A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Mixing a cocktail of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.
We're a pastor and a philosopher who have discovered that sometimes pastors need philosophy, and sometimes philosophers need pastors. We tackle topics and interview guests that straddle the divide between our interests.
Who we are:
Randy Knie (Co-Host) - Randy is the founding and Lead Pastor of Brew City Church in Milwaukee, WI. Randy loves his family, the Church, cooking, and the sound of his own voice. He drinks boring pilsners.
Kyle Whitaker (Co-Host) - Kyle is a philosophy PhD and an expert in disagreement and philosophy of religion. Kyle loves his wife, sarcasm, kindness, and making fun of pop psychology. He drinks childish slushy beers.
Elliot Lund (Producer) - Elliot is a recovering fundamentalist. His favorite people are his wife and three boys, and his favorite things are computers and hamburgers. Elliot loves mixing with a variety of ingredients, including rye, compression, EQ, and bitters.
A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Sexual Ethics, Queer Theology, & Responding to Critics: Matthew Vines (Part 2)
Matthew Vines returns to discuss how the revised edition of his book addresses critiques from prominent theologians, the distinction between affirming theology and queer theology, and the possibility of affirming, orthodox Christianity.
Matthew unpacks the scholarly consensus that modern sexual orientation concepts simply didn't exist in biblical times—a fact many prominent theologians like NT Wright dismiss without substantial engagement. This historical disconnect creates profound implications for how we interpret biblical passages addressing same-sex relationships.
The discussion takes an interesting turn when Matthew articulates a strong critique of queer theology, distinguishing it from his own affirming theological stance. He argues that queer theory's categorical opposition to all normative structures actually harms LGBTQ+ acceptance by creating an antagonistic "us versus them" narrative rather than one of shared values and inclusion.
We also explore Christian sexual ethics more broadly, with Matthew making the compelling case that monogamy and covenant faithfulness remain valuable principles with profound theological significance. He explains how Christianity's sexual ethic was actually liberating in the ancient world, especially for women and enslaved people who had previously been treated as property without sexual agency.
The conversation concludes with Matthew sharing the mission of The Reformation Project—his organization dedicated to equipping Christians to advocate for LGBTQ+ inclusion while maintaining orthodox Christian beliefs. By modeling how affirmation and biblical commitment can coexist, they're challenging the false narrative that accepting LGBTQ+ people necessarily leads to theological liberalism.
Topics covered in this episode include:
• How ancient and modern understandings of sexuality are fundamentally different, with sexual orientation being a modern concept
• The two main schools of thought in sexuality studies that emerged in the 1970s: social constructionism (Foucault) and essentialism (Boswell)
• NT Wright and Preston Sprinkle's claims about ancient sexuality
• Matthew's response to criticisms of his interpretation of Matthew 7 regarding "good and bad fruit"
• The role of Christian sexual ethics in liberating vulnerable populations by restricting sexual activity to marriage
• How queer theology differs from affirming theology in its rejection of all norms as inherently oppressive
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Cheers!
I'm Randy, the pastor, half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology and spirituality.
Kyle:We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air, around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.
Randy:Thanks for joining us and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walk into a Bar.
Randy:Friends, here we are again with our friend Matthew Vines. Matthew wrote God and the Gay Christian in 2014, and, as you heard the last episode we talked to him about the revised and expanded edition. He's got two extra chapters where he kind of speaks to the critiques that have been coming at him for the last 11 years some from Preston Sprinkle, some from NT Wright and a few others, but those are the two major ones and we get into some of that opposition a little bit here in this conversation and we also get into some really fun, spicy things about queer theology and some of Matthew's beefs that he has with queer theology, to say it. To put it lightly, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kyle:I don't want to spoil anything, but he has strong opinions.
Randy:A little bit, a little bit.
Kyle:And it's one of those things where I'm that's not my world and I have philosophical presuppositions that are opposed to many of those philosophical presuppositions. So I'm like, simultaneously suspicious of all that, in the similar way that he is. But also I have this piece of me that wants to resist anything that any guest brings. You know, that seems too strong or too easy. I want to like so this could have been one of those things, but it wasn't, I held back.
Matthew:You did.
Randy:Largely because I don't know that much about that stuff. But he's read that stuff and he has very strong opinions and so we'll get into that. I understand also his strong opinions. I think he sees that field as actively kind of thwarting the work that he's been doing for a decade.
Kyle:Yeah, and there is a chapter that delves quite a bit into that at the end of the book. It's not like a major focus of the book, but it's in there if you're interested.
Randy:I'd like to see him write a book about it actually.
Kyle:Yeah, and engage with some of those folks directly.
Randy:Quite directly yeah.
Kyle:But, yeah, this is the more energetic, I suppose, half of the conversation, but you know Matthew's a delight. So, yeah, enjoy. Matthew Vines, thanks so much for joining us again for part two of this conversation. We're super glad to have you back. It's great to be here.
Kyle:So we were in the middle of discussing how it is that the ancient world differed from the contemporary world with respect to sexual orientation, that that concept didn't exist in the ancient world with respect to gay marriage. You have a whole appendix in the back of your book about each of those things. Um, light stuff, yeah, really light stuff, super interesting stuff. Have you noticed? I'm guessing the answer this is yes, based on the people that you cite.
Kyle:But is there is there anyone outside of conservative christian scholars who seem interested in finding an ancient parallel with modern lesbian, gay, bisexual? I ask that because the people you're coming against there are people like Preston Sprinkle, people like NT Wright. The people you're bringing against them are usually more representative of secular scholarship. I get the sense from you and I'm taking your word for it here because I don't know about this but it seems like there's something approaching a consensus among the broader secular expert community about these issues, particularly with respect to how the ancient peoples viewed sexuality and the absence of anything like our modern understanding of orientation. So is it just conservative Christians that think that, and if so, does that tell us?
Matthew:something. That's something. Yeah, it is not just conservative Christians that think that, but it is increasingly conservative Christians who are the ones who think that. So, in order to, there are still some dissenting voices who are like secular historians. But to understand kind of where we're at in the history of sexuality studies, you have to go back to the start of the whole field of history of sexuality in the 1970s. And so when this field began, there were two primary schools of thought. There were the social constructionists, who are primarily represented by Michel Foucault, and there were the essentialists, who were primarily represented by John Boswell, who was the gay Catholic historian who wrote a book in 1980 called Christianity, social Tolerance and Homosexuality I believe the subtitle is A History of Gay People in Western Europe from the 1st through the 14th century and Foucault actually endorsed Boswell's book, which is interesting because they had really different views about this question of views, about this question of like.
Matthew:Boswell believed that because gay people existed, he believed deeply that gay people exist right and have always existed, and then he also believed that we, that that is a useful category, that sexual orientation is not a uniquely modern category, that it is something that can then almost be just found in ancient text. So he interpreted plato's symposium and the speech of aristophanes and put a symposium as a reflection on why some that can then almost be just found in ancient texts. So he interpreted Plato's Symposium and the speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium as a reflection on why some people are gay and why some people are straight, which is one of the texts the ancient texts that I would say on the surface does sound like that, but there aren't a ton of classicists who would still hold to that reading today. I get into that in the appendix. I don't need to get into that all right now. But so you had this kind of this battle between these two views, and the reason why both views were seen as possible around 1980 was because until the 1970s there had been quite strong taboos against anyone studying the history of sexuality in an open way, without kind of prejudice, against same-sex sexuality in particular. And that's why it was so significant when KJ Dover in 1979 published his book Greek Homosexuality, because he was straight and also one of the preeminent Greek historians and translators of Greek texts, and he had no inhibitions whatsoever in his interpretations of these texts.
Matthew:For centuries, a lot of texts Greco-Roman texts related to same-sex relations had been bowdlerized, and so no one really knew exactly what they said, because there was a sense that it you know it offended basic manners and morality to have such frank or often vulgar discussions of not just sexuality but same-sex sexuality in particular. Especially a lot of the Roman stuff is wildly vulgar. I mean the book Roman Homosexuality is like not for the faint of heart. Anything about Roman sexuality in general is like wow, okay, so they did that. But all this to say that's part of Boswell's driving motivation in writing his book, and I have a lot of respect for the courage that it took and his intelligence as well, even if his thesis hasn't particularly held up all that well. But a lot of this motivation was hey, we don't really even know what's possible in terms of what these texts really mean and what they really say, because we need to shine a light on this whole area. And so that's what a lot of what the field of the history of sexuality was doing in the 1970s and 1980s was let's get actually good, accurate translations of a lot of these texts and not just Greco-Roman other languages as well. But that's of course, where we get our majority of our ancient texts and let's really test out different hypotheses and theories.
