Bethel McGrew: Sowing the wind

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday March 19. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: WORLD Opinions commentator Bethel McGrew on how pro-LGBT activists today are turning against same-sex marriage proponents of previous generations

BETHEL MCGREW: Twelve years ago, a young Harvard student named Matthew Vines went viral with an hour-long YouTube lecture in which he tried to convince his old church that they were wrong about homosexuality and the Bible. You could be Christian and support gay marriage, Vines argued, sharing that he himself was same-sex attracted and no longer believed it was a sin to pursue romance.

This presentation quickly established Vines as the progressive poster boy in the evangelical so-called “gay wars.” He would go on to publish a popular book and found a non-profit called The Reformation Project, drawing attention from big mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and TIME magazine.

But is Vines still the “it” boy in progressive “Christian” circles? The answer might surprise you. 

Recently, the Reformation Project put out an article called “Reform vs. Revolution,” summarizing a lecture where Vines makes a sharp distinction between “affirming theology” and “queer theology.” He still believes we should affirm gay romance, but that doesn’t mean we need to “queer” the church or the Bible. Rather, he says, “we just need to interpret [the Bible] more accurately and faithfully.” By contrast, queer theorists want to do away with sexual norms altogether, as blasphemously as possible. This really worries Vines.

But Vines’ lecture was not received well at all by his erstwhile fans, who widely denounced it on social media. One young lesbian woman attacked it as “just purity culture repackaged.” Another critic—someone who calls himself a woman and a “queer theologian”—complained at length that Vines is engaging in “respectability politics.” Where he is working for reformation, his critics from the left are working for revolution.

Watching this backlash, I’m reminded of similar denunciations around former gay marriage activist Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan was once an impassioned young man like Vines, insisting that “LGB” people deserved to be included in the institution of marriage. But as the “TQ+” people have made progressively more outrageous demands, Sullivan is also very worried. In a recent video, he warns that “they don’t believe in truth…about biology or anything else.”

Similarly, Vines affirms his commitment to “objective truth” against queer theorists who think all sexual morality is relative. Of course, he’s 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 now peering into the abyss of postmodernism, and they don’t like what they see.

They’re not alone. Prominent gay writer Douglas Murray will say that after the victories of feminism and gay rights, it was as if the West was on a train just pulling nicely into the station, when suddenly, that train went off the rails and crashed. But any good crash investigator will ask questions about what happened before the train set out for its destination. Questions like “Was gay marriage really the gently inclusive social reformation Sullivan and Vines think it was? Or was it a revolution in itself?

Vines claims to be deeply concerned about preserving truth. But the truth is that his own project began with a lie—about the law written not only in Scripture, but on our hearts. 

With that lie, Vines sowed the wind. Now, he is reaping the whirlwind.

I’m Bethel McGrew.

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