decades, and as a faithful Republican I was naturally on the side of all the right-wing conservative talking points about gay matters. But aside from that one beachfront encounter with a dirty homeless gay man, I’d actually never once met anyone else I knew was gay, and I’d certainly never had any kind of conversation with anyone gay.

In the mid 2010s, the “transsexual” matter exploded into the American consciousness, with laws beginning to protect sexual orientation and gender identity, and by the 2016 election season, “bathroom bills” were a hot topic. Naturally, as a good Republican I ate up all the anti-trans rhetoric, and participated in plenty of it myself.

Not surprisingly, the language around the trans topic closely mirrored that of the gay topic – that transness is somehow infectious, that it’s corrupting young people simply by them hearing about the matters. If anything, the rhetoric was amped up even further, claiming that there is a social contagion inherent to trans topics, where young people become convinced that they’re trans or nonbinary simply because they hear other people talking about it, or see them living outside gender norms, and they jump on the bandwagon and become queer themselves, with no regard for the eventual consequences.

In the late 2010s, at work I found myself unexpectedly assigned to mentor a young trans woman, and it was the most uncomfortable social interaction I ever had. I was repulsed by the person; she was the first trans person I had ever met, and the idea that a male could voluntarily surrender their masculinity was not only inconceivable, it was abhorrent. After all, I’d been steeped in the idea that masculinity was a Godly trait and must be honored and protected, as God had created men to be strong and powerful and the defenders of those around them. The idea that God made a mistake in the creation of an individual was unthinkable, and so naturally it was the man’s fault if they surrendered that role or those masculine traits for any reason. I have to admit that my behavior towards her was, while polite, very forced and ungracious, and the mentoring relationship didn’t last long. She disappeared from our branch not long after, and I have no idea what happened to her. Looking back, I’m sure I was very hurtful, and I’m sure she felt similar hatred from others in my organization and left before being abused further.

I hope it’s quite clear that I’m using a lot of offensive language here that does not, in any way, reflect what I now believe to be Truth. I’m simply not interested in explaining or putting quote marks and disclaimers around all the wrong, hurtful concepts I’m sharing.

So this was the queer-fearing world I inhabited for quite a few years.

But then things started to change for me. Several things happened at about the same time.

• I lost my faith in the evangelical institution in which I’d grown up, as during the COVID crisis and the BLM protests that erupted in 2020, I saw them abandon many values I’d been taught for decades. If they were tacitly admitting that those values were not really important to them, could I trust their stance on homosexuality or transgender?
• I also lost my faith in the Republican Party as it stormed the White House on January 6th 2021. If they were tacitly admitting that the rule of law wasn’t actually important after all, could I trust their stance on gay and queer rights?
• One of my children brought a newly-transitioning trans man to a family holiday celebration, and demonstrated that it was possible to continue to love and respect and value someone even when their gender identity was changing. The angst in the family gathering was tangible, but I found myself arguing with my parents that fundamental respect for this individual and their self-identification was necessary.
• My children started to have – or better stated, started to be open about their relationships with – queer friends, and through their friendships I began to meet queer people – gay, nonbinary, and trans. And I discovered that literally nothing I’d been taught about them was correct. They were funny, happy, creative, intelligent people – just plain normal folks with the same hopes and fears and dreams as me – and with a lot of grace and grit, dealing with a society that often hated every aspect of their existence.
• I discovered that not every Christian denomination was opposed to homosexuality or transgender rights. I guess I’d kind of known that, because I was taught that the PC-USA was heretical because they supported full homosexual participation, but it never occurred to me that they did so with careful and thoughtful and prayerful consideration. So I began to realize that faithful Christians did not, in fact, all agree that gay was sin.
• I found myself spending a couple hours talking to the gay son of a church friend at her funeral (after she died from COVID she caught in a church meeting). And I found him to be very intelligent, very thoughtful, and – most importantly – very faithful as a Christian, and clearly full of the Holy Spirit.
• I interviewed the pastor of an LGBTQ-friendly church, and learned about his personal journey of understanding, and observed how the anti-queer church community acted against him in ways totally contrary to what I’d been taught Christians should be, while he and his church were doing the works of Christ on behalf of a marginalized community. I began to realize that these evangelicals would give up literally every single one of Jesus’ commands just to attack someone who supported homosexuality, and this made me realize that their position was inherently untrustworthy while his affirming position and actions were far more Christlike.

As these events rolled across me with waves of new information and new understanding, I responded as I typically do: I started studying and reading everything I could get my hands on. You can find short reviews of all the various books on my Suggested Reading List blog page. I also watched hours of videos, and listened to dozens of hours of podcasts by other Christians who’d changed their mind about queerness. And I began to write and journal about my findings. After about three or four months of study I could not escape the sense that I had been horribly wrong for all those years. But I still was stuck with the sense that my religious background had to have been right, even if my heart told me I was wrong. After all, I firmly believed that the Church must be right, even if my heart told me otherwise.

