Girls Erased
Evangelicals love their ex-lesbians
Evangelical love their ex-lesbians—the ones who have faith in Jesus! That means they got married to a man.
And they love to tell people about it. Take Rachel Gilson, who’s had fawning coverage in Christianity Today, Desiring God and The Gospel Coalition.
“Sisters and brothers, what does God’s Word say to us?” she writes in Christianity Today. “That we do not have to be ashamed. Our sexuality does not own us or define us. Jesus does.”
Rachel has a sad story of a misspent youth.
Her non-Christian parents met in a gay club. Her father was abusive and left. As a girl, she happened to see some porn.
At this point, for an Evangelical reader, her descent into evil is assured. And pretty soon, she fell for a girl — who cheats on her with a man.
Attending Yale—a nest of liberalism and alcohol—she happens, by divine grace, to come upon Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. In a second miracle, she gets involved with the local chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ.
This story, of course, is completely fake.
Campus Crusade for Christ—lately trying to rebrand itself as ‘Cru’—has a long track record of anti-gay messaging. They’re famous for comparing gays to murderers, child abusers, Satanists, etc.
For decades, they hyped “ex-gay” organizations, often with extreme overstatement. But Rachel’s narrative is that, finally, some wonderful people, these ‘Cru’ Christians, really care about her!
“This was amazing: real people, really examining the Bible and applying it to their lives.”
Her big realization happens: she can obey the traditional morality handed down by Jesus without even knowing why. “We obey him, not our sinful desires. They are strong, but he is stronger.”
Just get married! God will do the rest.
Backed by ‘Cru’ with its muscle power in the Evangelical media landscape, Gilson published a book, Born Again This Way. Here she explains that all the horrible lesbian stuff pretty much stopped. She got married, and became a mother!—which in Evangelicalism is a divine calling.
“Jesus’ union with his church is supposed to be fruitful, and procreation is a picture of that.”
She doesn’t need to be fully ‘cured’ of the lesbianism to be basically cured. There could be a “change in attractional patterns for some,” she writes, but the real benefit to lesbians is that they’re not around women.
I’d love to learn more about her husband.
Andrew Gilson, another ‘Cru’ employee, is presented as a man who knew his lesbian wife wasn’t attracted to him but he did it for Jesus. His Twitter feed seems mostly devoted to promoting her career.
And so a theory appears in my mind.
Say an Evangelical organization with a half-billion a year budget—mostly from donations—really needs to get on college campuses. That’s the ‘Cru’ bread and butter. Their stated job is to teach America’s youth to get good and Evangelical. And they need to be on college campuses.
The problem is, they keep getting kicked off.
A 2009 history of the organization by John G. Turner, Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ, has glimpses of this ongoing conflict:
“After several private institutions, including Tufts University and Middlebury College, threatened to ban evangelical organizations that refused to welcome homosexual students as officers, Bright complained that ‘Christians are ousted wherever possible on campus.’ ‘The homosexual agenda controls everything,’ he maintained.”
There’s been regular updates in college newspapers of ‘Cru’ getting kicked off campus for its anti-gay discrimination. Now, Rachel Gilson appears — with a compelling ‘new’ take on the issue? A compassionate way to deal with the LGBT issue, fronted by a woman who might seem sympathetic.
For some reason I’m recalling that Norma McCorvey, a lesbian, was paid to pretend to be an Evangelical anti-abortion spokeswoman.
Then there’s Rebecca McLaughlin.
She’s another ex-lesbian with a very similar reparative therapy narrative—at the same time. And she’s Rachel’s bestie. Hmm.
Originally from London, relocated to America because of her husband, McLaughlin says, she knew she was lesbian, and decided to marry a man as a religious practice. Her book, Confronting Christianity, published in 2019, was hyped by Christianity Today, and works off Gilson’s 2017 essay.
She too is hyped by The Gospel Coalition and Desiring God. I guess lesbians found a way to get Evangelical men to like them.
McLaughlin comes off as a scholar.
If Rachel Gilson tells the dramatic sob story of a life going down the toilet as a satanic lesbian, McLaughlin takes on the problem as an intellectual.
She got a Ph.D. in English at Cambridge (her thesis seems to have been on ‘prisons in Shakespeare’). She went to an Anglican seminary. An unusual profile for a champion of American Evangelical sexuality morality.
She writes:
“Mine is the story of a girl who found herself from childhood falling in love with older, inaccessible girls, but hoped and prayed she would grow out of it. It’s a story of silence and quiet loss, as my heart got stuck to people who could not want me back.”
She launches a presentation of an anti-gay, pro-marriage theology. No matter what you feel, she argues, marriage and family are better for you than that icky gay life that’s away from ‘God’.
She offers a heterosexual theology.
For her, the Bible tells a story of God working through straight sex.
“Sex joins man and woman in intimate relationship as they become fruitful and multiply. The God who exists in utter intimacy, with love across difference at the core of his being, creates image bearers who are of the same essence but different, and calls them into one-flesh unity.”
The physical movements of sex return one the original state, or something?
In the theology she sketches out, it wouldn’t matter how you feel about sex — just that you’re doing it.
She seeks to prohibit the touch of genitals without marriage. To compensate, she allows that hugging is great.
She allows that non-genital touch with non-spouses is permitted. “The same Scriptures that say no to same-sex sexual intimacy say a massive yes to intimacy of other kinds” she writes.
She tries give the religion a bit of an update.
She seems to offer an Evangelical Christianity that is a bit more on the side of science, and anti-racist.
To compensate, the anti-gay talk gets truly violent.
She openly solicits comparisons between Evangelical theology and Islam, saying they’ll make common cause to repeal movements like gay marriage.
“Given the global population trends, the claim that those who oppose gay marriage will be ‘on the wrong side of history’ is likely to be inaccurate,” she writes.
She sees Leviticus 18:22 as an anti-gay text of ongoing importance, having been “reaffirmed multiple times.” I wrote her asking to clarify where exactly Leviticus 18:22 is “reaffirmed”—and what the penalty is to be—but haven’t heard back.
The penalty attached to that verse is death, and so I have to understand her to call for gays to be executed, as is done in the Muslim world.
She likes the “law” in general.
McLaughlin sees New Testament teachings as more restrictive even than Old Testament teachings. She writes:
“Jesus is sometimes caricatured as a prophet of free love, unconcerned about sexual ethics. But his teaching on sexual morality was consistently stricter than the Old Testament law.”
Of course that’s the same messiah who says, in Matthew 11:30, that “my burden is light.”
She doesn’t engage Bible scholarship on the question. There is no argument that lesbian intimacies are anywhere suggested in the Bible. (It remains legal in Judaism.)
Christians may claim the phrase “their females” in Romans 1:26 refers to lesbianism, an expedient lie. (See: David J. Murphy 2019 paper, “More Evidence Pertaining to ‘Their Females’ in Romans 1:26.”)
Why is she advocating for Evangelicals?
Again, one has to wonder if this ex-or-current-lesbian is being paid. Her frequent references to Rachel Gilson suggest a ‘Cru’ marketing campaign.
It’s yet another disgrace to the Christianity that heard Jesus’s teachings—all that “Love one another” stuff—as: “Lesbians, get married!” 🔶
