An Evangelical who writes on same-sex orientation must be brief.  Many readers will be thoroughly impatient with the subject, suspicious of the writer’s motives.  They will doubt it’s even possible to say anything new or useful on the subject.  This will be just as true of Evangelicals who might wish same-sex marriage could be possible – theologically possible – as it will be of those who think it’s an impossibility, almost by definition.  Each will need convincing to invest any amount of time in a proposed solution.  Thus, brevity.

But being brief is not enough.  We also have to be detailed and comprehensive, if not positively exhaustive.  Contested issues attract motivated criticism.  We must address other ways of thinking, different disciplines of expert knowledge, a wide spectrum of relevant human experience, a long and rancorous history of misunderstandings, litanies of evil, literatures both deep and broad, the politics of public life, and the power dynamics of large institutions.  All this must be done persuasively, with humane sensitivity, and without glossing over uncomfortable matters.

But even that, to be both brief and comprehensive all at once, is insufficient too.  Our answers must be illuminating, easily understood, and clearly right and good, since, by any Evangelical understanding, they must be answers for literally everyone.  This is what has proven the most difficult – and most of all when we have to address same-sex orientation and then same-sex marriage as a response to orientation.  Why is this case so difficult, if same-sex relations just a simple, self-evident matter of morality, as the Bible seems to treat it?

In this book we will take the question of orientation and marriage to scripture and compare the results with those we have found when we don’t ask these questions directly.  It is certainly the case that Christian scripture everywhere condemns same-sex relations.  We might expect that same-sex orientation would compound this, by making them a part of human nature.  We might expect that same-sex marriage would compound them again by making them a part of public institutions.  What we will see is that, on the contrary, the combination of same-sex orientation and same-sex marriage resolves the biblical condemnations themselves.  This will seem, at first, to be a little counter-intuitive.  But it will in fact explain, and quite lucidly, all of our difficulties.

What is orientation, then, and what are the problems it poses?  We will understand it as a total reversal of heterosexual attraction, not an addition to it; which occurs universally across human societies; which consists of loving and romantic attraction, not just sexual attraction; and which is both involuntary and permanent.

As Evangelicals, we have at least seven serious problems with this.  We struggle with: 1) acknowledging it at all, in some cases; 2) justifying mandatory life-long celibacy, our default responses; 3) refuting a charge of discrimination over this response and others; 4) explaining, in public life, exactly what the moral problem is with same-sex marriage; 5) either justifying mandatory lifelong celibacy from scripture or explaining away the condemnations of same-sex relations; 6) preventing churches and denominations from fracturing over these issues; and 7) presenting Christ and his message to the world as good news when we are widely perceived to be more-or-less bigoted toward same-sex oriented people.  These are biblical and moral problems, not just pastoral and social ones.

However, while these problems are often acknowledged, or lamented, the case for what we generally call the “traditional” or approximately Evangelical view of same-sex relations seems impervious to attack.  We will structure this book around the traditional case, sorting it into sections titled 2) Nature, 3) Morals, 4) Marriage, and 5) Theology.  I will call these the ‘four pillars’ of the Evangelical case against same-sex relations.  Dividing them up in this way let us work through them methodically, and not ping-pong from one to another, as frequently happens in these discussions.  This happens because, to Evangelicals, the pillars seem individually strong and mutually reinforcing.  It doesn’t seem like questions in one area are going to undermine that.  And that, even if it did, the others pillars would prop it up.  So, if someone seems not to be accepting one line of argument we can just say “Yeah, but what about” and try another.  And then back and forth all day until somebody gives up.  Here, we’ll take the issues one at a time.

Putting the argument in this order has one other important effect.  By proceeding from ‘Simple nature’ at one end to Evangelical theology at the other, we are also proceeding from the least religious reasons to the most.  That is, we are starting with those things we argue in ‘secular’ or public life, and then moving to those things we argue in churches, which often provide and motivate our public arguments.  I’ll use the term ‘simple’ for the arguments we think will work in public life, without relying on any religious assumptions.  ‘Simple nature’ is any fact we can point to in the world.  ‘Simple morals’ are anything we expect others to recognise automatically.  ‘Simple marriage’ is the common experience of living together and having families.  As we go through, we’ll consider the Christian reasons for believing that certain arguments should work on secular as well as religious terms.

