{"id":7371,"date":"2015-06-30T02:47:27","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T08:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/frankschaeffer\/?p=7371"},"modified":"2015-06-30T02:47:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T08:47:27","slug":"how-evangelical-protestantism-lost-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/frankschaeffer\/2015\/06\/how-evangelical-protestantism-lost-me\/","title":{"rendered":"how evangelical Protestantism lost me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
\u201cThis essay, which\u00a0represents my first detailed public statement on how evangelical Protestantism lost me, is addressed both to those evangelicals who are celebrating momentum on LGBTQ acceptance within the \u201cbig tent,\u201d as well as to those evangelicals whom\u00a0I would describe as fundamentalist, or fundamental-<\/span>ish<\/em>. The ones who still represent the majority of evangelicals, the ones I come from.\u201d ***\u00a0<\/span>So writes <\/span>Christopher Stroop, PhD, History and Humanities (Stanford University) and Senior Lecturer, School of Public Policy, Humanities Department\u00a0Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration \u00a0and\u00a0Editor of,\u00a0<\/span>State, Religion and Church. \u00a0<\/i>Chris sent me the link to this remarkable essay that was first published in Religion Dispatches<\/a>. *** I am republishing it here with the written permission of the author. Please read it!<\/div>\n
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CHRISTOPHER STROOP\u00a0<\/a><\/span>\u00a0
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ANTI-GAY EVANGELICALISM IS THE NORM: A LESS ROSY TAKE ON THE EVANGELICAL \u201cTIPPING POINT\u201d<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/article>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

We\u2019ve recently seen prominent evangelical\u00a0speaker and author\u00a0Tony Campolo\u00a0generate some buzz by\u00a0coming around to full LGBTQ affirmation, including here on\u00a0RD, where\u00a0senior editor Cathleen Falsani\u00a0heralded<\/a>\u00a0Campolo\u2019s move as \u201cevangelicalism\u2019s tipping point.\u201d<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll have to forgive me if I\u2019m not ready to\u00a0break out\u00a0the\u00a0champagne just yet. Well, make that a bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling grape juice, not only as\u00a0that\u2019s what my evangelical family used to drink on New Year\u2019s Eve, but also because\u00a0I\u2019m convinced that a sober, rather than celebratory, view of the evangelical tipping point is more appropriate.<\/p>\n

This essay, which\u00a0represents my first detailed public statement on how evangelical Protestantism lost me, is addressed both to those evangelicals who are celebrating momentum on LGBTQ acceptance within the \u201cbig tent,\u201d as well as to those evangelicals whom\u00a0I would describe as fundamentalist, or fundamental-ish<\/em>. The ones who still represent the majority of evangelicals, the ones I come from.<\/p>\n

What I hope members of both groups take away is that they need to listen to the voices of the hurting and the disaffected who have come out from their midst. I waited for years to speak out, because I love the evangelicals I was raised by and among, and I have no desire to hurt them. But I can\u2019t remain silent\u00a0any\u00a0longer.<\/p>\n

Far too many evangelicals seem more concerned with absolving themselves and their co-religionists of charges of bigotry than they are with the fact that 40% of America\u2019s homeless youth\u00a0are LGBTQ<\/a>. Many\u00a0evangelicals refuse to see\u00a0it, but part of that is on them. I\u2019m fairly confident that very few would\u00a0ever dream of kicking their children out of their homes for being\u00a0gay. At the same time, how many would isolate, pressure, and\/or expose their LGBTQ kids to \u201cex-gay\u201d therapy? Abandonment and aggressive statements aren\u2019t the only ways to harm LGBTQ youth.<\/p>\n

In response to private communications I received regarding myrecent\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0on evangelical reactions to Caitlin Jenner\u2019s transition, I tweeted:<\/p>\n

\n
Christopher Stroop @C_Stroop<\/span><\/div>\n
If you\u2019re not vocally opposing homophobia and transphobia or not concerned with LGBTQ youth at risk of suicide, don\u2019t #NotAllEvangelicals me<\/span><\/div>\n
10:25 AM \u2013 10 Jun 2015<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

LGBTQ homelessness and suicide are natural consequences of the perpetuation of views denying the full humanity of lesbian, gay, bi, pan, trans, queer, and all non-heteronormative individuals. Any theology rejecting their full affirmation is clearly tantamount to such denial, as we now have a wealth of testimony that the vast majority of LGBTQ individuals do not experience their sexual orientation or gender identity as a choice. If you like, you can believe in a tyrannical god who creates some people only to condemn them for something innate to their created personhood. I will not. Yet I was terrified of that god\u00a0for most of my life.<\/p>\n

