Up until now I don't think I've said anything about the Revoice conference. That's in part because I don't care to watch the presentations. I thought Denny Burk's response was weak, for reasons I didn't understand. Now that I know he doesn't consider homosexual attraction to be a disqualification from Christian ministry, I understand why his response was weak. I'll comment on Wesley Hill's wrap-up.
He's a leader in the movement. Perhaps the intellectual leader:
...a crowd of mostly non-straight people—some four hundred strong—gathered for the first annual Revoice conference, an event aiming to help LGBTQ+ Christians thrive in their churches and families. Appearance-wise, many of the attendees wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in Boystown or Brighton. Rainbow bracelets and body piercings abounded (one friend of mine sported rainbow-colored shoelaces to match the rainbow Ichthus pendant on his lapel).
Flaunting homosexuality is one reason why Bible-believing churches are hostile to the Revoice philosophy.
According to the “ex-gay” paradigm, far from being a biological or ontological identity, homosexuality is a condition. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and one of the people most responsible for transforming ex-gay experiences and testimonies into weapons in the culture war, wrote in 2002 that there “is no such thing as a gay child or a gay teen. … [Boys with a poor relationship to their fathers] have a seventy-five percent chance of becoming homosexual or bisexual.” Being gay was, in other words, a developmental disorder—and, for that reason, treatable.
i) I'm not qualified to have an informed opinion on the nature/nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality. However, Hill seems to dismiss post-natal environmental factors out of hand.
ii) I don't know if homosexuality is generally curable. Compare it to addictive behavior. Treatment is successful for some people, but unsuccessful for others.
iii) Likewise, the fact that some people kick the habit doesn't mean what they cease to find the addictive substance or behavior appealing. It just means they're no longer dominated by it. They can say no. .
I still recall, some time in the months leading up to my own admission that I was gay, listening to Mike Haley, an “ex-gay” speaker who then worked for Dobson’s organization, give a talk in a chapel service at Wheaton College about his conversion to Christianity. On the screen behind him were photos of his blonde, bronzed younger self from when he worked as a prostitute, emblems of his years of wandering in what he termed the “homosexual lifestyle.” Exodus International, at the time the world’s largest ex-gay organization, had described Haley this way in its promotion of his ministry: “Mike Haley was once addicted to homosexuality. Today he is a fulfilled husband and father.” When Haley concluded his talk by projecting a photo of him and his wife with their two sons, he received a standing ovation.
Does Hill believe that's sometimes the case? If so, then biological factors can't be the only explanation.
I was never involved with ex-gay ministries myself, but I do remember asking my evangelical professors and pastors whether the outcome Haley spoke about was possible for me. I received equivocal replies. Perhaps my friends and mentors could sense my doubts about the plausibility of any clear-cut answer. On the one hand, I was frightened by the prospect of remaining single and hoped there was a way of avoiding that fate. On a Christian college campus where students joked about getting a “ring by spring,” looking ahead to adulthood without a spouse felt like peering into a long, dim corridor of loneliness. On the other hand, I knew the character of my same-sex desire: It had been inchoately there in my elementary school crushes, it had undergone no fluctuation during the storm of puberty, and now, in my early twenties, it seemed as exclusive and persistent as ever. In light of those givens, I was skeptical of the effectiveness of any therapeutic interventions.
Are "elementary school crushes" evidence that homosexuality is innate? How does Hill differentiate preadolescent gay "crushes" from straight boys who idolize alpha males? There are straight boys who view alpha males as role models. They want to be like them. They want to hang out with them. How is the evidence for that distinguishable from preadolescent homosexual attraction? Clearly it's different inasmuch as those boys grow up to be straight. So how can Hill tell his "elementary school crushes" were incipient signs of homosexuality rather than, say, nerdy young boys who wish they were jocks?
Imagine being asked, “Have you tried this?”—where “this” always refers, by turns, to another book, another conference, another treatment center, another prayer ministry, another charismatic experience, or another counseling technique—each time you shared a story of pain and confusion with your fellow believers. Imagine that, and you will have an idea of what it felt like over the last several decades to be open about one’s homosexuality in traditional churches. Along with many other Christians who chose to acknowledge their same-sex desires in conservative Christian circles from the 1970s onward, I did try many of the suggestions my friends gave me. I saw counselors and received prayer. I read books with diagnoses of my “homosexual neurosis,” as one called it, and struggled mightily to shoehorn my childhood development into their framework, in the hope that some new level of healing might be opened up to me.
i) It may be reasonable for some homosexuals to give up on therapy if it doesn't work for them.
ii) Why say "same-sex desire" rather than homosexual desire? The use of "same-sex" as a synonym homosexual (or "gay:) is corrupting. Straight same-sex affection is natural, normal, and proper. Straight men with male friends. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. Brothers. Sisters.