At the other end, of course, are the arguments that are explicitly religious or biblical.  Our Evangelical beliefs, including how they have developed in response to orientation, will all come together at this end, in the section on Theology.  These are matters of basic faithfulness for ourselves, thought they are unimpressive to those who lack the same starting points.  But in each area, we’ll also be discussing the

In between the secular and the religious arguments there is a zone of contested moral knowledge: where belief or unbelief, ideology or misinformation, denial or delusion, religion or depravity, are thought to be blocking what a person is willing to acknowledge on the issue.  Natural law and original sin appear here.  This ‘contested zone’ shapes the overall argument.

Let me bid you a fond welcome, and say that I appreciate you taking time to give this book a hearing.  I recognise that conversations on this topic have seen no progress for a long while, and that there is little confidence that this will improve.  These frustrations are part of my own reasons for writing.

I’m a straight Evangelical from, at different times, Sydney and Melbourne in Australia.  I grew up with little church background and had the classic Pascal-style ‘fire’ conversion experience on a farm as a teen.  I’ve worked in technology and design, not Christian ministry, although I have a Master of Divinity degree from one of the better Evangelical colleges in Australia.  (For other readers, that’s a mid-level qualification in Christian theology.)  I was for seven years involved in planting a Baptist church in an inner suburb of Sydney with around a 30% LGBT population, in which time I held several of the leadership roles.  We ran a conference called A Different Conversation in some of those years, which emphasised listening to and understanding LGBT experiences of life and church, and the questions this raises.

The pressing questions are of course well known.  Must same-sex orientation lead to either mandatory lifelong celibacy, or to marriages without sexual desire?  Could either option ever be biblical or good?  Or does orientation change things?  On the other hand, do same sex relationships necessarily reject God’s truth and holiness, if not God and scripture entirely?  Can love and truth be kept together at all here, let alone in a publicly persuasive way?

We ought to believe these concerns are resolvable.  For God there can be no need to choose between love and truth, nor find a compromise position between righteousness and peace.  Everything must flow as one.  We should expect a Christian understanding of God’s truth to be consistent with a Christian understanding of God’s love, and with the Christian obligation that we love our neighbours.  Love and truth will dwell together.

So, let me suppose that you’re a faithful, intelligent Evangelical who genuinely wants to know and do what is best for same-sex oriented friends and colleagues but who also knows this must be grounded in what is true about them and about God.  You are aware that some people experience lifelong and exclusive same-sex attraction, and you can accept calling this experience ‘same-sex orientation’, at least for the sake of discussion – though I will say exactly what I mean by that as we proceed.  You are not yourself same-sex oriented, but you want to understand and empathise with the experience of those who are, and you reject shaming, discrimination, and abuse.  You believe that God’s love for all people means that your church must be a safe, welcoming, and joyful place for same-sex oriented people to find, love and serve God.

However, you do not see any way past the comprehensive biblical condemnations of same-sex intercourse as morally wrong, nor do you see any way to affirm that same-sex marriages are really marriages in God’s sight.  You have likely seen people adopt revisionist or liberal understandings of sexual morality – and especially same-sex morality – for reasons you have not found at all convincing.  This seems to you somewhere between stupid and dangerous for any Christian.

For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.  3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; 4 that each one of you know how to control your own body in holiness and honor, 5 not with lustful passion, like the gentiles who do not know God; 6 that no one wrong or exploit a brother or sister in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, just as we have already told you beforehand and solemnly warned you.  7 For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness.  8 Therefore whoever rejects this rejects not human authority but God, who also gives his Holy Spirit to you..  (1 Thess 4:2–8)

So at present you will most likely believe that unless a same-sex oriented person can marry someone of the opposite sex, with genuine sexual and romantic love (which is more-or-less to say, unless they’re bisexual), then they should be celibate, and be supported in this by a loving church community.  This is the best affirmation, dignity, and inclusion that you believe is possible.  But you recognise the terrible sadness and loneliness of a young Evangelical realising, usually in early adolescence, that this will be their lot in life.  This would be, I hope, how any Evangelical of goodwill and a traditional sexual ethic would like to be perceived.

