Same-sex attraction and identity: Are evangelicals on the right track?

In the two months since the announcement that Sam Allberry has been declared disqualified from ministry by his church in Nashville, USA, quite a lot has been written.

It has been good to read many articles expressing compassion and personal support for and appreciation of him. This is right, and is often missing in responses to the fall from grace of gospel ministers.

There have also been some responses which can only be described as gloating over the downfall of someone seen as a theological enemy. This is particularly out of place for those who criticised Sam for having a weaker doctrine of sin than they do; if we believe this, then it very ill behoves us to speak as if we ourselves are more righteous than he is. No-one who can argue (as I do) that the desire to sin is sin, without trembling at their own guilt before the Lord and the magnitude of His mercy to them, has any business to be writing about the subject at all.

But nor is it right to conclude, by some reverse logic, that in the aftermath of this sad news we may not question whether we, as an evangelical constituency, are going in the right direction in our response to the question of homosexual desire. It seems to me fairly clear that we are not.

A lot of the evangelical world seems to have settled on a position largely consonant with that argued for by Living Out, the organisation which Sam Allberry helped found, though has been less involved in for the last few years. You could summarise this as: homosexual orientation and identity is real, and in itself morally neutral; but homosexual activity is sinful and must be avoided.

But this position bristles with problems. First, it uncritically buys into a whole ecosystem of thought which is entirely alien to the Bible: the concepts of orientation, identity, sexuality, with the multiple labels of the LGBTQ+ acronym, mostly of very recent invention; of Pride and phobias, represented by the quasi-liturgical Pride calendar with its multitude of special days and months to celebrate both; of the idea of “coming out”, with its Freudian implications of an internal sexually-derived reality which must not be repressed. Living Out materials abound with examples of accepting all of these as reality (and the name itself assumes the truth of the third), but I suspect they are only reflecting the views of the wider evangelical constituency. It’s as if the Scriptures have no worldview of their own to teach us, no comprehensive doctrine of man wonderfully expounded by the church through the ages, no detailed analysis of the nature of the human heart. And so it uncritically accepts large elements of a worldview developed by non-Christian psychologists, philosophers and activists in the very recent past, without questioning where it came from.

Second, this view militates against the whole evangelical doctrine of repentance. For by accepting that “sexual orientation” is a neutral category, it redefines sexual lust as morally neutral too. And so sin becomes a matter of outward action only; and not, as our evangelical and reformation forefathers insisted, and Augustine before them, a matter of the heart. Our Lord taught that sin originates in the heart (Mark 7v20-23) and that the internal desire to sin is already sin (Matt.5v20-30); Paul taught that his covetous desire condemned him (Romans 7v7-11); John that our love for the world and the things in it mean separation from the Father (John 2v17). But if “sexual orientation” / being “same-sex attracted” is morally neutral, we will have to abandon the teaching of them all. The implications are serious. Would we say to a man who confesses a lustful desire for another man’s wife that as long as he doesn’t actually sleep with her, he has nothing to repent of? Would we go further and tell him that he is merely ‘Neighbour’s Wife Attracted’, and that this is a morally-neutral sexual orientation which he need not seek to change? Would we say, in line with the Living Out Church Audit, that this “orientation” would never prevent someone from exercising their spiritual gifts or serving in leadership in our church? Or would we tell this man, as every evangelical in the past would have done, that he needs to repent of the lusts of his heart, grieve for the offence they cause to God, cry to God for forgiveness for them, and seek to put them to death?

Third, it is pastorally very harsh. It tells Christians, rightly, that sexual immorality is wrong and must be avoided. But it simultaneously asks them to believe that the world is telling the truth when it says that the “identity” founded upon the desire for sexual immorality is true and good; even perhaps, in some ways, to be celebrated. That sets up an internal tension which is almost impossible to live with: who I am can never be expressed, and I must forever live in a way which is intrinsically alien to what I (falsely) believe to be my true self. This is a cruel tightrope to ask any Christian to walk, and it comes from trying to marry a true view of Christian morality with a false view of human nature.

Fourth, it encourages Christians to make a kind of peace with our sinful desires. Not, granted, by acting upon them (a position for which I am very grateful). But nevertheless it encourages us not to grieve for them, but to accept them as a valid part of ourselves; not to flee from them, but to approve of them; not to weep that our sinful hearts offend God, but falsely to comfort ourselves with the view that God doesn’t mind. And so it leads to a tendency to try to find ways to mitigate these desires by partially satisfying them without crossing some line into what would count as unacceptable. And that is, of course, a dangerous game to play with any sin.

Most of all, it devalues the blood of Christ. For in seeking to comfort ourselves from the guilt and shame of sinful desire by persuading ourselves that it is not sin at all, we fail to look to the one place where God has provided true cleansing of sin. We do not find a peaceful conscience by persuading ourselves that the sin in our hearts does not matter. We find a peaceful conscience by resting wholly in the sacrifice of God’s Son on our behalf, when He atoned for all our sins, of heart, word and deed, once and for all, by carrying them upon His own shoulders to the cross for us. Christ’s atoning blood, not a downgrading of the sinfulness of sin, is our only hope.

I am not of course saying that any of these things relates to what happened to Sam Allberry. I do not know, and it is none of my business. Sam himself displayed considerably more nuance and awareness about these issues than many other voices in the evangelical world, and I personally have been grateful to him for that. Moreover, we are told that he has expressed clear repentance, and we all as fellow-sinners must be grateful for his example in that. Sam is a brother whom we should pray for and receive with love. But it cannot be the case that this particular tragedy should lead us to stifle very real concerns about the dangers of a defective theology of sin and repentance. For the sake of our witness to the world and the wellbeing of our children, we need to reconsider.

Andy Robinson of Living Out responds in his article "A helpful challenge – but I don’t recognise those views".