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How Should Christians Think About Homosexuality and Marriage?

How Should Christians Think About Homosexuality and Marriage?

Last updated on: October 24, 2023 at 4:08 pm by Esther O’Reilly

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How Should Christians Think About Homosexuality and Marriage? 2023-10-24T16:08:36-04:00 Esther O’Reilly

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Sam Allberry (source: YouTube)

I try as a rule to avoid protracted debates on Twitter (sorry, I just refuse to call it X). But recently, I broke my own rule. The context was this long tweet by Jared Moore, a Southern Baptist pastor who’s recently released a new book expanding his dissertation on lust and the doctrine of sin. It’s called The Lust of the Flesh, and it’s not available wherever books are sold, but anyone interested can buy it directly from the publisher here. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book, although I’ve made a good-faith attempt to understand Moore’s position based on his very active social media posting and several podcasts summarizing his work.) To explain why his book is necessary, Moore took aim at a clip from a 2014 lecture by Sam Allberry, a former Anglican priest known in Protestant circles for his work on homosexuality and the church. In context, Allberry is addressing a mixed university audience of Christians and non-Christians. He says that even though it would be “lovely” if his own same-sex attraction was healed, he hasn’t yet experienced this, so he chooses to walk in faithful singleness and leave the rest up to God. Here’s the full transcript:

I would love, on one level, to be opposite-sex attracted rather than same-sex attracted. I would love to be a husband to a wife. I’d love to be a father to a child. (I’ve been staying with a family this week here in Moscow.) I love family life. I’d love to have kids. But however much I want those things, the great goal in my life is not that one day I become heterosexual. That is not the win for me. That is not the prize that excites me as a Christian. It’d be lovely if it happened, but it’s not what I spend every waking hour trying to kind of gun towards. No, far, far greater than becoming heterosexual is knowing Jesus better. Because I’ve come to the conviction, and all of us in this room tonight who are Christians, I hope, would say with me that we have found the one who provides real satisfaction. Doesn’t mean that everything in life is rosy and easy. It often isn’t. But that actually, if we have that relationship, it will never disappoint us. And so Jesus’ message to me as I continue as a Christian, as I continue to kind of wrestle with the feelings of same-sex attraction that I have and that are still at times very, very powerful, Jesus’ message to me is “I am the bread of life. Nobody else. I am. And whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”

Moore strongly objects to this. Here’s a bit of his reply:

Who told Allberry that he was “same-sex attracted” and could not marry a woman? The Bible didn’t. God didn’t. The Holy Spirit didn’t. The world and Allberry’s flesh did. But we are who God says we are, not who our flesh or the world says we are. You don’t have to be a “heterosexual man” to marry a woman, you just have to be a man! Because all men are “heterosexuals” according to Scripture, meaning that God created them to be men, and entailed in being a man is finding a woman to marry (Gen 2:18-25). This is the created order. This is the default. There are exceptions for not pursuing marriage given in Scripture, but “I’m same-sex attracted” is not one of them.

He goes on to say Allberry is “unnecessarily reaping loneliness.” Instead, Moore would counsel Allberry to “turn from his same-sex desires,” find a godly woman, and pursue her for marriage. “To summarize, the only thing keeping Allberry from biblical marriage is Allberry.”

This went modestly viral (at least, as viral as things ever get in evangelical Twitter), as a lot of people jumped in to push back, including me. I frankly didn’t have much in common with a lot of them, especially the nasty progressives who took the chance to speculate about Moore’s own sexuality. We all just happened to agree that he was giving really bad marriage advice here. The truth is, Moore and I would have a lot of overlap if we sat down to compare notes on these things, although we have different theologies of sin: Moore would identify same-sex attraction as sinful in and of itself, while I wouldn’t. In our back-and-forth, he even called me semi-Pelagian (rude!) However, as fascinating as I find that theological debate, I’m not really going to dig into it here, because I actually think it can be bracketed when it comes to Moore’s “actionable” advice for Christian men like Allberry.

Anyway, not long after all this, Allberry announced that he was planning to exit Twitter, because he claimed he was being “slandered” and no longer wanted to deal with all the “ugliness.” It’s not entirely clear how much of this was a direct result of Moore’s tweet. Allberry also just wrote a strong criticism of Andy Stanley’s choice to host a more or less gay-affirming conference. So it’s possible that he’s recently been catching flak from both left and right Christian Twitter.

