Playing hardball

It’s one of the most-cited books in conservative discussions of the gay agenda. Whether it changed the course of gay history or simply named and described changes already in motion is debatable. Either way, it was prophetic. But good luck trying to find an affordable copy under $90 now. I’m referring to After the Ball, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s classic guide to gay activism. Writing at the end of the ’80s, the Harvard-trained duo provocatively proposed that the gay revolution had failed. Their misguided fellow activists had lost the battle. But if everyone would just follow their battle plan instead, there was still time to win the war.

Kirk was a neuroscientist with a research interest in social psychology. Madsen was a political scientist with a very specific set of marketing skills that put him in high demand on Madison Avenue. Together, they made the case that where previous activists had flaunted their sexuality, the rising generation needed to take a more “crafty” approach. There was an art to persuading your average prejudiced dimwit, you see. You couldn’t just run down the street naked waving a Pride flag. You had to think strategically. You had to play the long game. 

Instead of trying to argue, fight, or shock the “homohaters,” Kirk and Madsen proposed the replacement tactics of “desensitizing” and “jamming.” First, soften up the culture with a steady stream of “reasonable” gay PR, until the topic becomes so common it’s downright “tiresome.” Next, “jam” the gears of people’s prejudice with propaganda that paints homophobes in the most cartoonishly unflattering light possible. Bonus points if you can bundle homophobia together with misogyny, anti-Semitism, or racism. Everyone wants to feel respectable, everyone wants to feel like they belong with “the pack.” So make people understand that if they persist in homophobia, they will become the outcasts. They will become the ones everyone makes fun of.

This taps into something deeply true about human nature. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t sometimes felt psychologically vulnerable to these tactics. I remember once being surprised by my anger when another supposedly conservative Christian writer implicitly hinted that I was a bigot, because I was unwilling to condemn old church pamphlets bluntly detailing the depravity of the gay lifestyle. Venting about this exchange later, without thinking too carefully, I began repeating, “I’m not homophobic!” By which I meant, “I’m not hateful. I’m not malicious. I’m not prejudiced, in the bad sense of the word.” I was a confident Christian, but in that moment, I was rattled.

Of special interest to Christian readers is how the authors planned out the hijacking of churches. At that time, even the average American mainline pewsitter was less than sympathetic to gay activism. No doubt the authors approved of an early ’90s sitcom where a progressive Episcopalian priest affirms our sensitive young gay hero behind his bigoted father’s back. But alongside this desensitization, they predicted churches would also have to be “jammed” by people “raising serious theological objections to conservative biblical teachings.” “Against the atavistic tug of Old Time Religion,” they write, “one must set the mightier pull of Science and Public Opinion.” They observe that this strategy worked with divorce and abortion, and it was poised to keep right on working.

In a 2015 retrospective interview, Madsen reveals that he himself was raised as an evangelical Christian. He’s typical of many “exvangelicals” who go on to become some of Christianity’s most strenuous attackers, unapologetically playing “hardball” with shallow arguments that are rhetorically effective on the poorly catechized. He predicts that churches will lose their young people as kids follow their “natural compassion” for gay friends. And indeed, we can observe that it’s not just Christian kids who are prone to waver but also Christian parents, or really anyone of any age who can’t discern what love without full affirmation looks like.

But a properly articulated Christian opposition to homosexuality has never sprung from some irrational denial that gay people exist and can make very nice friends, sometimes even battling such inclinations within church walls. The traditional ethic is not grounded in an ancient bit of code that arbitrarily fell from the sky, with no natural light to be shed on the matter. Rather, it is grounded in a robust understanding of what is best for a whole person’s flourishing, body and mind and soul. 

Kirk and Madsen knew this, because they weren’t idiots. They just laid bets that not enough people would notice—in or out of the Church—for their propaganda campaign to lose. Were they wrong?

In a cartoon after their heart, a Christian sheep tells a rainbow-colored sheep, “I don’t hate you. I just hate everything about you, and that’s love.” Yet Christian love consists precisely in rejecting the lie that “everything about you” must be dominated by your erotic appetites. Instead, we offer the gently insistent truth: You are not your desires. You are not your own. You are wonderfully made for so much more. And even now, your Maker stands at the door and knocks.