SBC Conference Speaker Says Newly Converted Gay People Can Stay Married Because ‘God Hates Divorce’ + Full Video, Transcript
Rachel Gilson has long been an of-cited source for Reformed Folk looking for to push an innovative and subversive message on same-sex theology. Frequently platformed and pushed by The Gospel Coalition, both in featured articles, videos, and as a conference speaker, her writings have been featured at John Piper’s Desiring God and that liberal rag Christianity Today. She currently works at CRU (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) on their National Theological Team, where “she is specifically giving leadership to staff, students, and churches in how to approach LGBT people and issues with grace and truth. “
She’s the author of the book “Born Again This Way” and has spoken extensively on same-sex issues, on account of being a former practicing lesbian who is in a “mixed-orientation marriage” with a straight man, despite her still being exclusively attracted to women. She’s also on the leadership team with Preston Sprinkle’s The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender and is a writer/fellow at the Gospel Colations ‘The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.’
We’ve been warning people about her for a long time, after she came on our radar in 2018 when featured in the Christianity Today post, “I Never Became Straight. Perhaps That Was Never God’s Goal.” In that article, she made the astonishing claim, “Slowly, I came to understand that ‘making me straight’ wasn’t the answer. There is no biblical command to be heterosexual.”
Gilson’s view is that while same-sex intercourse is sinful, same-sex attraction is not. She believes that if a homosexual is saved, the expectation is that they will never rid himself of those desires in this life, and the sooner one adjusts to this reality, the better.
She’s also slated to be a keynote speaker at the upcoming SBC’s Pastors’ Wives/Women’s Conference.
In a recently unearthed video from The Dissenter of her speaking at the 2018 Cru Conference, Gilson claims that God hates gay people divorcing just as much as straight people and that when gay marriages end, “it breaks that image of marriage just as surely as anything else.” This video was purged by Cru shortly after it was released, but not before we captured the whole thing.
After a question by someone who has gay parents and wants to know whether he should be supporting that marriage or whether he should support a divorce, she responds:
I don’t know your parents, I’m not gonna speak too particularly into it, right? But as we think about the question of people in a same-sex marriage, who maybe come to know the Lord, this is a real situation that I’ve encountered in my life. I met a woman recently in St. Louis, who was actually in a marriage to a woman and was processing what to do because she had come to the Lord, but her wife hadn’t.
We need to recognize in this situation that these are some very tender things. And if we just walk around being like, ‘I’ve got some great ideas’- like, you don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about what this relationship has been like, the joys that its provided, the heaviness its provided. Like, we never approach these situations with swagger. If we’ve got a relationship where they’re trusting us to speak in and trusting us to draw near, we want to listen really carefully. Like with any person, discipleship is going to be a process.
And so I’d say if someone in same sex-marriage comes to know the Lord, it’s not like, ‘okay, what we got to deal with first is your same-sex marriage.’
Most pastors probably would put ‘your gay marriage’ on top of the list of things to address for new believers, even though Gilson sees it as just a minor matter that doesn’t need to be rushed.
Like, our discipleship is our whole person. When we come to Christ, there are a lot of things that need attention, that need forgiveness, that need healing, that need adjusting. But I do hope that over the course of discipleship for someone in that position, they’re going to have a chance to examine what the Bible says about sexuality, and they’re going to have a trustworthy person to walk through with them what that means for their life.
When you’re a child, especially during that weird stage where you’re like, for the first time an adult child relating to adult parents, that’s weird, right? It’s just weird. You used to be five, and they were old, and now you’re like old but not as old. If you’re a parent, relating to someone that situation, you’ve already got that strange dynamic on top of something that is theologically and emotionally really heavy.
So I would say as their son, you love them and help them in whatever way, right? You love them as you try to follow the Lord, as they try to follow the Lord, to come around the scriptures together and figure out what’s going on.
She concludes by giving examples of what some couples have done when one person gets saved, without saying that their choices are terrible and spiritually schizophrenic and that the only acceptable response would be a very open, public, repentant, legal divorce as quickly as possible on behalf of the saved person, along with a separation of households.
I do think that it’s pretty normal for someone who comes to Christ, to see ‘Oh, this isn’t the way God designed to use my sexuality.‘ They don’t have to negate all the good things that they’ve experienced with the person that they’ve been in a relationship with to recognize that God says something else about sexuality.
They might end up making a very big cost. I mean, I’ve known some people who decide to stay in that relationship legally, but to live celibately. To break off having sex, that has happened with some couples who both come to Christ. I’ve known some couples where one person came to Christ and decided that in order to honor the Lord, he needed to be celibate and his partner decided, his husband decided to leave him.I mean Paul talks about this reality in 1 Corinthians 7, sometimes if a spouse comes to know the Lord, the other spouse can’t abide it and they leave and then that person is you know, that person is free.
But sometimes it will mean yeah, sometimes it will mean getting a divorce. God hates divorce. He does. It breaks that image of marriage just as surely as anything else. What’s interesting is though God hates it, it is still sometimes allowed in the context of a broken world.
Gilson makes an unsaved spouse divorcing a saved spouse sound like something lamentable that God hates, when in reality, He really, really loves it. Gay marriage is not a real marriage any more than an incestuous father wed to his own daughter is in a real marriage, and so there’s no reason to suggest that the Lord would hate an abomination. Gilson isn’t approaching it as if it’s sad that the believing spouse has to take action and divorce the unbelieving one, but that it’s sad that the believing one gets divorced by the unbelieving one.
I think it’s really challenging for example, to read the end of Nehemiah. If you’re not familiar with Nehemiah, it’s like after the Israel had been sent away, exiled for their disobedience and they’re being brought back to the land. And they’re told, like ‘you were exiled for disobedience, be obedient, be obedient, draw near to the Lord.’ …but even if they come back to the land, and they renew their vows, and they draw into the Lord, they end up marrying these foreign women, which is expressly what God told them not to do.
The Jewish people needed to stay a unique whole so that when the seed of Abraham came, Jesus, he would be able to fulfill the promises about him. They needed to stay a people, it was very important.
And they disobeyed and they got into these relationships. And what Nehemiah did is he broke up those relationships. God doesn’t love divorce. Sometimes the consequences of our sin are extremely complicated and very messy. It means we can’t be simplistic people and we cannot be proud people. And we can’t be people who just have these little set answers. When we’re walking alongside real human beings, we need to really meet them where they’re at. We need to be whole people.
Editor’s Note. Long time readers of us will recognize that this is not a new story, but rather we covered it in 2019.
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Yet another dim individual telling the rest of us what God wants. Thanks, but apparently unlike yourself, we can read our Bibles.
This is why Steven Anderson doesn’t want any gays in church at all.
Steven Anderson is a clown that has absolutely NO business behind a pulpit.
Maybe so, but he’s not wrong about not allowing the sexually immoral into the church. 1 Cor. 5 is clear, God doesn’t want them in His church.
Well, when subjectivity trumps objective truth, and when feelings have more authority that God’s Word, then … sure.
As the threshing continues, the numbers are going to continue to decline. The SBC can keep the porneia, or it can keep the Christians, but it cannot keep both. One or the other will be driven out.
“And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve”