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[00:00]
A
Foreign.
[00:08]
B
For biblical truths and your citadel for pure and undefiled complementarianism. I'm your host, Jonathan Swan, executive editor of icon, a journal for biblical anthropology. This journal is produced by the Council on Biblical manhood and womanhood, CBMW. And we are joined by CBMW's president, Denny Burke and executive director of Colin Smothers. Welcome back to the show, brothers, man.
[00:32]
A
So glad to be here and glad to be representing again.
[00:36]
B
A second week with the same.
[00:39]
A
That's right.
[00:39]
C
ICON is the official jersey now.
[00:42]
A
It's the journal of our fair organization. And you can go online and read all of our. Read the current issue, read all the back issues. Icons, a wonderful journal.
[00:51]
B
Denny, did you have any, did you lose some laundry? Is it? Or just you wanting to represent a second week in a row?
[00:58]
A
Well, you know, you know how it is with your clothes. Do you have like, you know, your clean pile and then you're not quite to the pamper pile. Do you have that?
[01:07]
B
It's the halfway.
[01:08]
A
Yeah, it's the already and not yet of your laundry. What do, what do you do with those?
[01:14]
B
We wear them on the podcast in the most public place you possibly can.
[01:19]
A
That's right. That's right. Talking like I'm in college still.
[01:23]
B
Well, you teach college. It's rubbing off on you.
[01:26]
A
Yeah, something, something's going on there.
[01:28]
B
All right, well, today we want to discuss an article in the New York Times written by Matthew Vines. Matthew Vines is a well known and outspoken proponent of side a gay Christianity. They are the side who call themselves Christians who are affirming of same sex marriage. And he's made an argument for gay marriage that has upset the readers of the New York Times. Fascinating. Denny, what does he argue for in this essay and why are they now subsequent to his article publishing letters to the editor?
[02:00]
A
Yeah, so Matthew Vines wrote this article late last month for the New York Times and the title was I'm gay, not queer. It matters. The whole column is about him making a distinction between being gay and being queer and why the way that people talk about these things really impacts the fortunes of gay marriage and whether or not it has a future in America. And he's arguing that basically the way we got Americans to adopt gay marriage is by appearing to be moderate and normal. It was trying to take something that was traditionally viewed as perverse and abnormal homosexuality and then mainstreaming it and then giving it a legal status, the status that we call is marriage. And he said. So we just said, look, it should be just plug and play. We have a thing called marriage. Who cares if it's a man and a woman? Why can't it be two men? As long as two people love each other, they ought to be able to come together and form families too. Oh, and by the way, these people who are gay, they're born that way, and it's a permanent trait. And you can't discriminate against somebody on the basis of, you know, an inborn trait that would be immoral and unjust. So they were making a moral argument and on top of that, just trying to say, look, if you like marriage, why won't you extend it to gay couples? And so. But they were. That was a very, a conservative appeal, as it were. It was radical at the time, but it had the rhetoric of conservatism around it because they were trying to get people who weren't for gay marriage to be for it. And so. But this idea of gay had kind of a cheery appeal to outsiders who were considering whether or not, you know, we should have gay marriage in this country. Now that was a specific tactic that was adopted by the left, I would say, in the 2000s, to, you know, convince normie Americans that gay marriage was something that we needed to have. Now, if you go back to the 1990s, 1980s, that's really not what the gay rights movement was like. They were very radical and they were very openly anti normative. And Matthew Vines is trying to say in this article, this idea of queerness is not the same thing as gay. Queerness is just anti normativity. So whatever norms you have, you think there's a gender binary. No, there's not. There's transgenderism. You think that heterosexuality is, is a norm? No, it's not. You should have homosexuality or, you know, polyamory and all different kinds of sexual perversions. And so queerness is kind of the catch all term for any kind of anti norm behavior. And he's saying if we adopt the label of queer and everything that goes with that, we're going to lose people. And he cites all these statistics in America among Americans saying that they're showing that there's declining support for gay marriage, even, you know what, these 11 years after Obergefell. And he says what it, what it took to win Obergefell, we're not going to lose because we're moving towards this queerness norm. And so he's exhorting liberals and activists to move away from this and saying we need to. Unless you want to see gay marriage support erode, you need to move back to a more conservative, quote, unquote, conservative form of