Gay sex, hookups and porn: What would Jesus do?

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Prominent evangelical Christian leaders met here this week to discuss a topic that’s typically taboo in Sunday church: sexuality. The Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics and religious liberty commission (ERLC) was hosting its first leadership summit, which its new leader said he hoped would provoke a “frank conversation” on sexual ethics. Speakers tackled topics including pornography, hookup culture, premarital sex, the decline of marriage, sexual abuse, divorce and — arguably the most contentious — homosexuality.

Younger attendees at the event, a meeting of the country’s largest Protestant denomination, sported beards, stylish plaid and the occasional NPR tote bag. Everyone spent the week tweeting — the summit attracted much attention from the Christian blogosphere — and one speaker jokingly asked people to “turn on their Bibles,” a nod to the popularity of e-books and Bible apps.

The group’s president, Russell Moore, took a gentler, less combative approach than his predecessor, Richard Land, who was known to make incendiary comments. (Just last week, Land suggested on a radio show that homosexuality is caused by childhood sexual abuse.) Many Southern Baptists, like other mainstream evangelicals, have given up talk of reparative therapy for gays in favor of love, grace and “peacemaking.” At this week’s summit, Florida pastor Jimmy Scroggins called for an end to “redneck theology” and said, “We have to stop telling ‘Adam and Steve’ jokes.”

But the event was also a setting where the word “fornicators” was used without irony and gay people were referred to as “homosexuals.” The meeting — with sessions such as The Gospel and Homosexuality — made clear that these evangelicals are not wavering in their stance on certain issues: Marriage is between a man and a woman, homosexual behavior is a sin, and church leaders must not condone it. And that raises the question: In a time of fast-growing embrace of gay rights, when more of their fellow Christians are insisting there’s room for debate on the issue, can conservatives maintain their vision of orthodoxy?

These days, for the first time, evangelicals are beginning to argue among themselves about homosexuality. Last month World Vision, the large evangelical anti-poverty organization, announced it would begin hiring married gay Christians. Less than 48 hours later, under public pressure from evangelical leaders including Moore, the organization reversed the decision.

The reversal was a triumphant moment for conservatives. But the fallout caused an uproar among progressive evangelicals. Polls consistently show that young evangelicals are far more accepting of gay relationships than older evangelicals are. A poll released in February by the Public Religion Research Institute, for example, found that white evangelical millennials are more than twice as likely as their elders to support same-sex marriage.

A new book by 24-year-old Matthew Vines, who is gay and evangelical, is adding to the debate. “God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships,” published on Tuesday by a Christian imprint of Penguin Random House, started to attract attention even before its release. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr., released an e-book rebuttal the same day.

In an interview last week, Vines said many evangelicals are open to changing their views on gay marriage, even if they tell pollsters they don’t support it. Young believers have gay classmates, co-workers and family members; the social costs of maintaining traditional views on gays are high, he said. “Their theological position is so much more open to changing than [Moore] wishes it were,” Vines said. “That’s not something he or any other evangelical leader is going to be able to change.”

At this week’s summit, compromise was not on the table. On Tuesday, Mark Regnerus, a controversial sociologist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, presented new unpublished data that found only 11 percent of young evangelicals who attend church weekly support gay marriage. Regnerus’ much-disputed 2012 research on gay parenting was cited frequently at the summit as proof that children need a mother and a father.

“I believe these truths are ascertainable by virtue of human reason, and they seem to be borne out in social science data,” Andrew Walker, the ERLC’s 29-year-old director of policy studies, said after hosting a session on threats to traditional marriage. He said he wouldn’t change his views on gay marriage and parenting even if social science conclusively proved that gay parents are no worse than straight ones. “I would still say, based on biblical precedent, that the child in that situation, while maybe on social outcomes is successful and flourishing, still has not been given access to either a mother or a father.”

The Southern Baptist leaders gathered in Nashville are holding firm. It’s not only their approach to homosexuality that many see as old-fashioned: They want Christians to wait until they marry to have sex and to abstain from pornography. 

“We’re moving into a time where a Christian understanding of sexuality is going to seem strange — it will seem freakish, and will in many cases seem subversive to the people around us,” Moore said in his keynote speech on Tuesday night. “What I think we ought to do as people of God is not to run away from the strangeness of Christianity.”