My early childhood was marked by episodes of abject terror over whether I was \u201creally saved.\u201d In my teen years, I wondered whether Calvinism were true and whether I might be part of the predestined reprobate. Later in high school, I moved on to thinking I had committed the\u00a0unpardonable sin, walking around with a palpable lump of anxiety in my chest for about a week because I had failed to keep a promise to God to stop masturbating.<\/p>\n

Much of my youth was consumed by religious fear and anxiety. For quite a while I was deathly afraid to let go of views God supposedly demanded of me that I knew intuitively were not loving or just or reasonable. I was afraid to go to hell, to lose my identity and sense of purpose, to lose the warm evangelical community. But I finally had enough.<\/p>\n

I remain true to what I see as the core values I was taught in my evangelical childhood\u2014compassion, standing up for what\u2019s right, taking care of the least of these, loving our neighbors. There\u2019s much good in evangelical culture, and there are many wonderful people among evangelicals. Nevertheless, I struggled through years of cognitive dissonance and self-loathing before managing to jettison the dogma I couldn\u2019t square with the values listed above.<\/p>\n

So, What About \u201cSin\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The majority of American evangelicals continue to be moved,\u00a0to greater and lesser degrees, by a fundamentalist ideology tied to an essentially literalist reading of the Bible.\u00a0And, despite\u00a0an often large\u00a0capacity for compassion, this makes it extremely difficult for them to change on key issues, including LGBTQ affirmation and same-sex marriage. Those who are celebrating the \u201ctipping point,\u201d it seems to me, are failing to hold their co-religionists accountable for the harm they have done to all of us who could not conform to the demands of the fundamentalist evangelical worldview\u2014particularly to members of the LGBTQ community. They are also de facto refusing to acknowledge their own complicity in that harm.<\/p>\n

However much American evangelical Protestantism is changing for the better\u2014and a significant portion of it is\u2014a hard line on the \u201csinfulness\u201d of living authentic LGBTQ lives remains thepredominant position<\/a>\u00a0among white evangelicals by an overwhelming margin of at least 70%. I say\u00a0at least<\/em>\u00a070% because, while this is the 2015 Pew figure for white evangelical opposition to marriage equality, when it comes to\u00a0LGBTQ issues there are plenty of evangelicals who occupy\u00a0what Baylor University researchers have\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe messy middle.\u201d While some of these evangelicals support marriage equality for a variety of reasons, they stop short of full LGBTQ affirmation.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been much hype in recent years surrounding a generational shift within evangelicalism. Take, for example, what Rachel Held Evans\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0about conversations she had with evangelical youth in 2012. In her words, \u201cmost\u2026I daresay all<\/em>\u2026have expressed to me passionate opposition to legislative action against gays and lesbians.\u201d<\/p>\n

This certainly does not match my own anecdotal experience, including with graduates of evangelical colleges and universities such as Wheaton and Cedarville. Most of the evangelicals I grew up with\u2014we are in our late 20s to mid 30s now\u2014were all for Indiana\u2019s RFRA legislation. According to the statistical information we have, they\u2019re not outliers. As of 2014, a minority of 42% of evangelicals under 35\u00a0reportedly<\/a>\u00a0support marriage equality, as opposed to 27% of white Evangelicals and 33% of black Protestants in all\u00a0age groups.<\/p>\n

On that note, I\u2019d like to address the editorial footnote that RD editors appended\u00a0to my recent blog post on evangelical responses to Jenner\u2019s transition:<\/p>\n

While \u2018evangelical\u2019 and \u2018fundamentalist\u2019 are highly contested and fluid terms (and certainly not equivalent) the above post uses \u2018fundamentalist\u2019 as a blanket label for fringe, conservative evangelicals.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With respect to the terminology of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, I take the point that my usage was imprecise. However, with all due respect, I do object to the characterization of the views I analyzed in my blog post as representing the \u201cfringe\u201d of evangelical Christianity.<\/p>\n

In that\u00a0piece I did choose a marginal figure, charismatic Pastor John Burton, to illustrate my point about the abusive dynamic present in much of American evangelical Christianity. I focused on Burton\u2019s words because they summed up in a clear, concise way the conflation of \u201clove\u201d and \u201cterror\u201d that is present in the widespread conservative version of the evangelical worldview I was socialized in\u2014a version that in my view is fundamentalist in its absolutist insistence on Biblical literalism, inerrancy in the Bible\u2019s original manuscripts, and exclusivity with respect to truth and salvation; in its essentially dominionist drive to enshrine its understanding of Christian principles into laws that are binding on everyone; and in its construction of what scholars associated with the University of Chicago\u2019s Fundamentalism Project have\u00a0called<\/a>\u201cenclave communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