Matthew:Well, it turns out that the social constructionist view fits with the evidence dramatically better than the essentialist view. And that said, there are two different. I'd say there's a hard and a soft approach to social constructionism, and while I do think that Foucault was broadly correct in his social constructionist, what I would call the soft view of social constructionism is simply that sexual orientation is because it is a uniquely modern category. We cannot retroject it onto ancient texts without kind of that's not an accurate way to go about it. It's anachronistic, right To try to read, to try to say, oh, so-and-so text in the first century is gay, so-and-so is straight. These are anachronisms that ultimately obscure more than they clarify, and so I do think Foucault was right about that. Foucault, however, also was what you would call a hard social constructionist, in the sense that he didn't just believe that, well, sexual orientation is an anachronism for reading ancient texts. He also was so deeply postmodern that he really began to believe, as many postmodernists do, that language itself almost constitutes reality, and therefore Foucault would argue much closer to the idea that gay people as such did not exist until the concept was created.
Matthew:I do not agree with this. There aren't a lot of people outside of the academy who are going to find that to be something that makes sense. But you can find a lot of people in the academy who think that makes a lot of sense and I think there are some ideas that you have to be so smart to believe that maybe they're not actually such good ideas. Delicious, condescending things I love it actually. I really love it, but it actually I really love it. Galileo was in that category. He was that 1% right. Everybody thought he was crazy. In fact, he was just more brilliant than everyone. Also, critically had information they didn't yet have. But there are other circumstances where it's like, maybe you're so brilliant that you've been able to talk yourself into believing something that in fact is not true, because your mind, like, gives you that persuasive ability over yourself that other people don't have, but it doesn't actually make the thing true yeah, there's stuff there.
Kyle:There's another read of that, which is that reality is so ultimately complex that, um, the most brilliant people pit it against each other will never reach resolution, because there's just that's in.
Matthew:That's almost indisputably true as well.
Kyle:Yes, like I don't.
Matthew:I've known enough really truly brilliant, smaller than the one percent people to know that those people are not seeing the truth because they disagree with each other like that was absolutely one of those people, but so were all the other people who disagreed with him then and now, um yeah, so all all that to say, if you were to go back to 1980, right, 45 years ago, then you would find uh, I mean, john boswell was a christian, but he's not like writing, you know. I mean you can. You could have found people in like the secular academy who held the essentialist viewpoint. And that is effectively the viewpoint that someone like Preston Sprinkle or NT Wright are holding to, even if they wouldn't use the term, because they're saying that there's no meaningful distinctions that should affect ethical analysis for Christians today between same sex practices in antiquity versus modernity or in concepts of same-sex attraction. And it is. But I would say by the really the mid-1990s, but certainly by 2010,. The social constructionists won the debate so handily against the essentialists that the essentialists are hard to even find anymore. It doesn't mean they don't exist, they're just very hard to find because in anyone who spends enough time reading the text, you realize like, oh, there's a reason. The social construction isentrism work if we add these epicycles over here, right, and these things here, and then after a while it gets really and you're like, oh, this doesn't work anymore. And then Copernicus comes along and you're like, oh, that works, that works, it's so much cleaner. And so I do think that the soft social constructions view it just works. It all fits and the data does not fit nearly as neatly into the essentialist view and that's why it's very hard to find people who still hold that view. That does not say that there's no one who still holds that view.
Matthew:Thomas Hubbard is a classicist at well. He was at UT Austin and he was one of the more prominent people who was still making the case that, oh, basically these are the same things With some nuance, basically the same. I cannot help but view his work through the prism of the reality that Thomas Hubbard has also been advocating for lowering the age of consent based on Greek pederasty. So the argument that he has made and he's made this in journal articles you can find in like 2010,. Is that, hey, why do we assume? He says that Hubbard argues that we should have a different age of consent for girls versus boys. He says having sex with girls who are like minors for an adult to have sex with a minor girl is bad for their development. But he's like, but we have evidence. This is what he says, to be clear, and I do not agree. Okay, if anybody's clipping this. Okay, hubbard argues I think very wrongly based on Greek pederasty, that, oh well, these boys didn't seem to be too messed up as adults, and so therefore, this is evidence that boys minor boys somehow do have this capacity to consent and to sex with adult men, and that's why the Greek pederasty should cause us to revise our understanding of the age of consent today. So I'm sorry, but I cannot help but understand Hubbard's.
Matthew:Hubbard's actually no longer. He retired from UT Austin. There was actually a bunch of student protests in 2020, specifically over this, specifically over Hubbard's support for pedophilia, and I'm sure he'd say no, no, no, it's a fibophilia. Okay, we're not getting into the technicalities here, it's messed up, it's really screwed up. And the idea and he so yeah, he was making that argument and, first of all, I think the argument on its merits is wrong, but I also think it matters like okay, so the few random people you can find who aren't conservative Christians making this argument also like there's often something weird going on that is like, oh, okay, so maybe you kind of want to ally the distinctions between these two things, because you also are trying like and again, not that you never, not that you should only look at people's motivations or even primarily look to them. I also just don't think that Hubbard's arguments are nearly as compelling or correct.
Matthew:I mean, bernadette Bruton also is. She is a scholar who kind of like Boswell in a certain sense. Boswell was very interested in developing the whole field of gay history, and I think this is now a field that is largely seen as an impossibility, right from a category standpoint. You can have a history of sexuality, but you can't really have a gay history in the way that a lot of people wanted, and so Bruton in her book 1996 book, love Between Women was describing part of her goal was to expand this concept of lesbian history as well, and so in her 1996 book and Preston Sprinkle draws heavily on her work from 1996, she does argue for greater continuity conceptually on sexual orientation and also in the sorts of relationships that are being described.
Matthew:That said, while I think her book did make important contributions, especially just to like the original translations of a lot of different texts and things like that there was, specifically she did make claims about same female, same sex marriages in antiquity that received the greatest scrutiny and critique from other classics scholars, and then I described this in my appendix as well. But in 2020. She gave a lecture at brown just two weeks before the pandemic. I was so happy for the scheduling purposes because I loved listening to it, but where she was engaging with the critiques and I think if you, if you read what she wrote in the 1996 book, you watch the 2020 lecture. She's, uh, definitely qualified the claims much more meaningfully in the 2020 lecture and I ended all that. So even some of the scholars who I think were more on the essentialist side in many cases have qualified their claims or beliefs and I do think the social constructions have effectively won the day.
Kyle:So it's not to say that you can't find anybody who's not a conservative christian who thinks that, but that's where yeah yeah, so that's it's like in philosophy, teaching my students about um metaphysical dualism, and I have to qualify at some point in that conversation that you don't have to be a Christian to believe this. It just so happens that all of the prominent ones are.
Randy:So I'm really, really, really glad that you released these new two chapters, appendices, whatever you want to call them, that you expanded the book, matthew, because and Kyle might laugh at this- but NT Wright has been really important to me.
Kyle:I'm a pastor, laugh at that. No, I in fact. He's been important to me too, probably in somewhat different ways, but yeah, you might laugh at what I'm about to say but um yeah I think nt wright might be probably is the foremost new testament scholar who's alive right now oh.
Randy:And I love NT Wright and I put a ton of weight in his opinions and what he says and his perspectives, and so, honestly, I mean I'm a pastor and I've been wrestling with this question my whole pastoral career for 20 years almost now, and by that I mean this is the biggest thing that I've wrestled with in my whole pastoral life and one of the things, one of the main things this is what you might think is funny one of the main things that kept me hanging on to a non-affirming theology was NT Wright, because my thinking is this is the foremost New Testament scholar who's alive right now and who in the world do. I think I am to disagree with him and I think that's actually kind of a good way of thinking in general, however, I've gotten past that hurdle and I'm okay to disagree with NT Wright about that and a couple of other things Not many, honestly, but a couple of other things. All that to say, I value NT Wright's perspective and his opinions and his take on the scriptures and on the ancient world. He's brilliant.
