Before you read, I want to thank my friend Chris Curry, who graciously edited this piece. Chris is a brilliant writer with decades of experience, but even more than that, his voice within the LGBTQ+ community has helped me see the heart of this conversation more clearly. His feedback, and friendship, shaped this essay in ways that words can’t fully capture. [@chriscurrykc]
I was 19 and sitting in a Bible college class when I first heard someone called a “false teacher” in real time. My professor was discussing a local pastor who had recently shifted his stance on women in leadership, and the term hung in the classroom air like a strong odor. Not someone who denied the Resurrection, mind you. Not someone who abandoned the gospel or rejected Christ’s divinity. Someone who changed his mind about whether women could preach. Even at 19, with one year of biblical studies under my belt, something felt off about the math.
When Everything Became About One Thing
Fast-forward 17 years, and I’m watching this same script play out with stunning predictability across American Christianity, only now the stage has shifted entirely to human sexuality. Pastors who have devoted decades to feeding the hungry, caring for the marginalized, and preaching Christ crucified find themselves branded as heretics the moment they question traditional interpretations of a few verses in a 31,000-verse book. Entire denominations have fractured not over the Trinity or the Resurrection, but over who can marry whom and what that means for church membership.
The math still doesn’t add up, but the pattern has become crystal clear: we’ve created a new orthodoxy where faithfulness to Jesus is measured primarily by one’s position on LGBTQ+ issues. And let me be clear: for LGBTQ+ Christians, your belonging in Christ is not up for debate. You are not a problem to be solved, but a gift to the church.
Yet, somehow, in a religion founded by a man who spent most of his time talking about money, power, and caring for the least of these, we’ve constructed a litmus test that would have been foreign to the early church and is still not the primary concern for much of the global church today.
So, how did this happen?
The Making of a Litmus Test
It didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen by accident. The elevation of human sexuality as the defining issue of Christian faithfulness represents a fascinating case study in how religious communities create boundaries and police belonging. It's a story that involves cultural anxiety, political alignment, and the very human tendency to make complex faith simple by reducing it to a single, clear line in the sand.
The historical record shows us that Christianity has always wrestled with how to interpret difficult passages and apply ancient wisdom to contemporary questions. The early church debated circumcision and food laws. Medieval Christians argued about just war theory. The Reformation era church split over papal authority. Every generation has faced the challenge of discerning which hills are worth dying on and which battles reflect cultural moment more than eternal truth.
But something shifted in the late 20th century American church. As sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry document in Taking America Back for God1, certain cultural issues became proxies for broader political and social commitments. Opposition to LGBTQ+ inclusion wasn't just about biblical interpretation—it became a way of signaling resistance to broader cultural changes around gender, sexuality, and traditional authority structures. The theology became inseparable from the politics, and the politics became inseparable from identity.
The Weight of a Few Verses
Here’s what strikes me as particularly troubling: we’ve built an entire orthodoxy around a few biblical passages while largely ignoring the hundreds of verses about economic justice, care for immigrants, and peacemaking. Jesus spoke directly about divorce, remarriage, and economic inequality far more than he ever addressed homosexuality (which he didn’t address at all). Paul wrote extensively about the dangers of wealth and the call to radical hospitality. The Hebrew prophets spent entire books condemning economic exploitation and social injustice.
Yet somehow, the question of whether two people can marry has become more central to Christian identity than whether we’re caring for the widow and orphan. A pastor can preach prosperity theology, support policies that harm the poor, or ignore racial injustice and still be considered doctrinally sound, but the moment they affirm a same-sex couple, their faithfulness becomes suspect. I find that so ridiculous.
This isn't to say questions of sexuality and inclusion don't matter deeply—they absolutely do, especially for LGBTQ+ Christians whose very sense of belonging and belovedness hangs in the balance. But there's a difference between treating an issue as important and treating it as the singular test of orthodoxy.
New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, hardly a progressive voice, has noted the irony here:
“We have allowed ourselves to be distracted by debates about sexuality while the world burns with injustice and the church often stands on the wrong side of history.”2
Wright isn’t advocating for any particular position on sexuality, but he’s pointing to a troubling reality about our priorities and focus.
The Weaponization Playbook
This pattern of making secondary issues primary isn’t new to Christianity. Throughout church history, Scripture has been weaponized to defend slavery, justify the subjugation of women, support authoritarian governments, and maintain economic systems that benefit the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. In each case, the same playbook emerges: take a handful of verses, build a theological system around them, and then declare that system essential to orthodox faith.
