The Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity (Dr. Mark Yarhouse’s research group) is conducting a new study on mixed orientation marriages. If you are in a mixed orientation marriage (that is, a marriage in which one spouse experiences same-sex attraction and the other spouse is attracted to the opposite sex), we would love for you to participate and also pass this survey on if you know others who are in mixed orientation marriages.

We are welcoming responses from both the sexual minority spouse and the heterosexual spouse, so once you’re finished, forward the survey on to your spouse, if you think they would be willing to participate. (Note that it is not necessary for both spouses to participate, but we welcome responses from either or both spouses.)

The survey should take 15-45 minutes to complete. At the end of the survey, you will be given the option to provide your contact information for a more in-depth phone interview.

Here is the link below.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PWRSTQD

Again, please feel free to share with others who are also in mixed orientation marriages.

If you search for the phrase “disinterested friendship” online, many of the articles you will find are attempts to explain paragraph 2359 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which lists “disinterested friendship” as one of the sources of support for homosexual persons seeking to live chaste lives.

The main difficulty is that, in English, the term “disinterested” can have two meanings. Most often, it means, “not interested, indifferent.” In a friendship that was “disinterested” (in this sense), friends wouldn’t care much for each other or for the friendship. But the older—and now rarer meaning—is “unbiased by personal interest or advantage; not influenced by selfish motives.” A few scans of 19th Century texts turn up in the search results, using the phrase “disinterested friendship” in this older, more positive sense.

The Catechism uses this older meaning of “disinterested,” as I showed in an older post that examined other uses of the word  in the Catechism. I concluded, based on the way the word was used in other paragraphs, that:

There is no reason that disinterested friendship should not delight in praising a friend. Disinterested friendship can be reciprocal and generous. There is no reason it should not be tender, forgiving, respectful, faithful, like a parent’s love for her child, or a child’s care for a dying parent. It is disinterested friendship because it has no selfish agenda. In the context of 2359, this would particularly forbid any sexual agenda. But to interpret this as calling for friends who are distant, uninterested, not concerned, or indifferent would do violence to the meaning of the word found in other contexts in the Catechism, and make no sense in the context of paragraph 2359. How would friends who are uninterested or indifferent provide the kind of support 2359 envisions?

Since the English phrase “disinterested friendship” seemed so ill-suited for communicating its intended meaning, I decided to explore the connotation of the corresponding phrase, “amitié désintéressée” in French, the language in which the Catechism was originally drafted. I thought this would help to understand what the drafters of the Catechism had in mind, and add to the analysis in my previous post.

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While in Arkansas this past weekend for a belated Thanksgiving, I went with my parents to see Boy Erased, the film version of Garrard Conley’s memoir of the same name about surviving a stint in a now-shuttered ex-gay treatment program in Memphis, Tennessee called Love in Action.

Conley’s story is in some ways discomfitingly similar to mine. He was the son of a Baptist preacher in Arkansas and realized he was gay sometime during his teenage years. I was the son of the most devout lay Baptists you could imagine, and, also from Arkansas, I knew I was gay from about the age of 13. My own brush with so-called “conversion therapy” was negligible compared to Conley’s, but I did imbibe a lot of its ideas over the radio waves during my adolescence. As I would later write when I was in my mid-twenties:

I remember listening to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio broadcast occasionally with my mother as we rode somewhere in the car together. My ears would perk up when the subject of homosexuality came up, which it did often, since this was the mid-’90s, and the “gay rights” movement was gaining steam. Dobson talked a lot about the “causes” of homosexuality — childhood sexual abuse, an emotionally distant father, the absence of affectionate male role models. I remember scrutinizing my past and present experiences. Did I fit these categories? I had never been sexually abused by anyone, let alone my parents. Was I close enough to my dad? I could think of one time I tried to initiate a weekly time of reading Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline with him and praying together, but it flopped. Plus, I never learned to play golf with him, nor did I want to take up deer hunting, as he seemed to hope I would sometimes. Did that mean I was suffering from a lack of paternal intimacy?

Dobson was one of the biggest promoters of the kind of therapeutic approaches depicted harrowingly and powerfully in Boy Erased. He advocated a popularized, lightly Christianized version of the Freudian origin story for same-sex desire. If homosexuality in boys is traceable to the toxic cocktail of an overbearing mother and a distant father, then it stood to reason that it could be treated — or even prevented. (Dobson viewed this as a compassionate, pastoral approach compared to the one that said to gay people, “You’re choosing to be gay, so, just stop it.”)

