Are we there yet?

Today I am pleased to introduce you to Jeff Chu.  Jeff is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America—a fantastic book that is part-memoir, part investigative analysis. The book, which just released last week, explores the intersection of faith, politics, and sexuality in America in a way that is thought-provoking, well-researched, colorful, and deeply personal without being indulgent. I highly recommend checking it out. 

Over his eclectic journalistic career, Jeff Chu has interviewed presidents and paupers, corporate execs and preachers, Britney Spears and Ben Kingsley. As a writer and editor for Time, Conde Nast Portfolio, and Fast Company, he has compiled a portfolio that includes stories on megahit-making Swedish songwriters (a piece for which he went clubbing in Stockholm); James Bond (for which he stood on a Spanish beach and watched Halle Berry emerge from the waves over and over and over); undercover missionaries in the Arab world (he traveled to North Africa and went to church); and the decline of Christianity in Europe (he prayed). On the wall of his New York office, you'll find a quote from former Senator John Warner, who once told Jeff: "You're a good little interviewer!"  A California native, Jeff went to high school at Miami's Westminster Christian, where he sat behind Alex Rodriguez in Mr. Warner's world history class. A graduate of Princeton and the London School of Economics, Jeff has received fellowships from the Phillips Foundation and the French-American Foundation, and in 2012, was part of the Seminar on Debates in Religion and Sexuality at Harvard Divinity School.  The nephew and grandson of Baptist preachers, he is an elder at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, New York. He loves the San Francisco 49ers, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and clementines. And he detests marzipan more than he can explain in words.

I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did. 

Are we there yet? 

By Jeff Chu

 “Jesus will not accept you, because of your hard heart and hate for him.”

“We must treat homosexuals like those suffering a mental disorder, because that is exactly what it is. If anything, we should have pity on these people.” 

“You need a good ex-gay therapist.”

Last week, messages like these filled comments sections of websites where my writing was being discussed. On Facebook, I was informed that I was clearly not saved. My inbox brought warnings that I needed to repent. 

I interviewed more than 300 people for my book, but intertwined with their stories is my own. I’ve never written about my life or my faith before, and naively, perhaps, I didn’t expect this onslaught. The night before my book came out, I sat at my desk in my office and did something that I haven’t done in years: I wept. 

For almost an hour, the tears rained down my face. I held my head in my hands, and I shook. Then, inside, I heard the softest echoes of my beloved late grandmother’s warbly voice, speaking to me in Cantonese as she had when I was 8: “You’re a big boy. Don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry. Crying doesn’t do anything.” 

Well, this big boy does cry—and on that day, it did do something. These were, at first, tears for fears—fears of being judged, fears of being condemned, fears of what might happen when the world saw me, through my book, for who I was and no longer for who I’ve long tried to be.

Then they became tears of grief. In some ways, I felt as if I were being excommunicated from my church—these messages all came from people who would place themselves in the evangelical part of the church that I grew up in. But in truth, they couldn’t kick me out. In soul and spirit, I’d already left those precincts of the church, and I was belatedly mourning that departure. I was also weeping for the loss of certainty—or at least the illusion of it that I once worked so hard to maintain. 

***

When I was a young journalist, I was taught to “kill your darlings.” Sometimes we writers will concoct a pun or a phrase that we just fall in love with. Applaud your own unparalleled cleverness, your unmistakable wit, I was told. Then cut what you just wrote. Your infatuation is also often the enemy of clarity—and sometimes truth.

One thing I had to mourn last week was the killing of perhaps my greatest darling: the persona of the Good Christian I long maintained, under the theory that it could somehow help preserve my faith.

This is, of course, a fallacy: Sometimes we speak as if our faith—and the faith—is unchanging. God may not change, but our beliefs and our understanding of Him do. Faith can’t be preserved, as if it were strawberries in jam or an unlucky beetle in ancient amber. It’s dynamic. It struggles and stumbles, waxing and waning, colored by circumstance, shifted by our spirits, and shaped (we hope) by the Spirit. I think, for instance, of Roman Catholicism, and how the Virgin Mary officially became retroactively and posthumously sin-free in the 19th century. And I think of the denomination I grew up, the Southern Baptist Convention, whose own less-than-immaculate conception was rooted in unfortunate disagreements with their northern brethren over slavery. 