And here was where the Lord intervened directly in my wrestling, and completely settled the issue permanently for me: near the end of my time of study and reflection, one night the Lord met me in a dream and very clearly recounted to me Peter’s dream of the sheet being lowered from heaven full of unclean animals, challenging Peter’s anti-Gentile hatred, and telling Peter “do not call unclean what I have made clean.” It was so vivid that I felt like I had experienced that event beside Peter. And I woke up knowing without any doubt that God was telling ME, by this dream, “do not call unclean what I have made clean” and that this applied absolutely directly to LGBTQ issues. And one particular aspect that I’d never noticed in this verse was the phrase “what I HAVE MADE clean” – that even if the church might have possibly had it right in the past to consider them unclean (which I doubt), God had definitively changed the rules and made them now clean, for me at least. I was personally no longer allowed to consider LGBTQ people “unclean.” I was forced to admit that, just like Peter’s religious community, my community was flatly wrong about something for which it claimed scriptural support.

So in October 2022, on National Coming Out Day, I “came out” as affirming for the first time. I wrote a lengthy paper detailing my study process and my conclusions, and published it openly on my blog. To date, it has had thousands of views and downloads, and is far and away the single most viewed content on my site.

So what has transpired since then?

It’s been both easy and hard.

Easy, because I now find such a grace and love for people I formerly feared and hated and condemned to hell. I can clearly see the image of God in them. I can see Jesus in them. I can see the Holy Spirit clearly on them and exuding from them as we relate and as they minister. In my encounters, I met numerous faithful and loving and Spirit-filled gay ministers and spiritual leaders. I began to learn from them, finding expansive new understandings of God Themselves that I’d been blind to because of my prejudice. I found a deep admiration for their faithfulness and determination and grit in the face of unbelievable persecution by the people that call themselves “God’s people.” In short, my spiritual world exploded in richness and growth.

But it’s also been hard, because my choice and my change and my coming out alienated me from many people who formerly loved and trusted me. Because they consider homosexuality to be an absolute mark of damnation on people, my affirmation of gay rights and acceptability to God instantly marked me as an incontrovertible heretic, and I lost all trust in their eyes. And as a result, my circle of friends and acquaintances shrank suddenly.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. What I’ve gained far outweighs what I’ve lost.

Would I change how I did it? No. I am confident I studied the matter with diligence, invited the Lord to change my heart if needed, responded to the Lord’s rebuke, and was appropriately public in standing up for the rights of the marginalized, which God demands repeatedly in the scriptures.

So in this Pride Month, in a new season in America where the political winds are blowing ever harder against those who are queer and also those like me who are affirming, I find it necessary to be vocal again – to reaffirm my affirmation of LGBTQ rights and lifestyles. It may cost me more than it has already, but I believe that’s something that is necessary right now, as the governmental forces of this current administration are doing everything they can possibly do to further marginalize and silence and even disappear my queer friends and siblings in Christ.

If you’re like me, you probably have heard of Christians considering themselves persecuted. I grew up being told that Christianity in America was under attack. It’s been a constant evangelical theme since I was a youth. In that view, godless liberals wanted to expunge God from society. Gay rights was just another one of those attack vectors. But I now realize that the real persecuted people in America are the LGBTQ minority, and the ones doing the actual persecution are the evangelical Christians. And that means that I, in fact, need to oppose them, to oppose that persecution.

And here’s my final observation: We read in the Bible that Jesus saved many people during His ministry on earth. But not a single one of those people He saved, or those who heard Him say “your faith has saved you” would have understood Jesus to be speaking of eternity. Rather, they knew that Jesus was talking about their life right here on earth. The Good News, the Gospel, that He charged us with spreading wasn’t about going to heaven when we die; it was that we can live fully here on earth. The eternity-with-God part is good, and it follows from our spirit’s resurrection here and now, but heaven wasn’t Jesus’ point, and I’m personally convinced that God will, in fact, eventually bring all to salvation – the Bible even testifies that He is unwilling that ANY should be lost. So the question of salvation is, what will WE do, right here and now, to bring life, and that abundantly, to those who are currently being persecuted and hated and oppressed by those in power who reject their right to live?

So I leave you with this challenge: will you stand with me against the persecution? Will you be vocal and public about your defense of their rights, their humanity, their acceptance by God? Believing they are not sinful is good, but it’s not enough. Queer people are dying while waiting for someone to speak on their behalf, for someone to defend their right to exist and to live as they’re created. We can help save them. That’s our gospel in this season.