Randy:That said, matthew, what do you make of these arguments from, particularly because I don't really care that much about Preston Sprinkle, but I do about NT Wright and when you actually look into, like you have in the book and I really think everyone should read this um, these arguments seem kind of flimsy, like they. They seem a little bit to me if I I would say it differently if nt right was in the room but it seems a little bit like wishful thinking, like there's trying, they're trying to manufacture something that isn't, whereas, like you tell a story. I don't know the names of the, the people, the two, two guys in the story, but clearly even before you said it in the chapter, in the new chapter, I was like oh, this is like David and Jonathan, right.
Matthew:In.
Randy:David and Jonathan, a person like NT Wright or other critic Christians would say there's no way those guys were gay. This was just a beautiful friendship where they loved each other and they would give themselves to one another in all the ways besides sexually. Praise the Lord, it's good and right. But then they'll take the same exact kind of relationship from antiquity and say, oh look, that's gay. Or you know, that's a sexual orientation that we're talking about a lifelong, monogamous, committed relationship. What do you make of the fact that somebody like NT Wright is making arguments that seem kind of flimsy like this, matthew?
Matthew:Yeah, I mean I, first of all, I agree with you. Nt Wright is a brilliant man and I think his, I mean I have found a lot of value in a lot of his work and I'm glad that he, you know, has published and written, you know, on so many topics and so thoughtfully, and so, yeah, I mean, and he's just seems like a good person. So, yeah, I like, I like NT Wright. I also take NT Wright at his word. When, in 2009, he was doing, he was being interviewed and I quote part of this in the appendix, but he was asked are you going to write a book about homosexuality? And he said I'm not, because I haven't done the research, which is admirably, you know, I guess I think that's admirably humble in that sense. Yes, but then the next sentence was he said but I know enough to know that there's no difference between what they were talking about when we were talking about today.
Randy:Yeah, and that kind of a strong statement keeps people like me from moving into an affirming Right.
Matthew:And and it's interesting because it's like well, which is it? Have you done the research? Have you not done the research or do you already know everything there is to know related to the historical context of this? So I think, yeah, he's now. But also it's interesting that 2009 interview.
Matthew:He said something that I thought was helpful. He said right now we're not having a debate in the church. He said all that's happening is we're just yelling names at one another. So on one side, we're just calling people homophobes and bigots, on the other side, we're just calling them heretics. There's no actual discussion, there's no debate. He quoted Isaiah 118. He said come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. As that's what he said he wanted to see.
Matthew:Well, I would love to see him engage in that kind of debate. I would love to engage with him in that kind of debate. So far, I have not seen him do that. I have just seen him occasionally make kind of more big picture statements that don't really get into. You know, that don't deeply engage either, like a actually well articulated and well considered affirming position or even the historical literature. So it's, I think, no matter how smart someone is if they haven't dedicated the time and energy to do the research on a specific topic that's going to shape and limit their treatment of that topic? I think inevitably so. I would love to see nt right engage more fully and I would you know, be happy to like engage on that yeah, yeah, I mean, that's just such a strong yeah and the examples seemed very off the top.
Kyle:Now this is long time ago. Right, 2009 was a long time ago. Maybe he's done the reading sense and just hasn't come public about it, but but I've, I've heard.
Randy:I mean, he has a podcast now ask, nt write anything. It's fantastic, go listen all that stuff. But in the podcast in the last within the last five years, he I heard him saying the same thing and he said he said to think that we have something new with sexual orientation, that the ancients did is just modern arrogance.
Randy:Now that's not a direct code quote, but that's basically what he said yeah that's a strong thing for him to say and that's something that I wish man. If he were here, I'd be like could you just be more careful with how heavily you come down on that?
Matthew:Well, for me it's not be more careful. I just just please engage the arguments, because I think I go through these texts like in great detail, especially in the appendices. So if people don't agree, I think that's certainly fine in their prerogative, but I'd love to see an engagement with that. So this is what I do appreciate about Preston Sprinkle is. I do feel like Preston, more than the great majority of my non-affirming critics, has at least attempted to engage with my argument. I feel like a lot of what I got initially when the book came out was just a this is unacceptable. Okay, but like. But can you like? I'm making an argument here. So if you, if you don't agree with it, then just explain why you don't agree with it or where you think the argument.
Matthew:There's a book like, coauthored by some folks, like Rebooting Yours, oh yeah that was the Southern Baptist book with Albert Moeller and some other, Denny Burke, some others.
Kyle:I noticed not many of those folks were mentioned in the expanded edition.
Matthew:Well, there was one thing that I did respond to in it, because most of it I didn't feel was something that called for a response, because it was more of, I just felt, a strong statement, right. But, like, what I'm interested in is like engage the argument, and so Denny Burke did engage my argument at one point, and I addressed this primarily in an end note. I addressed Burke by name in an end note, but so I make an argument in the opening chapter of the book, and I actually made this argument in my initial video in 2012 as well about Jesus's statement in Matthew 7, right, that you will know them by their fruits, and that a good tree will bear good fruit and a bad tree will bear bad fruit. And I made the argument, even though Jesus is talking about false prophets or false teachers in this text, I made the argument that the principle here can be applied to teachings as well, and so, and that if the effects of a teaching are as destructive as the effect of the non-affirming position is for gay people, then that should be a red flag. We might want to go look at the tree more carefully if this is the fruit from the tree. So, denny Burke's argument that he made in that 2014 ebook, and then Christopher Yuan expanded in his 2018 book Holy Sexuality and the Gospel, was that that was not an acceptable interpretation of Matthew 7, because what they said is no, no, no.
Matthew:Matthew 7 needs to be read in light of Matthew 3, in which John the Baptist is using similar language about trees and their fruit, but specifically is only talking about obedience and disobedience. Therefore, for John the Baptist, good fruit equals obedience to the commands of God. Bad fruit equals disobedience to the commands of God. So Yuan argues in his book. He said even if it's true that a teaching caused people to kill themselves, he said that's not bad fruit according to scripture, because that's not disobedience to the commands. I mean, well, suicide might be disobedience, right, but that wouldn't be like.
Kyle:Just ignoring what this does to the problem of evil. We're just putting that right over there.
Matthew:And then, to be fair to Yuan, he's not saying it wouldn't be bad, right, he's just saying that's not what bad fruit means in Matthew 7. He's trying to say it's more limited than that. So part of my response to this is and Burke also argued that he said that my interpretation of Matthew 7 was completely unprecedented in Christian history of applying this concept to Christian teaching. So what I do in the updated edition is I respond to both of these. One it's not unprecedented.
Matthew:I found examples going back to Augustine of Christians saying the same thing. Part of my whole thing here is I try to take credit for as little as possible because I'm trying to synthesize and to popularize what I see as the best scholarship that is out there. I'm not trying to make brand new. If everything I was saying were brand new, I would think it's very likely to fall apart. We'd probably end up having this conversation yeah, right, so like, I'm actually not trying.
Matthew:So like, if Denny Burke is saying, oh, nobody else agrees with my interpretation about something like, that's for me that's not like, oh, look at how unique I am. No, I'm like that actually would be a decent argument. On, you know, depends what it is. But in this case to Yuan. I also just explain why I think that you know Jesus is yeah, certainly obedience and disobedience would be examples of good fruit and bad fruit respectively, but that Jesus's words are not as narrowly tailored as John the Baptist in Matthew three and I get into some of his other arguments about the Greek and whatever else and why I do think that we can look to the fruit of the spirit in Galatians five as an example of things that are all good fruit and that the effect of so. Anyway, I do address that argument specifically in chapter one and the notes of chapter one, but that was the only argument from that book length rebuttal that I felt kind of called for a response.
Randy:Yeah, and can I say, matthew, thank you for that. Take on Matthew seven and the good tree and bad fruit and battery, battery and good fruits, that. That actually for me, was the straw that broke the camel's back when, when I heard you say that, I was like holy shit, that's right and that's Jesus, that's the scriptures. It was just that light bulb that went on after years of, just, you know, gnashing of teeth and studying and all that stuff. But since so fast forwarding my journey, I'm very firming right now, or currently, and the more I read books like this Matthew, and the more we kind of go down this rabbit hole of sexuality in the Bible.