For a long time, I resisted change. Though I felt alienated from the church and culture of my childhood, I played the image game well. I was treasurer of my college evangelical-fellowship group. I mentored younger students, my mouth saying things with far more surety than my heart ever felt. I even had a (shortish) string of long-term girlfriends—wonderful, godly women who, thank God, found much more suitable men to marry.

My semblance of pious normality reflected a Sunday-best mentality spilling over into the rest of the week. I thought that if, perhaps, I did a goody-goody-enough job with the façade, maybe it would percolate into the rest of me, preserving my faith. On some level, I guess I naively thought that I might even be able to fool God. 

I had to kill that person, that darling. I had to stop lying. And when I cried, I guess some of the tears were for that old Jeff. That costume, more comfortable than I’d like to admit even now, was a great hiding place, a cocoon that I convinced myself was safe. It was a big game of pretend, and I was pretty good at it, except that all games get old—or maybe you just get too old to play them.

***

A church of costumes and hiding places isn’t a place I want to be.

What we need, more than ever, is a church where we can shed the pretenses, and bring our doubts, our big questions, and our bigger fears. I don’t think I’m alone in desiring that. What I suspect many of us crave is a church where we can be our whole, ugly-beautiful selves.

This is who I really am: I am not an issue. I am a follower of Jesus. I love my husband like you love your husband. Sometimes I daydream during church, which I feel especially guilty about now that I am an elder. I am afraid to go to India because I don’t know if I am man enough to handle that much poverty in my face. I like to load the washer, but I’m terrible at unloading the dryer. I am really judgmental. I use the F-word a little too much. Sometimes, if I find a very old French fry, I will be tempted to eat it. (I will neither confirm nor deny that I ever have.) I love the Bible, and I believe that sin is a real thing, but I wish I understood better what God meant by it. I went to a Taylor Swift concert last week—for my job—and enjoyed it more than I’d like to admit. I need a good editor.

And who are you? Maybe you laugh too loudly. Or you cry too much. You love, even though you’re not always sure how to show it. You belch when you think nobody is listening. You love justice, but you’re not always sure what it looks like. You question your pastor. You watch too much Honey Boo Boo (which is to say, you watch it at all). You lie awake in bed some nights wondering whether God is as real as you want Him to be. You eat too many meals in your car. You say, “Bless her heart,” when you have no intention of blessing any part of her. 

Can we be these people in church? We must be—and the church that I’m talking about is not a building but the collection of the people who are trying their best to walk with Jesus. It does not end at 12:15 on Sundays. It’s wherever we and our hopes and our complicated, messy lives are. It’s a place where we aren’t afraid to say, “I don’t know.” 

Our church is a place where we’re unafraid to acknowledge that we’re always in beta. I was thinking about this during church this past Sunday. In his Easter sermon, my beloved pastor, Daniel Meeter, encouraged us to imagine “the life of the world to come … Imagine always trusting other people, without having to be careful, always being open and candid about yourself without having your guard up, and even knowing yourself with clarity and honesty and peace,” he said. “Well, you are not there yet.”

Indeed. 

Maybe I’ll end up in hell. Maybe I do have a mental disorder. Maybe their Jesus won’t accept me. But I still cling to a Jesus who will meet me—and will meet us all—where I am now. Can we build a church that welcomes our mutual strengths but also allows—and even embraces—our confessions of weakness? Can we be that community? Will you join me on this journey?

***

You can follow Jeff Chu on Twitter. And be sure to check out Does Jesus Really Love Me? which released last week! 

