Their Minds on Gay Marriage
And the Bible isn’t getting in their way.
By JIM HINCH
Tincher was one of 50 people flown from around the country and the world—Canada, China, Nigeria and South Korea—to a four-day Bible boot camp dedicated to discussing, and embracing, gay relationships. The gathering was organized by Matthew Vines, who by then was enjoying modest fame for a 2012 YouTube video in which Vines, looking even younger than his 21 years, delivers an hour-long lecture arguing that the Bible does not, in fact, condemn all same-sex relationships. The video has gone viral, racking up more than 730,000 views to date, landing Vines on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Styles section and helping him raise $100,000 for the conference, where he launched The Reformation Project, a nationwide network of pro-gay evangelicals committed to ending their church’s longstanding hostility toward gay people.
Tincher told me she had once “tried on” an anti-gay attitude to fit in with her conservative community in Liberty Township, outside Cincinnati, but like many evangelicals, she struggled to see how homophobia could accord with an all-loving Christian God. So when her pastor sent her a link to Vines’ video, she recalls, “I remember sitting in my kitchen and just crying. I knew it in my heart, but I had never been told that from the pulpit.”
Matthew Vines' video arguing that the Bible does not
condemn same-sex marriage has gotten more than 730,000 views on YouTube,
and helped him start a network of evangelicals committed to ending
anti-gay attitudes in the church.
Over the past decade, evangelical support for gay marriage has more than doubled, according to polling
by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. About a quarter
of evangelicals now support same-sex unions, the institute has found,
with an equal number occupying what researchers at Baylor University
last year called the “messy middle”
of those who oppose gay marriage on moral grounds but no longer support
efforts to outlaw it. The shift is especially visible among young
evangelicals under age 35, a near majority of whom now support same-sex
marriage. And gay student organizations have recently formed at
Christian colleges across the country, including flagship evangelical
campuses such as Wheaton College in Illinois and Baylor in Texas.Even some of the most prominent evangelicals—megachurch pastors, seminary professors and bestselling authors—have publicly announced their support for gay marriage in recent months. Other leaders who remain opposed to gay unions have lowered their profiles on the issue. After endorsing a gay marriage ban passed in California in 2008, Rev. Rick Warren, pastor of one of the country’s biggest megachurches, said in 2009 that he had apologized to all “all my gay friends” and that fighting gay marriage was “very low” on his list of priorities. Just last month, the Presbyterian Church, a Protestant denomination with a significant, though declining, minority of evangelicals, voted to allow ministers to perform same-sex weddings in states where they are legal.
How Christians See Gay Marriage
Support
for same-sex marriage remains lowest among evangelical Christians, but
they are beginning to catch up: Between 2001 and 2014, evangelicals saw
the largest percent increase in support for gay marriage, compared to
other religious groupings surveyed by Pew Research.Now, Christian political groups, including Focus on the Family and the National Association of Evangelicals, have virtually stopped campaigning on the issue, shifting their focus to legal efforts to shield religious business owners from having to cater to gay weddings. Republican politicians, who historically have relied on evangelical support, are backing away, too. In Ohio, where in 2004 evangelical activists were among the first in the nation to campaign for a successful ballot measure outlawing gay unions, both Rob Portman, the state’s Republican senator, and Jim Petro, former Republican attorney general, now support overturning the ban.
“We must prepare people for what the future holds, when Christian beliefs about marriage and sexuality aren’t part of the cultural consensus but are seen to be strange and freakish and even subversive,” Russell Moore, chief political spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote in an April blog post. As if in confirmation of Moore’s warning, the following month, a Southern Baptist congregation outside Los Angeles became the first in the 16 million-member denomination to vote to accept gay worshippers even if they are in relationships. “I realized I no longer believed in the traditional teachings regarding homosexuality,” the church’s pastor, Danny Cortez, wrote in an online statement.
Such views will only become more common in the years ahead, says Jeremy Thomas, an Idaho State University sociologist who has studied conservative Christians’ changing attitudes toward homosexuality. “Evangelicals will more or less come to embrace homosexuality in the next 20 to 30 years,” Thomas predicts. “I would put all my money on that statement.”
***
Just a few years ago, opposition to homosexuality was considered a cornerstone of conservative Christian thought, and gay relationships presented what many Christian leaders described as an existential challenge to orthodoxy. “What’s at stake here is the very foundation of our society, not only of America but all Western civilization,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, declared following a 2003 Supreme Court ruling striking down a Texas sodomy ban. Liberal Christians have argued for years that the Bible’s statements on sexuality, ranging from endorsement of polygamy to praise of celibacy, are complicated and rooted in their historical contexts. But now, pro-gay rights evangelicals want to prove that supporting gay relationships doesn’t contradict the authority of scripture.
That’s the idea behind Matthew Vines’ Reformation Project, whose second conference is expected to draw as many as 900 people to Washington, D.C., this fall. Vines, now 24, came up with the idea for the project after taking a leave of absence from his studies Harvard University to study the Bible and Christian history, all in an effort to convince fellow evangelicals, including his own parents in Wichita, that they should embrace gay people like him. He argues that the handful of biblical passages that evangelicals often cite as condemning same-sex relationships—the Sodom and Gomorrah story, for instance, or St. Paul’s denunciation of pagan Roman men “consumed with passion for one another”—need not be interpreted as anti-gay.
