An Open Letter To My Evangelical Friends

Rather than trying to convert, change or argue your position with the gay community, please listen to our stories.

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Dear Christian Friend,

I recognize and appreciate that you are concerned for my soul. I assure you it is something about which I have spent a considerable amount of time contemplating. Based on decades of study, research and personal experiences, I came to conclusions about my own spiritual life. Before you tell me I’m wrong, there are a few things I need to ask of you.

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Please stop quoting the Bible to me.
I am not only familiar with the six verses about homosexuality in the Bible, I have studied them ad nauseam. I have probably read more explanations, interpretations and Christian apologetics on these verses than you have. I also understand, based on my many, many conversations with other Christians that you probably think I am interpreting the Bible to suit my own “ungodly desires.” There were theologians that came up with different conclusions about the Scriptures long before you or I ever entered the scene. In my 25 years as a Christian minister, and seven years as an ex-gay leader, I wanted nothing more than my traditional view of the Bible to be true. My family and I counted on it.

When you quote Bible verses at me, refusing to have a conversation, it tells me you have been indoctrinated into a static system of ideologies and a stagnant cult-like belief. It does not speak to the relationship you say you have with God. Relationships are two-way streets, not one-way express lanes where you just follow the road signs to get where you want to go.

The point is that there are nearly as many ways to interpret the Bible as there are people on the earth. As I’ve written many times before – here, here, and here to name a few – the Scriptures have been used to defend slavery, demean women and oppress any number of people groups. If it were that simple, we’d all agree on what the Bible says and there wouldn’t be over 41,000 Christian denominations.

Additionally, the American version of Christianity to which so many subscribe as the religion from God Almighty Himself, is a relatively new phenomena from the last 100 years. It is not historical Christianity. Please take a few minutes, or perhaps a few years, to learn more about what you believe and where it came from. The world is bigger than you think it is.

Please stop moving the goal post.
I can’t even begin to recall all of the emails and messages I’ve received from Christians telling me that if I just understood the message of the Gospel, “correctly,” believed it “the right way,” relied more on Jesus, or had more of a personal relationship with Him, I would finally understand what God wanted for my life. Even if God didn’t miraculously heal me, I would at least have “the right” relationship with God.

No matter what experiences I’ve had, I’m told, they are never enough, or not the right ones. No matter how much of the Bible I’ve read, I didn’t read it the right way.  In fact, I’ve been told, if I would just…fill in the blank…then I would finally understand/change my ways/bow to God/repent…

These conversations dismiss decades of personal experiences and continually move the goal post further and further from grasp. Believe me when I say, been there, done that, attended all the conferences and even led a few of them. I could not have been more contrite, more patient, more earnest, or more whatever it is you think I should have been to not have this “problem” in my life.

But the problem is not my understanding; it’s that you refuse to acknowledge my experiences as valid. They don’t fit your view of what is supposed to happen when a person follows the magical formula, which keeps getting adjusted when the formula doesn’t work. Which leads me to my next point.

Please stop invalidating my experiences.
In a few paragraphs, filled with Scripture verses and anecdotal stories, I’m told how to fix my problem. Do you really think I haven’t heard of, or thought of what you’re saying to me? Do you think I just woke up one morning and said, “You know what? I want gay sex. I think I’ll change my mind about all this Christian stuff and do it.”

I spent an excruciating amount of time trying to figure out how to reconcile my faith and sexuality. In spite of what you’ve been told by Focus on the Family and other American Evangelical Christian organizations, sexual orientation is not a choice. If there were a way to change my sexual orientation, I and millions of others would have done so. Life would be easier. Rejection by family, friends and churches is degrading. No one chooses to put themselves through this kind of shame and humiliation. Gay kids don’t want to be kicked out of their houses by their “Christian” parents. Faith is a choice; sexual orientation is not.

But here’s the real problem. I’ve learned that it is easier to simply dismiss other people’s experiences when those experiences don’t match our own ideologies. Rather than critically think about our beliefs, we just tell people they are wrong. Once we determine we are right and they are wrong, it alleviates any responsibility to engage with them further. We have labeled and categorized them.

We file them and their experiences away with a superficial explanation of “those people.” Soon we are able to dehumanize them because they are “not like us.” This makes it easier to pass policies and laws that keep “those people” from interacting with society as full human beings. All the while, Scriptures are quoted to do our dirty deed; the same Scriptures used earlier to tell “those people” about how much God loves them. It’s really quite the paradox, and one that most Christians don’t recognize.

You can’t have it both ways. Either use the Bible to spread God’s love, or use it to divide, disenfranchise and discard. Your attempt to call hate love fools no one but you. The Scripture signs held up at gay pride parades do nothing more than mock your own religion and it seems that everyone is in on the joke, but you. Please put the signs down, stop speaking at us and start asking questions about us. I promise you’ll be surprised at how human we are and how much we have in common.

Please get educated on the topic.
While it feels good to listen to anecdotal stories from “ex-gays” who tell you they have changed and, thus, every other gay person can change, too. It is simply not true. You are being deceived. Those people may have changed their behavior, but they have not changed their orientation. There is no evidence that anyone has ever changed his or her sexual orientation in over 40 years of research. Instead, there is story after story of former ex-gays coming out of the closet after decades of claiming to have changed. Sadly, Christian organizations that once proliferated their stories as evidence of “thousands” of ex-gays who have changed, stop talking about them and to them, and move on to the next willing victim.

I have written several articles on the “ex-gay movement” including, here, here, here, and here. Some of this research was around long before my involvement with conversion therapy in 1990. No one told me it was out there. My faith and faith leaders told me I could change, never once allowing me to read or discover the devastation the “ex-gay” theology has caused so many people.

Pay attention to the information you research. Where did it come from? Who is behind it? Reparative therapy organizations who stand to make a profit? Ministries who need it to be true to keep their own faith alive? Or organizations who proliferate unsubstantiated claims about the gay community to raise money for their organization or political affiliates?

As a former evangelical who once believed there was a gay agenda, I can now tell you with certainty there is none. The gay community did not hijack the psychological or medical communities so we could degrade American society and bring about a sexual revolution. The psychological and medical communities did their own research and discovered gay people are natural variations of humans. We are just humans. We want to live among other humans and fall in love, raise our families, be able to work and even live among our faith communities exactly like everyone else. Yes, it looks different than what you’re used to, but at the core, we are exactly like you.

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I respect your right to believe what you want. Not only do I understand where you are coming from, I have lived your life.  Wife. Kids. Two dogs and a cat. Church every week. I believed the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that all anyone needed was to repent, ask Jesus into their hearts and surrender to God. Like so many others, though, that theology became a prison for me. It eventually decimated my family, not because we weren’t “doing it right,” but because we weren’t living authentically and being who we were meant to be. I believe we’re all called to be exactly who we are meant to be. That’s when we love the best.

So, with all due respect, please stop telling me who I should be, what I should be and how I should be doing it. For so many men and women, this is not a simple matter of disagreement over ideologies or differences of opinion. They are ridiculed and belittled. Some lose their jobs. Some are attacked. Some take their own lives because they absolutely cannot live up to the man-made standards established for them in the name of God.

I would love to engage with you and have a conversation, but I have no interest in being talked at. You are probably not going to tell me something I don’t already know, haven’t thought about, or haven’t heard. Please respect my life’s experiences and education. But more so, please treat me like a human being.

Sincerely,

Tim

Photo – Flickr/Bengt Nyman