It eventually comes to this

Twelve years ago, a college student named Matthew Vines exploded onto the faith and culture scene with his hour-long lecture “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality.” The viral speech was delivered to his home church in Wichita, Kan., presenting a revisionist case for affirming the goodness of same-sex romance. Vines had taken two years out of his Harvard studies to research the presentation, which doubled as a personal testimony about growing up same-sex attracted in an evangelical home. This quickly established him as the progressive poster boy in the evangelical “gay wars,” with his work drawing major press coverage in outlets like the New York Times and TIME. He went on to write a book (God and the Gay Christian, in 2014) and found a non-profit (The Reformation Project, established in 2016), which are frequently cited as valuable resources by other progressive voices. 

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that Vines has recently been coming under heavy fire … from the left. 

The criticism was sparked by a new statement on the Reformation Project’s website, titled “Reform vs. Revolution.” The statement is crafted to draw a sharp distinction between “affirming theology” and “queer theology.” In an embedded conference lecture, delivered last fall, Vines warns that the goals of queer theorists are at odds with the goals of the Reformation Project. “We don’t need to ‘queer’ the Bible,” he says. “We just need to interpret it more accurately and faithfully. And we don’t need to ‘queer’ the church.” Where the Reformation Project argues for normalizing LGBTQ people in the Church, queer theorists want to do away with sexual norms altogether. Vines marshals an array of shocking quotes to make his point, including some that use sexually blasphemous language about God’s nature. He even cites and agrees with Carl Trueman that queer theory is an alarming manifestation of expressive individualism, even though they still disagree about same-sex marriage. 

This has generated harsh backlash from so-called “exvangelical” Twitter. A young lesbian woman decries the statement as “just purity culture repackaged at the end of the day.” A gender-confused man calling himself a queer theologian complains, “What they call affirming theology is really just fitting ourselves into a box to offend c-i-$ [as in “cis” for cisgender] people.” Billie Hoard, also a male self-styled “queer woman” and “theology” writer, pens a lengthy Substack accusing Vines of engaging in “respectability politics.” Where Vines favors reformation, Hoard favors “revolution.” “Despite their use of the LGBTQ+ acronym on their website and in their material,” Hoard wonders if the Reformation Project really supports “non-binary people, gender fluid and agender folx [sic].” 

Watching this drama unfold, I’m reminded of similar dynamics around pioneering gay writer Andrew Sullivan, the “godfather” of gay marriage. Sullivan was once an impassioned young man like Vines, insisting that gay people deserved to be included in the institution of marriage. The radical leftist fringe of Sullivan’s time resisted these arguments, but it was Sullivan who won the day in mainstream culture. Yet the seeds first planted by those ’80s and ’90s radicals are now flowering in the new millennium with the gradual mainstreaming of “TQ+.” And Sullivan, like Vines, is alarmed. “They don’t believe in truth,” Sullivan warns about trans rights activists in a recent interview clip. “They don’t believe there’s any stable truth … about biology or anything else.” Similarly, Vines in his conference lecture affirms his commitment to “objective truth” against queer theorists.

Of course, Vines is in no hurry to re-embrace traditional evangelicalism, just as Sullivan is in no hurry to re-embrace the traditional Catholicism of his youth. But both of them are speaking as fundamentally modern gay men, who made their arguments on modernist terms. Now, they are peering into the abyss of postmodernism, and they don’t like what they see. How on earth did we possibly get here? they wonder.

This is the part where the conservative observer delicately clears his throat.

It’s not that modernist liberals are wrong about objective truth or postmodern insanity. It’s not that Vines is wrong to be shocked and disgusted by all the quotes he reads out. It’s just that it simply won’t do to see sexual progressivism as a train that was nicely chugging along the LGB track until it inexplicably veered off into TQ+ (to borrow a popular metaphor from Douglas Murray). Any good investigator at the scene of a crash would want to ask questions about what happened before the train left the station. Questions like “Was gay marriage really the gently inclusive, minimally demanding social reformation Sullivan and Vines think it was, or was it a revolution in itself? And when ‘queer theologians’ like Billie Hoard tell Vines they should all have ‘basically the same goal,’ is there not some sense in which they’re right?” Vines claims to be deeply concerned about preserving truth. But the truth is that his own project began with a lie—not only about the law written in Scripture, but the law written on our hearts and in our bodies. 

Those who embrace lies sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.