The slavery debate in American Christianity provides a particularly instructive parallel. Southern Baptist seminaries taught for decades that slavery was biblically justified and that opposing it was to reject biblical authority. As the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's own 2018 historical report acknowledges, "The founding fathers of this school — all four of them — were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery," and the institution's teachers and leaders systematically used the Bible to justify the practice.3 Prominent pastors argued that abolitionists were liberals who didn't take Scripture seriously. The same hermeneutical moves we see today—literalistic readings, cultural context dismissed as compromise, authority language used to shut down conversation—dominated those debates as well.
The Fruit We’re Actually Bearing
This is where the rubber meets the road for me. When I look at what our current orthodoxy around sexuality has produced, I don’t see the fruit of the Spirit flourishing. I see LGBTQ+ teenagers kicked out of Christian homes at alarming rates. I see suicide attempts among young people who’ve been told their very existence is an abomination to God. I see families torn apart, friendships destroyed, and churches hemorrhaging young people who can’t reconcile the love they’ve been taught with the exclusion they’ve witnessed. That’s why I refuse to treat this conversation as abstract. LGBTQ+ Christians are beloved children of God, and their full inclusion isn’t just an “issue”—it’s about lives, dignity, and the gospel itself.
On the flip side, I see churches that have chosen inclusion reporting deeper engagement with Scripture, more robust theological education, and stronger commitments to social justice. I see LGBTQ+ Christians whose faith has been refined rather than abandoned, who speak of God’s love with a depth that comes from wrestling through exclusion to find acceptance. The fruit, in many cases, suggests we might need to revisit our assumptions about what faithfulness actually looks like.
Reclaiming the Center
So what would it look like to step back from this litmus test and reclaim a more robust understanding of Christian faithfulness? So when I say sexuality shouldn’t be the litmus test of Christian faithfulness, I don’t mean it isn’t important. I mean the exact opposite: LGBTQ Christians should never be reduced to a test of orthodoxy, because your place at the table has already been secured by Christ.
It might mean returning to what the early church called the “rule of faith” —the core convictions that actually define Christianity. The Trinity. Incarnation. Christ’s death and resurrection. The call to love God and neighbor. The promise of new creation and the hope of justice.
It might mean developing what theologians call mature biblical interpretation—the kind that considers cultural context, literary genre, historical development, and the overall arc of Scripture rather than proof-texting isolated verses. Mature interpretation asks not just "what does this verse say?" but "how does this verse fit into God's larger story of redemption and renewal?"
Most importantly, it might mean returning to Jesus’ own words about how we’ll be known as his followers: not by our positions on sexuality, but by our love for one another. Not by our ability to exclude and gatekeep, but by our commitment to radical hospitality and inclusion.
The Long Game of Faith
I keep thinking about my 19-year-old self, confused by the dissonance between the gospel I was studying and the boundary-drawing I was witnessing in that classroom. That kid concluded something important: when we make peripheral issues central, we risk losing the actual center. When we make faithfulness primarily about whom we exclude rather than how we love, we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the mission we’ve been given.
The truth is, every generation gets some things wrong, and future Christians will likely look back at our debates with the same mixture of understanding and bewilderment with which we view past controversies. The question isn’t whether we’ll be perfect in our interpretation, but whether we’ll err on the side of love or the side of exclusion. Whether we’ll spend our energy building walls or building bridges. Whether we’ll be known for what we stand against or what we stand for.
The single issue of human sexuality has become a litmus test for faithfulness not because it’s the most important issue in Christianity, but because it’s become a substitute for deeper anxieties about change, authority, and cultural power. Recognizing this doesn’t resolve the underlying theological questions, but it might help us approach those questions with more humility, more curiosity, and more love.
And maybe, just maybe, it might help us remember that the gospel is bigger than our litmus tests, God’s love is wider than our boundaries, and faithfulness to Jesus looks more like laying down our lives for others than it does policing who gets to belong.
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Whitehead, Andrew L., and Samuel L. Perry. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Wright, N.T. Various writings and public statements on biblical interpretation and church priorities, including "Women's Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis" (2004) and interviews on Ask NT Wright Anything.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. "Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary." Louisville, KY: SBTS, 2018. Available at https://www.sbts.edu/history/southern-project/
So well-said, Beau. I’ve been saying for a while now that “Christians” are more concerned about who’s sleeping in whose bed than the red letters of the NT.
I left the Evangelical church because it was all about purity culture and the demonization of lgbtq. Great article Beau. The Christian church should be about inclusivity and love. I have found a new home in the Episcopal church.