GCN Radio - June 16, 2004
Transcribed by Vombatus

To listen to this episode, visit http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio

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BRIAN: Welcome to another edition of GCN Radio. This is Brian…

JUSTIN: …and this is Justin.

BRIAN: We’re glad to have everyone along for our fifteenth show.

JUSTIN: Has it really been that many?

BRIAN: Fifteen! We have done fifteen shows. I’m always amazed and I love going to that site and seeing all the people sort of accumulating on the site and looking down through the people we’ve had. We’ve had some great people!

JUSTIN: We have!

BRIAN: We have.

JUSTIN: And a couple of duds, but…

BRIAN: well, you know…

[laughter]

JUSTIN: Just kidding!

BRIAN: No. no, no, no, no. No duds. We have no duds. Everyone has been wonderful. Now, speaking of wonderful, I hear you’ve come from a wonderful weekend in Pennsylvania? Tell us what you’ve been doing.

JUSTIN: I’ve been attending a conference for an organization called Evangelicals Concerned…

BRIAN: Okay…

JUSTIN: …which is a national organization for evangelical Christians who take their faith seriously who happen to be gay or lesbian. It’s a great group. It’s focused on trying to help people integrate their faith with their sexuality. It’s a very gospel-based, Christ-centered kind of organization. It’s been a great weekend. I had to stay away from the computer for the entire weekend.

BRIAN: Oh no! How did you survive?

JUSTIN: I’m not sure! I kept wanting to check on GCN and see how things were going. Then when I finally got a chance to check my e-mails, I had about 700 new e-mails in my inbox.

BRIAN: Wow, you’re a popular guy!

JUSTIN: But, no, I had a great time, it was a great weekend with a lot of spiritual renewal and a chance to focus on what’s important. It was up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, so the setting was absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately it rained, but it was still nice be able to sit inside and look out over the mountain range and just marvel at God’s creation. So it was a great weekend, not just because of the setting but because of the people who were there and the teaching time that we had, and the worship time that we had. I’d love to go back again next weekend, but, you know.

BRIAN: It’s always great. Retreats and conferences are always great. Well, in fact we have the founder and president of Evangelicals Concerned on our program today. Dr. Ralph Blair joins us on GCN Radio. Dr. Blair, thanks for being on our show.

RALPH: Well, thanks for having me.

JUSTIN: I’m really interested to know what you think are the biggest issues facing gay and lesbian Christians in the twenty-first century.

RALPH: Well, there’s so little preparation for dealing with homosexuality, not only in one’s self, but families dealing with it, and pastors, and churches. So very often people are thrown back on themselves and their own coping mechanism and those might not be very helpful. So there’s no help coming from the Christian establishment, that is, the evangelical or conservative Christian establishment, nothing but opposition, to a great extent, although that’s changing, too. And then in the GLBT establishment, very frequently anything but help comes from there because there’s kind of an ‘anything goes’ and non-judgmental kind of mentality that doesn’t allow for any critique of self-sabotaging behaviors. So, it’s a very difficult thing, then, to put it all together.

JUSTIN: Well, going along those lines, you’ve been very critical in some of the things you’ve written about the tendency within parts of the gay Christian community to align ourselves with just any religious movement as long as it’s pro-gay. Do you think we’ve become lukewarm as Christians?

RALPH: Yes, I think that the emphasis has shifted from the integration of Christian faith and a responsibly homosexual lifestyle to simply being pro-gay. But I think from the other side, the anti-gay conservative Christians are doing basically the same thing. So it all comes down to a kind of culture war between the Right and the Left on social issues having to do with marriage for gay people, or whatever, and the gospel is missed. I find it very interesting, for example, in all of the controversies over the ordination of the bishop who’s openly gay, the Episcopal bishop, people on both sides, people who are supporting him and people who are against him, all they talk about is whether the person he’s sleeping with is same-gender. And I haven’t heard anything about what his theology is. It seems to me that if he preaches the gospel, the anatomy of his partner is irrelevant, and if he does not preach the gospel, again, the anatomy of his partner is irrelevant.

JUSTIN: So in a sense, the gay Christian community has, in a sense, fallen into the same trap as the anti-gay Christians out there, trying to put all of the emphasis on the gender of one’s partner and neglecting the gospel.

RALPH: Right, right. And that’s a majoring in minors.

JUSTIN: You’ve also written a lot about the ex-gay movement.

RALPH: Um-hmm.

JUSTIN: You’ve done a lot of study of that and you’ve got an article out there called “The Real Changes Taking Place”. It’s, I believe, quite a few years old now, but it still gets a lot of circulation on the Internet. What is your take on what is going on with the ex-gay movement, because we’ve had folks recently at GCN asking questions about, “Is this a viable alternative, are people changing in these groups?”

RALPH: I remember when the very first person who claimed to be ex-gay, Guy Charles, was ministering there in Virginia at the Truro Episcopal Church. But he was taking people that were coming to him for change, and he was having sex with them and calling it ‘David & Jonathan relationship’ and so forth. So he was gotten rid of by the church and then went on to become quite active in gay politics out in Chicago. He recently passed away. Ever since then it’s just been one ex-gay ministry after another that has bit the dust because nobody changes. There’s a lot of short-changing of people, but not any real changes. That’s unfortunate, because then a lot of people get so fed up with the false promises of a lot of these conservative Christians who push the ex-gay promise and then they throw out the baby with the bath and they don’t want anything to do with the church. I think for some people it can be useful, because then they have a sense of, “Well, they tried.” And they went as they were instructed to do and got in to the ex-gay movement and discovered it was a fraud and fortunately did not throw the baby out with the bath and became more serious Christians than otherwise.