I grew up in one of these, with my social world (beyond my family) consisting almost entirely of the churches and evangelical Christian schools I attended in Indianapolis and Colorado Springs, and of people associated with them.<\/p>\n

When it comes to LGBTQ issues, instead of quoting the marginal Burton I might well have quoted Franklin Graham, who recently\u00a0said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

So I would encourage churches \u2013 preach the gospel, proclaim the gospel, and take a stand against wickedness. And I hear so many arguments that we need to love the gays and lesbians. Of course we love them. And\u2026 we should love them enough to warn them that if they don\u2019t repent and turn from their sin and receive Christ by faith into their hearts, into their lives, they will spend eternity in hell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, Graham breezily assumes that sexual orientation is a choice, and that \u2018failing\u2019 to be straight means that one is not a true Christian\u2014an attitude that has\u00a0driven<\/a>\u00a0many LGBTQ Christians to depression and suicide in conjunction with attempts to change their sexual orientation and\/or gender identity.<\/p>\n

Once again, this is not love but\u00a0abuse<\/em>. Full stop.<\/p>\n

And even if \u201cex-gay\u201d therapy has been in decline since Exodus International\u00a0shut its doors and apologized<\/a>, it\u2019s still Graham, rather than Campolo, who echoes\u00a0the majority evangelical opinion on these matters. You can\u2019t change this by highlighting Campolo\u2019s shift or by\u00a0proclaiming<\/a>\u00a0Jim Wallis to be \u201cthe quintessential evangelical.\u201d<\/p>\n

My experience of growing up evangelical was less of a \u201cbig tent,\u201d more of what I like to refer to as \u201cthe quasi-ecumenism of Biblical literalism,\u201d in which denominational affiliation didn\u2019t particularly matter, but where a literalist reading of the Bible and certain political positions certainly did. \u201cRight belief\u201d was vigilantly policed. There was a little space for less fundamentalist views\u2014for accepting theistic evolution as opposed to young earth creationism, for example\u2014but it was an uncomfortable space.<\/p>\n

Sure, in the required chapel services at Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis we would occasionally have a speaker who, Campolo-like, would attack the hypocrisy of middle-class and affluent Christians being insufficiently concerned with the human realities of poverty, but this never for a minute threatened our general understanding that when we became old enough to vote we were morally compelled to be \u201cvalues voters.\u201d<\/p>\n

And ours was not the most hardline Christian school in Indianapolis. While Heritage encouraged students to get involved with Billy Graham\u2019s 1999 crusade in our city, Colonial Christian School essentially forbade its students from even attending. As class of \u201999 Colonial graduate Jennifer Berry related to me in a Facebook exchange, \u201cI did get the distinct impression they disapproved of Billy Graham in particular for his association with Martin Luther King, Jr.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does that make my high school \u201cevangelical\u201d and hers \u201cfundamentalist\u201d? We\u2019re talking more about matters of degree than kind. Jennifer and I actually went to the same church at the time. My evangelical world was pretty hardline; hers was even more so. The issues may change, but most of evangelicalism remains hardline.<\/p>\n

Before we get too celebratory about the \u201ctipping point,\u201d therefore, we need to listen to the voices of those who have been harmed by the fundamentalist tendencies in evangelicalism\u2014for example, those who blog at\u00a0Homeschoolers Anonymous<\/a>. These are people who know what it\u2019s like to grow up in enclave communities, in many cases more controlling and sealed off by far than my own was, and who have much to say about the dangers of letting ideology drive education.<\/p>\n

Likewise, we need to center the voices of LGBTQ youth, such as transgender teen Leelah Alcorn who was driven to suicide by her evangelical upbringing.\u00a0Her heartbreaking words\u00a0survive<\/a>, including her call\u00a0for\u00a0her death \u201cto mean something.\u201d Are evangelicals listening? \u201cWe loved him unconditionally,\u201d Carla Alcorn\u00a0told CNN<\/a>, misgendering the deceased Leelah and appealing\u00a0to a fundamentalist \u201clove\u201d that was certainly not unconditional.<\/p>\n

