Are Evangelicals to Blame for the Equality Act?

The Equality Act (read a quick summary here) is a threat to people of faith across the country. But are evangelicals partly to blame for it?

Evangelical theologian Matthew Lee Anderson has a long piece in Christianity Today (May/June 2021) arguing that evangelicals must realize our own role in the rise of the militant LGBT movement and its political successes. 

The story that evangelicals are (merely) victims of progressive aggressors not only fails to account for the ways in which the LGBT movement was shaped by populist evangelical rhetoric and tactics. It also forgets that the gay liberation movement was a direct response to the systemic and pervasive exclusion of lesbian and gay individuals from the structures of our public life—including from America itself.

Anderson, a professor of ethics and theology at Baylor University, expands on his point. The Christian right, he writes, rose in the 1970s in opposition to the cultural excesses of the sexual revolution. It is surprising that he does not mention Roe v. Wade, which was certainly a larger motivator for the religious right than gay rights. As the Christian right rose to a position of political and cultural influence, Anderson argues, it weaponized biblical truths about sexuality (which Anderson accepts) in a way that “demeaned and disrespected our LGBT neighbors.” 

As an aside, it’s interesting that evangelicals often speak about “our LGBT neighbors,” as if deserving biblical neighbor-love was what made LGBT people distinctive from other people, instead of one of the things they have in common with all mankind.

Anderson tells us of Anita Bryant, an early figure in the Christian right who campaigned against an early nondiscrimination ordinance in Miami in 1977. Bryant’s organization, Save our Children, “aimed at restricting LGBT rights,” in Anderson’s words, because she saw gay people as a “threat” to children. Christianity Today asked Billy Graham about Bryant at the time. While rejecting some of her language, he lauded her for “emphasizing that God loves the homosexual.” 

It’s interesting that Anita Bryant, one of the earliest campaigners for what came to be known as “family values,” earned praise from Graham for emphasizing God’s love. This seems to be at odds with Anderson’s narrative of Christians “demeaning and disrespecting” LGBT people. Another quote from Graham is key to Anderson’s argument: he “was also fearful that her campaign might galvanize and bring out into the open homosexuality throughout the country, so that homosexuals would end up in a stronger position.”

This, Anderson, argues, is precisely what happened. Anderson says that the opposition of Bryant and others to the Gay liberation movement “reinvigorated what had been an increasingly dormant movement, giving it a more militant and oppositional edge than it had previously.” In fact there is no evidence that the movement was “increasingly dormant.” Municipalities and states across the country were actively passing LGBT nondiscrimination measures because they were pressured to do so by an increasingly vocal and confident LGBT rights movement. 

Anderson’s attempt to paint the militant LGBT movement as something that was strengthened by evangelical opposition is completely paradoxical. On one level, movements in opposition to each other always shape each other. Johannes Eck helped shape Martin Luther’s opposition to Rome, and Reformation theology in turn led to real change in Roman Catholic theology at the Council of Trent. The pro-life movement and the pro-abortion movements, too, have shaped each other, such as how pro-abortion apologists now make reasoned philosophical (but still bad) arguments for abortion, and how the pro-life movement is increasingly focused on “love them both,” caring for hurting women as well as preventing the taking of innocent life. 

But Anderson’s argument goes beyond that. He argues that “Conservatives would make inflammatory appeals to populist, anti-LGBT sentiments, in turn fueling opposition.” Conservatives (or evangelicals – the words are used interchangeably through much of Anderson’s essay) were “inflammatory” and made “populist, anti-LGBT” statements. This is no doubt true. Evangelicals in the culture war battles of the last century, who grew up in a nation where two-parent homes were the norm and where homosexuality was something to be kept private, if not an outright perversion, saw the promotion and celebration of it as a negative development. Of course they responded the way they did.  

But Anderson denies agency to the LGBT movement. The activists who fought the NYPD to a standstill at the Stonewall Inn did not need opposition from evangelicals to become a vibrant countercultural movement. Law enforcement agencies and state governments, not evangelicals, were the most formidable opponents they faced. The LGBT movement grew organically out of the sexual ferment of the 1960s, and more broadly out of the concept of individualistic autonomy, which Carl Trueman writes about in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In short, Anderson is putting the cart before the horse, arguing that militant conservative opposition made the militant LGBT movement militant, when that very militancy is what conservatives and evangelicals were reacting against.  

Anderson continues, writing censoriously about the “pathologization” of homosexuality by the mental health professions. Referencing the historian Heather Whit, he says that pathologization made an LGBTQ identity “central to a person’s character or identity.” This meant that “gay people were forced to choose between the shame of being irremediably disordered and the pride of embracing their identity.” This is another head-scratching assertion. If being gay is a “pathology,” a disorder to be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), then it was not, for mid-century mental health practitioners or their patients, “central to a person’s character or identity,” just as other entries in the DSM (depression, for example) are not central to a person’s identity.

Gay people may indeed have been faced with a choice, to see homosexuality as a disorder (curable or not), or as an identity. But this choice was not new, and was not an American phenomenon. Both options were on display, in pre-modern form, in Victorian England and perhaps in other cultures. Nor was the “pathologization” of homosexuality done by evangelicals — it was done by psychiatrists, who later reversed themselves in 1974 and removed homosexuality from the DSM-II list of disorders.

When Anderson turns towards its conclusion, he brings Carl F.H. Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today, to his aid. Henry wrote much about the dangers of an overeager Christian political engagement and the necessity of unity among Americans, but wrote little about LGBT issues. Anderson makes an argument from silence to assert that “retrieving such a stance” might be welcomed by “LGBT Christians,” and might even make them “feel more at home in church.”

Anderson knows and accepts the arguments for biblical families and sexuality, but his cultural analysis here is less than assured. There are a few specific examples of “failures” here, such as an award given by a pro-family organization to a pastor who once said that “not even maggots” would engage in some of the things LGBT people do. But generally, Anderson just feels guilty in a non-specific way, and wishes to share that with other evangelicals. “By honestly recounting our missteps,” he asserts, “evangelicals might give progressive LGBT activists a reason to look afresh at our convictions about marriage and the body.” 

In the next paragraph, he admits that this is “highly implausible,” and he’s right. Indeed, Anderson’s essay fails to take on board the natural law argument for the one-man/one-woman family, and the unacceptability of any other norm.

For conservatives and evangelicals in an earlier age, the presence of open homosexuality was a heartbreaking sign of the loss of God’s favor for our nation. They saw it as something not just condemned in the Bible, but which by overturning the Creation mandate, was in a sense anti­-creational, or anti-cultural. These men and women would have looked back at the decadence of Greek and Roman civilization, with their promotion of a particularly horrifying form of predatory, pedophilic homosexuality (as related in the historian Tom Holland’s recent book Dominion)  and seen it as a dangerous precedent for our own times. 

Anita Bryant may have used language in combating homosexuality which few people would use today. But when she said that militant homosexuality could pose a threat to children, who can now say that she was wrong, in 2021, when Blue’s Clues features a drag queen singing about “transgender rights”? Anderson takes a firm line against the chemical sterilization or mutilation of children with gender dysphoria, but does he really think this is unconnected with the broader LGBT rights movement? Maybe it is the ridiculed Anita Bryant and her allies who read the writing on the wall accurately, and the writers of think pieces in Christianity Today, now and in the past, who have erred.

The battle over sexuality and culture is not over, as Anderson makes clear. But the movement to advance God’s joyful design for marriage and sexuality as a livable reality in our culture will win in the long term. Our movement to show the amazing and life-affirming truth of God’s design for our bodies is done no favors by the unrelenting insistence that Christians must, in some form, be to blame for the shape the LGBT rights movement took, and its subsequent successes and failures. We need better and broader history, which acknowledges that Christians have fought for millennia for the dignity of the traditional family, and that this fight continues today.