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.  

Will Opposition to Gay Marriage Drive Young Christians from Church?

A piece on CNN that I bookmarked thew other day asks the question of whether the Christianist battle against gay marriage could end up driving young Christians away from church.  Based on the rate at which the so-called millenial generation is leaving organized religion, I would argue that we are already seeing the answer to the question.  And, as the CNN piece suggests, the situation may worsen - at least if one is an anti-gay advocate - as more young evangelicals become increasingly receptive to same sex marriage like their peers.  The irony in all of this is that the Christofascists blame gays for the decline of religion, yet it's really their own foul behavior and hatred and bigoty that is killing the Christian brand.  Based on my own children and their friends, they want nothing to do with denominations that spew constant anti-gay vitriol.  Here are some excerpts from the CNN piece:

As the battle over gay marriage heats up in this election year, one evangelical Christian writer is calling for a truce, fearing that the outspoken opposition to gay marriage among some church leaders could alienate an entire generation of religious youth.

“Evangelicals have been so submitted to these culture wars for so long, so that’s hard to give up,” evangelical writer and speaker Rachel Held Evans, 31, told msnbc.com. But “the majority of young Christians really, really, really want to stop with the political emphasis.”

A 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute shows the generation gap between young Christians and their elders is large, with 44 percent of white evangelicals aged 18-29 in support of marriage equality compared to only 12 percent of those 65 and older.

According to the same survey, nearly 70 percent of young Christians also agree that religious groups are alienating young people by being too judgmental about gay and lesbian issues.  “For young Christians, having gay and lesbian friends is just a part of our life,” Held Evans said. “It’s just really hard for us to see them as mere issues to debate, because we’re talking about our friends here.”

To Held Evans, American churches’ attitude toward gay rights will play an important role in the retention of young Christians. In an article she wrote following North Carolina’s recent vote to ban gay marriage, Held Evans points to data mentioned in David Kinnaman’s book You Lost Me, which shows that 59 percent of teens who were raised Christian abandon the church when they become adults. One of the main reasons, the article says, is the church’s attitude toward gay rights.

While young Christians may be divided on whether gay relationships should be celebrated in the church, Held Evans said, they’re increasingly unified on their stance against legislative action, such as North Carolina’s gay marriage ban and others that will be up for votes this fall.

"Even young Christians who think that gay relationships are not God’s design, a lot of them will still say ‘but I think it should be legal for gay people to get married, because this is America,’” Held Evans said.

“I think the main problem we have is that a lot of the folks voting about homosexuality, voting about gay marriage, don’t know any gay people,” she said. “And I’m certain that if they did, it would change their attitude.”

I guess the cynic in me almost hopes that the Roman catholic Church hierarchy and the Southern Baptist Convention  continue their anti-gay jihad.  It may be the key to killing their foul version of Christianity - something that would be a net gain for the world.

Young, Evangelical ... for Obama?

The Seattle Times has an article today that may indicate yet another problem for the GOP come November. Namely, the fact that some of the younger evangelicals may be moving to abandon the GOP and the mean, intolerant form of Christianity peddled by Daddy Dobson, et al. I know based on my own children and many of their friends that the Christianists are driving many of the younger voters to shun the GOP even when their parents remain within the GOP fold. Here are some story highlights:

*

Michael Dudley is the son of a preacher man. He's a born-again Christian with two family members in the military. He grew up in the Bible Belt, where almost everyone he knew was Republican. But this fall, he's breaking a handful of stereotypes: He plans to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.

*

Dudley's disenchantment with the GOP isn't unique among young, devoutly Christian voters. According to a September 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 15 percent of white evangelicals between 18 and 29, a group traditionally a shoo-in for the GOP, say they no longer identify with the Republican Party. Older evangelicals are also questioning their traditional allegiance, but not at the same rate.

*

But students at a recent bipartisan political union meeting at SPU say there's something more going on with young Christians than disenchantment with McCain. In an informal poll of the political union, the majority supported Obama. "I think it's a new movement starting," said Amy Archibald, 19, a sophomore at the evangelical school. "Most of us would never blindly follow the old Christian Right anymore. James Dobson has nothing to do with us. A lot of us are taking apart the issues, and thinking, 'OK, well, [none of the candidates] fits what I'm looking for exactly.' But if you're going to vote, you've got to take your pros with your cons."

*

Young evangelicals are more of a swing constituency than they've been for decades, said Andy Crouch, an editor at Christianity Today, a national evangelical magazine. "This could turn out to be the election where both parties realize that the evangelical vote is so hopelessly split down the middle that it's not worth courting them at all because what parties need are blocs that can be appealed to en masse," Crouch said. "Paradoxically, evangelicals would become less relevant than ever before."