In this book I am putting forward an argument I have not seen made elsewhere: that same-sex marriages, specifically, as as a response to same-sex orientation, are not sexual immorality in God’s eyes, but rather something that ‘he’ celebrates as marriages, just the same as heterosexual ones.  That is what this book intends to show, in a way that better respects God, scripture, and our same-sex oriented church members – and does not leave us struggling to defend ourselves, God, and scripture from charges of rightly illegal discrimination in public life.

A special welcome to you.  You are, for three main reasons, the primary audience of this book.  You most sharply face the conflicts between same-sex orientation and Evangelical ethics and are also expected to speak publicly on these issues.  You comprise the largest group of subject matter experts who must evaluate any proposal this kind.  And you face the most substantial risks if you do so – risks that affect your employment, and so, extend to your dependents and to the good that you achieve through your work and ministry.

I am sure you are aware that the argument presented in this book – an Evangelical argument for same-sex marriage – can get you fired.  Even if it were entirely correct and you could argue it as well as is humanly possible, you could still be looking for work next week if you commented on it too favourably or too publicly, at least, in many Evangelical churches and organisations.  Many good and faithful people do not think they have ever seen a viable argument to this end, that any biblical discussion is long settled, and that the only challenge that remains is faithful and resolute governance.  While the arguments presented here convince me, I am a neither a professional nor a specialist in the relevant biblical and theological studies, as many of you are.  One of the two most important tests of this argument is whether it persuades you.

Persuasion might happen at one of two levels.  Minimally, you might decide that this is a genuinely biblical argument, and that its sources and methods are both Evangelical and orthodox.  Of course, merely saying that this is something an Evangelical could believe in good conscience, or ‘agree to disagree’ about would be controversial.

The bigger question, though, is whether these conclusions are convincing.  Can our best minds be persuaded that this is what God really thinks?  Is it humble or realistic to suggest that this is a solution, when the problems have been so intractable?  I have a few reasons for thinking so.  You will find I largely share your concerns with other attempts at resolving these problems, and you may find you may share my dissatisfaction with them.  In this book I put forward both questions and answers that I have not previously seen in the literature.  This argument threads the needle in ways that other answers have not and I offer it as a comprehensive solution.

In writing, I accept the challenge that any new Evangelical understanding of these subjects needs to be a manifest, and manifestly faithful, upgrade in our understanding of scripture.  Richard Hays’s influential chapter on ‘Homosexuality’ in The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996), sets a standard of proof that this book needs to pass.  In his study, he considers and rejects the argument that an analogy exists between the inclusion of Gentiles in the early church, with a concordant re-framing how Old Testament law was understood, and the inclusion of practising homosexuals in the church.  Why so?

The church did not simply observe the experience or Cornelius and his household and decide that Scripture must be wrong after all.  On the contrary, the experience of uncircumcised Gentiles responding in faith to the gospel message led the church back to new reading of Scripture.  This new reading discovered in the texts a clear message of God’s intent, from the covenant with Abraham forward, to to bless all nations and bring Gentiles (qua [as] Gentiles) to worship Israel’s God.  That is, for example, what Paul seeks to establish in the complex exegetical arguments conducted in Galatians and Romans.  We see the rudiments of such a reflective process in Acts 10:34–35, where Peter begins his speech to Cornelius by alluding to Deuteronomy 10:17–18 and Psalm 15:1–2 in order to confess that “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  Only because the new experience of Gentile converts proved hermeneutically illuminating of scripture, was the church, over time, able to accept the decision to embrace Gentiles within the fellowship of God’s people. This is precisely the step that has not – or at least has not yet – been taken by the advocates of homosexuality in the church.  Is it possible for them to reread the New Testament and show how this development can be understood as a fulfilment of God’s design for human sexuality as previously revealed in Scripture?  In view of the content of the biblical texts summarised above, it is difficult to imagine how such an argument could be made.  (p.399, emph. added)

Of course, we are speaking here about same-sex marriage and same-sex orientation, not same-sex relations in general.  But Hays’s point remains.  I invite you to consider whether this book meets his challenge.