How [Not To] Respond to Abuse Allegations: Christians and Sovereign Grace Ministries

[Trigger warning: child abuse]

As you may know, Sovereign Grace Ministries, an association of Reformed church plants, is facing a significant lawsuit that alleges church leaders covered up the abuse of children by discouraging parents from reporting abuse to authorities and requiring victims to forgive their abusers in person. The pending lawsuit, which is seeking class-action status, recently added five new plaintiffs, five new defendants, and 28 charges, including the allegation that some defendants engaged in abuse directly. 

As the situation has unfolded, some Christian leaders have called on their fellow Christians to withhold judgment from Sovereign Grace Ministries. Tim Challies took to his blog today to urge Christians to pray for the leaders of SGM who have been facing “troubling days” and to “maintain a hopeful attitude toward others, even, and perhaps especially, those who have been accused.”

While I think we can all agree that Christians should withhold condemnation regarding the abuse allegations until the facts come out in the case and the issue has been thoroughly investigated and subjected to due process, what baffles me is Christian leaders’ continued support of Sovereign Grace Ministries in spite of the ministry’s repeated efforts to evade external investigation into this matter. 

This week, the Associated Press reported that SGM has asked a Maryland court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that courts should not get involved in the internal affairs of church business. This follows SGM’s statement in November appealing to protection under the First Amendment to defend its freedom to provide confidential pastoral counseling.  "SGM believes that allowing courts to second-guess pastoral guidance would represent a blow to the First Amendment that would hinder, not help, families seeking spiritual direction among other resources in dealing with the trauma related to any sin including child sexual abuse," a representative of SGM said in a November 14 statement.

Yes, we should withhold judgment unless the defendants are proven guilty. But what we can judge, and what we should flatly condemn, is Sovereign Grace Ministry’s repeated efforts to evade any external investigation into these allegations.

As David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Christianity Today in a helpful article on the subject, "the First Amendment is not—and shouldn't be—a defense against child abuse.” 

I bring this up, not to “sow disunity” or “pass judgment on fellow Christians” (criticisms I’ve already received), but to bring attention to a problem that Christians absolutely must confront.  

Over the past year, I’ve been corresponding more regularly with victims of abuse who have patiently and graciously exposed me to the ways in which the Church routinely mishandles abuse allegations by shaming the alleged victims and protecting church leaders. I’m working with several of these smart, inspiring survivors to post a weeklong series here on abuse and the Church, hopefully this spring or early summer. 

What concerned me about Challies’ post in particular was its disproportionate emphasis on protecting the leaders of SGM over protecting the alleged abuse victims.

He writes, “We tend to believe that the side that is slow or hesitant to release information must be in the wrong, that their silence is an admission of guilt. Keep in mind, though, that Jesus did not protest his innocence and that people took this as a sign of his guilt, though he, of all men, was completely innocent." 

My friend Elora Ramirez was floored. “I wonder if he understands the implications?” she wrote on Facebook. “Does he know what that line of thinking does to victims of abuse? Devastating.” 

As Christians, our first impulse should be to protect and defend the powerless, not the powerful.  Furthermore, by characterizing allegations of child abuse as a sad case of “disunity” and “strife” within the church and urging his fellow Christians not to ask too many questions about the situation, Challies only perpetuates the painfully common narrative that those who raise concerns about abuse in churches are troublemakers, out to sow disunity and dissention, and that we are wise to keep this matters quiet. (I don’t think he intended it that way, but it's how it came across.)

Even if these allegations turn out to be false—which they may be—how Christians respond to them sends a signal to victims of abuse about how they will be treated if they come forward. So we have got to put a stop to these shaming narratives that cast the alleged abusers as innocent like Jesus and the alleged victims as persecutors. The effects of narratives like these are simply devastating.  

Dianna Anderson puts it well here:

"You see, victims – especially victims in evangelical environments – are told that their allegations of abuse are private matters, that opening their mouths and saying that things are not okay is “divisive” and “against Christian unity.” It is no small matter for victims to bring forth accusations and to go to court against their abusers. It is no small feat for them to stand up for themselves and continue to speak."

