Are Evangelicals ready for a gay celebrity?

The outing of Jonathan Merritt

On August 4th, Evangelical star Jonathan Merritt came out of the closet. Was there a bit of déjà vu? He was outed in an ugly scene back in 2012.

Back then, in a rush explanation, he explained that he was molested as a boy, and held himself out as ‘broken’. This outing, he’s just saying he’s gay. I think over his difficult history.

Born in 1982, Jonathan Merritt is the son of James Merritt, a Georgia megachurch pastor.

This is the key fact of his career. As Jonathan writes later: “Any modicum of success I have or will achieve in my life, I owe in part to my father.”

Evangelicals love dynasties—with prominent pastors being, very typically, the sons of pastors. Jonathan seemed set up for religious success.

The way he explains it in his 2014 book Jesus is Better Than You Imagined, he was seven (so in 1989) when a “much older boy” named Michael instigated some touching. Jonathan later panicked.

“‘Can a boy get AIDS just from touching a private part?’ I asked my parents.”

He frames it as “something inside of me” having been “bruised” or “broken.” His heterosexuality got damaged, was the idea.

By age 10, he was suicidal.

The molestation was eating away at him. He writes:

“I was so suffocated by my secret that I believed only death would provide me the space needed to breathe freely. One day, I remember walking into my room, locking my door, tying a brown leather belt around my frail neck and trying to hang myself from my bedpost.”

He wrote out a suicide note for his parents that explained his tragic situation, assured that should be die, at least, “they’ll truly know me.”

But he went on, doing well in school.

He writes: “I felt attracted to pretty girls, though none of them gave me much attention. But I also occasionally felt myself drawn to other boys.”

In college, he dated girls, but was haunted by gender inadequacy.

“I didn’t feel like much of a man, and even when I was attracted to a girl, I was afraid I would never be able to love her as I wanted to.”

His dad become president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2000 to 2002.

James Merritt has seemed a bit kinder on gay issues. I’m reading a 2002 news story of his giving a rare speech on the subject:

“Merritt told the crowd, ‘I want to make this statement, and I want to make it as plainly as I know how: We love homosexuals. God loves homosexuals.’

Amid sustained applause, Merritt continued, ‘But he loves them too much to leave them homosexuals.’”

Pastor Merritt continued on to discuss gays and lesbians as ‘unsaved’, i.e. as spiritually unredeemed. If they could get saved, he seems to think, their sexuality will revert to heterosexuality.

He asks for compassion on those terms:

“These people are lost. They need Christ.”

In 2009, Jonathan Merritt made waves by arguing for Christian tolerance.

At age 26, his USA Today column, “An evangelical’s plea: ‘Love the sinner',” advocated for Christians to be less harsh toward gays.

He mostly follows his father’s lines. He writes:

“God’s model is a lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual union, but we must balance this message with the scriptural understanding that we are all sinners.”

Shortly afterward, a popular Evangelical T.V. personality, Azariah Southworth, himself quietly gay, emailed Merritt. They kept up a correspondence that got flirty.

They met up. Southworth writes later:

“He had bright blue eyes and boy-next-door good looks. I was smitten. He seemed a little paranoid, though, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.”

They’d each write of the experience.

The accounts are different. Merritt says that he shared “my story of struggle” with Southworth, and they met up as friends. He writes:

“…and as we were saying goodbye, we had physical contact that fell short of sex but went beyond the bounds of friendship. Afterwards, I went back to my hotel room by myself, and laid there, sorting through my clouded emotions.”

Southworth says it was pretty much a date. They went bar hopping, as Merritt was drinking, and getting frisky. Southworth was concerned about doing something that Merritt would regret. He writes:

“I knew the guilt that would ensue for him. I’ve been there. It’s so freeing when you connect with another gay person before you’re ‘out’ but when it’s over, you reenter that world of secrets and lies. You’re surrounded once more by the immense social pressure to look and act a certain way within your faith community. Being gay makes you feel so alone.”

