There is a heart-rending interview going around the net with Vaughan Roberts, the rector of St Ebbe's, a hardline evangelical church in Oxford. He is gay, though he wouldn't use the term, and celibate. He talks about two things: the difficulty of remaining celibate, and the difficulty for conservative evangelicals of ever admitting to anyone, even to themselves, that they are in fact gay. A further layer of irony and pain is added to the situation because his interviewer, Julian Hardyman, leads a Cambridge Baptist church where his predecessor was chased out of the job for coming out and announcing he had a partner.
What the article makes clear is that, even among conservative evangelicals, it is no longer possible to deal with gay people, and the problems their existence poses, by simple repression.
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