advocacy. So that's his whole argument. And what caught my eye was that, I don't know, it was, you know, this month, some weeks after he did his column, the editors took letters to the editor in response to his column and man, oh man, some unhappy campers. The readers of the New York Times do not like what Matthew Vines was selling. Matthew Vines was, you know, as far as they're concerned, giving in to the fascists, I think, and you know about it because they just think that he's too. The arguments that he's making are conceding too much to the right. Why, why should we be normative or submit to their ideas of normativity? Why shouldn't we be able to speak these ways? Everybody should be basically, you know, bending the world to match our predilections and tastes when it comes to marriage and sexuality. And so it was really fascinating, you know, you and I would, would hear Matthew Vines and think, this guy's radical. This guy is dangerous. In fact, a Christian false teacher. The readers in New York Times say, no, he's not radical enough and we're complaining about him.
[06:39]
B
One of the things that strikes me in the article is how Matthew tries to normalize gay marriage and has numerous statements to that end contrasting what he's proposing with the radical queer theorists. And I want to read a couple quotes and have you guys react to it. He kind of summarizes the biblical, what his. He calls the biblical case for gay marriage. In this way, he says they were in keeping with a core biblical idea about marriage, that it is a covenant designed to reflect God's self, giving love for humanity through the sacrificial love of spouses for each other. This I admit, far from radical vision of gay relationships, which brings me to queer. He also says this. As a 19 year old, I found freedom by coming to understand that there is nothing inherently radical or subversive about being gay. And then last quote here, the gay rights movement changed the world and changed my life by showing that being gay is not a rebellion against ordinary life. It is a simple one way of living it, every bit as dignified and human as being straight. As support for gay gay rights begins to wane, we urgently need to regain the clarity of that simple transformational message. What say you about his comments regarding how radical or unradical gay marriage is?
[08:03]
C
You know, honestly, it's, it's hard to know where to begin with this article and the responses internally. I'm, I'm tearing my Hair out hearing all of these things, because, I mean, what we're hearing is just complete nonsense and inconsistency on the part of Matthew Vines. This is a person who has hitched his wagon to a movement that he does not understand, a movement that predates him, a movement that has gone way beyond apparently where he wants to go. And he is trying to rescue it, as it were, from wherever he has perceived this thing to go off the rails. But he is on this crazy train and. And he should have known what he got on back in the 2000s and, you know, 2014 when he published his book God and the Gay Christian. I mean, it's unbelievable that someone could be so public in their identification with a movement and not understand that this is where the movement has been all along. As Denny was saying, this is a movement that is anti natural family. This is a movement that is anti God in its very philosophical underpinnings, anti design that God created mankind in the beginning, male and female, for covenant marriage, for procreation, for one another, to fill the earth. And to say that gay marriage could in some way be normal or normalized is to use that word without any meaning whatsoever. And so it, to me, it's just. It's completely baffling that this person. I mean, this is a little bit personal. I'm sitting here recording this podcast from Wichita, Kansas. This is Matthew Vines hometown. He came from Wichita, Kansas, a conservative enclave, was raised in a conservative evangelical church. I know folks that still go to this church. He went to Harvard. He gained some credentialism by his attendance there, and then went on this crusade, very much the public face for trying to get evangelicals tempt as a wolf evangelicals toward their support for gay marriage. And it worked. People were going his direction to. To support the. The overturning of millennia understanding of. Of an institution marriage. And this is where this movement has ended up. Now he is seeing the disaster all around that is being wreaked by. By this movement in the LGBT community, the. The queer movement. We have women's sports absolutely getting decimated. We have polyamory on the ascendancy. We have even things like pedophilia becoming normalized, to use that word. And all of this under the banner of queer. So I totally understand why he would want to distance himself from the word queer, but I'm sorry, you cannot have that cake and eat it too. Gayness, from its inception is itself anti normal, non normative. That was the argument from the very beginning, from the first radicals. He tried to make it Conservative. He tried to make it appealing. I'm sorry, that doesn't work. And you can't get that genie back in the bottle.