However, Allberry made it clear in a follow-up thread that Moore was certainly a big part of the reason, accusing Moore of generally bad “behavior towards fellow Christians” and hitting back hard at the diagnosis that Allberry was “obviously lonely.” He also revealed that Moore had asked for a book endorsement only a couple months ago, which seemed odd if Moore thought he was that unsound. Moore in turn said he’d asked about ten people “to his left” for endorsements in hopes they would read the book and repent. Then he claimed Allberry had immediately Twitter-blocked him some time ago just for retweeting Tom Buck’s critical reports about the website for his UK ministry Living Out (which reports Allberry would go on to partially “address,” though legitimate concerns remained).

Now, I’ve had my own criticisms of Allberry and Living Out. I shared the concerns Buck raised, which overlap with my concerns about the Side B/Revoice movement in the states (see my First Things retrospective here). While Allberry’s own work is mostly fine, he’s repeatedly exercised poor judgment in the other work he signal-boosts. Then again, his associations are kind of all over the place. On one hand, he promoted Revoice in its early years, but on the other hand, the old lecture Moore went after was hosted on the Vimeo channel for…wait for it…Canon Press, which is Doug Wilson’s publishing company in Idaho. Allberry has also shown up as a fairly recent guest with Wilson on Canon’s interview show. I would never have predicted this particular “crossing of streams.” (Wilson has had a dialogue with Moore too. I’ll say a bit more about Wilson, but let’s just say his role in this whole discourse is…very weird.)

But I digress. This post isn’t going to be about my various quibbles with Allberry, because I’m more or less on Allberry’s side here. And as I went back and forth with Moore, I decided he was importantly wrong in a way that deserved to be addressed beyond a Twitter spat.

Let me start with what I’m not saying when I disagree with Moore: I’m not saying that it’s impossible for same-sex attracted (SSA) Christians to mortify their temptation and nurture rightly-ordered attraction to the point where they could enter a happy, fruitful marriage. Indeed, I’ve interacted with several Christian men who have done just that. One of them even waded into the debate…on my side. Because even though he shares Moore’s framework for sin, he could also testify that it took years before he felt prepared to pursue a woman for marriage. As he bluntly put it, “the horse had to come before the cart.”

It was this point that it seemed Moore either couldn’t or wouldn’t accept as we argued—though there were several moments where I was genuinely confused as to what he was arguing. And frankly, as I look back over the sum total of Moore’s posting around this topic, I’m still genuinely confused. At times, he seems to be reviving the old-school charismatic “Pray away the gay” model. Here he is in an older, brief exchange we had a couple months ago, saying it’s biblical to “assume” Christ will “heal” same-sex desire. Here he is asking why Christians question Jesus’ ability to change SSA if he could “walk out of a tomb.” Here he is inviting people to reply if Christ has “changed” their attraction. And so on.

Again, I’m not here to demonize reparative therapy. But it just needs to be said that in the heyday of the ex-gay movement, many struggling Christian men and women did try to follow this very advice, with statistically very mixed success. This was especially difficult for SSA men. Over time, even various leaders in the movement stumbled into disgrace as they tried and failed to model their own “success stories.” One leader was on record saying it took months for him to consummate his marriage—and that actually wound up being one of the happy ones! So whatever your theology of same-sex attraction, even granting that change isn’t impossible, you have to do something with the cumulative weight of all this evidence, all this pain. And you have to consider seriously that lots of godly people will be quite understandably reluctant to enter into a marriage covenant with someone who has this particular struggle.

This was the point where I came in and started pressing Moore’s argument, speaking as a heterosexual woman who deeply loves and cares about SSA men, but would never want to marry one. Moore in turn accused me of arguing based on “feelings” versus Scripture, “doing anthropology rather than theology,” and “arguing from unnatural rather than natural law.” That last one especially had me scratching my head, given that I’ve been on a personal mission to make natural law great again for years. Indeed, it’s because I’m a fan of natural law that I believe marriage is naturally ordered towards sex and procreation…which means that sexual desire shouldn’t be considered an “optional extra” (as the Brits say) when entering into a marriage, whatever trials might befall a couple down the road after making a commitment. It’s fine for a man to mortify unnatural desires and try to nurture natural ones—in fact, it’s more than fine, it’s good and right. But nowhere does the Bible say he is morally obligated to take a wife as a means to the end of “fixing” himself. Ditto for the husband of an SSA woman. That way lies trouble and sorrow, as many devastated couples will attest. I have to wonder what Moore does make of all those broken marriages. In the thread, someone asked if he would say those couples just needed to “try harder,” and he rather indignantly said no, of course he’s not advocating “try harder theology.” But it’s hard to see what exactly he is advocating. Not to be cheeky, but it sounds sort of, well, semi-Pelagian.

