IF you have lesbian or gay friends and/or have done much reading on the subject, you likely understand same-sex attraction in most cases to be a natural biological variation and neither inherently sinful nor indicative of rebellion against or rejection of God. Many, many lesbian and gay persons and couples know and love Jesus.
(NOTE: I either own or used to own or have read many of the anti-gay books that churches, including some of our former churches, recommend or refer to on the subject. You won't find links to those here.)
BUT IF NOT:
Did you know that "The Mother of Contemporary Christian Music," Marsha Stevens-Pino, is a lesbian and continues (with her spouse/wife) to write worship songs (https://balmministries.net/home)? And that the late Lonnie Frisbee, whose ministry caused or jump-started the growth of Calvary Chapel and The Vineyard during the Jesus Movement, was gay or bisexual?
Some of the sordid depictions of the lesbian/gay "lifestyle" may in large part be a reflection and result of how society has viewed and treated lesbian/gay people. As the late Dick Gregory said: If you visited a concentration camp, you were not smelling Judaism; you were smelling Nazism. And if you visited an inner-city ghetto, you were not smelling Black people; you were smelling racism. Fifty years ago psychiatrists rightly in my opinion stopped classifying same-sex attraction in the DSM as being a mental illness.
Justin Lee (author of Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate - second edition May 2024), who formed The Gay Christian Network, said that his father believed that lesbian/gay people should only be celibate or marry persons of the opposite sex—i.e., what's known as the "Side B" position. And then Justin‘s mother died. And Justin‘s father realized what loneliness and the desire for companionship meant. And then he changed his mind about same-sex marriage.
Meanwhile, much of the church continues to say to lesbian/gay Christians, as this book by Patrick M. Chapman explains, "Thou Shalt Not Love."
With apologies to Bob Dylan:
You say you’re lookin' for someone
Who'll pick you up each time you fall
To gather flowers constantly
An' to come each time you call
A lover for your life an' so much more
But we say "No, babe
No, no, no, you can't have that, babe
We don't care what you're lookin' for, babe"
(Even though we have that for ourselves)
More information:
Kathy V. Baldock's Walking The Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community is a great book on America's and the church's history re: lesbian/gay/transgender people, and it now has a study guide. Any Christian who reads this book, no matter where they stand, will be better informed afterwards. She tells the stories and tackles the hard questions as well as the relevant biblical passages.
Kathy discovered how the word "homosexual" first appeared in an English Bible translation (the 1946 Revised Standard Version (RSV) New Testament and the 1952 RSV Bible), as well as the person (Rev. David Sheldon Fearon) whose letter to the RSV Translation Committee resulted in it being changed in the 1971 second edition of the RSV Bible. A new documentary 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture tells the story.
Follow Kathy's webpage: http://canyonwalkerconnections.com/
Or Kathy's Facebook pages:
https://www.facebook.com/WalkingTheBridgelessCanyon/
https://www.facebook.com/CanyonwalkerConnections/
See Kathy’s detailed reviews of Christian anti-lesbian/gay books. Click on the image of the book cover to read the review: https://canyonwalkerconnections.com/library/kathys-book-reviews/
Kathy gave the following talks in 2018 in Austin, TX, about the history of our understanding of same-sex attraction:
Unclobbering the Tangled Mess—Part 1
Unclobbering the Tangled Mess—Part 2
Robert A. J. Gagnon's book The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics is frequently cited in arguments against homosexuality. Classicist Jean-Fabrice Nardelli assessed Gagnon's book, Gagnon responded, and Nardelli wrote a rejoinder to Gagnon’s response, critiquing Gagnon's scholarship in detail:
• Nardelli: Robert Gagnon The Bible And Homosexual Practice. Ten Years After: A Non-Theological Assessment
• Nardelli: Robert Gagnon The Bible And Homosexual Practice. Ten Years After: A Non-Theological Assessment. Second, Revised Edition
• Gagnon: "The Dogs Bark But the Caravan Moves On": My Response to Jean-Fabrice Nardelli’s “Critique” of The Bible and Homosexual Practice
• Nardelli: Rejoinder To Gagnon's '"The Dogs Bark But The Caravan Moves On" Part One'
Input an email address and read for free a former Vineyard pastor’s spiritual and pastoral and theological journey on this issue at this link: A Letter to my Congregation (Second Edition), by Ken Wilson.
Watch Pastor Danny Cortez's story. He was a Baptist pastor when his son came out as gay.
The Reformation Project's Video Series The Biblical Case for LGBTQ Inclusion is pretty good and informative.
5 free videos by Jeffrey Tripp on the Bible and Homosexuality:
• Sodom and Gomorrah
• Leviticus 18 & 20
• Malakoi and Arsenokoitai
• Romans 1:26–27
• Positive Gay images in the Bible?
Some Relevant Scholarly Articles:
Holger Szesnat: Disagreeable Matters in the (Homo-)Sexuality Debate: Wrestling with the Scriptures in the Church
Caleb M. Day: A Time to Throw Away? Rethinking the gender requirement for legitimate Christian sex
Robert K. Gnuse: Seven Gay Texts: Biblical Passages Used To Condemn Homosexuality
Some Books:
Martti Nissinen: Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective
Sarah Ruden: Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time
Dale B. Martin: Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation
Note: I have been told that these two sources are better analyses of arsenokoitai and malakoi than Dale B. Martin’s chapter about them:
David Wright: Homosexuals or Prostitutes? The Meaning of ἀρσενοκοῑται (1 Cor. 6:9, 1 Tim. 1:10)
Bruce Winter: After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change (See Appendix: Roman Homosexual Activity and the Elite p. 110)
Christopher B. Hays (son) and Richard B. Hays (father): The Widening of God's Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (September 10, 2024). Richard B. Hays's 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics has been a go-to book for Evangelicals for its scholarly anti-homosexuality position. He has changed his position in this new book. There are several reviews of the book online, and one thing many reviewers fault the Hayses for is that they do not address the so-called “clobber” passages.