Hello!  My heart goes out to you for reading this.  I recognise you have at least as many reasons as my Evangelical readers for being leery of a book of this kind.  I’ll have a special welcome for LGBT Evangelicals in a moment, but let me welcome with everyone first.

The end-point of my argument finds that same-sex oriented people are neither theologically, morally, nor even practically (except in a few unavoidable ways) distinct from heterosexuals in Evangelical life and thought.  I will outline a relatively uncontroversial Evangelical sexual ethic, and argue that same-sex orientated Evangelicals are in precisely the same situation as their heterosexual peers, in that they should be encouraged to fall in love and marry.  For simplicity and to be more directly relevant to my Evangelical audience, I focus on the experience of same-sex orientation during adolescence, as this is more likely to overlap with church and family.  I will deal specifically with the claim that these teens in these churches can hope for the love, fulfilment and belonging that any other Evangelicals anticipate in married life, without being any less Evangelical for that.  This generalises to a range of other situations.

In writing primarily to my fellow Evangelicals, I am writing to people who in many cases view you as outsiders and speak and write about you as if you were an abstract puzzle, an absent political problem, and a moral threat to society.  Not all do, of course, but enough to need a preface of this kind.  The rest of us are not widely seen to be correcting or rejecting this, and those who do are often seen to be compromising on their Evangelical convictions in the process – and sometimes they definitely are.

Here’s why a content warning is needed.  I’m saying that authentic Evangelical faith, and by extension, Christian faith and Christian scripture, already contains a solution to the challenges that we have found in same-sex orientation, and those which Evangelical LGBTs have faced in their families and churches.  I’m showing that the biblical condemnations, and their rationales, make sense when we don’t have to consider orientation or marriage.  But that, correspondingly, they don’t work when we have to consider these.  This, of course, is exactly what we have seen in public life, when Evangelicals have made unpersuasive moral arguments against same-sex marriage, seemingly motivated by private religious convictions that they can’t argue publicly.

The strength and breadth of the biblical condemnations are an integral part of my argument.  So, I’ll be applying those condemnations at full force, and quoting the work of others who do so, because this shows that even in their strongest form they do not apply to same-sex marriages between same-sex oriented Evangelicals.

I am conscious that for LGBT readers this may bring back memories and fears of abuse, discrimination, or rejection, especially if that happened in a church or a Christian school.  It may be that there are some readers who cannot presently put that experience aside.  If that is you, I suggest that you should not continue reading but rather come back at whatever time you may feel ready.

Many of you are not Christians, and many are ex-Christian or anti-Christian as a direct consequence of your experience of Evangelical churches.  If that’s you, you have likely experienced prejudice and opposition from Christians, especially in the political sphere.  You might prefer that Evangelicals would just die out rather than that we would resolve our problems with LGBTs.  There is some natural justice in the fact that our inability to come to terms with these issues is moving us back to the margins in western society.

However, LGBT people will continue to grow up in our churches, and it is a matter of our own faithfulness to God, and our Christian obligation to love others, that we resolve the problems that we have.  If I could apologise for those of us who haven’t done so, then I would, but Evangelicalism doesn’t work like that.  We have no central hierarchy.  We only work through persuasion.  Which is problematic when we also have a lot of anti-intellectual sectarians under the Evangelical banner.

That’s a large topic of its own, so let me just say this.  If you run into any of those, could you just send them my way by asking them what they think of this book?  Thank you.

Some Evangelical readers may have rolled their eyes at my ‘content warning’ for LGBTs in the last section.  Is this political correctness gone mad?  No.  It’s an utterly rudimentary courtesy.  Because some have had traumatic experiences of church and faith on account of their sexuality, we can scarcely have a conversation of any depth without acknowledging that they expect this to be repeated or reinforced when they interact with Christians.  If you are not familiar with that experience, or why it might be reasonably called trauma, then let me to share some quotes with you that may help to capture it.  These come from Writing Themselves In, an Australian survey of tens of thousands of LGBT youth (2010).  The survey asked no specifically religious questions, but some responses mentioned Christianity.  I’ll quote these verbatim, with misspellings included.  Any time we speak about same-sex issues, this is the background that some of our hearers will have.  How would you reply to one of these young people if they told you this at a social event?

