Changing Our Mind
Reviewed by Anonymous
Setting the stage
Ethicist David Gushee used to believe that gay and lesbian relationships are immoral, even writing so in Kingdom Ethics (Intervarsity Press, 2003), perhaps the world's leading evangelical ethics textbook. In Changing Our Mind (David Crumm Media, 2014), Gushee shocked the evangelical world by proclaiming that he not only no longer believes this but also that he now desires the fellowship of the "bullied" (LGBT people) more than that of the "bullies" (122). And indeed, Gushee's new position that LGBT Christians should be included in the Church with completely equal standards as other Christians forced him to change communities and to be the recipient of a great deal of rejection in the evangelical world that he helped to build. I myself still remember the look on the face of one of my professors at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, when she heard the news. It was deep disappointment mixed with pity for him and concern for those whom he might influence now that he had fallen away from truth.
Gushee wrote this book with evangelicals like her and his former readers in mind. "It is only fair," he writes, "that everyone who has ever trusted what I wrote about this issue or any other issue in the past should be shown how it is that my mind has changed on this particular issue now" (5). He does not address, in other words, liberal Christians or non-Christians in this piece. In showing his work, Gushee also hoped to encourage evangelicals, "in all gentleness," to join him in making the journey to full LGBT inclusion (6). To his credit, he does acknowledge that some of the evangelical folks who are reading his book are themselves LGBT. In this way, he largely avoids the error of just speaking about LGBT people as though they are only objects of and not participating subjects in the conversation.
Structure & content
Gushee, David. Changing Our Mind. David Crumm Media, 2014. 158 pages. $7.99. ISBN: 9781939880765.
Content wise, the two main elements of his journey that he elaborates on are his Spirit-arranged relationships with LGBT Christians and how these relationships prompted a paradigm leap in the way that he understands the Bible's passages related to homosexuality. Additionally, like a good ethicist, he also spends a good deal of time making sure that everyone fully understands what the issue is, why it has become our generation's "hottest of all hot-button issues," and what ethical actions are available (even if you do not go all the way to fully accepting LGBT people) (23). Before I describe and evaluate some of his method, formative relationships, and arguments, it is important to note at the outset that Gushee remains very evangelical in his commitments. He is still committed to the Bible's supreme authority, to almost all of what he wrote on other issues in the past, and to a conservative Christian sexual ethic, which reserves sex for marriage.
The manner in which Gushee presents his relationships and arguments is very brief, organized, and accessible. The second edition of the book has 158 pages organized into twenty chapters, each of which focuses on a specific theme that is stated succinctly and in plain language at its outset. For example, chapter twelve: "Two texts in Leviticus, and complexities related to what Christians are to make of them today" (64). You do not need either a higher theological education nor a long attention span to undestand Gushee's points. You just need some familiarity with evangelical Christianity. This is clearly a strength of the book. He has condensed a vast amount of material into easily digestable chapters that get to the heart of the matter. This also means, however, that the book is not designed to exhaust every angle on the debate. It is not a magnum opus and will leave many readers with remaining questions. Some of my own questions will become apparent below.
Relationships matter
As noted above, several relationships stand at the core of Gushee's decision to change. He mentions these relationships briefly throughout the book and then delves into them in more depth near the book's conclusion. The three most influential relationship groups were his sister and her partner, his former students who came out to him, and the gays and lesbians who unexpectedly joined his church. All of these people, he writes, taught him many things about God and about the issue that he had not already known (e.g., the depth of trauma that traditional teachings inflict, especially on young people). Furthermore, he states that before his sister came out to him in 2008, he did not personally have any out LGBT friends and so it was not until well after Kingdom Ethics that this issue had a real face for him (117).
By relaying details of these relationships, I believe that Gushee does a good job humanizing this issue for conservative Christians who may never have knowingly befriended a queer person. He manages to break a lot of stereotypes that such Christians might have. For example, there are no LGBT Christians (not true! there are probably five million in the USA alone), LGBT people are all liberals (not true! many of them love Rick Warren too), and all LGBT people are permiscuous (not true! not only are there celibate gays but there are also many who desire the life-long covenant of marriage) (14, 119, 104). In other words, Gushee debunks the harmful trope that there is a "homosexual lifestyle." LGBT folks are just people, "in all their maddening and lovable diversity" (6).
