Are Evangelicals Changing Their Minds on Gay Marriage?

Amy Tincher with Vines

While far right Christian denominations are confronted with the exodus of the Millennials, they also have another perhaps growing problem.  What some of the bitter, control obsessed leadership would not doubt call heresy: evangelicals who are beginning to support gay rights and worse yet in the eyes hate-filled leaders, gay marriage.  It is a phenomenon that seemingly is lost on the Republican Party which continues to prostitute itself to the ugliest elements of the Christofascists.  A piece in Politico Magazine looks at this new and growing threat to the theocrats and their tawdry whores in the GOP.  Here are some excerpts:

Amy Tincher is an evangelical Christian who plays bass in the band at her suburban Ohio church, where she and her fellow congregants firmly believe the “words we adhere to” are those in the Bible. But last summer, without telling her husband and two kids exactly what she was doing, she boarded a plane for a conference in Kansas whose purpose many evangelicals would plainly consider heretical.

Tincher was one of 50 people flown from around the country and the world—Canada, China, Nigeria and South Korea—to a four-day Bible boot camp dedicated to discussing, and embracing, gay relationships. The gathering was organized by Matthew Vines, who by then was enjoying modest fame for a 2012 YouTube video in which Vines, looking even younger than his 21 years, delivers an hour-long lecture arguing that the Bible does not, in fact, condemn all same-sex relationships. The video has gone viral, racking up more than 730,000 views to date, landing Vines on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Styles section and helping him raise $100,000 for the conference, where he launched The Reformation Project, a nationwide network of pro-gay evangelicals committed to ending their church’s longstanding hostility toward gay people.

Tincher told me she had once “tried on” an anti-gay attitude to fit in with her conservative community in Liberty Township, outside Cincinnati, but like many evangelicals, she struggled to see how homophobia could accord with an all-loving Christian God. 

It’s no secret that attitudes toward same-sex relations have changed in this country: Gay marriage is legal in 19 states plus the District of Columbia, and all major public opinion surveys now show a majority of Americans are in favor of it. But Matthew Vines and Amy Tincher are no longer outliers either: Increasingly, even evangelical Christians, long known for doctrinally condemning homosexuality, are embracing gay people, too.

The shift is especially visible among young evangelicals under age 35, a near majority of whom now support same-sex marriage. And gay student organizations have recently formed at Christian colleges across the country, including flagship evangelical campuses such as Wheaton College in Illinois and Baylor in Texas.

The change has taken conservative political leaders by surprise, fractured the coalition against gay marriage and begun to dry up funding for some of the traditional-marriage movement’s most prominent organizations.

Christian political groups, including Focus on the Family and the National Association of Evangelicals, have virtually stopped campaigning on the issue, shifting their focus to legal efforts to shield religious business owners from having to cater to gay weddings. Republican politicians, who historically have relied on evangelical support, are backing away, too. In Ohio, where in 2004 evangelical activists were among the first in the nation to campaign for a successful ballot measure outlawing gay unions, both Rob Portman, the state’s Republican senator, and Jim Petro, former Republican attorney general, now support overturning the ban.

Such views will only become more common in the years ahead, says Jeremy Thomas, an Idaho State University sociologist who has studied conservative Christians’ changing attitudes toward homosexuality. “Evangelicals will more or less come to embrace homosexuality in the next 20 to 30 years,” Thomas predicts. “I would put all my money on that statement.”

“While influenced by God, [the Bible] is not dictated by God,” Adam Hamilton, the pastor of an influential Methodist megachurch near Kansas City, Missouri, said in a recent interview. “It is possible to be a faithful Christian who loves God and loves the scriptures and at the same time to believe that the handful of verses on same-sex intimacy are like the hundreds of passages accepting and regulating slavery or other practices we today believe do not express the heart and character of God.

But leading anti-gay marriage organizations are already feeling the financial effects of the evangelical population’s widespread moderation.   The National Organization for Marriage, which has funded nationwide efforts to prohibit gay unions for the past seven years and last month sponsored its annual March for Marriage in Washington, D.C., reported a roughly $2 million deficit on its 2012 tax return, the most recent publicly available. And just three donors contributed nearly two-thirds of the organization’s $9.3 million in donations that year.

In evangelical communities like Amy Tincher’s, the transformation is still a work in progress. She says her husband, Adam, once “mildly” homophobic, is “listening to me and hearing me.” In May, the couple decided to leave their Liberty Township church, New Vienna United Methodist, and join a United Church of Christ congregation closer to their home, where Tincher was “blown away by the acceptance and the welcoming” at Sunday services. Tincher had started a pro-gay Bible study group at New Vienna and informally counseled gay teens, but some of her peers were turned off; two of them left the roughly 75-person congregation for a few weeks when they learned of her activism, the pastor, Sarah Chapman, told me. “I felt a tug like it was time to move on [to] a congregation that is hungry, thirsty for the knowledge that I have,” Tincher says.

Kudos to Tincher.  One can only hope that many more follow in her path and leave the bitter, psychologically damaged who need to hate others to accept themselves to watch their toxic parishes dwindle away toward extinction.