And the fact remains: “slow to release information” is entirely different than evading external investigation by hiding behind the First Amendment, which is exactly what SGM is doing. If SGM indeed has nothing to hide than its leaders should be transparent and cooperative in this investigation. 

So while we should withhold judgment regarding the specifics of these sexual abuse allegations, Christians should flatly condemn SGM’s attempt to keep the facts from coming out by appealing to the First Amendment. That’s an abuse of freedom of religion and an insult to the gospel, plain and simple. 

***

Note to commenters: Please remember to refer to “alleged” victims and “alleged” abusers. This is an important distinction to make in a pending case like this one, even though the percentage of false allegations in abuse cases is quite small. 

An important post from Mary DeMuth: “The Sexy Wife I Can’t Be”

Trigger Warning: sexual abuse

If you have a moment today, please stop by A Deeper Church and read Mary DeMuth’s post today entitled “The Sexy Wife I Can’t Be.”

An excerpt:

“I walk with a giant limp in the sexy wife arena. I still feel outright rage when I read that for the sake of my husband, I’m supposed to be adventurous and wild, that to be this way represents true spousal godliness. Because honestly? Those words just make me feel less than. Those are a set of guidelines I’ll probably never meet….

It’s okay to struggle in this area. It’s normal. I give you permission to say it’s frightening and bewildering. I pray you’ll find the words to communicate with your spouse how you feel, how this is hard for you. I hope for an understanding spouse who loves you utterly for who you are, not how you perform. I want to tell you that it does get better, but that you won’t improve by simply trying to on sexy clothes or offering your body as a fruit plate. True sexual liberation comes from the inside out, where Jesus walks into those terrible memories and mourns alongside you...."

Read the rest.

Do Christians idolize virginity?

Several recent posts from some of favorite bloggers raise this question in powerful ways. I thought today would be a good day to share them, as we continue our series on Sexuality & The Church.

The first is from Elizabeth Esther, who writes:

“It took me a long time to realize I idolized virginity. I kept saying I was just promoting virtue and chastity and purity! Nothing wrong with pushing purity, right? Nothing wrong with Being Good!

Like other Christians, I talked about the “sacrifice” of abstinence. There were princess-themed books about saving our first kiss. Some of us wore purity rings and made pledges to our Daddies not to have sex until we’re married. Ultimately, we implied that a woman’s inherent worth and dignity could be measured by whether or not a man has touched her.

I understand why we do this. Christians are alarmed by what we see as a sexually permissive society. America no longer seems to share our values. This scares us. The less sacred sex seems to the broader culture, the more sacred we insist on making it among fellow Christians.

The intention might be good but over-emphasizing the specialness of virginity has unintended, harmful consequences.

We start by making ridiculous promises to our daughters. We tell them that “sexual purity” is a guarantor of a more intimate married sex life. We tell them that if they “lose” their purity, they will never really get it back. Oh, yes. They can be forgiven. But. You know. They’re damaged goods.

Christians say that the world objectifies women through immodest dress and a permissive sexual ethic. However, by idolizing sexual purity and preoccupying ourselves with female modesty and an emphasis on hyper-purity, Christians actually engage in reverse objectivization. 

Yes, we Christians say, we believe in the inherent dignity of all human life. But we especially believe in it if that human life is virginal, wears a purity ring and bleeds on her wedding night.

This is harmful and, dare I say, idolatrous. Read the full post.

The second comes from the always-brilliant Sarah Bessey, who wrote a post for A Deeper Story entitled “I Am Damaged Goods”:

Over the years the messages melded together into the common refrain: “Sarah, your virginity was a gift and you gave it away. You threw away your virtue for a moment of pleasure. You have twisted God’s ideal of sex and love and marriage. You will never be free of your former partners, the boys of your past will haunt your marriage like soul-ties. Your virginity belonged to your future husband. You stole from him. If – if! – you ever get married, you’ll have tremendous baggage to overcome in your marriage, you’ve ruined everything. No one honourable or godly wants to marry you. You are damaged goods, Sarah.”

If true love waits, I heard, then I have been disqualified from true love.

In the face of our sexually-dysfunctional culture, the Church longs to stand as an outpost of God’s ways of love and marriage, purity and wholeness.

And yet we twist that until we treat someone like me – and, according to this research, 80% of you are like me –  as if our value and worth was tied up in our virginity.

We, the majority non-virgins in the myopic purity conversations,  feel like the dirty little secret, the not-as-goods, the easily judged example.  In this clouded swirl of shame, our sexual choices are the barometer of our righteousness and worth. We can’t let any one know, so we keep it quiet, lest any one discover we were not virgins on some mythic wedding night. We don’t want to be the object of disgust or pity or gossip or judgment. And in the silence, our shame – and the lies of the enemy – grow.

She concludes:

No matter what that preacher said that day, no matter how many purity balls are thrown with sparkling upper-middle-class extravagance, no matter the purity rings and the purity pledges, no matter the judgemental Gospel-negating rhetoric used with the best of intentions, no matter the “how close is too close?” serious conversations of boundary-marking young Christians, no matter the circumstances of your story, you are not disqualified from life or from joy or from marriage or from your calling or from a healthy and wonderful lifetime of sex because you had – and, heaven forbid, enjoyed – sex before you were married.

Darling, young one burning with shame and hiding in the silence, listen now: Don’t believe that lie. You never were, you never will be, damaged goods.

A-freakin’-men is all I have to say to that. You really must read the entire post.

Similarly, Carolyn Custis James recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post entitled “Why Virginity is Not the Gospel,” to which Dianna Anderson added a helpful critique.

I wrote about my experience with "True Love Waits" in A Year of Biblical Womanhood. As you will notice, this is the context in which the infamous v-word appears! 

I signed my first abstinence pledge when I was just fifteen. I’d been invited by some friends to a fall youth rally at the First Baptist Church, and in the fellowship hall one night, the youth leader passed around neon blue and pink postcards that included a form letter to God promising to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. We had only a few minutes to add our signatures, and all my friends were signing theirs, so I used the back of my metal chair to scribble my name across the dotted line before marching to the front of the room to pin my promise to God and my vagina onto a giant corkboard for all to see. The youth leader said he planned to hang the corkboard in the hallway outside the sanctuary so that parents could marvel at the seventy-five abstinence pledges he’d collected that night. It was a pretty cheap way to treat both our bodies and God, come to think of it. Studies suggest that only about 12 percent of us kept our promise.

I have a feeling this is going to be a hot topic in the months and years to come, and we will be discussing it at length as part of series, though later in the year. 

What do you think? Does the Christian culture idolize virginity? How should our narratives surrounding sex, virginity, and purity change, particularly as they concern women? 

Torn, Chapters 7-11: Internalizing the Culture War

As part of our series on sexuality and the Church, today we continue our discussion around Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate by Justin Lee.

This week, we’re talking about Chapters 7-11, in which Justin describes how Christians responded to his sexuality.

Chapter 7 – “That The Man Should Be Alone”

After his experience with ex-gay ministries, (which we discussed last week), Justin had to confront the reality that he would likely never become straight. This left him with three options, as he saw it: the first was to hide his same-sex attraction and marry a woman in spite of his lack of attraction to her, which he felt would be unfair to both himself and the woman in such a relationship; the second was to pursue a relationship with another guy, which he had trouble reconciling with what he’d been taught regarding the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality; and the third option was to remain celibate, which left Justin with the prospect of being alone for the rest of his life.

