Still Time to Care

What We Can Learn from the Church's Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality

Greg Johnson

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310116066
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

Charting the path forward for our churches and ministries in providing care —not a cure— for our non-straight sisters and brothers who are living lives of costly obedience to Jesus.

At the start of the gay rights movement in 1969, evangelicalism's leading voices cast a vision for gay people who turn to Jesus. It was C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer and John Stott who were among the most respected leaders within theologically orthodox Protestantism. We see with them a positive pastoral approach toward gay people, an approach that viewed homosexuality as a fallen condition experienced by some Christians who needed care more than cure.

With the birth and rise of the ex-gay movement, the focus shifted from care to cure. As a result, there are an estimated 700, 000 people alive today who underwent conversion therapy in the United States alone. Many of these patients were treated by faith-based, testimony-driven parachurch ministries centered on the ex-gay script. Despite the best of intentions, the movement ended with very troubling results. Yet the ex-gay movement died not because it had the wrong sex ethic. It died because it was founded on a practice that diminished the beauty of the gospel.

Yet even after the closure of the ex-gay umbrella organization Exodus International in 2013, the ex-gay script continues to walk about as the undead among us, pressuring people like me to say, "I used to be gay, but I'm not gay anymore. Now I'm just same-sex attracted."

For orthodox Christians, the way forward is to take a close look at our history. It is time again to focus with our Neo-Evangelical fathers on caring over attempting to cure.

With warmth and humor, as well as original research, Still Time to Care provides:

• Guidance for the gay person who hears the gospel and finds themselves smitten by the life-giving call of Jesus.
• Guidance for the church to repent of its homophobia and instead offer gospel-motivated love and compassion.

part one

The Paradigm
of Care

one

C. S. Lewis and His Gay
Best Friend, Arthur

In homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, [the works of God] can be made manifest: . . . every disability conceals a vocation, if only we find it, which would “turn the necessity to glorious gain.”

—C. S. Lewis

They grabbed Bedborough and threw him in the choky. That’s the slammer to Americans. It was May 31, 1898, and George Bedborough would be arraigned for attempting to “corrupt the morals of Her Majesty’s Subjects.”

A bookseller by trade, he had slipped a hardbound copy of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 2 to an undercover investigator pretending to want to purchase the volume, which included chapters exploring the nature, prevalence, and causes of sexual inversion—homosexuality. George Cecil Ives, a close friend of Oscar Wilde, had only recently organized the first group in England to advocate for the rights of such individuals. Sodomy had been decriminalized in France a century earlier; the Order of Chaeronea would seek the same in the United Kingdom. Whether or not one acted on the tendency, to be sexually inverted in the Anglo-American world was to be mentally diseased and societally dangerous.

Outcast.

After the arrest, George Bernard Shaw and others formed a Free Speech Committee to work for Bedborough’s vindication. The bookseller accepted a plea bargain and got off with a fine of one hundred pounds—a heavy sum at the time, equivalent to about fifteen thousand dollars today—for selling a psychological textbook on homosexuality.

It was into this world the next month that solicitor Albert Lewis and his wife, Florence, announced the birth of their baby boy Clive Staples. The great-great-grandson of a bishop, C. S. Lewis would wander far from God before coming to saving faith in Jesus. And he would model for Christians in the twentieth century a charitable Christian posture toward gay people. He would even add his voice to those seeking to decriminalize homosexuality. This was before the culture wars trained believers to take an adversarial posture toward gay people. Before the ex-gay movement told us they could become straight if they tried.

