Engaging with LGBT Persons

Welcome to the Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture, and today our topic is a simple one, sexual identity. [Laughter] Our guests are Mark Yarhouse and Gary Barnes, and I’m going to let them introduce themselves. But our goal today is to walk through an area that certainly has vexed the church in terms of how to balance grace on the one hand and moral commitments and personal relational dimensions, keep all those balls going all at once has been a trick for the church. So Mark, why don’t you tell them about your ministry and background, and then we’ll follow with Gary, and we’ll dive in.

Mark Yarhouse: Well, I know the study that shaped – had an impact on me personally was I did – participated in a long seven-year longitudinal study of attempted change by Christians who dealt with same-sex attraction in their life and were involved in Christian ministries. And it was set up from the standpoint of the culture saying, “Nobody has ever experienced change,” or “Change can’t happen. Orientation’s immutable.” So we were trying to answer that question: can orientation change?

And we tracked the people over a seven-year span. So that’s an example of a study that for me I think shaped a lot of how I think about these issues.

Mark Yarhouse: Well, the findings didn’t please anybody. [Laughter] You have to understand, the findings are presented in a culture steeped in cultural wars right now around sexuality. So politically, socially, there were people on the one side saying, “This is an immutable characteristic and it cannot change, like eye color, hair color.” And our data suggested that wasn’t true, that there was some movement along a continuum for some people. But then there were other people in the church saying anybody who tries hard enough or just has enough faith can expect a 180-degree change.

And the data didn’t show that either. In fact, I think most people didn’t experience as much change as they had hoped to. And I think so to me, I left the study with a more sober view of what is the likely outcome for people over time, and then how do we as Christians respond to brothers and sisters who are trying to navigate that terrain. How do we demonstrate compassion and love to them when they may not experience the kind of movement the rest of us are kind of expecting to see happen?

And so when we hear in the conversation some people saying, “You don’t appreciate this is the way I seem to be oriented. This is the way I am. This is not at one level about a choice. It’s more profound than that.” Is that one of the areas that the church has struggled to get its hands around and come to appreciate in terms of how to think about sexual identity?

Mark Yarhouse: Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of a meeting I had once with a teenager who was just about to go off to college and his parents, and they were consulting with me for a couple days. And we were sitting down talking, and I said at one point in the interview, “I don’t think that you chose to experience your same-sex attractions.” And he stopped and said, “Dr. Yarhouse, you’ve got to tell my parents because they believe I chose this to make their life miserable.”

And I said, “Look, I’d be happy to talk with your parents about theories of causation and things like that, but no, I don’t think you chose this. Now, I do think you have choices to make, choices about behavior and identity.” And he said, “Oh, Dr. Yarhouse, don’t tell my parents that.” [Laughter] You know, there was this sense of it’s not really a good question, like –is this a choice or isn’t it? That’s not the best question because then you do move into those debates about causation in that way.

I think the better question is what is volitional here. What is volitional? And I have really haven’t met anybody who chose to experience same-sex attractions. The question now is: what do I do with the feelings that I have? How am I going to live my life? And all of us are answering that question: what am I going to do with the impulses that I have? How am I going to order them and live in light of them? And that’s really the making of how God does sanctification in our lives anyway.

Mark Yarhouse: I think so. Otherwise, your debate is limited to –is this a foregone conclusion or willful disobedience? And nobody in their right mind is going to say, “Yes, it’s just willful disobedience.” And so you end up speaking past one another. It fuels the cultural wars. It doesn’t lend anything pastoral or anything substantive to a discussion that actually affects the lives of real people when you talk past one another.

So yeah, I think being able to move towards, “How do I live in light of what I feel? What does it mean to follow Christ in light of these feelings that I didn’t choose and that I’m not sure are going to go away, maybe unlikely to go away, maybe movement along a continuum? What’s my life going to look like in light of that?” is a much better starting point for a healthy discussion.

Mark Yarhouse: I think we end up talking to ourselves and people who are dealing with this issue in our own pews will leave the church, and people on the outside would just I think wonder why we think we’re relevant to them. It’s just that kind of distancing.

Mark Yarhouse: Yeah, I mean part of my observation, even if the data that we had from that longitudinal study was that a lot of what I think we captured that was changing was sexual identity. I mean, people were changing their behavior. People were changing their identity label. Like if your label was gay or bisexual, you can change that to no label or straight or gay to bisexual. I mean, those are just identity labels.

