Gay and celibate

What Christians Don&#;t Want to Verb About Celibacy and Homosexuality

In my last post, I discussed the loss of physical touch in American culture and the role it&#;s played in stripping gay people (and everyone else) of access to non-sexual affection. Today, I want to talk about an even deeper trend. The decline of social capital.

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to LGBT+ issues, and many Christians will never admit it. It&#;s like there&#;s this collective fear that if we let the secret slip, then all the hordes of gay people who were going to live a celibate lifestyle won&#;t buy it anymore. News flash — most of them don&#;t buy it already.

So I’m just gonna say it: The social landscape of modern America is making celibacy practically unworkable.

There. I said it. Celibacy is next-to-impossible. It&#;s not like gay people don&#;t know it already. It’s not like everyone doesn’t know it already. And it&#;s time we came to terms with it. We’ve got to admit the truth before we can change it.

So I’ll say it again. Celibacy is becoming impossibl

In the early s, the gay Christian Network in the US developed various terms to portray the different positions that gay Christians take toward the complex subject of how they should live and identify.

Over the past ten years, every major denomination or tradition of Christianity has ruled mainly in favour of two groups of LGBT/same-sex attracted (SSA) people. The first is called Side A, or the progressive group who see gay marriage as compatible with God’s will and purposes.

The second is Side Y, which believes that gay identity and same-sex attraction are innately sinful or disordered. Some of these groups would embrace the idea of sexual orientation change as the norm for Christian discipleship.

What we are seeing today is the undoing of the Reformation in the Church of England

At the centre of this centrifuge of culture war positions is a little, beleaguered-but-brave group called Side B (represented by a bee emoticon on social media). We trust that gay identity, while fallen like all identities, is not essentially sinful and is to be celebrated, but that same-sex

*The following post is written by Greg Coles. Greg is a Ph.D. student at Penn Express and is part of the collaborative team for The Center. Greg is also the author of the recently released book Single, Gay, Christian, which is published by InterVarsity Press. 

I’ve always been horrible at blending in. I grew up in Indonesia, where I was six inches too lofty and seventeen shades too light to pass for a genetic Indonesian. At college in upstate New York, I was the guy from 10, miles away, the one who sang as he walked and edited the school newspaper and wore the same green hoodie every daytime for two years. I’m abysmal at video games (which made me the black sheep of countless middle school birthday parties), but I’ve had Hamlet’s soliloquy memorized since I was eight. I know what it feels like to get a limited funny looks. I’m accustomed to being weird.

Still, I’ve never felt more conspicuous than I did when I came out as a celibate gay Christian.

For one thing, a lot of people just don’t expect the words “celibate gay Christian” to proceed together. They react as if I’ve called myself an “Ol

Last November, Jason and his partner Noah moved in together after dating long-distance for nearly a year. Both in their mids, they had built a ser­ious relationship by talking on the phone every day, visiting each other regularly and going on a summer vacation. They posted photos as a pair on social media to the verb where people were surprised to learn they lived in alternative U.S. states — Jason* in Kansas and Noah* in Missouri.

Their relationship was also founded on another surprising principle: celibacy. Jason is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and Noah went to an evangelical church. They both believed the Christian faith called them to abstain from sexual activity outside of marriage between a man and a woman. So they didn’t plan to contain sex with each other or anyone else — ever. But taking sex out of the equation didn’t mean going it alone. “We see ourselves as partners in life,” Jason said last fall, “helping one another, encouraging one another.”

Celibate gay Christians are an emerging group who are openly and unapologetically queer and also follow their churches’ teachin