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. “
In a recent promo video unearthed by The Dissenter, Gilson is seen appearing in a promo video for Preston Sprinkle’s Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender, giving a snippet of her testimony while appearing alongside other LGBTQ people, including ‘Christian Transgendered’ man who thinks he’s a woman, sending the message that this is perfectly normal and acceptable.
Southern Baptist Convention speaker, Rachel Gilson, appears in Preston Sprinkle's promo video alongside "transgenders" who say that God hangs out in LGBTQ+ spaces and loves everyone. >> https://t.co/nPtp55jGsopic.twitter.com/QfYDhLbmdO
It’s an unsurprising move from Gilson. 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 Coaltions ‘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.”
We wrote about her recently after she suggested during her talk at the 2018 CRU conference 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.” She also spoke of a gay couple “divorcing” as a sad event, which is strange for a Christian to say when it should be a joyous occasion.
While Sprinkle’s The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender seeks to be a resource for Christians, they have long instead been a source of confusion and discord, serving as controlled opposition intended to muddy up the waters, which we’ve covered in our posts:
Christian speaker Rachel Gilson has gone into damage control mode and responded more fully to claims that she has a permissive attitude regarding whether gay-married folks who become saved should divorce their spouse.
Just a simple "I tried to be compassionate to this kid and ended up sowing confusion." Feels primarily like it's about protecting the bottom line of an SBC conference (Lifeway being the episode's sponsor doesn't help counter that impression, either).
— Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) May 26, 2023
We wrote about this recently after she suggested during her talk at the 2018 CRU conference 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.”
She also spoke of a gay couple “divorcing” as a sad event, which is strange for a Christian to say when it should be a joyous occasion. While Gilson is likening it to the same sadness and sobriety we should feel when a straight couple gets divorced; it’s more like how we should feel when an incestuous father “divorces” the daughter he spent a decade grooming and then “married.” No tears here.
Specifically she said:
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.
While she initially responded to the controversy on Twitter with a statement: “If someone in a same-sex marriage becomes a Christian, the path of obedience is to end that marriage by divorce. This has been my consistent teaching” Gilson sidesteps all the questions people were asking.
Instead, she presents a clarification that does almost nothing to respond to the question or concerns, all the while gaslighting her critics into thinking that her views have remained unchanged, when they are diametrically opposed to each other. Further, while her new statement says they should get divorced, she does not address questions like whether or not they should stop living together, whether or not they can remain platonic roommates, or several other options she seemed fine advocating for her in her previous statements.
And so that means some principles about divorce that we might normally bring in when we’re talking about marriage can feel confusing when we bring them to a same sex marriage. Because legally, we’re using the language of marriage, but it’s not actually marriage in God’s eyes.
So I was recently reflecting on this because I was thinking about basically one of the first times I ever answered this question in public, which was at a big student ministry five and a half years ago. (Editor’s Note, the full video Q &A is available here) And I’d just given this long seminar explaining why the Bible says ‘no’ to same-sex, marriage, same-sex sexual relationships. And this young man, a college student in the audience, asked a question in front of like a couple thousands of his peers, saying he had just become a Christian recently.
And like many college-aged converts, he really wanted to share the gospel with his parents. His parents, were his two moms. And so his question to me was like, ‘Well, I want to share the gospel with my moms, but if either of them come to Christ, are they going to have to get divorced?
..So for example, that 1 Corinthians 7 principle, well, it just doesn’t apply, because it’s not a marriage to begin with. 1 Corinthians 7 talks about, there’s some sort of grace. I mean, this actually happened to my mother in law. She became a Christian after she was married. Her husband, my father in law has never become a Christian, but she stayed with him, because there’s part of the principle of being that quiet witness to the gospel over time. They’ve been married over 40 years and we keep praying for his full repentance.
But in the case of the same-sex marriage, it’s not actually a real marriage. And so in order to follow Christ completely, to follow into obedience, you have to end that relationship, you have to exit that marriage.
Then, she makes the reference: "So, I was recently reflecting on this because I was thinking about one of the first times I ever answered this question in public…"
— Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) May 26, 2023
This is not what she said earlier. Reread her initial statement. She continues:
Similarly, and I’ve said this before as I’ve answered this question in public. Many Christians are familiar with the dictum that God hates divorce. And that’s true.But even though God does hate divorce, even in legitimate marriages, there are certain times when actually divorce is applicable. Jesus talks about for the exception of pornea. Or we even seen in Ezra 10, God had said to the Israelite people, ‘you have been booted out of the land for not obeying Torah. Now, as you come back into land, do not marry the women of the land.’ And then they just went in their unfaithfulness, they married women of land.
And so part of their repentance was actually to end those marriages. And those were legitimate, like actual male-female marriages, and they still out of faithfulness had to end them. So even moreso when we’re coming to a legal situation that’s not actually marriage in God’s eyes, how much moreso does the understanding that ‘God hates divorce’ not actually apply?
And so I think that is what a place where Christians can stumble, is they know God hates divorce, and so they don’t know what to do here. But actually what obedience is in this case, to follow in righteousness, is to separate from each other.
Now, of course, there might be children involved in this scenario- there often are. So of course there’s going to be all kinds of pastoral implications of ‘how do we, as a church family come alongside someone making this very costly move for the sake of Christ?’
So now she’s saying that they MUST get divorced, which is true, but in the next section, notice how in the last paragraph, she sprinkles in a bit of nuance, allowing for the idea of a gay couple divorcing but staying together in some manner, which is what she talked about initially.