I think that was where we saw more shifts than we did the underlying overall pattern of attraction, although I think there was some movement for some people there as well. So if the debate’s all about orientation, then it’s all about this pattern of attraction that’s sustained and durable in a person’s life. Identity, though, opens up a larger discussion about personhood, about who I am before God, about my relationship with Christ, about who I am in the church, about what it means to be part of a family, part of a community. Identity, to me, seems like a much more robust and more helpful pastorally helpful direction to take people.

And so there’s first of all a most important need to become a listener, to become a learner, and to get out of my automatic way of thinking about things. And so there’s really great new information from both a theological and psychological point of view that Mark and others are making available for us now. For instance, on the longitudinal study that Mark was talking about, and you look at the change that does occur, well, it’s too simple of an answer to say, “Does it change or does it not change?” It’s more, “Well, what can change?”

Like he’s making a distinction between identity and orientation. Or the three-tier model, you know, of same-sex attraction.

Mark Yarhouse: Well, I mean, what I’ve chosen to do in my professional and personal life is I’ve adopted a brand that I try to live out called convicted civility. I’ve talked about that in a few places. It comes from Richard Mao. I met him recently and he acknowledged that it came from Martin Marty and [laughter] and maybe it comes from other sources, I don’t know. But it’s the idea that –

Mark Yarhouse: So yeah, the idea is that we have far too many Christians who are strong on convictions, but you wouldn’t really want them to represent you in any public way because of how they do it is just so – it’s just not very civil in its engagement and loving and caring for the other person. Then you have Christians who are so civil, so loving, so caring, that you have no idea what they stand for. So there’s this tension that you want to live out.

And so in my own life, I try to do that, in professional engagements with others, I’ve been in frequent dialogues with people in the gay community who are psychologists or psychiatrists or just I’ve had activists like one – I was making a presentation on my own research at my own university one time and a local activist who would identify himself as a gay activist contacted our university and said I’m going to – he did a YouTube video and he called for all of his gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and other friends to come and just sit in the front couple rows and stare this “son of a gun” down.

And it was a pretty colorful YouTube video. [Laughter] So what is convicted civility do in those moments, like if it’s your brand, if it’s the lens through which you see things, you know, I talked with a friend of mine that I work with and we decided, “Let’s call them. Let’s just,” so I invited them to come. He’s coming anyway protesting me. [Laughter] So I invited him to come and meet me and meet my students, and sure enough, they sat down in the front rows and stared at me as I was presenting.

Yeah, but I talked with him afterwards. He made a video afterwards and said, “You know, I didn’t agree with everything this guy said, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.” And I’ve got to tell you, he was just eviscerated by people within the gay community who felt like he should’ve been tougher on me.

Mark Yarhouse: You know, so he got more heat from them than he got from the Christian community that embraced him. And that gave him pause. What does that mean for my community, for interacting with these guys? One of the guys who came to protest me, I went out for coffee with him a few times, and he shared, you know, he was raised in a Christian home. He talked about his upbringing.

He said, “Look, I thought when I met you that you were going to have smoke coming out of your nostrils and horns on your head. That’s the way you were depicted to me, and yet here we are having coffee and talking about this.” And you know, those are – I think that’s what – part of what convicted civility does. It’s really relational. But it’s not like I changed my theological position in interacting with these folks.

But the personal interaction of actually relating to someone who thinks differently and engaging them in terms of where they are and why they’re there, and then getting down in the nitty-gritty of having that hard conversation ‘cause it isn’t an easy conversation is something we tend to shy away from. Why do you think that is? Why are we slow to engage?

Mark Yarhouse: Well, let me say this about that. I mean, I think there is an us-them mentality, that they’re all out there and we’re sort of hunkered down within our churches, and it lets us have an in-group and an out-group, a community we can talk to and sort of we kind of know we all agree on the same thing. And then it sort of serves the culture war because they are taking strides to damage things that are sacred to us, and so whether that’s around marriage or other issues. And so it has a tendency to bring us a false sense of intimacy and closeness at their expense.

But even worse than that is that that whole dynamic assumes that there are no people within our own churches who are dealing with this issue because they sit in our pews quietly and they say, “Well, when you talk about us and them, I’m – I have more – I have a lot in common with them.”

