Former gays say the church has yet to address the problem of Christians who are struggling with homosexuality.
From all outward appearances, Mary (not her real name) is an evangelical Christian. She was reared in a fundamentalist tradition, and holds a degree from a respected evangelical college. Mary believes in the Trinity and acknowledges without reservation that Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord. She believes that all people are fallen and can be saved only through God’s grace. She believes the Bible is God’s Word and that Christians should strive to understand and obey it. She studies Scripture and prays regularly.
But unlike most other young Christian women, for as long as Mary can remember, she has had a sexual interest only in other women. Mary has hated herself for most of her life. “I don’t want to be gay,” she says, “not because it’s terrible, but because of the discrimination we have to endure. If I knew how to change, I would. I have prayed about it. I’ve sought counseling; people have tried to cast demons out of me.
“God has helped me to see that I’m okay. I can’t believe he wants me to feel the pain and confusion that comes from thinking homosexuality is a horrible sin.” she says. “I realize the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, and I don’t take that lightly. Nobody wants to live in sin. But I’m prepared to accept judgment for how I am living. I’ve gone to God so many times and pleaded with him to take it away. I don’t know what else I can do.”
Mary is one of countless people who agonizes over reconciling her Christian faith with homosexual feelings. People who believe in basic Christian doctrine are polarized on the issue of homosexuality. At one extreme, Christians portray homosexuals as sexual perverts who should be banned from the church. R. J. Rushdoony, a leader in the Christian Reconstruction movement, has written approvingly of a system of government where in practicing homosexuals would be executed.
From the other extreme, a growing body of literature has emerged suggesting that the church’s traditional teaching about homosexuality is not scripturally sound. Among other things, these scholars have argued that Sodom was destroyed not because of homosexuality, but because of its general sinfulness. In addition, they maintain that Deuteronomy 23:17–18 was meant to condemn cult prostitution, not homosexuality, and that a mistranslation of the Hebrew text accounts for the discrepancy. However, notable evangelical scholars—among them John R. W. Stott and Richard Lovelace—contend that the arguments of the prohomosexual camp are flawed.
Outside the theological arena, scientists and psychologists are seeking to understand the many mysteries that surround the homosexual condition. What causes it? Can it be cured? If so, how?
The debate over whether a person’s genetic make-up contributes to sexual orientation has not been settled. Those who believe homosexuality is genetically based say it can no more easily be changed than can blue eyes or left-handedness. But a growing number of Christians who are struggling to overcome homosexuality affirm that the behavior is learned and can be unlearned.
Last month 180 people, most of them ex-gays, attended the tenth annual conference of Exodus International, a coalition of some 50 ministries to former homosexuals. This is more than double the number that attended the conference just two years ago. Exodus executive director Alan Medinger, himself a former practicing homosexual, said the number of ministries to people struggling with homosexuality is growing rapidly. However, he said, 58 U.S. and Canadian cities with populations of more than 500,000 still have no such ministry.
In dramatic contrast to gays who celebrate their homosexuality as a gift from God, those associated with Exodus affirm that heterosexuality is God’s plan for humanity. But like their gay counterparts, they maintain that the evangelical church has failed to understand and deal with the problem of homosexuality.
“A heterosexual man can understand what it’s like to lust after a woman,” Medinger said, “but he can’t understand what it is like for people to lust after others of the same sex. It’s aesthetically distasteful. Some people find the things homosexuals do to be so repulsive that they get carried away with emotion in trying to understand the issue.”
Several people at the Exodus conference testified that when they sought help from a pastor, they were told simply to stop practicing homosexuality. But Dan Roberts of Quest Learning Center in Reading, Pennsylvania, said in a seminar that “telling a gay person to ‘quit’ is like telling a hungry person not to be hungry.”
Thought leaders in Exodus have moved toward a fundamentally different understanding of homosexuality. They say that Cambridge, England, research psychologist Elizabeth Moberly is among the most effective communicators of this new approach.
Moberly takes issue with the traditional view that homosexual behavior is perverse or unnatural. Rather, she maintains that the homosexual urge appears quite “natural” once its cause is understood. That cause, she says, is aborted development in same-sex relationships, especially between parent and child. Moberly defines homosexuality essentially as “a state of incomplete development.” Writing in Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic (James Clarke & Co.), she says, “the homosexual condition does not involve abnormal needs, but normal needs that have, abnormally, been left unmet in the process of growth.”
Such an understanding has given Moberly and others a new perspective on the gay lifestyle. To her, a homosexual who goes through 200 partners a year is not evil or grotesque. Rather, he is viewed as a child searching desperately and helplessly to renew a much-needed relationship that was severed in his past.
Moberly says the church has failed to provide what homosexuals need most: a context within which to develop nonsexual same-sex relationships. “The homosexual has a greater need for relationships than a single heterosexual,” she writes, “because the former involves a child’s need for his parent rather than the need of one adult for another.” Moberly’s view gives Christians struggling with homosexuality the hope of growing into heterosexuality.
Theologian Carl F. H. Henry observes that, while Moberly’s views might help Christians understand homosexuality, they “ought not imply that homosexuals are not morally responsible for their sexual behavior.”
Some at the Exodus conference were living testimonies that practicing homosexuals can become heterosexuals. Luanna Hutchison was a lesbian for six years. She found out early in life that her parents had wanted a boy. So she acted as a boy, and prayed that God would change her into one. As a young woman she received a police escort from a women’s restroom because someone thought she was a man. After extensive counseling, she has come to realize her femininity.
Events That Shaped Society’s View of Homosexuality
1948 Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male is published. Kinsey maintains that more than 25 percent of the U.S. male population have some homosexual orientation, though only 4 percent are exclusively homosexual. Later he does a similar study of females.
1950 The first major American homophile organization, the Mattachine Society, is formed.
1955 D. Sherwin Bailey publishes Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, a foundational work for prohomosexual theological scholarship.
1957 The Wolfenden Report is issued in England. Based on a 1954 meeting of physicians and Anglican clergy, it recommends that homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private no longer be considered a crime.
1967 England’s Parliament recommends The Wolfenden Report.
1968 Troy Perry, a minister from a Pentecostal background, forms a prohomosexual church, which now has more than 50 sister churches known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.
1969 Pat Nidorf, a Catholic priest from San Diego, forms Dignity, an organization for gay Catholics.
1972 The United Church of Christ ordains Bill Johnson, the first avowed homosexual known to be ordained in a mainline denomination. In contrast, the United Methodist Church declares homosexuality to be “incompatible with Christian doctrine.”
1973 The American Psychiatric Association votes to remove homosexuality from the category of mental illness.
1975 Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore ordains an avowed lesbian.
1976 Exodus International, a Christian ministry to help people out of homosexuality, is formed.
1983 The National Council of Churches tables a membership application from the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.
1984 Gay caucuses in the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) fail to convince their denominations to allow the ordination of practicing homosexuals.
Sy Rogers, a former transvestite and now an Exodus board member, attributes his former gender confusion to a troubled childhood. For a time he lived as a woman, taking female hormones in anticipation of a sex-change operation. His conversion to Christianity was the beginning of the end of his gay orientation. Now he’s married, and he and his wife are expecting their first child.
Such testimonies mean little to John Evans, a man who stood outside the Exodus conference site handing out tracts declaring that Christianity and homosexual practice are compatible. Evans returned to a homosexual lifestyle two years after he helped found Love in Action, one of the most noted ministries under the Exodus umbrella. “I have yet to meet a true homosexual who has completely changed to heterosexuality,” he says.
Exodus leader Medinger acknowledges that his group has had problems with ministry leaders who return to a gay lifestyle. Part of the reason, he says, is the scarcity of heterosexual people involved in ministries to homosexuals. When an ex-gay is trying to help a struggling homosexual, the temptation to fall is great.
Thus, evangelical thinkers like Lovelace and Stott are calling for the church to give a higher priority to ministering to homosexuals. Lovelace emphasizes that homosexual practice is sin. “If we can interpret the Scripture to endorse homosexual acts among Christians,” he says, “we can make it endorse anything else we want to do or believe, and our faith and practice are cut loose in a borderless chaos.” But he adds that the church has “neglected … constructive mission among the gay subculture,” estimated to comprise up to 10 percent of the U.S. population.
Likewise, Stott writes that “at the heart of the homosexual condition is a deep loneliness, the natural human hunger for mutual love, a search for identity, and a longing for completeness. If homosexual people cannot find these things in the local ‘church family,’ we have no business to go on using that expression.”
The fact that practicing homosexuals are seeking Christian fellowship poses a quandary for the church. How can Christians accept practicing homosexuals into their fellowship without ignoring the biblical mandate to discipline unrepentant sinners? That problem is complicated by the belief held by many homosexuals that their behavior is not sinful, or at the very least, that it is not a major sin.
Theologian Carl F. H. Henry says that because the church “has the only redemptive message, it cannot abandon homosexuals.” He advocates “half-way ministries,” which would limit full participation of sexually active gays in the body of believers.
The issue of gays in the church is far from being resolved. Mary, who feels excluded from evangelical churches, says, “I think we need to communicate, not run away from each other.” Stott emphasizes that homosexual practice is sin, but says it is no worse than pride or hypocrisy. “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices,” he has written, “we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them.”