BRIAN: I wanted to ask, we talked about a lack of preparedness for people to deal with their homosexual feelings and you were mentioning some of these other problems that gay Christians are having… how do we begin to turn some things around?

RALPH: Well, I think that the big thing is to understand that there’s been an awful lot of ignorance and misunderstanding about what homosexuality is and isn’t. And certainly that’s true of some of the popular interpretations of some bible verses that allegedly speak about homosexuality, which they do not. I think that people will have to understand that they’ve gotten sidetracked on a fight between the left-wing and the right-wing on certain social causes and social issues. So I think that the answer comes with a greater understanding of the whole thrust of scripture.

JUSTIN: I want to ask you this because you work in the field of psychology and one of the big questions that people have is we hear a lot from some of these conservative Christian groups that they’ve figured out what causes people to be gay or lesbian. That it has to do with how you were brought up, that it has to do with how you related to your parents or that it has to do with being molested as a child, or these sorts of things. In your opinion is there any truth to that?

RALPH: Essentially what you’ve outlined is an old, what’s called a psychoanalytic, interpretation. Freudian, you know. Evangelical Christians, conservative Christians have for decades rejected the whole psychoanalytic approach to things. And now that secular psychologists are moving away from the psychoanalytic interpretation—after all, it dates from quite some time ago—the anti-gay conservative Christians are beginning to pick up that vocabulary. Which is quite ironic; they don’t apply psychoanalysis to anything else, but it dresses it up, they kind of baptize the Freudian approach but that doesn’t make it true. We have now a great deal of scientific research that indicates that we really don’t know what is the etiology of homosexuality any more than we know the etiology of heterosexuality.

JUSTIN: Yeah, it does sound very much like it becomes a convenient explanation for those folks who want some sort of explanation that they don’t have. For those of us, then, who are gay or lesbian and who are Christians, what do you think we could be doing to make sure that we don’t fall into this trap of just becoming another spiritual, pro-gay group? You know what I’m saying, just more spiritual people out there talking about vague spiritual things?

RALPH: I think for a lot of people, who have a little more of a clear understanding of Christian faith, and maybe as children sang “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” and gave their hearts to Jesus and then later discovered they were gay and unwelcome in their home church picked up their marbles and left because they thought, “Well, the church doesn’t want me and Jesus doesn’t want me.” Yet they still have a need for God and so they run, understandably, to religious or spiritual places that will be accepting of them. But unfortunately that leaves them outside of any well-grounded biblical faith. So I think that gay people are Christian or who want to investigate Christ need to investigate that for themselves and not take as gospel, as it were, just what they’ve heard.

JUSTIN: So in a sense, the Christian message itself really is our salvation.

RALPH: Yes! Yes, and I think that more and more, particularly young people are not so clear in their own minds about what Jesus is all about. Because then at least instead of trying to refute misunderstanding, you can start in a sense from scratch, and say, “Look, don’t you even owe it to your own intellectual curiosity to find out what Jesus really said and what he was about, just to be an informed person.”

JUSTIN: And I notice that you’ve said something similarly about Paul. In one of the booklets you were talking about how Paul is the one that so many of us have tried so long to get away from because so much of Paul’s writings are considered anti-gay by a lot of folks, and yet really the gospel as presented by Paul is so much for us.

RALPH: Oh yes. As F. F. Bruce, one of the leading conservative New Testament scholars said, Paul is perhaps the most liberal man of the first century. Way out ahead of everybody else in the way that he handled issues involving women, and slavery and those sorts of issues.

BRIAN: You talked about gay Christians not being accepted in their churches. We have people in our community, at GCN, who haven’t been accepted in their schools. We had a young man on our program that got kicked out of his college, and his college was snooping in e-mails because this student was e-mailing a pastor about gay issues. Nothing inappropriate, but he got dragged out in front of the student body and expelled. How do we get away from this kind of judgmental mentality?

RALPH: I think that you have to take the larger picture. This summer we’re going to have the 25th year of our summer conferences, and every single year I’ve invited evangelical leaders to be key-noters. Some of them are gay and some are straight. They’re faculty on evangelical colleges and seminaries and other kinds of evangelical institutions. And they’ve been fully supportive of the position that we take, that is, to support a gay couple in a monogamous relationship. And today, I have more of such people, bona fide evangelicals than I have slots for them to speak. So I think things are getting better, but you’re always going to find situations where, especially when political issues come to the fore, alumni donations may dry up if they are quote ‘soft’ on homosexuality, and so forth, that kind of thing is always there, but the other direction is in place, too.

JUSTIN: Those sorts of things are very heartening to us, to see that the world is changing and the church is changing and we hope that trend continues. We’re out of time. I’d love to talk to you more. But I do want to encourage those folks who are interested in getting involved with a wonderful, very serious committed Christian group of folks that will support them to check out Evangelicals Concerned and the web address is www.ECInc.org, right? And the western group has a website at www.ECWR.org. And we’ve got a sermon by Dr. Blair on our website that is excellent and I encourage people to check it out, and hopefully we can get some more stuff by him on the site as well. You have booklets available if they want to contact you, is that right?

RALPH: Yes. Right, they can write me at the website. And I want to tell you that you have a great site, too.

JUSTIN: Thank you so much, we appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. Folks, you can check us out on the website every week, as usual, at http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio/. And so for this week, I’m Justin…

BRIAN: …and I’m Brian.

JUSTIN: We’ll see you next week!

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