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Beyond the Culture War: Managing Sexual Relationships Inside a Congregation of Gay Evangelicals

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

America’s popular culture war narrative has often portrayed the evangelical community and the gay community as fundamentally oppositional groups whose range of disagreements center around arguments over the morality and nature of homosexuality. Against the backdrop of these arguments, we undertake a qualitative study of a congregation of gay evangelicals, specifically investigating how pastoral leadership attempts to manage sexual relationships amid a congregation that is firmly and self-consciously rooted in both its gay and evangelical identities. We look at the particular goals and ideals that pastoral leadership espouses for sexual relationships, and we explore how these goals and ideals represent, draw from, and potentially help integrate the congregation’s competing cultural identities. We find that pastoral leadership strives for what we are calling a “blended approach” to managing sexual relationships—an approach that simultaneously emphasizes traditional evangelical sexual norms (such as commitment, stability, monogamy, and longevity), while allowing these norms to be significantly tempered by a strong recognition of the private and public contexts that have shaped the gay community’s understanding of sexual and relational life. We speculate that this blended approach to managing sexual relationships may be pointing the way toward future developments within some predominantly-heterosexual evangelical congregations.

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Notes

  1. Grace Church is a pseudonym.

  2. We note that in spite of the fact that the Senior Pastor graduated from Bob Jones University, Grace Church does not interpret the Bible in a fundamentalist-style, literalistic fashion, but instead utilizes a more mainstream evangelical approach that draws significantly on historical–critical methods. This approach, often described in terms of the quest for “authorial intent,” is essentially the idea that the meaning and authority of the Bible does not rest in specific words (of either an English translation or of an original language) but rather in what a particular author was trying to communicate at the particular time that a particular text was written.

  3. While recognizing that the label evangelical can be used in a number of distinct but interacting ways (e.g., variously referring to theological positions, ecclesiastic emphases, denominational traditions, political agendas, etc.), we follow the approach of Christian Smith (1998, p. 19) when we describe Grace Church as evangelical not only because we as researchers judge such a characterization to be quite valid but especially because it is a label that Grace Church uses to describe itself. At the same time, we recognize that evangelicalism is a fairly broad religious category, which encompasses a wide range of persons and organizations. In an attempt, then, to be somewhat more specific, we suggest that Grace Church could be further categorized as being on the more progressive side of evangelicalism, certainly exhibiting mainstream evangelical beliefs such as acknowledging the reality of hell and emphasizing the physical death and resurrection of Jesus, but in comparison to the more conservative side of evangelicalism, showing a greater degree of flexibility in regard to some theological fine points and especially in regard to various social and political issues, most obviously those related to homosexuality.

  4. Information concerning congregational characteristics and demographics was obtained through participant observation as well as through interviewing the Senior Pastor. See the “Methods” section of this article for more detail. Also, see note 6 for information specifically about the ministerial staff.

  5. We note that while virtually all pro-gay arguments are associated with persons who can rightly be called social liberals, some of these arguments, such as the ones voiced by Andrew Sullivan, are legitimately described as being arguments that are simultaneously socially liberal and politically conservative—hence, Sullivan’s “Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” (2003).

  6. We note that in addition to the Senior Pastor, Grace Church’s ministerial staff has increased in recent years to include a Minister of Congregational Care, a Minister of Worship Arts, and a Minister of Outreach and Development. In this article, however, we focus on the leadership of the Senior Pastor. This is due in part to space limitations, but also reflects our judgment that the personality, tenure, and role of the Senior Pastor have clearly made him the dominant and authoritative voice of Grace Church’s pastoral leadership. For more information about the Senior Pastor, see the Findings section of this article.

  7. We note that the roughly equal proportions of lesbians and gay men who participated in the SPSD course generally mirror corresponding proportions within the congregation as a whole. We note too that except where we specifically use the phrase gay men, all other use of the adjective gay should be understood as referring to both men and women. This usage is consistent with that of the SPSD course participants as well as that of the Senior Pastor and other parishioners.

  8. We note that the ages and ethnicities of the SPSD course participants are also fairly representative of the congregation as a whole. Although the congregation does include children, young adults, and senior adults, most Grace Church parishioners are in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Likewise, while a majority of the congregation are Caucasian, a significant minority are African American or Latino. We note as well that the Senior Pastor is a Caucasian male, approximately 50 years of age.

  9. Although the sexual individualism that we here associate with aspects of Grace Church’s gay identity did not originate in the gay community and is not defined there, we judge that in the minds of most Grace Church parishioners, such individualism is perceived as a key aspect of their gay identity that stands in fairly stark opposition to contrasting aspects of their evangelical identity.

  10. We note that the partners of these persons who have participated in commitment ceremonies may or may not also be parishioners at Grace Church.

  11. This document was initially written by the Senior Pastor and has since been developed and modified through a largely consensus-based process involving both the ministerial staff as well as long-tenure lay leaders.

  12. When asked what might happen if a leader did not keep these commitments, the Senior Pastor referred back to the Leadership Guidelines documents, which states that if “a leader falls short, our goal will be to respond with the right combination of mercy and accountability…. When lapses occur, we will prayerfully ask the Holy Spirit to guide us to a response that reflects the right balance.”

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, GA. We thank Rachel Einwohner, Becka Alper, Nick Vargas, Stephen Warner, and seven anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Correspondence should be addressed to: Jeremy N. Thomas, Department of Sociology, Purdue University, 700 W. State St., West Lafayette, IN 47907. Email: jnthomas@purdue.edu.

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Thomas, J.N., Olson, D.V.A. Beyond the Culture War: Managing Sexual Relationships Inside a Congregation of Gay Evangelicals. Rev Relig Res 54, 349–370 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-012-0051-8

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