Could any of this have happened in families, churches, or Christian schools with which you are yourself associated?  And if it had, would these people have felt they could be open to you in the way that they were in this anonymous survey?  Or, even if our own churches were fine, can we overcome the extra barriers we face because of the actions of others?

A second major reason LGBTs mistrust Evangelicals is that they have been wilfully misunderstood and sometimes systematically misrepresented by people writing under our banner.  Tim LaHaye, who sold millions of books on marriage and family, wrote The Unhappy Gays in 1978.  Try to imagine a time when the following comments from this book could have been commonplace in your church or community.

Moral fidelity among homosexuals is almost unknown.  (p.31)

Most homosexuals are the best liars you will ever meet.  (p.44)

I have met only one homosexual who was not a self-indulgent, self-centered, undisciplined individual.  (p.76)

We do not wish to persecute homosexuals.  We are, however, opposed to the propagation of their life style by perverting our children, which is the only way their sterile system can continue.  (p.154)

The lenient attitude of many college administrators is appalling.  They often make no attempt to fire known homosexuals from their faculty.  (p.198)

A homosexually lenient society will cause an increase in crimes and sadistic murders.  (p.199)

Few Evangelicals today speak anything like this.  This was published less than 50 years ago, but younger Evangelicals most likely can’t recall this being something a Christian publisher would print.  If today we watch a drama with LGBT characters, we understand their motivations in a way that is completely absent from that kind of writing.

In this book I will address an up-to-date Evangelical position of the “welcoming but not affirming” kind, which does recognise orientation, and so, intends to be more informed and compassionate than those earlier views.  However, and this is critical – the damage done by those views has rarely been acknowledged, let alone apologised for, or publicly repented from, by Evangelical denominations and leaders.  This may to some degree be explained by caution about speaking publicly, given that such apologies would lead to further questions about what we now think instead.  But the absence of such apologies means that when people recall TV protesters with “God Hates Fags (Lev 20:18)” signs, they have little trouble associating this with the rest of us, and linking it with every kind of bigotry they can remember.  Doubtless many of them think that is the authentically Christian position, and that friendly Christians are just being disingenuous or, if sincere, are nice people despite their faith, not because of it.

We need to deal with that history, and a content warning is one small, important way to start.  Owning and confessing the problems would be better still; certainly, it would be better than Christians complaining that they are the ones being persecuted and misunderstood in all this, while seeming oblivious to what others have lived through.

But best of all would be to have a view of the entire matter that is authentically Christian, is easy to explain in public, that shows clear understanding and empathy, and it easily distinguished from immoral and illegal discrimination.  Of course, the purpose of this book is to provide such an understanding.

My deepest respect to you.  My comments here include all that I said to Evangelicals and to LGBTs as a wider group, above.  I’m very conscious of writing as an outsider to your experience, and as someone whose concern is largely whether LGBT issues expose inconsistencies in our common Evangelical life and thought.  I recognise, though, that I had the same odds of being gay that anyone else did, and, so, that it’s not something foreign to my humanity or anybody else’s.  So, I have tried to listen, understand, empathise, and to think through the challenges that same-sex orientation and Evangelical life and thought have posed for each other.  I said above that one of the two best tests of this book will be whether it persuades Evangelical academics.  The other will be whether it makes sense to you.

As I have mentioned already, my conclusion is that same-sex marriage simply is biblical marriage, in God’s eyes, for same-sex oriented Christians, and that this resolves our problems with same-sex orientation at every level.  This means that same-sex oriented Evangelicals both can and should fall in love and marry, like anyone else.  It means that God recognizes and celebrates such marriages.  It means that celibacy is once more gift and a choice, not an obligation, as it was in scripture and as it is for anyone else.