In April, when Vines published a book about these beliefs, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships, it sparked a torrent of online conversation and prompted the National Religious Broadcasters, an association of Christian media groups, to kick out the book’s Christian publisher for “unbiblical material.” But God and the Gay Christian now sits near the top of several religion bestseller lists on Amazon, and, even more strikingly, prominent evangelical pastors are echoing Vines’ interpretation.
Of course, many evangelicals still uphold traditional church teachings on homosexuality and rush to defend them. Days before Vines’ book was published, the American Family Association, a Mississippi-based evangelical nonprofit organization, issued a press release headlined, “God and the Gay Christian Is Anything but Biblically Accurate: American Family Association Calls Out Book’s False Message and Misleading Marketing.” “What we are seeing is the impact of this relentless brainwashing by the mainstream media, and it affects people that aren’t thinking clearly or aren’t grounded in a biblical worldview,” AFA’s issues analysis director, Bryan Fischer, told me. “There are some evangelical leaders who are sounding a very defeatist tone—the battle is over, and we lost and we have to get used to it. That kind of defeatism just has no place in the evangelical community.”
And yet, even in the statements of evangelical leaders ardently opposed to same-sex marriage, there is a new tone of uncertainty. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, posted a lengthy online critique of Vines’ book the day it was published. “Evangelical Christians in the United States now face an inevitable moment of decision,” Mohler writes. While calling Vines’ argument “neither true nor faithful to Scripture,” he acknowledges that it is “nonetheless, a prototype of the kind of argument we can now expect.”
That argument is making its mark on politics, too.
Since World War II, notes Jeremy Thomas, the Idaho State sociologist, evangelicals have moved toward more liberal views on numerous social issues, including divorce, women in the workplace and pre-marital sex. In more recent years, they also have embraced liberal views on an array of social justice causes, such as climate change, human trafficking and immigration reform.
But the particular issue with the biggest implications for evangelical views of homosexuality may be the AIDS epidemic in Africa. A decade ago, inspired in part by the activism of Rev. Rick Warren’s wife, Kay, evangelicals helped to persuade President Bush to propose his landmark $15 billion Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. A side effect of the effort was stronger ties between evangelical churches and AIDS relief organizations, many of which are staffed in large part by gay people. In a 2006 interview for an article I co-wrote in Guideposts magazine, Kay Warren recalled meeting the gay director of a local Orange County HIV outreach organization. The outreach director “wanted to know what we thought of homosexuality, and I was stumbling my way through that,” she recalled. “What I had going for me was he could tell that I was sincere and that I genuinely did care about people with HIV, and I wasn’t trying to judge people or clients from his agency.”
Evangelical Christians like Warren still might never go so far as to support laws allowing gay marriage in the United States. But leading anti-gay marriage organizations are already feeling the financial effects of the evangelical population’s widespread moderation. The National Organization for Marriage, which has funded nationwide efforts to prohibit gay unions for the past seven years and last month sponsored its annual March for Marriage in Washington, D.C., reported a roughly $2 million deficit on its 2012 tax return, the most recent publicly available. And just three donors contributed nearly two-thirds of the organization’s $9.3 million in donations that year.
On April 30, NOM President Brian Brown appealed to followers in an urgent blog post about the upcoming march: “It’s the end of the month and bills are coming due. Contracts have been signed that require payment in advance for logistics, equipment, consumables, travel arrangements and many, many more critical details. We are still around $25,000 short of our $100,000 fundraising goal for this month—will you help us close the gap with an immediate and generous donation?” In a phone interview that same day, Brown insisted, “We have lots of support.” But he also conceded, “We have some debt, but not at the 2012 level. … We don’t accept the dominant narrative that this is lost.” (Brown did not respond to a follow-up request for comment after the march about NOM’s finances or estimates that the march drew only a few thousand protesters.)
Pro-gay rights groups, in contrast, are bringing in more and more money, said Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association. He pointed to the money behind a pro-gay outreach initiative among several national gay advocacy organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, that aims to expand LGBT rights in Southern states; Colorado gay rights philanthropist Tim Gill has committed $25 million to the effort. In 2012, the AFA, in comparison, raised $17.2 million and ended the year with a $4.5 million deficit, according to tax records. “They spend more on this one specific project than comprises our entire budget,” Fischer said. “There’s no way in the world we’re going to outspend them.”
In response, evangelical groups are changing their political priorities. Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family, said opponents of gay marriage currently have no plans to introduce new ballot measures banning same-sex marriage outside the 31 states where it is already illegal. “You have to take the long view and the spiritual view about these cultural swings,” he said, “and try to protect the territory you can.”
***
At the church she is leaving behind, it’s clear the topic of same-sex relationships is at least fading as a cause for hostility. A lesbian couple has even started attending services there. “It’s almost like there’s an armistice agreement in our congregation,” Chapman, the pastor, says. “I do not preach about homosexuality from the pulpit, because this is an issue about which good people disagree.”
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