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We don’t attach other modifiers to our Christian faith when the modifier in question originates with sin or natures that are the product of the fall. We should no more endorse “gay Christianity” or “gay identity” than we should alcoholic Christianity, racist Christianity, or slanderous Christianity. We ought not modify our Christian walk with attributes born of fallen desires.

That’s from Andrew Walker’s review of David Bennett’s new book A War of Loves: The Unexpected Story of a Gay Activist Discovering Jesus. I can’t tell y’all how weary I am of hearing that criticism from my fellow traditionalist Christians.

In the first place, it takes no account of the way we “Side B” folks have qualified — again and again and again and… — what “gay” means to us. David himself qualifies it carefully in his book:

The word gay does not necessarily refer to sexual behavior; it can just as easily refer to one’s sexual preference or orientation and say nothing, one way or the other, about how one is choosing to express that orientation. So, whereas “stealing Christian” describes a believer who actively steals as an acted behavior, “gay Christian” may simply refer to one’s orientation and nothing more. This is why I rarely, if ever, use the phrase gay Christian without adding the adjective celibate, meaning committed to a life of chasteness in Christ. To call myself a celibate gay Christian specifies both my sexual orientation and the way I’m choosing to live it out.

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Over a lunch last summer, a new friend and I discovered that we had a mutual friend in David Bennett, a current doctoral student at Oxford and a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. I have known David for a few years as a thoughtful writer and a delightfully larger-than-life personality. He has written powerfully about his conversion from atheism — he worked as a non-religious gay activist in his native Australia before migrating to the UK — to Christianity. And, as someone who accepts the historic Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality, David has also written movingly about his calling to a life of celibacy and the way he tries to live out that calling in community.

As we swapped anecdotes about David, my new friend paused and said, “At heart, David is an evangelist.” I immediately nodded. Although David is many things (a catholic reader, a charismatic “prayer warrior,” an enthusiastic host and friend-maker), he is, above all, someone who loves those who don’t (yet) love Jesus. He is, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, a herald of the good news. He wants you to know that Jesus has invaded his life — and can transform yours too.

His conversion memoir, A War of Loves: The Unexpected Story of a Gay Activist Discovering Jesus, releases today, and I hope you’ll consider reading it. Here is what I wrote for the back cover:

Imagine a gay comedian like Stephen Fry writing a conversion memoir like C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy or Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy, and you’ll have some idea of the laughter and the tears that await you in these exuberant, aching, Jesus-obsessed pages. David Bennett has found that, far from eliminating his love for men, Christ’s call to take up his cross and follow the path of celibacy has led him deeper into love. David’s story of embracing that call is disarming, captivating, and — most of all — hope-giving.

I mean that endorsement, and I hope it might entice you to pick up the book.

And congratulations to you, David, on your pub day!

Today over at First Things, I’ve got a piece up reflecting on this year’s Revoice conference, which was the highlight of my summer. Here’s a snippet:

In a line that’s become a kind of mantra among Revoice attendees and presenters, the celibate lesbian Catholic writer Eve Tushnet has said: “[Y]ou can’t have a vocation of not-gay-marrying and not-having-sex. You can’t have a vocation of No.” What Revoice offers—and, please God, will go on offering for years to come—is a way of thinking Christianly about homosexuality and other non-straight sexual orientations that moves beyond enumerating the sins we’re called to renounce. Revoice is trying to pose the deeper question: To which forms of love and friendship and service are we called to say yes?

Please read the rest!

Sam Allberry discusses the difference between temptation and sin with Denny Burk, and explains why saying that same-sex attraction is sin can “crush” the faith of young Christians with same-sex attraction, and “tip them over the edge pastorally.” Taken from “Q&A with a same-sex attracted pastor—Sam Allberry” starting around 12:13.

Reading yesterday’s Public Discourse article by Denny Burk and Rosaria Butterfield, I was startled to read their claim that distinguishing between the temptation of same-sex attraction and sin, as Ron Belgau did in his recent Public Discourse article, is a Catholic thing, something we Reformed Protestants just don’t do, or at least ought not do.

As a Reformed Christian (PCA) myself, I’d be the first to acknowledge that there are real differences in how Reformed Christians tend to think about sin and how Roman Catholics tend to think about sin. But I’d never have thought to draw the line where Burk and Butterfield do, precisely because so many Reformed Protestants, including those presently or formerly same-sex attracted individuals most connected with Burk, Butterfield, and the Nashville Statement—Sam Allberry, Christopher Yuan, and, well, Butterfield herself, all repeatedly draw this distinction in their writings and in their talks.