Mark Yarhouse: Yeah. And when you say, “Homosexuality is a sin or this is an abomination”, use language like that, it’s not the theologically it’s incorrect to talk about homosexual behavior is sin, but when you use language that we often use from the pulpit, it actually intensifies and increases the shame the person in the pew feels, and it’s more likely to drive them away from the church towards the gay community outside that is willing to embrace them. That’s the whole point is that why would they stay with the church when the church doesn’t even know how to engage and talk with them and love them well? Why wouldn’t they go to a community that says, “We love you as you are.”?

And in it actually, I can promote a moralistic, self-righteous faith in the process, which makes me less inclined to move towards you in your difference because it serves a purpose for me –

And that, I think that – that’s why I say the cross is a leveler.

Gary Barnes: Yes.

Gary Barnes: Yeah.

Mark Yarhouse: No, I think that’s a good starting point. I think – you know, when I hear people in the church community who are dealing with this issue, I don’t think they feel that we believe that. I think they feel like we kind of rank things and order things. And they’ll just never measure up. I don’t think a lot of that’s really coming from them. I think it really is coming from how we interact as a church. I mean, Christians in the West are not known to be – from a global perspective – the most spiritually mature and tested sort of Christian in terms of our faith commitments, our love for one another.

We’re very materialistic. We have sort of this American dream Christianity that we need to wonder how much is that really biblical? And then you have a young person in the church saying they’re dealing with this issue saying, “You know, you get to go home to your spouse. You get to live this out. You’re with your best friend.” And I don’t even think most of us appreciate what they’re giving up or what they’re saying no to to be faithful to God. And most of us kind of get a pass in our churches for the things that we deal with.

Like it’s not that our church teaches that what we struggle with is not sin, but we really get kind of a pass when we struggle with our own stuff because we kind of do it privately or we say, “Well, guys are guys.” Or whatever – we kind of talk about it in a way that [laughter] makes it sound like we are really different than the person in the pew [crosstalk] –

Mark Yarhouse: Right.

Mark Yarhouse: Right.

Gary Barnes: Yes.

Mark Yarhouse: And I can’t avoid the engagement just to avoid the misunderstanding.

Gary Barnes: That’s right.

Mark Yarhouse: Yeah. I mean, this – it’s a three-tier distinction that I’ve made now for a few years, and it was just an observation from research that had been conducted on national studies of sexuality that when you ask people, “Do you experience same-sex attraction?” a certain percentage of people would say yes. And that’s higher percentage than if you asked the same group of people, “Do you have a homosexual orientation?” So a smaller percentage, maybe you know, two to three percent of the population would say that they’re orientated towards the same sex, but higher like five to six percent or even higher would say, “I have experienced same-sex attraction.”

So there’s a difference between experience same-sex attraction and having a homosexual orientation. And then of course, we all know that there’s also a third possibility, which is saying, “This is my identity.” So gay identity was the third of the three tiers. And so I was just showing from research that the percentages are different, and then the experience is different. So sometimes, I use this in my counseling practice. This is more of a helpful resource for counseling or pastoral care to just make this three-tier distinction and see if it’s helpful to the person.

I don’t use it as an apologetic. I don’t use it engage in a battle. I don’t argue with people. But I’ve had plenty of people sit in my office and say, “Thank you for that three-tier distinction. I’m gay.” [Laughter] And I’m not debating.

Mark Yarhouse: But I’ve had many people –one young man said to me, “Dr. Yarhouse, I don’t think I would take that three-tier distinction to the gay bar and talk with my friends about it because to them, it would feel like I was splitting hairs. But for me, you’re giving me the intellectual space I need to make sense of what I feel and to make decisions about my identity.” So that’s really what it’s used for. Now, what’s the difference between attraction and orientation? You know, it’s the strength of the attractions, how persistent and durable they are over time.

If they’re strong attractions to the same sex that persist, they’re durable, then someone might say, “That’s my orientation. I’m oriented towards the same sex.” And then gay identity is usually, you know, that’s more of a modern socio-cultural label for explaining sexual preferences. It usually carries a connotation of a sexual ethic that’s more permissive than a traditional Christian sexual ethic. But I’ve also been noticing lately that you have a younger group of Christians who deal with this issue who are more comfortable using gay just as an adjective, not as a noun, but to say in the common vernacular, “I’m telling the world that I do experience same-sex attraction, so I call myself gay. I may be a celibate gay Christian, but I’m using the common language that most people would recognize.”

So I want to recognize there’s those three-tier distinction, but even there, there are differences in how people are using gay today that are important for people in the church to understand.