While it makes sense considering his audience, it is unfortunate, though, that Gushee does not highlight the diverse ways in which the LGBT community might be different from non-queer people. He seems to suggest that the more similar a queer person is to some version of a conservative straight or cis person the better. This is not a book which celebrates queer culture. There are no drag queens, Stonewall riots, or pride parades in this book (literally the words do not appear). Furthermore, Gushee does not differentiate well between members of the LGBT community and frequently uses the shorthand "gays and lesbians." Not only was this confusing to me as a bisexual person, but I also found it astonishing that he never comments on how a transgender person's experience of the Church or the Bible might be different from an LGB person's. He uses the LGBT acronym and even spells out the word "transgender" fourteen times but the closest that he gets to a substantive reflection is saying that transgender youth face a higher risk of homelessness (139). Gushee clearly missed an opportunity to explain to his audience that gender identity is not sexual orientation and that the famous "clobber passages" are primarily about the latter. He also left me wondering: where was his discussion of Genesis 1-2 from a trans perspective? and why does he does never touch on Deuteronomy 22:5 (about crossdressing) or discuss eunuchs and gender variance in the Bible?
Scriptures matter
This leads me into a discussion of the second major reason that he changed his mind: his interpretation of Scripture shifted because his relationships caused him to revisit the text more carefully. The specific texts that Gushee works through are (in these groupings): Genesis 19/Judges 19, Leviticus 18/20, 1 Corinthians 6/1 Timothy 1, and Genesis 1-2/Matthew 19/Romans 1. A summary of his conclusions about each can be found on page 100. Basically, Gushee studies the specific words, contexts, and genres of each text (with the help of other Bible scholars) to show why none of them are relevant to today's LGBT people.
The only passages, he writes, which potentially could have relevance to LGBT people are the last set. These passages are often read as meaning that God's original (and enduring) design for human sexuality is one of male and female sexual and gender complementarity (81). In chapter fifteen, he creatively offers three proposals for how to overcome this interpretation. First, we can treat these texts as a faith/science integration issue, like we did with the heliocentric solar system. The stubborn fact is that there are a small minority of people whose sexual orientation or gender identity are different from the norm in Genesis 1-2, and we must integrate this fact with our reading (91). Second, we can choose to look forward to Christ's new creation rather than backward to primeval creation for our sexual ethics because looking back has often caused harm. The creation narrative has, for example, been used to justify human domination of the earth, female inferiority, and racism (94). Third, we can more seriously accept that we live in a "Genesis 3 world" and cannot go back to Eden (96). Everyone's sexuality, including heterosexual people's, is broken and life-long covenants are the best way for people to deal with this fact.
Gushee's treatment of these passages is quite compelling if you are someone who likes evangelical styles of exegesis and who holds a high view of Scripture. He is even handed and never ignores the strongest points of the "traditional" argument. Yes, he does let his personal experiences transparently impact his reading (a "no no" for many evangelicals), but he also makes a very evangelical move to justify why this ok: he says that this is actually a biblical thing to do. This is the focus of chapter seventeen: "How paradigm shifts (or leaps) in biblical interpretation have often occurred through suprising encounters with God and people" (106). No Jew expected a crucified messiah, but an encounter with Jesus changed the way that they read Scripture (107). Additionally, based on Scripture, no Jew could have imagined treating Gentiles as their siblings, but Peter's transformative encounter with Cornelius changed this too! (108).
By way of conclusion, I would like to touch on how this book has affected my own thinking and to share my recommendations. First, I found this book helpful as a way to make peace with the evangelical communities that I have been a part of. Gushee proves to me that evangelical people and hermeneutics do not necessarily need to be homophobic. I am not convinced nor enlivened anymore by their way of reading the Bible, but I'm glad for them that they can find a way out of their homophobia while keeping their central commitments and aspects of their culture. Second, I found the twentieth chapter to be the most helpful in the whole book. In this chapter, which was added in the second edition, Gushee makes an extended comparison between the "teaching of contempt" that characterized the Church's interactions with Jews for 2,000 years and the Church's historical treatment of LGBT people. The chapter proved to me that real, widespread change can happen on this issue too and that it could happen quickly. I also appreciated that Gushee did run this comparison by "highly placed friends in the American Jewish community" (132).
Would I recommend this book? Sure, I would, but only to those people who are evangelicals or who wish to dialogue with them about sexual orientation. In addition to his helpful work breaking stereotypes and providing alternative evangelical interpretations, I also think that Gushee's practical advice could be beneficial in conservative spaces. LGBT lives could be improved even if the only thing that his readers accept are his practical and commonsense calls to end shunning of LGBT Christians, acknowledge the existence and suffering of LGBT Christians, actually meet LGBT Christians, reject the ex-gay movement, oppose criminalization, and put an end to the bullying and homelessness of LGBT youth (45-46). These are not insignificant things. So, go ahead and give this book to your evangelical community, just make sure to also give them books on (or written by!) transgender Christians and on some of the unique (non-heteronormative) contributions that LGBT Christians have made to the Church too.