Position · 1970

Affirming Theology

The view that faithful, lifelong same-sex relationships can be holy, and that churches should bless or marry same-sex couples and ordain gay and lesbian people on the same terms as others.

History

Roots

For most of Christian history the question did not arise in this form. Church teaching treated same-sex acts as sinful, read the Sodom story (Genesis 19) as a judgment on them, and had no category for a stable same-sex orientation. The modern debate began when that reading was questioned on historical grounds.

The first serious challenge came from the Anglican scholar Derrick Sherwin Bailey. His Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955, Archive.org) argued that the sin of Sodom was gross inhospitality, not homosexuality, pointing to texts like Ezekiel 16:49. Bailey did not argue for blessing same-sex unions, but his work fed the Church of England’s submission to the Wolfenden Committee, whose 1957 report urged decriminalisation in Britain. The separation of what the law should punish from what the church should teach opened the space the later debate filled.

Causes

The affirming position took shape in the 1970s, pushed by the gay rights movement after Stonewall (1969), by psychiatry dropping homosexuality from its list of disorders (1973), and above all by gay and lesbian Christians who refused to choose between their faith and their lives. Troy Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles in 1968 as a denomination with an explicit ministry to gay people (MCC history). In 1972 the United Church of Christ ordained William R. Johnson, the first openly gay minister in a mainline Protestant church.

Scholarship followed. Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, both evangelical feminists, published Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? (1978, Archive.org), the first book from inside evangelicalism to ask whether committed same-sex couples might be accepted. John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980, Archive.org) argued that the early and medieval church was far less hostile than assumed until the twelfth century. Robin Scroggs’s The New Testament and Homosexuality (1983, Archive.org) argued that Paul’s world knew mainly pederasty and exploitation, so his condemnations could not have had loving adult partnerships in view.

Influence

Through the 1990s and 2000s mainline Protestant bodies moved denomination by denomination, usually after long and bitter debate. The Episcopal Church consecrated Gene Robinson, a partnered gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America allowed clergy in “lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships” in 2009 (ELCA social statement on human sexuality). The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opened ordination in 2011 and redefined marriage as between “two people” in 2015. The Methodist Church of Great Britain allowed same-sex weddings in 2021.

Each move strained the wider communion it belonged to. Robinson’s consecration followed the Lambeth Conference 1998, whose Resolution I.10 declared “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture” (text); the result was a near-break between the North American churches and much of the Global South, and the founding of GAFCON in 2008. In the Church of England, the House of Bishops commended Prayers of Love and Faith for blessing same-sex couples in December 2023, without changing the church’s doctrine of marriage (press release). The United Methodist Split is the starkest case: after a 2019 special conference tightened the rules, about 7,600 American congregations left, and the 2024 General Conference then removed the 40-year ban on gay clergy (UM News).

Key ideas and contributors

The texts addressed something else. Affirming scholars argue that the handful of passages on same-sex acts condemn practices unlike modern committed relationships. On this reading, Sodom is about violence and inhospitality, the Levitical laws (Leviticus 18:22) belong to a purity code Christians no longer keep, and the Greek term arsenokoitai in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 refers to exploitative sex, possibly with boys or slaves. Scroggs and Boswell set out versions of this case.

Paul’s “against nature” was about excess, not orientation. Romans 1:26–27 is the hardest text for the affirming side. James Brownson’s Bible, Gender, Sexuality (Eerdmans, 2013) argues that Paul’s ancient categories of “nature” concerned lust that overflowed its bounds and the dishonouring of social status, not the orientation of people who love one person faithfully. Brownson also argues that “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24) describes a kinship bond, not the anatomical fit of male and female.

The church has changed its mind before. Affirming writers appeal to the inclusion of Gentiles in Acts 10–15, where the church saw the Spirit given to people it had thought unclean and changed its rule. Jeffrey Siker and Luke Timothy Johnson made this argument in the 1990s and 2000s, Johnson saying that the experience of gay Christians must be weighed alongside Scripture as the experience of Gentile converts once was. Opponents note that the church’s earlier changes on slavery and on women are themselves disputed analogies.

Bad fruit counts against a teaching. Matthew Vines’s God and the Gay Christian (Convergent, 2014) popularised the argument that a teaching which requires lifelong celibacy of everyone with a same-sex orientation produces despair, broken families and suicide, and that by Jesus’ test (Matthew 7:15–20) this is evidence the teaching is wrong. Vines writes as an evangelical who holds a high view of Scripture, which made the book unusually influential. The ethicist David Gushee’s Changing Our Mind (2014) made the same turn from a conservative evangelical starting point.

The covenant is the point. Most affirming theology keeps a strict sexual ethic: marriage is lifelong, exclusive and faithful. Its claim is that these goods can be lived by two men or two women, so the church should extend marriage rather than lower it.

Key controversies

Do the texts really say something else? The fullest reply is Robert Gagnon’s The Bible and Homosexual Practice (2001, Abingdon; Archive.org). Gagnon argued that ancient writers did know of mutual, adult same-sex relationships, that Paul’s wording in Romans 1 echoes the creation account, and that arsenokoitai was coined from the Greek of Leviticus and so covers same-sex intercourse in general. David F. Wright’s article “Homosexuals or Prostitutes?” (Vigiliae Christianae, 1984) made the same lexical case against Boswell. Boswell’s history was also widely criticised by medievalists.

Creation, not prohibition. Defenders of the Traditional Marriage Ethic say the debate over six texts misses the foundation. Jesus grounded marriage in God making humans “male and female” (Matthew 19:4–6), and the whole biblical picture of marriage, down to Christ and the church in Ephesians 5, depends on sexual difference. Richard Hays’s The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996, Archive.org) put this case with great care and became a standard text for the traditional side.

How experience relates to Scripture. Critics say the Gentile analogy fails because Acts rests on an explicit scriptural argument (Acts 15:15–18), and that letting experience overturn a consistent biblical witness gives up the authority of Scripture itself. Affirming writers reply that the church always reads Scripture in light of new knowledge, as it did with cosmology. The most striking turn came from Hays himself: in The Widening of God’s Mercy (with Christopher B. Hays, Yale, 2024) he argued that the Bible shows God repeatedly enlarging the circle of his people, and moved to an affirming position.

A third way: celibate gay Christians. Some gay Christians hold a traditional ethic while openly naming their orientation, a position often called “Side B”. Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting (2010) and the Revoice conference (from 2018) represent this view. Affirming writers think it asks too much; some traditionalists think it concedes too much.

Unity and the global church. Most Christians worldwide belong to churches that reject the affirming view. The Roman Catholic Church holds that same-sex acts are disordered (CDF letter, 1986) and in 2021 ruled that the church cannot bless same-sex unions (responsum). Fiducia Supplicans (2023, Vatican) then allowed brief, non-liturgical blessings of couples while denying any change in doctrine; many African bishops refused to apply it. The Eastern Orthodox churches and most Evangelical, Pentecostal and Global South Anglican bodies also reject it. Affirming churches answer that truth is not settled by numbers; their critics answer that a teaching held by nearly every church in every century should not be changed by a regional minority acting alone.

What remains unresolved

Both sides now largely agree on what the biblical writers said and disagree over what it means for people the writers may not have pictured. The deeper question is about method: how much weight the church’s experience and modern knowledge can carry against a consistent textual witness, and whether marriage is defined by its covenant or by sexual difference. Behind that sits a practical question no denomination has solved, which is whether people who disagree about this can remain in one church.