Erin Nanasi | Forward Progressives | April 16, 2014
As one of fifty online writers chosen to review “God and the Gay Christian” by Matthew Vines prior to publication, I admit, I had some preconceptions. I thought I would be reading a book by a “progressive Christian,” that would agree with my own beliefs. Matthew Vines has not written that book. “God and the Gay Christian” is a conversation-changer. Matthew Vines accepted his own sexuality while a student at Harvard. But as a young man raised by evangelical parents, in an evangelical church, he had no idea how to be a gay Christian. It made no sense to him that the God who had loved him, and who
Matthew loved, would suddenly consider his life an abomination, evil, less than. And then there were Matthew’s parents. They loved him, they tried to accept his homosexuality, but they were burdened by the same information that Matthew was: the Bible considers homosexuality a sin.
What if it didn’t? What if the Bible, a book Matthew and his family believed and trusted, hadn’t said anything about same-sex love, or same-sex relationships? Was it possible that everything Matthew and his family had been taught was misread and misinterpreted? Matthew began a journey to discover the truth about “God and the Gay Christian,” both for himself, and for his father. Early in the book, Matthew writes that this was a path along which his father would travel as well. Reading that passage changed my views, it removed my preconceptions, and it made reading “God and the Gay Christian” more moving and more profound.
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