Randy:And what was the state of sexuality when the Bible was written in the ancient Near East? The state of sexuality when the Bible was written in the ancient Near East, the easier it gets for me to have this attitude and I don't think this, but it's not far from thinking this is logical to say. Why are we even getting our sexual ethics from this two to 3,500 year old book that was a product of its ancient world, that has their concept of sexuality is so far away from ours, and what healthy sexuality looks like that? Why are we even talking about in measuring our sexuality and what is a healthy sexual ethic against the Bible? Anyways, maybe we should just be done with trying to see the Bible as a source for healthy sexual ethics, because it's so different and it's such a totally different category than what we have now.
Randy:I don't believe that, but I could get there, I can see it and I'm closer to that than saying we should base all of our idea of what a healthy sexual ethic is on the Bible 100% and that's it. I hope I'm making sense right now. But what's to keep us from saying you know what? Why are we paying attention to what the Bible has to say at all about sex? Because it's just so dang different. It's irrelevant.
Matthew:Well, I would say that's a good question, and before you get there, just give me a call so I can walk you. I can talk you off the ledge. Yes, because I do think that is, and I know, of course, you're saying that this is a thought experiment, but I think I'm not there, but I think it's.
Matthew:Yeah, I hear. I think the argument is overstated in how different some things are. So certainly, if you're looking at the Old Testament, you can find all kinds of practices related to sex that are way out of accord with really what a Christian view has ever been, even from the first century, when it comes to practices like polygamy and concubinage and leveret marriage, all of those things. And so to the extent that people are saying we shouldn't get our sexual ethics from Solomon, I agree. To the extent that people are saying we shouldn't get our sexual ethics from the Old Testament in a vacuum, I would agree. However, if you go back to, I'm very partial to I'm sure you're both familiar with Tom Holland's work.
Kyle:I'm not Nope, tell me about it.
Randy:Oh, are you familiar.
Kyle:Thanks for thinking that we are. I appreciate the compliment, but I'm not.
Matthew:Well, tom Holland, he's the second most famous Tom Holland from England, so he's not the.
Randy:I was going to say if you're talking about Spider-Man, I'm down, I'm in with his film work.
Matthew:He's not the Spider-Man actor. Tom Holland is a British historian who wrote a book called Dominion in 2018. And he is a secular, agnostic person who just has a positive view of Christianity. And his argument is and you got to love those people, right, because sometimes it's so helpful.
Randy:Yeah.
Matthew:You're like okay, so we at least know you don't have X, Y and Z biases. It doesn't necessarily mean your argument is right, but it's at least helpful you know to break. And his argument is that basically, the great majority of liberal values that many secular Westerners today revere are the direct inheritance of Christianity and specifically the Christian moral revolution that you see from the first to the fourth centuries as Christianity becomes the new dominant worldview in the ancient Mediterranean. And I think I think he is basically correct in his argument that the basic values that your average secular progressive today would see as some of their central bedrock values of individual rights, of equality, a lot of, a lot of basic American, traditional American values are inseparable in their origin from Christianity and from a Christian ethic.
Matthew:And I think this is true as well when it comes to sexual morality. So, yes, I mean it's easy enough to you know point out the significant discrepancies between Old Testament sexual practices today. But if you're looking at the Bible, the Christian Bible, and you're going to interpret the Old Testament through the lens of the New as well, and you're looking at the teachings of Jesus and Paul on marriage and sexuality, I don't think there is really this giant gap between what we should regard as healthy sexuality and what Jesus and Paul and the authors of the new Testament are teaching. I don't, I don't you know like I don't see a gap personally, because I do like. So basically, what you moved here's the Christian moral revolution when it came to sex. It used to be that, for an ancient Greco, roman man, sex was not something you have with someone. It is something you do to someone man sex was not something you have with someone.
Matthew:It is something you do to someone, and that's why sex is fundamentally about mirroring the hierarchies of the world. So that's also why I mean most people today, even secular people, progressive people, would think if you're having sex with someone, you probably don't think they're scum of the earth, right, because why else would you do that? We intrinsically now think of sexual relations, right, that there is something, there's some level of mutuality involved in a sexual encounter, and that is not the way that it would have been seen. And so, consequently, a Roman man could have sex with anyone, as long as that person was not the property of another Roman man or another Roman man of the same status. What this meant was, if you were a woman or you were a slave, just say you were a slave. In ancient Rome, it was seen as completely acceptable for you to be raped, however often that would happen. That was not seen your and everybody could know that the, the patriarch, was doing this, and nobody looks differently or looks down on him for that. So the entire concept of me too, I think it's fundamentally rooted in the Christian moral revolution of the first through the fourth centuries, which was incredibly liberating for both women and enslaved people in particular, and anybody of lower status.
Matthew:Because suddenly, I mean it's interesting the argument we've been having in Western culture since the 1960s has been well, maybe one perspective has been no, the real problem was Christianity shouldn't have. What Christianity did, was it limited men to what women were, which is, your sex should be had with your spouse. That's it, and that's what the rule was always for women. Right? Women did not have the same sexual freedom that men had, and so there have been some feminists who've argued oh, the real mistake was limiting men to women. We should have increased women's sexual freedom to the sexual freedom of men. But you cannot have the sexual freedom that men had in ancient Rome without a lot of victims. You just can't. Had an ancient Rome without a lot of victims? You just can't.
Matthew:And so I think that by restricting sex to a monogamous marriage that would be if you were a slave or a woman and your husband or your master converts to Christianity that's very good news for you in a very direct, physical way, which is it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody does what they're supposed to do, but now at least they're not supposed to do it. And now, increasingly, there's a source of authority you should be able to appeal to that will tell the person not to do this. That is revolutionary. And so this idea that monogamy is somehow uh, regressive and holding people back. I think people fail to appreciate how liberating monogamy is historically, especially for the people who are not going to be the essentially of the privileged status.
Matthew:So I think the biblical sexual ethic is fundamentally about seeing sex as connected to relationship and that sex is not just about something you do to someone. That sex is about something you have with someone for the purpose not just of short-term entertainment or pleasure, but for the purpose of deepening the greater kinship bond that you share with them. And that's why, if you're going to share all of yourself physically to someone, you want to match that by sharing all of the rest of yourself with them. That's the basic logic of limiting sex to marriage.
Matthew:And there are now, obviously, there are negative ways that you can go about teaching that and I think a lot of the problems that have shown up in purity culture, a shame based approach to teaching. That is not going to be healthy and will also have victims. But you don't need. I think there are healthy ways that that can be taught and I think that so to me, the Christian sexual ethic, as fuddy-duddy as it may seem to a lot of people is actually like, has been a very liberating force. So I think we, we, uh, we abandon it at our peril.
Randy:So what would you say is a better approach to the text we find about sexuality, sexual immorality, to the text we find about sexuality, sexual immorality, boundaries, whatever in the Bible. You know, how do we? How do we, what's our hermeneutic then, and how we, how we parse those, those texts and those understandings, as we're trying to pastorally and practically live out our lives and saying are the rules the same?
Matthew:I mean, I think the basic hermeneutic would be a Christocentric hermeneutic, so that's going to, I mean all the issues of like polygamy and things like that.
Matthew:If you're looking at the New Testament as from a Christian standpoint, then obviously the New Testament is going to yield a monogamous standard.
Matthew:If you were looking at the old, so I think most the vast majority of the things that people post on memes that are like making fun of biblical sexual morality are about things in the Old Testament that, if you look at through a Christocentric or even just New Testament lens, are not going to still be practices that we should be accepting, or in many cases, never practices that should have been accepted but were, and other than that, yeah, I mean what to me I mean now, of course we also have. I think legalism is typically unhealthy, but that doesn't mean that you don't have clear boundaries and clear ideals and clear norms, and I think the basic sexual boundaries, ideals and norms that Jesus uh himself put forward is that marriage and sex are fundamentally about covenantal faithfulness and commitment. I think that is a timeless principle and all I'm wanting to do is say let's make sure that gay people and gay Christians can participate as well, on the same terms, with the same responsibility and the same support as everyone else.
Kyle:Yes, but the flip side of that thing that you described as a timeless principle is a mandated celibacy for those who are not in that covenantal relationship, many of whom not by choice. So given what you also say in your book about the dangers of mandated celibacy, maybe we should talk about that chapter a little bit. Sure. Yeah, how do you? I don't know if this gets at what Randy's feeling, but this sense of how do I go to my congregation and uphold these biblical values about sex when many of them are going to receive that as a kind of nonsense?
Matthew:Yeah, I mean and again, I'm not trying to tell pastors what the best approach is to how.