When "same-sex" becomes a synonym for homosexual, it acquires homosexual connotations, which corrupts the term. We know longer have a term to designate straight same-sex affection.
Being gay in traditional churches, up until very recently, meant always having to ask whether one had prayed enough, hoped enough, hungered enough for one’s own photo with a spouse and children to project on a screen to thunderous applause.
Why the felt need to tell everybody you're homosexual in the first place?
At a time in my life when I wondered whether it would signal defeat if I said simply, “I’m gay, and I don’t expect that to change, and I want to be celibate,” an older single friend of mine wrote a letter to me—one that I now look back on as a turning point in my thinking, illuminating an unexplored possibility:
Perhaps the real question is not how to make unfulfilled desires go away, but rather, what they teach us about the nature of our lives, what is ultimately important. … This, I suspect, is much akin to Paul’s own discussion of the thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12. Paul prayed but it did not go away. God allowed it to remain in his life that he might know the surpassing greatness of God’s grace in ALL circumstances. Likewise, unfulfilled desires point us to the only eternal source of satisfaction—God himself. … [T]hey help us identify with the true nature of the human condition of all those around us who are suffering [things] over which they have no control. It is an immediate bridge for ministry to our fellow human beings.
Reading those words was a revelation. In their wake, I began to ponder questions I hadn’t known I was allowed ask: Might there be some divine design, some strange providence, in my homosexuality? Might my sexual orientation be something God does not want to remove, knowing that its challenge keeps pulling me back towards Him in prayer? Might it even be something through which more empathy and compassion for fellow sufferers are birthed?
i) It's true that the struggle with a personal sin or weakness can be a sanctifying experience and cultivate compassion. That said, Paul doesn't indicate that his thorn in the flesh was a besetting sin.
ii) Since, moreover, Hill rules out heterosexual marriage, he will never be in a position to find out if that has a healing affect on his condition. He makes it a choice between "celibate gay Christians" and sexually active homosexuals. But that's a false dichotomy. His body is still designed for sexual relations with a woman. Why take that option off the table? There are couples who are not in love when they marry, but come to love each other during the course of marriage.
Asking these questions let me abandon my fevered search for some cure for my gayness and prompted me to look instead for what C. S. Lewis once called the “certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, [the] certain social role” of which only those who aren’t straight might be capable. Homosexuality, I continued to believe, is sinful insofar as it represents a thirst for acts that Scripture forbids, but I came to see that it is at the same time—like St. Paul’s thorn—an occasion for grace to become manifest.
It's one thing to give up on therapy if it doesn't work for you–another thing not to give it a try. Once again, consider addictive behavior.
Exploring that grace was the point of the Revoice conference. It was the first theologically conservative event I’ve attended in which I felt no shame in owning up to my sexual orientation and no hesitation in declaring my sexual abstinence. At Revoice there was no pressure to obfuscate the probable fixity and exclusivity of my homosexuality through clunky euphemisms. Nor was there any stigma attached to celibacy, as though my embracing it were simply, as the ex-gay leader Andy Comiskey once wrote, “a concession to same-sex attraction.”
Once again, why the felt-need to open up about homosexual attraction?
The ecclesial blessing for same-sex partnerships requires one to dismantle the entire edifice of two thousand years of Christian teaching on embodiment, marriage, and celibacy—namely, that marriage is a sacred bond between one man and one woman and that sexual expression is permissible only within that covenantal relationship, whereas those who live outside that covenant are called to celibacy.
i) Homosexuals don't need homosexual friends. Rather, they need straight friends.
ii) Friendship isn't based on vows and covenants. Friendship is based on mutual respect, mutual understanding, mutual trust, rapport, acceptance, common values, common interests, common activities, shared risk, shared history. We choose our friends. In friendship, the essential bond is informal rather than formal. The bond can't be strengthened by vows and covenants. That's artificial.
iii) Hill's comparison intentionally blurs the distinction between marital commitment and friendship.