In an attempt to do a reductio on Moore’s view, I asked whether he would offer similar counsel to a Christian man experiencing pedophilic temptations—something which, rarely but very, very tragically, some professing Christians do report. Moore answered that this was a “false equivalence,” because such a marriage would “put children at risk,” but there was no similarly urgent risk if a man still had unresolved same-sex desire. So he would say yes to the latter, but no to the former.

Now, note what just happened here: Moore has admitted that the most unwanted, most unnatural sexual desires could still remain and create “risk,” even for a Christian man who is desperately trying to get rid of them! On its face, this seems incompatible with his insistence that men can simply “turn from” same-sex desire and repent their way into a sexually healthy marriage. If it’s that straightforward, why isn’t it just as straightforward for the most urgent edge cases, where the motivation to change will be all the stronger? The only possible resolution I can see is if Moore believes the pedophilic man could also eliminate his temptations given enough time, but it’s immoral to create even a temporary abuse risk. Well, true enough. Apparently, not everybody shares Moore’s good instincts—witness the fact that Doug Wilson married a woman to a pedophile in his own church . (Note: It’s been brought to my attention that the article I linked has disputed details about the aftermath of the marriage, so I’m happy to tell people to read with caution. However, it’s still not in dispute that Wilson counseled a pedophile to get married.) Anyway, I’m very thankful that Moore doesn’t push his views to the edge of insanity here! But I still take issue with what comes across as a frankly rather glib attitude to exclusive, unresolved same-sex desire within marriage, whether or not you believe that desire is in and of itself a sin. Like the married man who was taking my side, you might even share Moore’s hamartiology while still believing a man needs to spend possibly years resolving this particular indwelling sin before marriage, not after.

Meanwhile, when I bluntly pointed out that even consummating a marriage could be a struggle for some men, Moore retorted that any non-disabled man could consummate a marriage. Without being graphic, I suggested that what he seemed to be proposing…isn’t exactly what God had in mind when he designed sex. Once again, I find it ironic that Moore accuses me of not arguing according to “natural law,” while subtly proposing a less than “natural” patch for his own argument here.

I haven’t yet brought Scripture into the picture, but since Moore has accused me of being “unbiblical,” I want to note a place where Moore himself seems to be doing more eisegesis than exegesis. In this tweet, he cites the much-dissected passage in 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul talks about the “gift” of singleness, while advising those without said gift to marry “lest they burn.” Moore writes, “Christian, feeling or thinking you are ‘same-sex attracted’ is not a biblical reason to reject marriage. You do not have the gift of singleness if you burn with passion (1 Cor 7). Turn from your same-sex desires to Jesus, and find a godly opposite-sex person and pursue him or her for marriage.” (As a quick side note, someone else noted that “with passion” is an interpolation, and there’s an alternative reading of this verse where “burn” refers to burning in hell. I’m not convinced of this alternative reading, and apparently neither is Moore.)

Now, in one sense, it’s (painfully) true that someone “burning” with disordered attractions doesn’t have “the gift of singleness.” But that doesn’t mean that this particular passage is comprehensively including all manner of natural and unnatural attractions! (Indeed, Moore’s answer to my reductio means that even on his reading, it can’t, for one could just as well say—in an especially awful, twisted sense—that the pedophilic man lacks “the gift.”) And right from the beginning of this chapter, the whole passage is quite obviously, robustly hetero-centric. The chapter begins with rules for sex within marriage, which Paul advises couples not to defer indefinitely, because this can create the temptation to sexual sin. The whole point of this advice is that marriage is how men and women properly channel the same sexual urges they are otherwise “burning” to relieve outside of or before marriage. Speaking for Paul-self, it’s the bachelor life for Paul. But, as your neighborhood grumpy bachelor, he’s here to tell you son, if ya just can’t wait to hop in the sack with that girl, well then, put a ring on it and get on with the show! And while he is sensitive to the fact that husband and wife might not always be on the same page about timing—hence his nudging each not to “deprive” the other—he is quite clearly not envisioning a context where right from day one, the very idea of heterosexual sex is a chore rather than a relief, a task rather than a pleasure. So, in conclusion, I simply don’t see where Moore finds what he’s looking for in this text.

