Dr. Brad Harper is the associate director of New Wine, New Wineskins and in 2014 presented on his journey as an Evangelical theologian with a gay son at the Justice Conference in Portland, Oregon. This presentation is available in its entirety to subscribers of Cultural Encounters, our bi-annual journal offering a biblically informed, Christ-centered trinitarian engagement of contemporary culture. The following is an excerpt from that talk:
Recent research has indicated how sixteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds in our country view evangelical Christians. The number one thing that young non-Christian people say about us is that we’re anti-gay. Boy, doesn’t that make us proud? It’s not that we love Jesus, or that we love each other, or that we help the poor. It’s not even that we try to convert them to Christianity—that would be way better, right? But it’s that we’re anti-gay. For 91 percent of them, that was their first perception of us.
The church and the gay community are often talking past each other, arguing simply over the morality of the behavior and not building relationship bridges through which we can dialogue from a place of love and trust. We are often on opposite ends of an argument and do very little to connect in a place where we can actually talk to each other. For young gay people in the United States, coming out is still a very difficult thing. There’s a lot more of it happening now than when I was in high school. If you’re a young gay male, and you come out in my high school in the mid-seventies, you’re in trouble. You’re probably going to get beaten up a lot. I didn’t know who the gay guys were in my high school until my twenty-year high school reunion. Then it was okay for them to come out. It’s still a very difficult thing even today. For kids in Christian homes, it’s even more difficult. There are many, many kids in Christian homes in our country and in our city who, by the time they’re in junior high school, begin to realize they have an attraction to the same sex. But rarely will they say anything about it.
So what they begin to do is pray like mad for God to take it away. He doesn’t. For people who have an embedded, lifelong orientation toward the same sex, prayer does not generally take it away any more than prayer heals people from cancer. Does it happen every once in a while? Yeah, but what do we call that? A first-class miracle. That’s not the norm. And it’s the same way with this.
So they come to some various conclusions when God does not respond and take away their attraction. “I might as well immerse myself in the gay world since God is not changing me.” This has been the response of many gay men and women who have grown up in the Christian church. “God must have already condemned me, and I’m going to hell anyway, so I’m just going to do what comes naturally to me.” Or even, “There is no God. He doesn’t respond. I’ve prayed every single day for a year and cried out to God, and there’s nothing, so this must be mythology.”
For more from this presentation by Dr. Harper make sure to subscribe to Cultural Encounters here. Students of Multnomah Biblical Seminary can get access to the journal for free by emailing NewWine@multnomah.edu. The latest volume of Cultural Encounters also offers reflections on Ferguson, California culture and theology, religious diplomacy, and much more. You can see a full article list here.
Dr. Harper was also interviewed alongside his son Drew recently by John Lussier. The interview covers a number of issues related to the LGBTQ and Evangelical communities. You can watch that here.