We’re told to bear one another’s burdens. I’m hoping that as we are good and faithful witnesses to LGBT people in our lives, we’re going to have to figure out some of the best practices for these answers, because we’re going to see God redeem more and more people out of the LGBT community into the family of God.
So we’re going to have to figure out what that looks like sometimes. And I think there’s plenty times where it’s going to be messy, sometimes it’s going to be confusing, but the the Scripture is clear on the sexual ethic front. And it’s clear on the relational front; you end you end that marriage.
But then there’s, you know, there’s a lot of practical questions that come alongside; ‘Okay, well, how do we make sure everyone is loved and honored and cared for as the ramifications of that decision play out?’
Overall, great stuff. Maybe even @WPCButGoodGuys-worthy! But when you have an earlier public statement that's almost a complete 180 from most of the theses here, you have to confess that, not gaslight people with flat denials like "This has been my consistent teaching." pic.twitter.com/WurCn8ZPLB
— Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) May 26, 2023
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.
SBC Conference Speaker Says Newly Converted Gay People Can Stay Married Because 'God Hates Divorce'
In a recent Gospel Coalition podcast, author and contributor Rachel Gilson answers the question of whether Christians should use people’s personal pronouns, noting that this issue “is probably one of the most difficult to answer well in a space like this, and I mean like in a digital question and answer type space.”
We do not know what is difficult about it: the answer is simple.
No. No, we should not use them.
This is true of the more benign ones like he/she/them/etc., but also the grotesque world of “nounself-pronouns” and “neo-pronouns” where people identify as “xe/xem/xyr, moon/moonself, star/starself, bee/beeself, bun/bunself, and anything else under the sun.
However, the question is a bit more complicated for Gilson, who has been smuggling unbiblical perspectives on biblical sexuality into the church for years. She previously advocated (or at the very least, gave a tacit approval) that if one partner in a “gay marriage” becomes saved, then they should not necessarily divorce their same-sex “spouse,” because “God hates divorce,” but rather continue in the marriage and remain celibate.
She’s also expressed her belief that becoming saved and having a new heart has essentially zero effect on one’s sexual orientation, and that for all intents and purposes, sexual orientation is not something that is touched by the sanctifying process of the Holy Spirit. She believes that the number of gay people who get their sexuality redeemed by Christ and oriented towards the opposite sex is a fraction of a fraction of a percent, but that this reality is “ok” because her homosexuality is a “gift” to the church.
In her podcast answer, Gilson goes straight to the scriptures which talks about the weaker versus stronger brother, and says that if people do not wish to use these [ridiculous and made up] pronouns, that is their choice, but that “you have to recognize that when you are interacting with a transgender person your inability to use their preferred name or pronoun could actually be received as very offensive by them or deeply hurtful by them.”
In contrast, she explains the “stronger brother” position, which according to her warped theology is that “others of us have no problem at all using preferred names and pronouns. We’re like, “Yes! This is a way of showing love. I’m ready to do this.” And in that case, your conversation partner is probably easily going to feel loved and accepted by you.”
Once this compromise is made, calling a boy a girl or a girl a boy, or a boy “bunself” or a girl “fairyself,” Gilson explains that this grants you “access to the heart of your friend,” which then in turn lets you talk about spiritual things with them by getting those pronouns and lies “in.”
Sadly, Gilson has it completely backwards. It is not the weaker brother who refuses to call people by their preferred pronouns, but rather the stronger one who is not willing to compromise the truth of God’s reality and break the 9th commandment despite enormous pressure from the world and once formerly reputable Christian organizations like the Gospel Coalition telling them to do so.
[Editor’s note: If you aren’t familiar with Paul’s thoughts on this, you can look the up in Romans 14. In context, weaker brothers are the ones that make up rules that they try to make “religious” and impose on everybody else. Kind of like Rachel Gilson is doing.]
Transcript below, provided by WPC
I think the question of preferred pronouns…really can come down to a question of conscience. So if you’ve done a quiet time recently in the weak brother/strong brother passages of scripture, Paul has a category for the reality that some Christians are going to come to issues and fall in different spots. And one of the most important questions there is how are we going to relate to each other when we fall in different spots? So, on the one hand, some of us would feel incredibly compromised using a transgender person’s preferred name or pronouns, because it feels like we’re complicit in a lie. It feels like we’re breaking the ninth commandment, right?
Like we’re bearing false witness about a neighbor, and we need to take that really, really seriously. It is never safe to go to a place that your faith doesn’t allow you to go against your conscience. And if that is your position, you have to recognize that when you are interacting with a transgender person, your inability to use their preferred name or pronoun could actually be received as very offensive by them or deeply hurtful by them.
And so I would encourage people in that category to think, “Okay, well, my truth is clear. How can I communicate clearly the grace of Christ here? How can I go above and beyond to show love, knowing that my posture on pronouns is going to be tricky for the person I’m talking with?” Others of us have no problem at all using preferred names and pronouns. We’re like, “Yes! This is a way of showing love! I’m ready to do this.” And in that case, your conversation partner is probably easily going to feel loved and accepted by you.
So then I would challenge you, since you have access to the heart of your friend, what would it mean for you to use that access to have truthful conversations either about who Christ is, maybe, if you feel competent about the nature of the body, even just beginning conversations of if your friend has thought about how God relates to these questions in their lives. But no matter where we come down, I want us to be able to relate to each other with honor and respect, because the church has not had to answer these questions before, and we we need to have grace with each other, right? We know that God loves desperately the transgender people in our lives, and so we need to be thinking as a community: how can we expose them to the love that we have received ourselves?