To finally wrap this up, why do I care about all this? Well, I care because Moore and I share many of the same concerns about “enemies within the gates” here. When Moore goes after the logic of Side B and Revoice, to a great extent he’s spot on. In one podcast, he rather hilariously pictures someone trying to help a parishioner “sublimate” his foot fetish by putting him in charge of foot-washing, in a perfect parody of how people like Wes Hill write about their same-sexuality. He also quite rightly points out the narcissism inherent in constantly talking about one’s attraction to the same sex, in the need to keep drawing people’s attention to it over and over. I also share his irritation with people like Greg Johnson who seem aggressively determined to insist that there are virtually no stories of real change or happy biblical marriages to be told here. That is simply false. Even secular people, if they’re honest, will admit that narrative is simply false. I remember an article by the secular gay British columnist Matthew Parris admitting it was a “dirty little secret” among gay men that many of them could have gone with women instead. They just decided not to.

The problem is that Moore goes beyond these necessary critiques when he says that someone like Sam Allberry must pursue marriage, or else he’s living in unrepentant sin, just for that. Like I said, I’ve got my problems with Allberry, but the mere fact that he doesn’t feel secure enough in his sexuality to pursue marriage isn’t one. Nor, contrary to what someone else was trying to get me to say in the whole thread, is this idea original to Sam Allberry. I’ve reviewed a book from before the word “gay” was even a thing, anonymously written by a young British evangelical who reaches basically the same conclusion as Allberry, for the same reasons all kinds of men before and after him have reached that conclusion. It’s not new, and it’s not rocket science.

It would be one thing if Allberry resented the very idea that he should desire marriage, or the idea that it would in any sense be “lovely” if his desires were to change. But he doesn’t. By contrast, certain figures in Side B/Revoice do carry this kind of resentment, even bristling at the description of their attractions as “disordered.” (As I’ve always said, contra Al Mohler, there were perfectly good ways to mount a Catholic critique of the project. The problem was not that it was “too Catholic,” but that it rejected both good Protestantism and good Catholicism.) That doesn’t mean conservatives should use “Hey, at least they’re not Revoice!” as an excuse to be lazy and avoid critically examining people in this area. It just means that it’s still worth making distinctions.

At the end of the day, men and women are complicated. Sexuality is complicated. We don’t fully understand where people’s various unwanted kinks and quirks come from. Sometimes there’s a backdrop of abuse, severe dysfunction, and/or promiscuity. But sometimes—as in Allberry’s case—there’s not. Recently, I was listening to Andrew Klavan’s son Spencer talk about his growing horror as a pubescent teen who thought of himself as very put-together in a very masculine way, slowly realizing that he had sexual feelings for other guys. This was emphatically not something he wanted. On the contrary, it shattered his entire carefully manicured self-image as a young “manly man.” He talks about trying to date a girl for a while, before finally breaking it off because it just wasn’t fair to her. Sadly, unlike Allbery, he eventually decided to pursue his desires and now justifies his gay “marriage” within a mainline “Christian” framework. So, not a happy ending. But I mention the beginning of his story here as just one among many following a similar pattern: “I was a normal kid in a loving home, I expected to like girls, but then this bizarre thing happened instead, and I really, really hated it, but it never went away.”

Is this every story? Absolutely not. But it will be at least some men’s stories, and Christians need a framework within which they can dispense wise, commonsense advice to people fighting an uphill battle here. I think in describing his own struggle, Allberry lands in pretty much exactly the right place: “Those desires may run very, very deep. Often they do. But according to the Bible, they are not central, and they’re not defining. And so the sexual attractions that I experience are not fundamental to my identity. They’re part of what I feel—sometimes quite a significant part of what I feel—but they’re not who I am.”

Can God deliver people out of same-sex attraction into happy marriages? Of course He can. Does He? It looks like sometimes yes, He does. But does He always? Well, no. Why not? We don’t know, the same way we don’t know why God doesn’t do any number of things He doesn’t seem inclined to do. I mean, goodness, I could ask “Why” all day long. Why did God allow demonic terrorists to torture and traumatize children? Why doesn’t He smite all of Israel’s enemies and free their hostages now? Or, closer to home, why doesn’t He heal my terribly suffering relatives and friends from chronic disability and pain? Why, God, why? On and on it goes. The answer is the same: We don’t know. We just don’t. It hasn’t been given for us to know. For us, as T. S. Eliot says, “there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

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