Randy:I'm not saying, that's where I am.
Kyle:I'm just trying to like share.
Matthew:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would often like it's very contextual in terms of what I think a lot of people don't even understand, like to the extent if all you know is you were just told a series of no's, that's you're not going to continue to hold on to that. You have to have a deeper understanding of what is the actual positive reason behind something is a very compelling positive vision within scripture's one flesh concept at the heart of its sexual ethic. That, to the extent that people are able to like have that be presented to them, I think like so depending. I think some people just like you know it's not necessarily going to be helpful to get up and just be like don't, don't, don't, do, do, do right, like. I think people need a fuller understanding of it.
Matthew:But when it comes to the celibacy question, yes, christians who are not married have always been called to be abstinent outside of marriage and I still think that that is the right teaching that the church should continue to uphold. This has been the one area where oftentimes it's like yeah, we're also not supposed to gossip Right, but just because somebody gossips one time, you're not like, oh my goodness, that person, we can't even look at them the same way. She's not part of our group. Well, maybe she gossiped about you, but you know what I mean. Like like there, there's no other area. The Christian bar for ethics, from the sermon on the Mount, is always perfection and there's no area where anybody is ever going to be perfect, and so there's. We should always have a healthy dose of grace.
Matthew:I think the problem when it came to sexuality is that and you know partly this is the sexuality is a little bit different in that you have, like, certain consequences. You have sex one time, you could potentially get pregnant, you could potentially get an STD, like. It is reasonable why there might be a particular concern around like, but really should be around a healthy sex education to make sure that people are aware of what the consequences are and that sort of thing. But like, yeah, there can be greater long-term consequences to like, you know, sexual slip-ups than like, oh, a slip-up where I gossiped or you know got, you know spoke angrily towards someone, but at a moral level it's really no different at all. Like, and so I think that's part of the problem is that people, a high standard is put forward as like this rigid, legalistic thing and then anybody who fails to live up to that high standard is feels like a lot of shame and guilt, and I I I think we can recognize that because we are still on, uh like, we are still sinful. We're never going to be perfect in any area and we don't need to be riddled with shame and guilt about that. But it doesn't mean that we should say, well, let's not even try to, let's not even order our lives toward the ideal and the goal that Jesus put forward. So, when it comes to the question of celibacy and abstinence outside of marriage, I do think that should still be the way that we are seeking to live our lives.
Matthew:The difference is and the argument and that can be very challenging for people the argument that I make in the book is that that is different. Abstinence outside of marriage, as long as marriage is at least a possibility, is a different thing than lifelong singleness and celibacy, when marriage is, is not even allowed for you in any context. So even if you do meet someone who you fall in love with and want to marry, it's not allowed, because then you're I mean even like people who are like Christians, who are seeking to remain, like you know chased outside of marriage. They can still go on dates, they can still flirt, they can still fall in love, all of these things Like they're. It's not like they're supposed to have this completely arrested emotional development where anything in the field of romance or desire is just like not allowed, whereas when it comes to gay people and gay Christians within a non-affirming framework, really all of that is completely suspect and wrong because there is no end point at which something could have a positive, godly expression.
Matthew:So I do think there's just a fundamental, categorical distinction there. And yes, abstinence outside of marriage is a difficult teaching. It's a very difficult teaching and one that I think that Christians should continue to like, seek to live out, but saying lifelong singleness and celibacy for this whole class of people. And also, you can never hold anybody's hand, and every time you ever feel butterflies for somebody, you should be your. You need to feel a sense of conviction and guilt for that. That is destructive. That's not just challenging, it's destructive.
Kyle:Yeah, totally that. I totally agree with you about the category distinction there. But the first half of that, how realistic a possibility does it need to be for somebody for them to be able to live towards that ideal of sexual flourishing and marriage you said? As long as it's a possibility for them, that seems to get pretty thin, depending on context, and I just wonder if we're not obviously that categorical distinction you described makes a huge difference but give me an example of somebody where you feel like it's unrealistic.
Kyle:Somebody who really doesn't want to be single but is single not by choice of their own, who finds it very unlikely that they're going to ever find somebody that would be willing to marry them, that they would also want to marry but might have some sexual options if they open themselves up to that. That's not that unusual.
Matthew:No, that's not.
Kyle:People might have principled objections to certain kinds of, you know, the social system of marriage or something, but they still want to have sexual, and there are certainly times where there are people who feel like it's totally hopeless and feel like they've tried.
Matthew:you know, they've had enough relationships.
Kyle:Let me put the question a different way, Given your Calvinist approach, and I just mean your embrace of that one particular argument that Calvin made for viewing, yeah, for interest in relation to us usury for viewing the sort of moral logic behind it.
Kyle:Right, um, if we can envision, much less actually substantiate empirically. But if we can even envision, uh, non-exploitative, non-harmful, um, maybe even tending towards flourishing examples of non you know, new Testament marriage, sexuality, why not create space for that? Doesn't the principle that you're basing your argument on lead in that direction? And if not, why not?
Randy:If it's bearing good fruit, yeah.
Matthew:Yeah, I mean again, the whole fruit issue I think is important, and also the fruit fruit I think should lead us back to scripture to study it more carefully. It does not just lead us to say, hey, this, the fruit looks, this looks pretty good to me certainly. I'm sure there are certainly non-marital sexual relationships that have a lot of positive qualities and it's not like, you know, anybody is stepping up and it's like I've been harmed by, you know, this relationship. But I also think the whole criterion of harm is often the only way that more secular people think about what is ethical and unethical. And harm matters, of course, but from a Christian standpoint, that's not the only criterion that matters, it also just matters.
Kyle:Let me phrase it differently, phrase it positively. I'm not a utilitarian, okay, so let's be virtue ethical about this. We're talking about a very full, flourishing human life, with all of the good-making qualities of a human life. If we can find examples of that that include, you know, very active sex lives outside of marriage, why not take that kind of Calvinist, you know, approach to reexamining the text of Scripture in light of that new reality?
Matthew:So you're saying the good fruit is what specifically?
Kyle:You're saying the good fruit is what specifically I'm saying, if we can find examples of people who are living outside of that biblical sexual ethic that mandates? Sex within marriage, only Sex only within a certain kind of monogamous marriage covenant. Why not take that reality, that empirical reality, back to the text, in the same way that you do, and re-examine, you know, the mandates about marriage and sex being within marriage, in light of that?
Matthew:Yeah, you could do that. I personally just don't find it convincing in terms of yielding a different conclusion, and the reason for that is that I think that sex is not nearly as individualistic as most contemporary liberal Westerners tend to think of it as. So a good example of this would be an issue like polyamory, where, in theory, this is something where a lot of people are like okay, imagine a throuple, three people who they all love each other and they're all in a sexual relationship together and they're all, they all treat each other really well and there's all, there's a lot of good fruit. So what's the harm? Well, let's just assume the best possible polyamorous throuple, right, and let's not assume, you know, let's assume it's three incredible people, incredible, so many good things going on, and we can acknowledge there could be good things going on. The problem with that is that ethical analysis literally only considered those three people and it didn't look any broader than that.
Kyle:But we can also imagine fast forward into a future where that is a new cultural norm and it's not hard to imagine, and in fact I think we are currently in a position where the actual cases that I was referring to which are not the throuples but the actual cases of people just not being in Christian marriages and having very flourishing lives that is a cultural norm, and so we're not in the position of basing this on three people. We're in the position of basing this on maybe close to a majority of human beings.
Matthew:Yes, but hear me out, okay, because I'll come back to this. But if you start with the thruple issue, I think where it becomes clear that polyamory is actually not something that should be embraced is when you look at it from a community standpoint and not just from an individual standpoint. If you are pastoring a church community, in order to accept polyamory, in order to accept a thruple, you have to accept the principle that a ring on someone's finger does not necessarily mean that that person is off limits when it comes to dating. This will fundamentally alter a community's dynamics and nature and it inevitably produces greater instability within the community, because who wants to go to a church where their ex goes to? And so if you're about to triple the number of Xs in a community by saying that we're increasing enough, like polyamory, you begin to realize the problems with it at a communal level. I think something similar is true, not to the same dramatic degree as with polyamory, because every church I've ever seen it's only been a handful that embraced non-monogamy fell apart in epic fashion and it was, like, you know, city um, which I think is eminently predictable. But when it so I think that's like another level of drama. But I think there's something similar is true at a principal level when it comes to extramarital sex, and that is that you can't normalize, you can't have that without also having a number of knock-on effects related to that.