Southworth dropped Merritt off at his hotel. “He gave me a kiss goodbye and got out of the car.”

Southworth had visions of a big romance.

Instead, he found, Merritt was becoming distant. Feeling forlorn, Southworth monitored Merritt’s anti-gay commentary in the media—getting annoyed by the hypocrisy. He writes:

“Jonathan’s approach to LGBT people and issues may be less extreme than that of the late Jerry Falwell, but in the end the results and message are the same: Your sexual orientation is a sin and you need to change with God’s help.”

By 2012 Southworth had re-invented himself as an openly gay ex-Christian blogger. He wrote a post outing Merritt. There were no sex details, but just the message: “Come out.”

Seeing the blog post, Merritt had a breakdown. He writes later in Christianity Today: “I fell to my knees next to my kitchen table with tears in the corner of my eyes: ‘Lord, I can’t do this. I’m not ready. I’m not strong enough.’”

He felt a reply came to him: “It’s time.”

But…he continued to deny it.

Having to deal with the matter, he gave a interview in which he acknowledged a gay tendency, framed as a result of sexual abuse.

Without referring to Southworth by name—just calling him a ‘blogger’—Merritt framed their meeting as “an unwise situation,” borrowing the language used when Evangelical men get flirty with women not their wives.

Merritt then says he went into Christian counseling—leaving the impression that reparative therapy works. He never says he was ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’, etc. He refers to it as his ‘brokenness’.

“Those close to me know I have actually been planning to share the story of my brokenness for some time. Because it is part of my spiritual journey. And because it underscores the power of the Gospel to transform lives.”

The thrust of the interview was that he wasn’t gay, but rather, attraction to men was a sin that he dealt with, at times unsuccessfully.

Merritt’s career benefited from the episode.

He became more politically progressive, more interesting to mainstream media, all while remaining minimally acceptable to Evangelicals. As I read the religion, this owed largely to his father continuing to support him.

In 2018, his dad tweeted:

“We are BFF. We do disagree on a lot but we do agree on Jesus and his death, burial and resurrection and many other important things. My love for him and all my sons is UNCONDITIONAL. I will always have my family’s back.”

Pastor Merritt’s displaying this grace publicly is itself historic. If he’d divorced his son, as many Evangelical parents have, Jonathan Merritt’s career as an Evangelical speaker might well have ended.

It must be said, however, that Pastor Merritt has not articulated a pro-gay theology. It‘s framed as a family matter.

Jonathan was in bad shape.

He has written of being in “chronic pain, vibrating with anxiety, and deep in depression.” He took to examining his “mind-body connection,” with a new practice of meditation.

His career was his true romance. There’s been some legendary moments, like his 2017 interview with Eugene Peterson, the revered pastor who caused shockwaves by saying he’d perform gay marriages.

No one but Jonathan Merritt would’ve asked the question.

But how honest is he being?

His new self-outing is not, perhaps, a model of confession. He goes over the old history: “I was publicly and painfully outed by a person who had earned my trust only to betray it.”

He doesn’t deal with his years of anti-gay narratives and hypocrisy. He now salutes himself as “a gay man, beloved by God, who has endured the worst the world could throw at him and fought his way to health and wholeness.”

There’s no talk of relationships with men, and he still reads as, essentially, celibate and sexless. Perhaps the really historic marker would be a gay Evangelical romance in public?

Update: The gay issue continued to be a problem for the Merritt family. His promotion of an “open homosexual” led to his resignation as a visiting professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Jonathan Merritt continues on as a religion journalist and ghostwriter, now not an Evangelical, but a vaguely New Age-ish Christian spirituality.

Azariah Southworth is now a podcaster, co-hosting the gay Christian show Yass Jesus. I’m not seeing that he commented on Jonathan Merritt’s second coming out. He doesn’t reply to a query about it. 🔶