“I don’t have the words to convey how much this questions weighed on me,” writes Justin. “I knew I couldn’t continue calling myself a Christian unless I was willing to accept whatever God had planned for me, even if it was a lie of loneliness…After agonizing over the decision I knew I had to make, I finally reached the inescapable conclusion: I had to follow God, whatever that might mean. I knelt down in my bedroom and I made a promise to God… Dear God, I prayed, I don’t want to be celibate. I don’t want to be alone. I want to fall in love with someone and spend my life with that person. But even more than that, I want to serve You. And if Your will is for me to celibate my entire life, I will do it. Please show me what You want for my life, and help me to do Your will, whatever it is.” (p. 104)

Justin says this moment marked a turning point in his journey. He felt a wave of peace rush over him. He didn’t have any answers right away, but he knew that “whatever the future might hold, I was committed to endure whatever God called me to. And God was going to be with me.” (p. 105)

Chapter 8 – “South Park Christians”

Justin knew that God would be faithful to him, but the Church, he said, was another story.

Recalling an episode in “South Park” in which Stan discovers his dog Sparky is gay and responds by simply shouting “Don’t be gay!” again and again at the poor dog, Justin says that most of the Christians in his life were “South Park” Christians who responded to his agonizing questions about his future with a flippant, “Don’t be gay!”

“The Christians I knew typically assumed it was all a matter of choice, so admitting the truth about my feelings only subjected me to ostracism, misunderstandings, and the brand of ‘unrepentant sinner,’” he recalls.

When Justin told one of his pastors that he didn’t think the ex-gay ministries could make him straight, the pastor told him that as long as Justin remained celibate, he was welcome to continue worshipping with the congregation, but that if Justin entered a same-sex relationship, he would be asked to leave. Justin had never even considered that he might be kicked out of the congregation, so his pastor’s words stung. The pastor then encouraged him to return to the ex-gay ministries.

One of Justin’s friend contacted Focus on the Family on Justin’s behalf; another bought him porn, hoping it would make him straight; still others questioned Justin’s commitment to his faith, and many approached him with contention, eager to debate the Bible with him.

When Justin became involved with a campus ministry, the reactions among his classmates were largely the same. When Justin shared his struggle, they were kind, but tended to turn every conversation into a debate over Scripture and homosexuality. One girl even asked Justin to “leave his agenda at home,” and respect the group’s views on homosexuality. “My agenda?” Justin thought. “No one had ever accused me of having an ‘agenda’ before. The only ‘agenda’ I knew I had was my day planner…”

Time and again, the message Justin received from the Christians in his life was simply, “Don’t be gay!”

Chapter 9 – “The Poisoned Yeast”

Still, Justin loved his evangelical brothers and sisters, knowing them to be good, generous people who were passionate about the gospel and eager to do the right thing.  The reason these good people responded to him so inappropriately was because of misinformation, he says.

Justin recalls a frustrating conversation with an evangelical leader named Mark who tried to convince Justin that his homosexuality must be the result of faulty parenting, or some sort of childhood trauma, because there was no concrete scientific “proof” that biology contributed to same-sex attraction. When Justin noted that there was no scientific evidence to support the theory that homosexuality was the result of bad parenting, Mark had no idea how to respond. Mark went on to suggest that perhaps Justin was gay because he was raised Southern Baptist and not given opportunities for artistic expression which created a form of defensive detachment! Justin had to stifle a laugh. Mark then continued to posit that Justin must be gay because his alopecia areata (a hereditary condition that makes Justin lose his hair) gave him a “traumatic” childhood. But Justin insisted that, in spite of some teasing here and there, he had a happy childhood.  But the guy wouldn’t give up! He was determined to point to a trauma that had made Justin gay and that could be fixed with therapy.

“It didn’t really matter to me what Mark thought of me,” Justin writes. “I would likely never see him again…It was Mark’s influence that bothered me. No matter what I said, Mark was going to keep going to groups like this one and telling thousands upon thousands of Christians that being gay was caused by faulty parenting, that it only led to misery, and that anyone who wanted to become straight could…And they would pass those beliefs on to their children and other Christians, who would act upon that misinformation whenever they encountered gay people.” (133)

“A little bit of misinformation, like yeast or poison, can work its way through the entire church,” Justin writes. “contaminating an important force for good in the world and turning it into something doing damage. With the church contaminated by misinformation, people feel that they have two choices: either accept the church and the misinformation along with it, or reject the whole thing.” (134)

Justin determines to participate in a third option: fighting the misinformation.

