This is a real possibility, which no responsible member of the discussion can ignore. The main reason to be skeptical of parsing hairs of the ‘gay Christian identity’ is that doing so may itself be simply a vain exercise in self-deception. After all, in the midst of our great cultural conflagration about gay marriage and the grand apostasy of our churches, who has time for nuance ? That is the unserious objection to the effort, in my view. The effort by Revoice to thread an impossibly small needle on these questions is nothing if not foolish. From the standpoint of the conference’s critics, of course, that is simply the problem: the attempt to raise a question about these things itself seems to be indicative of a moral failing, a capitulation to modernity. However, I can now see one benefit to including forms of speaking and thinking about these issues that I find uncongenial to clarifying the Christian witness: doing so underscores that this is still an argument that is being had, a question under consideration. Saying that here deprives me of the joy of saying so for the first time at the conference itself, which I had planned on doing. The T and Q in the endless list of identity-designators raise independent questions and require diverging answers to the L, G or even B: collapsing them all into one conference obscures these differences, to its detriment.
But not every philosophical discourse is equal to the task: Judith Butler’s reign as philosopher-queen should come to an end (with apologies to my dear friend Nate Collins, the organizer of Revoice and author of this very good book on the subject ).
The questions involved in this discussion require a non-Scriptural vocabulary to properly assess them. The conference is an attempt by a wide variety of such Christians and their supporters to explore what fidelity to the Christian teaching on sexuality and marriage demands, and what the possibilities for being a gay Christian might be.Ĭontroversy about the conference was inevitable-but the organizers also imprudently invited such criticisms by expanding its scope beyond questions immediately raised by the gay and lesbian experiences. Can we have an argument about being a ‘gay Christian’? That is the question which I have been wondering since the storm of Baptist and Presbyterian furor descended upon Revoice.