What did discipleship look like for you after you got saved?
Tim and I would meet for coffee each week, and though I didn’t know why, he was discipling me. That was vital. There were so many others at the church who came around me and supported me, recommending books and sermons and praying for me. I would get random “I’m praying for you today!” texts all the time. I joined a community group right away. I listened to all of Tim Keller’s sermons, as well as John Stott and Dick Lucas. It was a process of people discipling me at my church and God discipling me through these other voices. During that time right after I got saved, I had a three-month period of no work, which was unusual. So I had all this time to spend with God, to pray and read the Bible. I couldn’t stop reading the Bible. Every time I’d listen to a sermon or read the Bible I’d end up in tears: “Oh my gosh, this is true! I can’t believe I know God and know the meaning of life finally!”
There are conversations today about whether one can be a “gay Christian.” Is there a way to reconcile following Jesus with having a gay identity?
They are irreconcilable. It’s strange to me to see these attempts. I had such a clean break from it, and it was entirely God’s grace upon me to see that it was necessary. Would you call yourself a greedy Christian? Would you call yourself a tax-collector Christian? It seems strange to identify yourself with sin. It’s a square circle. Defining yourself as a “gay Christian,” even if you are celibate and not active in a homosexual relationship, is wildly misleading. And it’s almost like you’re stewing in your old sin, hanging onto your old self in a weird way. It’s not helpful to have that moniker over you and to continually identify as such. Why would you identify with your old self that has been crucified with Christ? So I flee from that term as far as I can. It’s not who I am at all. If people ask me how I identify, I’m just like, “I don’t identify by my sexuality. I’m a follower of Christ who has a lot of struggles, including same-sex attraction.”
The LGBT movement has gained so much ground by framing homosexuality as an immutable, personhood-level identity. What are your thoughts on the state of how Western culture sees “gay” today?
In the last 20 years or so there has been such a huge push to make it sacred. It went from a sin to a sacrament. The book Making Gay Okay does a really good job showing how that happened. Media, movies, TV—it’s all been pushing towards this. When I was coming of age as a gay kid, it wasn’t like this. It was still taboo. There were gay-pride parades, but they weren’t at Macy’s. Every store in the world didn’t have a rainbow on it. But now it’s everywhere, it’s so dominant, and to say anything against the narrative is seen as crazy if not downright harmful.
Everything is inside out and upside down. The idea of the rainbow, for example, is so odd to me now—using this biblical symbol as the icon of the LGBT movement. When I was gay, I felt shame. Instinctively I knew it was wrong. But though I felt shame, over the years you harden your heart to it. I think the driving force behind these choices, like the rainbow flag and pride parades—the word pride, even—is to convince yourself that there’s nothing wrong with it, nothing to be ashamed of. You have to constantly tell yourself that and let the culture tell you that. Because there is shame attached to it, so hyper-emphasizing the “rightness” of it helps people embrace their “identity” more.
