Admitting Evangelicals Don’t Understand Gay People, Baptist Leader Denounces ‘Ex-Gay’ Therapy

The President of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission today said evangelical Christian don’t understand what it’s like to be gay, and denounced so-called “ex-gay” therapy.

During a session at the Southern Baptist Convention‘s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission conference on homosexuality and marriage today, ERLC president Russell Moore announced that evangelical Christians don’t understand gay people. Dr, Moore went on to denounce harmful “ex-gay” or “reparative” therapy, calling them “severely counterproductive.”

“The utopian idea if you come to Christ and if you go through our program, you’re going to be immediately set free from attraction or anything you’re struggling with, I don’t think that’s a Christian idea,” Moore told journalists, according to a report today by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Religion News Service. “Faithfulness to Christ means obedience to Christ. It does not necessarily mean that someone’s attractions are going to change.”

Moore said evangelicals had an “inadequate view” of what same-sex attraction looks like.

“The Bible doesn’t promise us freedom from temptation,” Moore said. “The Bible promises us the power of the spirit to walk through temptation.”

“The idea that one is simply the sum of one’s sexual identity is something that is psychologically harmful ultimately,” Moore said. “And I think also we have a situation where gay and lesbian people have been treated really, really badly.”

Moore said the ERLC is working with parents of those who are gay and lesbian.

“The response is not shunning, putting them out on the street,” he said. “The answer is loving your child.”

In a separate session, Moore interviewed Rosaria Butterfield, who says she was in lesbian relationships for a decade before identifying as a Christian. She went from being a professor at Syracuse to a homeschooling mother married to a North Carolina pastor.

It’s unclear that Dr. Moore’s comments will foster any change in the 16 million member body of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose followers are historically among the most anti-gay in the nation. It would also be characteristic for other evangelicals to denounce this apparent attempt to soften the Church’s stance on LGBT people.

Moore’s predecessor, Dr. Richard Land, continues to be one of the most virulently anti-gay activists in the nation.

And just this morning, The New Civil Rights Movement published video of a conference speaker claiming Matthew Shepard’s hate crime murder was not a hate crime at all.

 

Image via ERLC