If You Believe in Gay People Please Leave Part II: Dr. David Gushee,
Part II of our three-part series on white evangelicalism and LGBTQ+ issues. Dan's interview with ethicist and former AAR president David Gushee, who left evangelicalism after changing his views of LGBTQ relationships.
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David Gushie is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University, and just finished a term as President of the American Academy of Religion.
He's the author of numerous books, most notably for us today, a book called Changing Our Mind.
A third edition just came out in 2017, in which he argues for the full inclusion of LGBTQ individuals within the Christian community And in 2018, very recently, a book called Still Christian, Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism.
So, Professor Gushie, I just want to say welcome.
Thank you for having me on your podcast, Daniel.
Yeah.
So sort of to set up our conversation here, in Still Christian, you detail your experience as an American evangelical academic, or an academic in American evangelicalism, and maybe that's a discussion how those fit.
Yeah.
spending the bulk of your career within colleges with a sectarian Christian identity, and you detail a number of points in your sort of academic, professional, ethical, and spiritual journey that eventually led to your kind of exodus from evangelicalism.
And some specific points that you highlight, I just sort of throw these out there and people can take a look at them if they want to check it out in your book.
But some things that caught my attention a long time ago, one was your advocacy for combating climate change among evangelicals.
Another was your full-throated opposition to torture, sort of in the post-9-11 world, which stood in contrast to a lot of conservative evangelicals.
And then the one that is of particular interest for us today, I think, is your advocacy for the full inclusion of LGBTQ individuals in the life of the Church.
And while all those be worth our time, it's that latter one that I'm wondering if you would talk about.
And so, you suggest in Still Christian that your growing support for members of the LGBTQ community has been a central element of your own professional and religious journey, and I'm just wondering if you can talk about that, and if you can talk about what has that done with your relationship to evangelicalism?
How would you typify that relationship now?
If you could just tell us something about that.
Sure.
It helps to situate my story, partly geographically and partly by age.
I graduated in 1993 with my doctorate, and that was a long time ago in terms of the LGBTQ issue, right?
Right.
And my first teaching job was at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, which had just been taken over by the fundamentalist Southern Baptists.
But the school was in a process of being moved to the right.
So that was certainly not going to be an environment in which anybody was out gay and in which that conversation was going to happen other than the condemnations of LGBT people that were being offered by the president.
Al Mohler.
And then in 96, I fled.
Southern Seminary and I went to a conservative, another conservative Baptist school, but not quite as conservative.
This was called Union University in West Tennessee and same kind of conservative evangelical ethos and, you know, about, I don't know, 4,000 students and pretty much everybody who was LGBTQ was closeted.
So for the first, I was there for 11 years.
So for the first 14 years of my career, I was in the kind of classic, hermetically sealed, overwhelmingly white, straight, male, lead, evangelical world.
And that was my world.
And I taught Christian ethics.
I didn't do much with sexuality.
It wasn't a focus.
But when I taught about what was then called homosexuality, I took a kind of a compassionate, conservative posture.
Right.
Not demagoguing the issue.
I was very much disturbed by people who did demagogue the issue, but I thought this was kind of not really an issue.
In fact, in my textbook that I wrote with Glenn Stassen of Fuller Seminary called Kingdom Ethics, in the first edition, which was published with InterVarsity, we took Again, that kind of soft, compassionate, conservative, you know, or traditionalist perspective.
Sorry, how would you describe that?
For listeners who may not... I think I understand what you mean by compassionate, conservative perspective.
How would you describe that in just a couple sentences?
Basically, God's design for sex is between a man and a woman in marriage.
Anything else is a deviation.
But, you know, we're all sinners and we all fall short in different ways.
So we don't need to be especially judgmental, but we need to hold the line on that norm.
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