THE BIG FOUR

Four figures dominated the imagination of evangelicals in the last half of the twentieth century. First, we have C. S. Lewis, who has been identified as evangelicals’ favorite Christian thinker of the twentieth century, even though Lewis never identified as an evangelical.¹ Second, we have Francis Schaeffer, whom Christianity Today once identified as “Our St. Francis.” Schaeffer did more than any other figure to speak into a post-Christian culture and foster the evangelical mind.² Third, we have Billy Graham, who was known universally as the Pastor to Presidents and was the ceremonial figurehead of the postwar neo-evangelicalism that arose as a response to the narrowness of American fundamentalism. The neo-evangelicalism that attempted to cast a positive Christian vision for a modern age. Finally, we have John R. W. Stott, the longtime global evangelical leader whom, upon his death in 2011, the BBC hailed as the Protestant Pope.³

Lewis. Schaeffer. Graham. Stott.

In the discourse of these four Christian leaders, as in the works of other educated evangelical elites at the time, we see the beginnings of a positive and biblically orthodox Christian vision for gay people who follow the call of Jesus Christ.

For Lewis, this was personal.

HIS GAY BEST FRIEND, ARTHUR

Twentieth-century evangelicals adored Clive Staples Lewis. A 1998 poll of Christianity Today readers rated Lewis as “the most influential writer in their lives.” J. I. Packer called Lewis “our patron saint.” While Lewis taught literature at Oxford and Cambridge, he is perhaps best known for his children’s books and his Christian apologetic writing. He is well recognized as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity. Lewis never wrote a book or article on the topic of homosexuality. Yet when he did comment on the topic, he did so with a posture of genuine personal humility.

Lewis hesitated to speak authoritatively on matters in which he had little experience. In his preface to Mere Christianity, he explains his great dislike of anyone who from a position of safety issues commands to men on the front line. Hence he avoided speaking about contraception. “I am not a woman nor even a married man, nor am I a priest. I did not think it my place to take a firm line about pains, dangers and expenses from which I am protected.”⁴ As a sexually inactive layperson, Lewis was content to remain silent. He takes a similar stance on the topic of homosexuality. In Surprised by Joy, his spiritual autobiography, he labels homosexual sin “one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit.” He then adds, “I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.”

When he does discuss homosexuality, Lewis displays a posture of humility, empathy, and compassion. His lifelong best friend, Arthur Greeves, was gay. Lewis called him his “first friend” and made it clear to him that his sexual orientation never would be an issue in their friendship, even though Lewis was straight. Lewis’s own weakness as a young man tended more toward sadomasochism; he signed some 1917 letters to Arthur with “Philomastix,” or whip lover, knowing that Arthur did not approve. When Arthur came out to Lewis as gay the following year, Lewis felt as though he was in no position to judge. Lewis himself was “affected in this strange way” by the attraction to mix sexual intimacy with the infliction of pain.⁵

My Most Intimate Friend

Lewis adored Arthur, describing him as “after my brother, my oldest and most intimate friend.” They had lived across the street from one another as boys growing up in Belfast. Arthur grew up in a very harsh Plymouth Brethren home. Lewis was an atheist from the time he first conceived of religion. Yet Lewis described Greeves as his alter ego.

Writing of his first meeting with Arthur, he states, “Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even a greater.”⁶

The two remained close into adulthood, when they were in constant communication even over great distance. A published collection of Lewis’s three hundred letters to Greeves is filled with deep affection and runs to 592 pages.⁷ These letters provide us with great insight into their relationship.

When Arthur came out to Lewis as gay in 1918, then-atheist Lewis responded with support. “Congratulations old man, I am delighted that you have had the moral courage to form your own opinions <independently,> in defiance of the old taboos.” He added, “I am not sure that I agree with you: but, as you hint in your letter, <this penchant is a sort of mystery only to be fully understood by those who are made that way—and my views on it can be at best but emotion.>”⁸ Greeves may very well have had a romantic crush on Lewis. If so, though, Lewis never made an issue of it.⁹

Thirteen years later, when Lewis came to believe in Jesus as Christ, Greeves was the first person in whom Lewis confided.¹⁰

In a December 29, 1935, letter to Arthur, Lewis offers spiritual and relational support during a dark moment in his friend’s life. Upon hearing that Arthur had just ended an unhealthy relationship with another man, Lewis takes pains to validate Arthur’s feelings of loss. “As regards to your news—sympathy . . . sympathy on the wrench of parting and the gap it will leave” and “I don’t think you exaggerate at all in your account of how it feels.”

