On Matthew Vines and Telling the Truth About Dissenters

In the beginning of his book God and the Gay Christian, Matthew Vines takes pains to tell his readers that he is not a Bible-dismissing secularist or a Bible-minimizing liberal evangelical. The grand thesis of God and the Gay Christian is that it is perfectly consistent to affirm the reliability and the authority of the Bible and also the moral acceptability of monogamous, committed same-sex relationships.

As someone who claims to believe in the absolute truths of Scripture, Vines has shown an astonishing unwillingness to tell the truth about those who disagree with his theology. On Monday I linked to a piece written by Andrew Wilson, a satire called “A Christian Case for Idolatry,” in which Wilson uses the vocabulary and logical framework of same-sex affirming evangelicalism to make a case that Christians can worship idols.

Vines did not appreciate Wilson’s parody. He tweeted that it was demeaning to LGBT people and that those who found it clever need to “build more friendships” with LGBT people. But he said something else too: He claimed that Wilson’s parodical arguments actually misrepresented the arguments of same-sex affirming evangelicals, like the arguments found in Vines’s book.

Let’s be clear: The claim that Wilson’s parody was unkind and the claim that it misrepresented the content of God and the Gay Christian are two very different claims. I think both claims are wrong and demonstrably so, but the first claim is largely based on how Vines felt when he read the piece. Even if I think his impression of being demeaned was unwarranted (I do), I acknowledge that people are free to have their own internal reactions. If Vines says LGBT people feel demeaned by the parody, that charge must be at least taken seriously.

Vines’s claim that he was misrepresented is a very different issue. That question is  not a matter of internal emotion or personal reaction, but a question of objective language and content. Vines’s views do not live solely in his head, he has written a book that people can buy and read and understand. If Wilson did indeed misrepresent Vines’s arguments, then we are able to verify whether that’s true in a way that we aren’t able to verify Vines’s complaint about the article’s offensiveness. We should be able to compare “A Case for Idolatry” with God and the Gay Christian and see if Wilson’s language was indeed misrepresentative of what’s in Vines’s book.

On Monday, I did exactly that in a 2,000+ word article that consisted largely of quotations from both Vines and Wilson’s work. I believe that piece is strong evidence that Vines’s claims about being misrepresented are at best misleading and at worst outright falsehoods.

This morning Vines doubled down on both his claims in a short piece that is long on repetition and short on substance. Vines continues his assertions, but the shocking part is this: He repeats his accusation of misrepresentation, but does so without EVER referencing my article or even linking to it. Though my article made the rounds on social media and Vines in fact responded to it through Twitter on Monday, he gives his readers absolutely no clue as to its existence, and simply repeats his arguments without ever engaging my use of his quotes.

Vines is perfectly free to ignore what I say, of course. But repeating the claims previously made without responding to an article which brought into serious question those very claims is incredibly misleading to Vines’s readership. His complaint that Wilson hasn’t even read God and the Gay Christian sounds very hollow if Vines cannot bring himself to address why Wilson’s article sounds almost identical to long portions of the book.

Matthew Vines seems like an articulate, winsome man. I got that impression while reading his book over the summer and I still have that impression now. But I do find myself doubting whether he is as willing to fairly engage the opposition as he lead me initially to believe. A person with a high view of God’s Word should have a similarly high view of things like evidence, logic, reason, and truth. I’ve offered a compelling case that his accusations against Andrew Wilson and his article are false. He should respond in a way that promotes the pursuit of truth, and not merely the repetition of convenient talking points.