Matthew:Do you think that our current, like sexual culture in the United States is a healthy and good one? Overall, I would say it has a lot that's bad to it. The entire idea of hookup culture and all of these things is empowered by changing the lines and by saying, nah, you don't really need to be married as long as there's. So then the line switches to as long as there's love, and then it's like, well, what really is love? And you know, is it just what kind of feelings have to go there? I think I don't think.
Matthew:I think there have been positives and negatives from the sexual revolution for the 1960s, and a lot of the argument that wants to baptize extramarital sexual relationships is very interested in downplaying the negatives. I see a lot of negatives and I don't think you can disconnect that from the normalization of extramarital sex. So I think that just the. I think the fruit would be better if we and I think the fruit in general is better with a focus on reserving sex for marriage. And again, that does not mean that everything outside of that boundary is equally harmful or that everything outside of that boundary is necessarily, self-evidently harmful. But I do think in the aggregate, the more that you, the further you stray from that boundary and you put it together at a communal and societal level, there are negative effects, and I do think there are many negative effects in terms of how sexualized our culture is today, how much pornography has negatively affected many people and many relationships.
Kyle:We're back to measuring the harm now, I guess.
Matthew:I'm saying this is partly why this argument wouldn't be persuasive to me, because I don't just see only good fruit over there.
Kyle:Sure, sure, sure, yeah, yeah.
Matthew:No, that wasn't the point. Yeah, that's fair that Christians have historically interpreted to reserve sex for marriage. I think the moral logic of those teachings gives you still a moral distinction between sex being reserved for marriage and not.
Randy:Let's be good there.
Matthew:No, I appreciate it though.
Kyle:It's been the conversation to go this direction, so that's not on me.
Matthew:No, I appreciate it, yeah, anyway.
Randy:We're in part two of the conversation and we're getting close to the end, but, matthew, I want to open the queer theology can of worms yeah, why do you go for it?
Randy:I'm sorry. I'm sorry, kyle. Um, you, you say in your book, and you, kind of jokingly but also strongly before we were on air, talked about the queer theology and your, your, your, your beefs with. So you say in your book, and it's true, affirming theology is not the same as queer theology and that's a very important distinction and, I think, not a distinction that enough people know about. So can you tell us why include that in the book? What are you thinking in that regard?
Matthew:Yeah, it's a good question. So when I first was coming out around 2010 and was studying a lot of this stuff, I did encounter some queer theology and I remember at the time I just thought, huh, this stuff is weird, and I just kind of set it to one side and moved on, because it was not engaging the questions I was interested in. It didn't make any sense to me Very marginally Yep, right and I and also it wasn't really coming up at all. No one was asking me about it. So I was just like, okay, moving on.
Matthew:But I think in more recent years social media has ended up giving more of a megaphone to fringe perspectives on all kinds of topics, and sometimes that can be good because maybe some fringe perspectives deserve a wider hearing or deserve to become mainstream. And sometimes it's not as good when some fringe perspectives you realize deserve to be fringe but then maybe have their moment in the sun. And I think that so queer theology what it is is simply the application of queer theory to theology. So a lot of people think or assume a lot of straight Christians in particular will assume oh, this is just theology that maybe particularly emphasizes the voices and experiences of LGBTQ people, and so it feels like something they should support. And it's a bit ironic because many Christians used to be socialized that anything LGBTQ be against it.
Matthew:And now, once you become affirming, the new message is anything LGBTQ, you got to be for it. You're not for it, it means that you're not a good enough ally and I'm like well then, so we're not applying any more critical thinking skills here than we were before. Like, just because something is using, just because something flies under the banner of LGBTQ, does not necessarily mean that you should support it, even if you're an affirming person, and especially so if the way that it's using a term is fundamentally different than the way that most people use the term. So queer theory does not use the term queer Most like. There are plenty of younger people who, like the word queer, identify with the word queer as a general umbrella term for non heterosexual Uh that's not how.
Randy:all the time yeah.
Matthew:Yeah, that's not how. And hey, people are. You know if, if people, if that word is empowering and helpful for people, great. That's not how queer theory is using the term queer. Queer theory has been very clear since its founding in the 80s and 90s that it is using the term queer as a synonym for anything that is non-normative. Anything that is not seen as normal is therefore queer. It's almost actually going back to an older understanding of queer right as weird, strange, other. And so in that sense, yes, queer theory would see non-heterosexual as queer, but just one of many things that aren't queer, so anything that is not accepted. So if you have heterosexual couples who are swingers, they're queer too under the queer theory meaning of the term. And so some of the founding queer theorists, like Gail Rubin, I mean she put almost every category of sex you can imagine under this framing of things that should all be accepted.
Matthew:Because for queer theorists, very influenced by Michel Foucault, the idea was that all norms are inherently oppressive, because and you can almost see a little bit of what they're getting at where it is true that the existence of a norm inherently limits the freedom of people to act against that norm, that is true, but the queer theorists just believe that that is never a good thing, that to limit someone's freedom to act in a certain way, especially a way that is seen as deviant by the majority of society, is therefore oppression. And I'm like it's not oppression. We have norms against stealing, and if you're a kleptomaniac, you're going to feel put down. You're, in fact, your freedom is constrained by those norms. You will be punished for violating those norms. Well, so what you should be like that's a because if you believe in objective morality, if you believe that some things are good and some things are bad, uh, then that's why we have laws, that's why we have a civilized society, because we do believe that freedom is not some intrinsic good. It needs to be free, like. There are certain ways that freedom should be limited. Now, the most obvious way is the old, you know adage about. You know, my freedom stops where my fist hits your nose, but the like that's. It's not just from a Christian standpoint. Certainly it wouldn't just be limited to that.
Matthew:But even the queer theorists oftentimes blur those boundaries too, like Yael Rubin was talking in her paper in 1984, which is foundational text for the whole field of queer theory about how we need to, how exhibitionism and voyeurism and people having sex in public are all things that people should not look negatively on. Well, I'm sorry, but like, if you've got kids at the park and somebody else is having sex at the park, that is their fist hitting your nose effectively, like that is damaging to people. It's also not the society that we want to live in. So this is how queer theory, like queer theory, has this shockingly sweeping view of what it should be, subverting Anything that is seen as normal. Queer theory says we need to subvert this and all that queer theology is doing. You cannot find a work of queer theology that is not embracing queer theory as a methodology. Like, queer theory is the defining methodological tool of queer theology. And if you find a work that you think is queer theology and it's not using queer theory, then it's of queer theology. And if you find a work that you think is queer theology and it's not using queer theory, then it's not queer theology, then it's just affirming theology. So I'm doing affirming theology because I have no interest in queer theory, I don't agree with it as a methodology whatsoever. But consequently, because queer theory takes this categorically anti-normative posture, it ends up yielding some of the most bizarre and almost intentionally shocking and offensive conclusions.
Matthew:Marcella Alphus-Reed is the most influential figure in the field of queer theology and one of her leading and most important claims was that the Trinity is an orgy. Like I mean, it's shock, jock stuff, really Like it is by design. Lynn Marie Tonstad is a professor of queer theology at Yale Divinity School and she says, oh, her leading contribution to the field of Trinitarian studies and Trinitarian theology is that we need to understand the Trinity through the model of lesbian sex. I'm just like, how does this count as a substantive academic contribution? And I've heard people who've gone to lectures of hers. They said it was pornographic. And it's not surprising, because when you, I've read things she's written that are X rated. And she says that her intention is to deliberately misread Christian theologians, like that's her whole project. And I was just like, first of all, what is the point? Like why are we doing this? What is the? And I know some people enjoy being edgy, but it just seems so counterproductive and ultimately futile to me. If not, I mean, and just also, I mean Patrick Chang is a leading queer theologian.
Matthew:He's talked about how part of the goal of queer theologians is to intentionally shock and offend Christians. Intentionally shock and offend Christians. And the reason I'm like so why are you doing this? Well, the reason they will say they do this is because we are basically, if you take this Foucauldian view, that we're basically swimming in this sea of oppression and we can never really get out of it, but all we can do is try to shape, shift within it and move the oppression around.
