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ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1970s, the largely LGBTQ+ membership of the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) was frequently described as evangelical by its observers, including by some evangelical leaders. Meanwhile, antigay evangelical writers labored to convince their audiences that the MCC was not what it looked like, and its members were not like them. This article analyzes the array of discursive strategies that antigay evangelical writers used to deny, distort, and distract from the MCC’s evangelical factions and features in the 1970s. These writers’ efforts reveal the severity of the threat that the MCC seemed, to them, to pose – if not to any doctrines, then certainly to predominant ideas about sex and gender within evangelical communities. Notwithstanding Religious Right rhetoric from the late 1970s onward about ‘secular’ gay liberationists, the evangelical panic over gay activism in this period was in part a panic over how similar, not how different, some gay liberationists were.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 “2nd Annual General Conference,” In Unity (August 1971), 4.
2 Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic, 72; Jim Downs, Stand By Me, 41–64.
3 Fiske, “Homosexuals in Los Angeles”; “Hope for the Homosexual,” 46–49; Robert Cleath, “The Homosexual Church,” 48–50; “The Homosexual Church,” 107; Wright, “The Church and Gay Liberation,” 283–284; Fiske, “Color Some of the Churches Lavender,” 1971; “The Gay Church,” 38–39; “Preaching That God Loves Gays Too,” 70–71.
4 Wilcox, Coming Out in Christianity, 95.
5 Enroth, “The Homosexual Church,” 356.
6 Kennedy, “The Sexual Revolution,” 37.
7 Drakeford, A Christian View of Homosexuality, 130. For similar descriptions of the MCC by evangelicals in the 1970s, see Scanzoni, “Conservative Christians and Gay Civil Rights,” 861–862; Buzzard, “How Gray is Gay,” 36.
8 According to National Opinion Research Center, 70% of Americans considered homosexual relations “always wrong” in 1973, 75% in 1987. According to Gallup, 66% of Americans opposed allowing homosexuals to teach in public schools in 1980, 70% in 1985. Yang, “The Polls – Trends,” 477–507.
9 Certainly, there were many non-evangelical factions and features within the MCC as well. In Melissa Wilcox’s words, the denomination was a “hybrid organization” with an array of religious influences and contingents, who learned to practice, as Lynne Gerber has described it, “lived ecumenism.” Wilcox, “Of Markets and Missions,” 92, 100; Gerber, “Deciding Not to Decide.”
10 Cleath, “The Homosexual Church,” 48. Hose chose to remain anonymous, “lest his regular job in the ‘straight’ world be jeopardized.”
11 E.g. Culver, “Homosexuals Find Comfort in Own Church,” 3; Wade, “A View of the Vision,” 10; Pieters, “Intro to MCC,” 13; Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore, 42, 206.
12 Perry, The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay, 222; “Gays in Religion”. Folder 20, Box 17, Oscar McCloud Papers, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA [audiocassette tape].
13 For a summary of and critical response to this theoretical approach, see e.g. Frankenberg, “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness,” 72–96.
14 On the role of marriage debates in both the MCC and gay communities broadly in the early 1970s, see e.g. White, “Gay Rites and Religious Rights,” 79–90.
15 Cleath, “The Homosexual Church,” 48–50. Importantly, Cleath also highlighted aspects of MCC life that did not pass as “normal,” such as events where some members dressed in drag.
16 I. M., “Metropolitan Community Church,” 13.
17 Drakeford, A Christian View of Homosexuality, 25.
18 Morris, Shadow of Sodom, 28; Perry, interview by the author, October 21, 2021.
19 Drakeford, A Christian View of Homosexuality, 25–26.
20 LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays, 181, 186.
21 Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, 32.
22 LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays, 184.
23 For a selection of the San Diego congregation’s bulletins in the 1970s, see folder 3, box 6, Metropolitan Community Church Historical Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Pasadena, CA.
24 LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays, 185.
25 Ibid., 184.
26 Ibid., 186.
27 Ibid., 184–185.
28 Ibid., 184–185.
29 Morris, Shadow of Sodom, 7–10, 26–33, 70–81. Four of the book’s 18 endnotes are quotations from Perry’s book The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay, and the transcript of Morris’s interview with Perry occupies five pages (28–32).