For many reasons you may be the most averse to this conclusion.  If you spent years of your life on the serious work of perpetual celibacy, this may seem like exactly the kind of seductive compromise that you have trained your mind and heart to overcome.  If your experience of injustice for LGBT people led you to see sexual ethics as more peripheral than social justice in Christian living, this book could bring those concerns together again.  If you had an entirely negative experience of the gay community, so that you were “saved out of the gay lifestyle,” you may think this is complicit with an ungodly system waging war upon faithful Christians.  If you moved your Christian life away from church communities entirely, no longer willing to be a flashpoint of controversy, this book may open old wounds, or worse, old hopes.  If you slogged through any number of books hoping for a solution like this, but found none were adequately Evangelical, you may find it difficult to hope for something that genuinely works.  On top of all that, there are many reasons why this may not be the right time in your life to sit down and try to work through all the issues.  If that is the case for you, then I suggest that you make a mental note to come back at some time in the future but leave it aside for now.  If you’ll give only it a short skim, then just read §1.c (‘Problems’) and §1.d (‘Outline’) of the introduction.

I hope it will be clear that this proposal has been formed by asking of scripture the questions posed by same-sex orientation and marriage together.  It is not a traditional position.  It intends only to be a faithful, biblical, and so, an orthodox response to same-sex orientation.  My own opinion is that Christian pastors and thinkers were well placed to have resolved these issues between the 1930s and the 1950s, before the sexual revolution on the one hand and the divided politics of modern Western Evangelicalism turned a fundamentally pastoral concern into a political football.  Having missed the boat at that time, our present position is more complicated that it needs to be.  I offer this book in the hope that it is the best solution and that it is better late than never.

A big wave to any of you who have wandered in.  I must say up-front that I will be primarily asking whether Evangelical problems with same-sex orientation can be solved ‘in house’, that is, without changing our views of scripture or our practical sexual ethics.  Whether that is possible or even desirable will be a matter of curiosity to some of you and not to others.  If you often do find yourself in conversation with Evangelicals, this may offer some useful ideas or starting points.

Still, same-sex orientation is a strikingly good test of some of the questions that your movements pose for Evangelicals, and a few of you may find that especially interesting.  Can Christianity be genuinely free from institutions that run rough-shod over individual freedoms and conscience?  Or free from damaging systems of privilege and presumption in society?  Or free from oppressive or anti-rational traditionalism?  We will touch on these issues in several places.  In particular, chapters §2.c and §6.c (‘Law’ and ‘Reconciliation’) will address the issue of Evangelicals seeking political control rather than merely the same right to persuade that anyone else has in a liberal society.  And chapter §7.b (‘Minorities’) will discuss queerness and transgender as it considers what same-sex marriage for Evangelicals might mean for these groups.

I’m delighted to welcome you also, and offer my appreciation for reading outside the usual lines.  As will be clear by now, my fellow Evangelicals will be my primary audience in this book, and there’ll be a lot of biblical theology.  But I would hope that a former Christian, a lifelong atheist, or someone from another world religion could pick up this book and come away with a better understanding of Evangelicalism, a best-case view of its logic and ethics, and an ability to assess what kind of Christians are hypocritical or not on their own principles.

I wasn’t myself born into a practising Christian family, and I still have a bonsai copy of my old sci-fi-themed teenage atheism somewhere in here.  So as I go through, I’ll make a few well-sign-posted detours to explain Christian things in hopefully accessible ways.  Depending on your background, it may be of interest that §3.a (‘Scripture’) offers a crash course on why Evangelicals think the way we do on these issues; and §4–5 (‘Marriage’, ‘Theology’) address some of the ideas that underlie the obvious, surface-level conflicts.  §6.b (‘Reconciliation’) will discuss politics, and §7.a (‘Theodicy’) will ask a few of the pointier critical questions, such as about the death penalty in Leviticus.

All comments are welcome.  Go to my website¹ to see if your question has already been answered, and if not, or if not well, please send an email to nigel@chapman.id.au with a subject line containing ‘[SAME]’.

• All scripture references will be NRSV unless noted otherwise.
• Since I’m writing mainly for a Christian audience, I’ll use Christian terms such ‘Old Testament’, ‘Intertestamental Literature’, and so on.
• God’s personal nature requires personal pronouns, which in scripture are masculine (he, him, his), as in English.  But God does not have sex or gender in any kind of orthodox Christianity, and is no more male than female.  So, in any new section, I’ll put the first use of ‘his’ male pronouns in quote marks, as I have done here, as a small reminder that this is only a biblical convention.  (For more on gender, see §4.d.)