In fairness, some evangelicals are listening with open hearts. I have seen some come around to LGBTQ affirmation, some to the \u201cmessy middle.\u201d In addition to disheartening exchanges, I have had a number of encouraging conversations of late. Many are trying, in some cases very hard, to come up with a language and approach that prioritizes love over judgment\u2014all while leaving room for the belief that\u00a0living an authentic LGBTQ life is a sin<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are\u00a0calls<\/a>\u00a0to drop the hurtful and condescending \u201clove the sinner, hate the sin\u201d rhetoric, which\u00a0is surely an improvement, but it\u2019s also an attempt to\u00a0square the circle<\/a>. As long as the belief persists that same-sex partnerships and transgender identities are inherently sinful, this belief will do psychological harm to LGBTQ people born into evangelical communities. Still, I want to recognize that the \u201cmessy middle\u201d is making a genuine effort to listen with compassion. Whether this middle space will end up becoming a transitional halfway house to full LGBTQ affirmation remains\u00a0unclear.<\/p>\n

While I genuinely do not know the extent to which evangelicalism is capable of a thorough sea change, I do know that even if that day\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0coming, there\u2019s something more than a little off-putting about the gleeful\u00a0amens<\/em>\u00a0shouted by more progressive evangelicals whenever one of their own changes his or her\u00a0mind and decides to renounce their continued role in perpetuating\u00a0a culture that harms and kills innocent people.\u00a0Shouldn\u2019t the recognition of that harm lead rather to more sober reflection and repentance?<\/p>\n

While I\u2019ve been unable to call myself\u00a0evangelical for years, I\u2019m also not an atheist. Confirmed Episcopalian in 2012, I\u2019m a highly infrequent churchgoer these days, as I find myself wondering if\u00a0the culture-warring and theocratic tendencies in the Christianity that I\u2019ve known are intrinsic\u00a0aspects of the faith that can never be fully exorcised.<\/p>\n

I can already hear the criticism from more moderate to progressive evangelicals who would say that, while they know there are some\u00a0in the evangelical world who harbor anti-gay views, their experience is different from mine; that I\u2019m trying to universalize my individual experience. But to\u00a0those who feel this way and have\u00a0seen\u00a0the data\u00a0and the statements (or lack thereof) of influential evangelicals, I ask: who\u2019s really trying to universalize their experience?<\/p>\n

I appreciate the Christians, including evangelicals, who are trying to do better, those who are living up to Christ\u2019s example of radical inclusivity\u00a0that I\u00a0see as the spirit of the Gospel. The problem is that an awful lot of Christians, particularly in evangelical\u00a0culture, continue to fetishize the letter and lose sight of the spirit. And not only that, but\u00a0instead of accepting that we live in a pluralist society, too many of these evangelicals, with a huge assist from conservative Catholics, go off in the name of \u201creligious freedom\u201d to fight tooth and nail to keep members of the LGBTQ community from enjoying the same rights and freedoms they do.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not mince words. Religiously justified bigotry is still bigotry. And this is why you lost me, evangelicals\u2014because for every Peggy or Tony Campolo among you, there are still more than two Franklin Grahams.<\/p>\n

Frank\u00a0Schaeffer<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is a writer.\u00a0His latest book \u2014<\/span>WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD:<\/strong>\u00a0How to give love, create beauty and find peace<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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Available now on Amazon<\/h2>\n
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Follow Frank on Twitter\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>www.twitter.com\/frank_schaeffer<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0See Frank\u2019s paintings\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>http:\/\/www.frankschaefferart.com\/<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0Follow Frank on Facebook<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/frank.schaeffer.16<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0Contact Frank at<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>http:\/\/www.frankschaeffer.com\/<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThis essay, which\u00a0represents my first detailed public statement on how evangelical Protestantism lost me, is addressed both to those evangelicals who are celebrating momentum on LGBTQ acceptance within the \u201cbig tent,\u201d as well as to those evangelicals whom\u00a0I would describe as fundamentalist, or fundamental-ish. The ones who still represent the majority of evangelicals, the ones […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,228],"tags":[1384,20,116,103,1026,1794,1793,1796,834,501],"class_list":["post-7371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion","category-sex","tag-chris-stroop","tag-evangelicals","tag-gay-marriage","tag-gay-rights","tag-peggy-campolo","tag-politics","tag-religion","tag-sex","tag-supreme-court","tag-tony-campolo"],"yoast_head":"\nhow evangelical Protestantism lost me<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""This essay, which\u00a0represents my first detailed public statement on how evangelical Protestantism lost me, is addressed both to those evangelicals who are\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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