30 Morris, Shadow of Sodom, 79–80. For a similar admission from another antigay evangelical writer, see Lovelace, Homosexuality and the Church, 50.
31 Morris, Shadow of Sodom, 35.
32 E.g. Bergsma, “The Pastor and the Psychopath,” 15; Walters, “Have Psychiatry and Religion Reached a Truce?” 19–23; Vincent, “Clergymen and Psychiatrists: Rivals or Allies?” 9–11.
33 One line in the Statement of Faith, “We are saved from loneliness, despair, and degradation through God’s gift of grace,” reflected the influence of the Social Gospel and/or liberation theology movements in its framing of salvation as a gift in this world as well as in the next. It is also fair to say that the line reflected gay experience.
34 E.g. Keysor, ed., What You Should Know about Homosexuality, 87; Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 76–78.
35 Even the antagonistic “non-practicing homosexual” who wrote Christianity Today’s 1974 article acknowledged that teachings on sexual ethics in the MCC generally resembled those of evangelicals. He claimed, however, that the Fellowship lacked biblical “fervor” on the matter: “Promiscuity and the ‘gay life’ of bar-centered boozing and bed-hopping are discouraged, but hardly with the fervor of Paul’s treatment of fornication (I Cor. 5).” I. M., “Metropolitan Community Church,” 14.
36 Keysor, What You Should Know about Homosexuality, 96.
37 E.g. LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays, 182.
38 Morris, Shadow of Sodom, 71.
39 On the influence of Pentecostalism within the MCC, see Warner, A Church of Our Own, 183–208. On Pentecostalism’s increased influence on and partial incorporation into mainstream evangelicalism in the 1970s, following a long history of mutual suspicion (if not antagonism), see e.g. Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics.
40 Lovelace, Homosexuality and the Church, 51.
41 Perry, The Lord is My Shepherd, 112–114. Spiritual eclecticism is evident elsewhere in the autobiography, including in its opening pages.
42 See e.g. Sean McCloud, Making the American Religious Fringe, 127–159.
43 Gangel, The Gospel and the Gay, 149–150.
44 E.g. Drakeford, A Christian View of Homosexuality, 130; Gangel, The Gospel and the Gay, 150; Morris, Shadow of Sodom, 76.
45 E.g. LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays, 181–182, 186–187; Drakeford, A Christian View of Homosexuality, 131; Greg L. Bahnsen, Homosexuality: A Biblical View, 86–87.
46 Enroth’s anticult books published by evangelical presses include: Youth, Brainwashing and the Extremist Cults; The Lure of the Cults & New Religions; A Guide to Cults & New Religions.
47 Wilcox, “Words Kill,” 7.
48 Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 115.
49 Ibid., 106–108.
50 Ibid., 32.
51 Ibid., 113, 115.
52 Ibid., 40, 76.
53 Ibid., 40.
54 Ibid., 96, 106–107.
55 Wilcox, “Words Kill,” 18–19.
56 Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 34–35, 69, 77, 107–108.
57 Ibid., 70–71.
58 Birchard, “The Gay Church,” 5, 11.
59 Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 70–71, 108–109, 113.
60 E.g. Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 9, 45, 117; Morris, Shadow of Sodom, 26, 71; Cleath, “‘Gays’ Go Radical,” 40. Non-evangelical publications made similar linkages – e.g. Fiske, “Color Some of the Churches Lavender.” On the MCC’s early political activism, see e.g. White, Reforming Sodom, 138–170. On the influence of Black theology and liberation theology in the MCC’s early years, see e.g. Wilcox, “Of Markets and Missions,” 88–91.
61 Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 133.
62 Ibid., 139.
63 Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 54–60; Birchard, “The Gay Church: Two Views,” 5. See also e.g. Drakeford, A Christian View of Homosexuality, 80–83.
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Notes on contributors
William Stell
William Stell is a Faculty Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at New York University, where he teaches courses on American religions. His forthcoming book is a history of evangelical gay activism in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.