Not the Worst Sin

While Lewis didn’t make an issue of Arthur’s sexual orientation, he did take issue with those who target people for it. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis zeroes in on what he saw as the hypocrisy of those who treat homosexuality as a special category of sin. He points out the homosexual practices that were then common in English public schools like his own, Malvern, which he described using the fictitious name Wyvern, but suggests that there were bigger problems—problems that can’t give the sexual stuff “anything like a first place among the evils” of the school.¹¹ The schoolboys would have preferred girls had they had access to any, Lewis argues. But their options were limited, and their sexual behaviors were mild in comparison with their cruelty, worldliness, and singular focus on self-advancement.

While Lewis viewed any and all same-sex sexual intimacy as sin, he insisted it was not the worst of sins. “There is much hypocrisy on this theme. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this.” The sexual sins were hardly the most problematic in his school. “What Christian,” he asks, “in a society as worldly and cruel as that of Wyvern, would pick out the carnal sins for special reprobation?” He concludes, “Cruelty is surely more evil than lust and the World at least as dangerous as the Flesh.”

This is not to say that Lewis thought the matter morally neutral. Lewis cautions not only against homosexual practice but against same-sex romance altogether. “I am sure that any attempt to evade [bearing his cross] (e.g., by mock- or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way.”¹²

A Positive Vision

In a letter from C. S. Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken dated May 15, 1954 (which Vanauken published in A Severe Mercy), Lewis suggests that a same-sex orientation might carry with it a vocation—a positive calling. Vanauken had sought Lewis’s advice on how to answer questions from students about homosexuality. Lewis writes,

I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homosexual desires is sin. This leaves the homosexual no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (John 9:1–3): only the final cause, that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e. that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we find it, which would “turn the necessity to glorious gain.” Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations which, if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homosexual has to accept sexual abstinence. . . .

What should the positive life of the homosexual be? I wish I had a letter which a pious male homosexual, now dead, once wrote to me—but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social role which mere men and mere women could not give. But it is all horribly vague—too long ago. Perhaps any homosexual who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under Divine guidance will, however, be shown the way.¹³

From Lewis, we see a positive vision for the same-sex-oriented Christian. When we come to Jesus and accept our cross—whether the loneliness, the temptations, or the abuse from the well intended—God can redeem the tears that have accompanied it. We see here a suggestion that God deigns to bring blessing out of a fallen condition, that through a frowning providence God himself will be glorified. We see here a vision for the works of God to be made manifest. That’s a posi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: I Used to Be Gay
• A Note About Terminology
• Part 1: The Paradigm of Care
• 1. C. S. Lewis and His Gay Best Friend, Arthur
• 2. Evangelicalism Before the Ex-Gay Movement
• 3. John Stott: Architect of the Paradigm of Care
• 4. A Positive Gospel Vision
• Part 2: The Paradigm of Cure
• 5. The Birth of a Movement
• 6. “From Gay to Straight”
• 7. Conversion Therapies
• 8. The Ex-Gay Script
• 9. Fissures from the Beginning
• 10. The Movement Matures
• 11. Questioning the Paradigm
• 12. The Death of Cure
• 13. Postmortem
• Part 3: The Rising Challenge to a Historical Ethic
• 14. Did We Get the Biblical Sexual Ethic Wrong?
• 15. Tackling the Argument from Cultural Distance
• 16. Is the Biblical Ethic Inherently Violent to Gay People?
• Part 4: A Path Forward
• 17. Confronting the Walking Dead
• 18. Ending (Unintentional) Emotional Abuse
• 19. Picking Up the Ball We Dropped Forty Years Ago
• 20. Celibacy and Hope
• Conclusion
• Notes