The following quotes, taken directly from Butterfield, Allberry, and Yuan’s writings, show that they draw quite similar distinctions to the ones Burk and Butterfield criticize Belgau for drawing. (Note: Kindle locations give the approximate starting point for each quote, and appear to vary between different Kindle editions; if you have trouble locating the quote, search for a few words of the first sentence.)

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Over at Commonweal, David Michael writes about his Swedish wedding and how it drew his and his wife’s friends in at every turn:

Ignoring the standard U.S. wedding magazine checklist, filled with inconceivable items like second lingerie fittings, my then-fiancée Johanna made a simple checklist: food, decorations, music, readers, a priest. Next to every item, she wrote the names of our friends.

I balked at putting our friends to work, but for Johanna, it wasn’t even a question. “That’s the best part. They actually get to spend time with the bride and groom during the preparations. You might only get five minutes with them at the actual wedding. Besides,” she added, “I helped out at all their weddings.”

When she set up shop at her grandmother’s house a few days before the wedding, several of her friends joined her. A law student who had previously studied cooking began to bake the desserts and cake. A couple arrived with their baby tucked in their backseat alongside a PA system, dance-floor lights, and a keg of homebrew. They were joined by more Swedes, and soon there were more than a dozen family members and friends working side-by-side. We made decorations and prepared the food, pausing for a meal or to go swimming in the sea before continuing with the preparations. Even the Americans got in on the act: our friend Rachel arrived, all the way from Seattle, bearing the programs and nameplates that she’d designed and printed, and her husband came with the suit I was borrowing from him. The day before the wedding, a dozen or so people—Americans and Swedes—helped decorate the church reception hall from mid-afternoon until well into the night. Admittedly, there were moments I wished we’d had the money to pay someone else to set up, but the work provided a sense of quiet meaning and care that’s hard to find at a bar or a restaurant. For our friends, the work provided the opportunity to make their love manifest.

I was lucky enough to be a guest at this wedding, arriving with two other American friends in time to help set up the reception hall and mingle with the other guests while doing so. One of them brought me a beer and pulled his chair close to mine so we could chat and get to know one another while he kept an eye on his baby son asleep in a carrier on the lawn. The way David describes the atmosphere in his essay is precisely how it was: the mood was laidback, the conversation was meandering, and the occasion wasn’t “about” anything other than being together.

And for David, one of the most significant things about these Swedish customs is that it provides something in short supply in the States: “a public notion of friendship.”

What occasions do Americans have to tell friends that we love them for who they are and to acknowledge that love publicly? Our culture allows us ample opportunities to make friends, but it affords very few opportunities to mark that friendship. And even when we have those opportunities, we often squander them.

At least among American men, declarations of love between friends are frowned upon, if not verboten. If we do express our mutual love, we frame it in irony and wit, employing terms like “bromance.” But when you cannot directly say “I love you”—privately or publicly—your capacity to love your friends becomes diminished, and friendships are reduced to what Aristotle calls “friendships of pleasure.”

By contrast, at David and Johanna’s wedding, the multiple-hours-long reception provided an opportunity for friend after friend to offer toasts, publicly celebrating and declaring their love for the bride and groom.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is one of my hobbyhorses: We need more ways to honor and celebrate our friends! On finishing David’s essay about his Swedish wedding, I found myself thinking about the times, after my speaking gigs, when I’ve been asked for thoughts about how we might begin to do that—how we might learn to more easily and readily declare in public our love for our friends. From now on, I may just send them a link to David’s piece and say, “Start here. Look for ways to do things like this.”

In response to a tweet calling my recent Public Discourse article defending Spiritual Friendship and Revoice “the single most helpful, most thought provoking, and most clear thing” from the Spiritual Friendship perspective, Denny Burk tweeted in reply,

I agree. And I would add that Belgau has many other thoughtful articles on these themes on the Spiritual Friendship website as does Wesley Hill. There are still important differences between us, but I appreciate the thoughtful engagement here.

In light of recent controversies, I genuinely appreciate this acknowledgement, even though differences remain.

In an effort to explore at least one dimension of those remaining differences in a—hopefully!—thoughtful and charitable way, I want to ask Denny—and his associates like Albert Mohler, Owen Strachan, and Colin Smothers—a question about how Calvinists should view the sanctification of friendship in this life, in cases of ongoing struggle with the desire for homosexual sex.

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