The Gay Evangelical Wins

There have been books on gay apologetics for as long as there have been openly gay Christians, ever since 1972 when Troy Perry, who founded the first gay-affirming Christian church in Los Angeles in 1968, wrote “The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay.” Performing same-sex unions as early as 1970, Perry started a conversation largely ignored by the queer liberation movement that followed in the footsteps of Stonewall. By 1980, John Boswell was giving academic grounding to what was still a very new idea, that homosexuality and Christianity were not necessarily incompatible, and since the mid-90s we have seen an explosion of books telling the story of gay people who found a way to come out of the closet and maintain their faith: Mel White, Gene Robinson, Andrew Sullivan, and so on (Rosaria Butterfield is one published lesbian example). All of these men and women, however, were to some degree a part of gay culture as it has been generally understood for almost 100 years – they keep queer company, have no qualms getting a drink at a gay bar, and even in their faith hold fairly nuanced, progressive views.

Where a demand for gay civil rights was once joined to a general demand for a sexual revolution, Vines extends to its furthest point the position of Sullivan and Evan Wolfson who argued that gay people do not by their very nature upend the status quo. For Sullivan, this status quo was East Coast gay culture; he met his husband at the Black Party in New York. What’s different about Matthew Vines is that, for him, the status quo was his upbringing in a very conservative Presbyterian church in Wichita, Kansas, a congregation he has never formally left and to which he presumably hopes to return. It’s safe to assume that Vines has never stepped foot inside a gay bar and would not be ok with the general licentious and sexually libidinous atmosphere usually found there. Vines was a student at Harvard when he came out but, instead of staying on the East Coast and embracing a culture that felt foreign to him, he quit school and began a mission that now includes his new book God and the Gay Christian” and The Reformation Project , an annual gathering training conservative Christians how to take the conservative gay gospel to their churches back home.