Chapter 10 – “Faith Assassins”

In this chapter, Justin discusses with refreshing charity the ways in which the reputation of Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, is damaged by this misinformation and by a preoccupation with waging culture wars against the LGBT community.

“Well-intentioned Christians, believing that being gay is a sinful choice that can be easily changed, speak and act accordingly,” he writes, “recommending ex-gay ministries and fighting against cultural acceptance of homosexuality. To those who know better, this comes across as hurtful and unkind.” (p. 139)

This I something we have discussed at length here on the blog in the past, (see "How to Win a Culture War and Lose a Generation") so I won’t spend much more time on it here. Justin does a fantastic job addressing it in the book, which I recommend reading in its entirety.

At the end of this chapter, he laments over the divide between Christians who advocate “God’s Truth” on one hand and “Love” on the other when “in the Bible, Truth and Love are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. God’s Truth is all about God’s Love for us and the Love we ought to have for one another. We are being untrue to that Truth if we treat people unlovingly. And we are missing out on the full extent of that Love if we try to divorce it from Ultimate Truth…We Christians must work to repair this schism in the church. If the church is to survive much longer in our culture, it must teach and model the Christianity of Jesus—a faith that combines Truth and Love in the person of Jesus Christ, revealed to us in the Bible and lived out in the everyday lives of his followers.” (p. 147)

Chapter 11 – “The Other Side”

On the other hand, Justin found himself struggling to fit in with other gay people. When some of his gay friends convinced him to visit a gay club, he felt totally out-of-place. Even many of the gay Christians he knew seemed uninterested in engaging what the Bible said about sexuality, which Justin was eager to do. Others, angered by their experience with the Church, left the faith altogether. 

Justin joined a LGBT club on his campus and begins taking more leadership in it. What he discovered as he got to know more gay people was this:  “The one big thing the gays and the Christians had in common was that they both believed in a Gays-vs.-Christians cultural dynamic. They might not all phrase it that way, and some might limit their antipathy to a particular subset of the other group—evangelicals, say, instead of all Christians—but at the end of the day, belief in this dichotomy was so strong on both sides that even those of us who should have known better, the gay Christians, had bought into it.” (p. 156)

This created a false dichotomy that forced many of Justin’s friends into a horrible choice: “Would you be a good person, or ben an honest person? Deny what you believe about God, or deny what you know about yourself? Condemn yourself to a lifetime of faking it, or condemn yourself to an eternity in hell?”

Justin hits the nail on the head with this:

“It wasn’t that there weren’t any gay Christians to begin with. It was that in a Gays-vs.-Christians culture, everyone had to pick a side.” (p. 157)

Feeling torn, Justin fell into a deep depression.

“During the day, I daydreamed about ways to kill myself,” he recalls. “I didn’t really want to die, but I couldn’t see any future in this world where I could possibly be happy. I felt like I was staying alive out of obligation to God,  not because I had anything at all to live for.”

Justin finally goes to see a counselor. In therapy, he realized this: “My depression wasn’t about a chemical imbalance. It wasn’t even really about my loneliness. Without realizing it, I had internalized the culture war, and it was tearing me apart inside. I couldn’t deny my faith, I couldn’t deny the truth about myself, and I couldn’t keep living two separate lives.”

His story picks up in the next Chapter 12, which we will discuss next week, along with Justin’s thoughts on what the Bible says about homosexuality.

Questions for Discussion…

1. What sort of misinformation regarding homosexuality have you encountered in the Church? 

2. For LGBT folks (and friends & family): What sort of experiences have you had with Christians—good, bad, and ugly? Can you relate to Justin’s experience of “internalizing the culture wars”? 

As usual, I’ll keep a close eye on the comment section after this post. I’ll have to close the thread after 24 hours, just because it becomes too much to monitor, especially when I’m travelling. Thanks so much for understanding!