Matthew:Judith Butler this is also very influential in Judith Butler's thinking, and so that's why you know Butler advocated what you call the politics of parody and that, this idea that, well, you can never really overcome the oppression but you can just make your daily life an act of mockery and resistance of the majority norms that stuff is toxic to anybody who actually wants to achieve greater public acceptance of any minority group.
Matthew:And so if your goal is public acceptance, gain social support and acceptance for LGBTQ people, you should run from queer theory, because queer theory is poisonous to social acceptance by design. If your goal is to be against everything that is normal and to subvert society and its norms on everything, you should expect society to push back and say no. So my concern with queer theology is that queer theology is contributing to the growing polarization and increasing backlash against the LGBT community in the United States and more broadly. Fundamentally, I think the backlash is rooted in a backlash to queer theory, because so many of the ideas in queer theory are so unhinged and they do not represent the vast majority of gay, bisexual and transgender people, but because it uses the word queer and a lot of people don't understand that it's using the word in a different way.
Matthew:It is shaping public perceptions of the LGBT community as a community that is bent on subversion and that is not simply seeking to be included in society in a way that can benefit everyone, and so I think it is actually increasingly imperative for LGBTQ people and our allies to understand this distinction and be able to articulate what we are for and what we are not arguing for. So, yes, I am for affirming theology. I am against queer theology because I am against queer theory as a guiding methodology. Norms are not inherently oppressive. It doesn't mean that norms should all be supported, but we should look at norms through the teachings and model and life of Jesus and uphold norms that accord with his teachings and challenge norms that are against his teachings. That is a very different approach than saying that norms are themselves oppressive and to be resisted.
Randy:Matthew, yeah that was, that was a preach.
Matthew:Yes, okay, now I said my piece, tell me, you're done yeah, yeah, it's.
Kyle:It seems like maybe you've been critiqued, uh, you've been misrepresented, perhaps as a queer theorist, in the past. Is that fair? Is that no?
Matthew:I actually haven't. It's that, um, and some of the queer theologians have been very clear to not claim me as well. Yeah, because they feel like, oh you know, and they'll be very clear that I do not get to, I'm not queer, because I'm not politically queer and I'm like, okay, I mean, I'm happy just being myself and I happen to be gay, but this is not somehow my politics or my worldview, and that's true of the vast majority of LGBTQ people. It's just that I think the LGBT community more broadly is increasingly being misrepresented, and the way that we are increasingly perceived, especially by people who are right of center, is through this prism of the most extreme ideas pushed out by queer theory that then get filtered through the algorithms of TikTok and social media in a way that are misrepresenting with the vast majority of gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Matthew:I actually think transgender people are uniquely harmed by this because they are a smaller number of people and so there are fewer transgender people and so fewer people know them, and so they are more vulnerable to misrepresentation and misunderstanding. And so if you have a small minority of people in one identity group who can easily, then alter perceptions of the entire group, even though the entire group is not in alignment with that, and so I think it's actually very important for anybody who cares about LGBTQ people to be able to explain this distinction, unless you genuinely do think all norms are oppressive and should be subverted. But in that case I would just ask all I want hey, the queer theorists, just just use a different word. If you want to call yourselves radically anti-normative theorists, go for it. Okay Then. Then distinction will be clear. But as long as there is confusion, they're going to reject. As long as there's confusion, then there, then there will be the need to transgress that language right out the end.
Randy:So, matthew, this is if if you'd rather not answer this, but I'm interested because in your book I don't see any of this. So are you trans affirming yes, okay? Yes and I would love to have a third episode where we can talk more about that.
Kyle:I also noticed the absence of that in the book and I just assumed it was a choice based on the subject matter and your intended audience, and it's a very different argument, obviously, to argue for trans affirmation biblically because it just ain't in there yeah, well, to put it in just a few minutes, because it's an important topic, I mean.
Matthew:So, yeah, in the original edition of the book, I like only barely touched on it, just in a way to say you, you know, be like in a positive way. But like I just thought, wow, like this is a whole other topic that would require so much more research and also like that I'm probably not the best position to speak to anyway, since that's not my experience and since then, yeah, I mean it's. It would almost have to be an entirely different book and I don't feel like I'm the right person to write that. So I do say and I try to address this in the end notes, even to the introduction about, like there's a reason why I'm specifically focused on gay Christians in this book. Partly the whole question around mandatory celibacy has a unique application to gay people that it does not have to bisexual people. That does not mean that of course, there's anything wrong with being bisexual to bisexual people. That does not mean that of course there's anything wrong with being bisexual. It does not mean that bisexual people cannot be in same-sex relationships, but some of the pastoral implications of the non-affirming theology on same-sex relationships are going to be drawn out most clearly by a focus on sexual orientation.
Matthew:And so and I discussed this too with transgender that, like there's, there is some overlap, and I think and I've heard from many transgender people and families of transgender people who have found the book to be very helpful because there are. I mean, one of the primary obstacles to transgender acceptance from a Christian standpoint is this view of universally normative understanding of gender complementarity, and so if you have that view of gender complementarity, you're probably not going to have a positive view of transgender. And so I think that for a lot of transgender people, the theological issues are intertwined, even though they are not identical, and so I hope that the book and I've heard from the first edition, I hope the second edition continues to be helpful for many transgender people, because I think that a lot of the same questions theologically have a lot of overlap. At the same time, there are also differences, and there are differences that would almost, you know, could easily be hundreds of pages of their own book. So my basic core thing is that I do not believe that being transgender is a sin, and I think that I know many transgender people who love God, who love the Bible, who love the church and who want to worship and serve and be part of the body of Christ, and I do not think that them being transgender should be any hindrance to their full inclusion in the body of Christ. That does not.
Matthew:What's interesting is that's not really the question that is most energizing to people today.
Matthew:Right, the great controversies today are about issues related to sports or medical transitions for minors, some of those types of topics, and those are separate questions from the basic question of is this a sin or is it not a sin, and I think for most transgender people, that question is going to have greater relevance to their day-to-day life than some of those other debates about that are, you know, certainly significant topics in their own right, but that are not.
Matthew:As I mean, if you believe that it is a sin to be transgender, that's going to affect every transgender person who has benefited from transitioning. If you know, it is certainly possible to have a like to affirm transgender people and to believe that transgender, being transgender, is not a sin, and to have a variety of viewpoints on some of the other more like political, medical questions in that area. So that's why I also recognize, like you know, that's. That's part of what makes it challenging. Is that so much of the heat right now around those topics really is outside of my lane, which is about biblical interpretation and like inclusion in the church. But I certainly no. I do not think that there is anything morally wrong with somebody being transgender, and I want transgender Christians to be fully welcomed and included in the church.
Randy:Thank you. Last question here, matthew the book. The book, again, is God and the Gay Christian. It's a revised and expanded edition to additional chapters or appendices, um, that are really important. This is an important book. This is one of those that I would say. You got to read it. This book was originally published, though, in 2014,.
Randy:As we established in our first part of this interview, so much has happened in regard to LGBTQ, rightsbtq, right since then. Right overfell happened right in the year after you read release this book, which I'm sure when that happened, you were like, oh my gosh, why couldn't have I released it? Now, you know, or maybe that did it spike. You're saying right, yeah, and then lots and lots of progress happened after that for the, I would say for the queer community. Right, and then with, with trump and trump, a lot of hostility towards the LGBTQ community, and it felt like we regressed in many ways to where we are now in 2025. And I know many people in the queer community who feel nervous, scared, actively making plans to move, for instance, right, instance right. Where do you think so? From 2014, when you wrote this book, to 2025 now, how do you see that trajectory and where do you see this?
Matthew:conversation going, let's say, 10 years from now. Well, the trajectory will depend greatly on the extent to which the LGBTQ movement either embraces or distances itself from queer theory, because, sure, there've always been and I'm well aware of this from 2014, there are many conservative Christians who are very opposed to the acceptance of not just transgender people but of gay people and same sex relationships. That's a reality. But, yeah, so there's kind of like. So why is there this current cultural backlash? Some people say, oh well, you know, it's just these conservatives. They've always been against us and they've never stopped. But I'm like, well, sure, there's always been people who've been against us, but something clearly changed about four or five years ago, where there was still growing, gradual progress and acceptance for both gay and transgender people up until about 2020, 2021. I think the primary issue here there are multiple issues is and, yes, there have certainly been activists who have, you know, not operated in good faith and who have, who are coming from a place, who do have animus. But, like, I don't think that that can be the primary explanation, because you have to ask well, what material were you giving those activists to work with? And around 2021, in particular, 2020, with the pandemic, with TikTok, with social media.
