Andrew Brown says that the current evangelical orthodoxy about gay people cannot last because there are just too many gay Christians, but progress is heartbreaking.
It is through the individual splintering of stony hearts like that mother’s that the current evangelical orthodoxy about gay people will break up, at least in countries where people dare come out at all. There are some other signs that this is happening: a long piece at Fulcrum, a site that is meant to represent the moderate mainstream of evangelical opinion in the Church of England – ie it’s wrong about gay christians but not nasty about them – which reviews in ecstatic terms an American book suggesting that gay people have reason to distrust the church, and perhaps the most important thing about them is that they are people, rather than that they are gay. Well, duh. But it’s earthshaking in an evangelical context.
It is one of the fundamental untruths of the evangelical position on sexuality that there aren’t really any gay people in the church; or that if there are, they would be known. And that’s where the third piece of news this week is surprising.
Read the rest here.