Matthew:I think that the whatever it was, but I think queer theory began to have a breakthrough in terms of that whole way of seeing and even self-understanding related to LGBTQ. It used to be that the narrative was that about inclusion and integration based on shared values. Queer theory's narrative is about opposition to the majority, based on an us versus them. We are better than you posture effectively, and so increasingly the message even though I don't think this represents most LGBTQ people but increasingly the message that many people are hearing is one that is just oh, if you are like a heterosexual, cisgender person, you're kind of less interesting, you're like vanilla, maybe. Actually, you're part of the problem because you haven't been actively interrogating your identity enough and so you're upholding these binary structures just by continuing to identify this way.
Matthew:And I've heard, I mean I've encountered, people who are men, who are exclusively attracted to women, who are identifying as queer as a political statement, and I was like this is not constructive and they think that they're being like better allies. And I even had one of these people tell me that I need to stop identifying as gay and everyone needs to identify as queer, because I'm I'm limiting myself and I'm like OK, michel Foucault I mean literally, I felt like I was talking to him, but yeah, so, to the extent that the narrative now feels like it feels to many people, especially on the right, it feels like the LGBT community is against them out of an antagonism toward majority norms. That is a very, very different premise than we love our families and we want to stay a part of them. We love our be. We want to stay a part of them. We love our church, we want to stay a part of it. We are grateful for our freedoms in this country and we want to be fully included in that.
Matthew:So to me, that's what happened basically is the perception of the narrative at least shifted. There was an inflection point about four years ago and there's a variety of reasons behind that, but yeah, so it's not surprising to me that we'd have seen public support certainly at a minimum plateau and, in certain instances, decline, and I just think that that's yeah. So I think, and the transgender community as well was experiencing slow but steady increases in public acceptance until about 2020. And I think what happened is at least the perception of the narrative changed, and the perception of the narrative became. It's no longer just about inclusion and acceptance. It's almost you need to pick one group over another group or it just became a much more adversarial perception. That is not actually how the vast majority of transgender people I know feel about, like how they want to be perceived in the world. They literally just want to be able to like, move on with their lives and have ordinary good lives and not be discriminated against and not be treated with disrespect or hostility or rejection. And so you know, the queer theorists don't like that.
Matthew:The queer theorists say that anybody who wants to be seen as normal is part of the problem. No, it's really the queer theorists' ideology that's the problem, because the vast majority of LGBTQ people do want to be seen as normal, not in the sense that we will never challenge any norms. Obviously, if there's an unjust norm, we should challenge it. Not in the sense that we will never challenge any norms, obviously, if there's an unjust norm, we should challenge it, but in the sense that we don't want our lives to be an ongoing political statement simply against the concept of normativity itself. And so I do think that you cannot understand the present backlash without recognizing the influence of the queer theorist perspective and because it is so harmful to LGBTQ people and also not representative of the great majority of them. I just think we need to become increasingly clear about that, and I am cautiously optimistic that if we are able to do that, that that will ultimately yield a better climate again.
Randy:So normalizing the LGBTQ community and movement, which is kind of the opposite of what queer theory wants to do.
Matthew:Yeah, but not normalizing, like ironically sometimes, some of the queer theory perspective. They're like, yeah, we need to normalize everything, right, and we need to almost normalize, like Marcella Aldiss-Reed her book was. One of her books was like subtitled, about, like you know, perversion, theological perversions, and she was celebrating the concept of perversion as something to be embraced. Which is like, okay, so you do want to normalize it and then normalize a lot of it is incoherent when you break it down, but it's like no, we should not be normalizing anybody who what they're trying to normalize is intentional, like the few vocal people who do want to normalize active subversion and hostility. Don't normalize that. But yes, people who are just gay, bisexual or transgender and are just ordinary people who happen to be gay, bisexual or transgender and who want to be able to still be accepted, included, supported and move on with their lives, yes, these people should be treated as normal and that's what most of them want. And I guess the people who find that to be oppressive, like again, I think they're overthinking it.
Kyle:Quickly to end, I want to let you give a plug for the Reformation Project and the work that you guys do. What is it, where can people find it, why should we all know about it, etc.
Matthew:Yes, well, great question. The Reformation Project is the nonprofit organization that I started in 2013. Like the book, I had no intention of starting an organization when I first gave that talk in 2012, but it almost grew out of it, naturally because I was hearing from a lot of people who said, wow, this video at the time is really helpful for me personally, but I still feel so isolated and alone and I feel like I don't have any support in my church community. So the reason I started the organization was to help equip and empower Christians in non-affirming churches or who have any connection to non-affirming communities or denominations or schools, to be a more effective voice to advocate for an affirming view, but to do so critically, not in an adversarial posture.
Matthew:Our core values are love for God, love for the Bible and love for the church. We're coming at this not just from a oh, we think you're causing harm. We want to stop you causing harm. If you take that approach, it'll become self-righteous, it'll become hectoring and it'll become divisive. Our approach is we love God, we love Jesus, we love the Bible, we love our faith and we do feel like the church is currently shooting itself in the foot with this non-affirming position. It does not mean that people have bad motives the great majority of people do not but we want to approach people in love from our shared faith, beliefs and values, to invite them and ask them to reconsider their views on this not to reconsider their view of the Bible's authority overall, but their interpretation of scripture on this specific topic and to yeah, so I think that that's also what a lot of one of our tagline is like an affirming, an orthodox and affirming church is what we're seeking to advance, because I think the concern of many non-affirming Christians also what a lot of one of our tagline is like an affirming, an orthodox and affirming church is what we're seeking to advance, because I think the concern of many non-affirming Christians is that if you, if you become affirming, or church becomes affirming, then eventually that church is going to every first order, christian doctrine is going to be out the window within a few years max.
Matthew:And there certainly have been churches where that happened and in the great majority of those cases really all those cases that I can think of they weren't even really trying to hold onto scripture's authority. This is part of the reason, too, why biblical authority continues to matter to me, because I just it's a fruit issue, like and I see what happens when communities decide that biblical authority isn't important anymore, and it tends to lead to significant destabilization of their Christian identity in ways that are ultimately to the detriment of the community and many of the individuals within it. That's just my experience. But so I think that part of what we're trying to do with the Reformation Project is challenge this perception that exists that, oh, to be affirming is to be a theological progressive who doesn't much care about the authority of scripture and therefore may or may not continue to identify as Christian five years later. That's the fear that I think holds many non-affirming Christians back from actually engaging, kind of the best version of the affirming argument.
Matthew:And so part of what we want to do is to model, through churches and individuals, how you can be affirming and still deeply committed to basic Christian Orthodox beliefs and values. And also we want to help churches and help pastors to navigate this conversation in their churches in a way that can demonstrate that. So we have programs for pastors, we have programs for parents whose children have come out, who are wrestling with that. We have a biannual conference called the Reconcile and Reform Conference, which this year will be October 2nd through the 4th in Atlanta. Anyone is welcome to come. Whether you're affirming or not, you are welcome to come and to take part or just kind of observe, whatever your interest may be. We would love to have you there and that's a great experience where we have Christians just from all over the country and other countries as well, uh to come together for worship, for connection, for teaching and uh learning, who are then seeking to go back to their churches to to be that voice for greater inclusion in a way that is committed to scripture's authority.
Randy:Brilliant. Yeah, I tell my I don't know if I've said this on the podcast before or not, but I tell my non-affirming pastor friends that, look, I get to actually pastor everyone in my church in regards to their sexuality. I don't have an approach that says you just can't do a bunch of. You just can't do anything. Sex is off limits for you. We actually, when you have an affirming theology, now you get to pastor people and let them know what a healthy sexual ethic looks like in their context and within the way God made them, and that's a beautiful thing and it gives you actually more pastoral permission and freedom to actually scripturally speak into, guided by the Spirit of God, guided by our experience, guided by these wonderful relationships, be able to actually speak into their lives in relevant ways that matter to them. That should be important for us pastors. I think so. Matthew Vines' book is God and the Gay Christian, a revised and expanded edition. Thank you for keeping this conversation going. Thank you for the work you're doing. It's so important. Just thank you for joining us tonight.
Matthew:Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Randy:Thanks for listening to a pastor and a philosopher, walk into a bar.
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