[11:13]
A
Yeah, and his whole modus from the very beginning was to make an appeal to Bible believing Christians. He was trying to get, not like liberals, he was trying to get conservatives who believe the Bible, who believe in the authority of scripture, to believe that you can affirm homosexuality while affirming the authority of Scripture. And so his whole book, God and the Gay Christian, this came out what, 12 years ago now? 2014. I remember because when it came out, Dr. Mohler got a group of us together on the Southern faculty and we all wrote a response to it and it came out in a little book. We had a book length response, I think, on the day that the book released, because we had an early copy of his book. But we were making biblical arguments based on the authority of Scripture because that's what he said he was doing. So a lot of these Christian people who were affirming of gay marriage previously would say, well, we know what Paul says about these things, but we think he's wrong. That's not what he was saying. He said, no, Paul's right in what he teaches, but you just misunderstood him. And so he's been trying to say, look, yeah, you can be conservative, you can affirm the Bible, you can believe in inerrancy, you can believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and affirm gay marriage. That was his whole argument 12 years ago. And guess what? That book wreaked all kinds of havoc. Now, he wasn't the first one to do this, but he was probably the most important popularizer of this teaching. He was actually mainstreaming some other scholars, but he was popularizing it so that when you hear people like Jen Hatmaker and Rachel Held Evans and these other people who were becoming affirming during those years, they were referring back to his book. There's no telling how many people in churches whose names we don't know were tempted away from the faith once. We're all delivered to the saints by this man's book. And the way he did it was by trying to tell people, no, this is normal. This is Christian. Now I just want to read a verse to you. This is Leviticus, chapter 18. In verse 22, you shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female. It is an abomination. Also Leviticus chapter 20, in verse 13, if there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed A detestable act, they shall surely be put to death. Now, this is the way the Old Testament talks about it. Excuse me. And of course, in the Old Testament, there were civil penalties for breaking the moral law in certain cases. Certainly in this case, we don't have those civil penalties anymore. But you nevertheless have, reflecting there certainly what the moral law of God is. And it views homosexual behavior not as normal, but as an abomination. And we're losing our ability to talk that way, to talk that way about what it is and about the way that God regards homosexuality. Now you're saying, well, that's not very compassionate to talk that way. Yeah, it is. Because there are really people out there who are dealing with homosexual feelings. They need to understand what God feels about that so that they can feel the same way that he does. In other words, so that they can repent of homosexual feelings and walk in holiness and trust in Jesus and be saved. But he's trying to prevent people from having the ability to do that. Because when you tell people that they don't need to repent of something that's sinful, you're keeping them from Jesus. You're leading them away from Jesus. You're not leading them to Jesus or making it easier for them to follow Jesus. You're preventing them from following Jesus. So that's why Matthew Vines teaching was always so destructive from the start, because it was telling people these things are an abomination. You can be received in, you can be affirmed. But the whole thing was premised on making it normal. But his whole project has never been that for anybody who's thinking biblically, anybody who's thinking according to, you know, the way that God designed creation should be able to see that what he is selling is not the truth, but he's selling a lie.
[15:28]
B
Final question here. The major part of his argument in these articles is that queer theory, the anti normativity, undermines what he thinks is a moral justification for homosexuality, which is the idea that our sexual desires are unchosen and immutable. Why does that argument not work biblically to justify homosexual sex acts?
[15:56]
A
Well, I mean, I think we would all agree that the feelings that we have at any given moment are not always chosen. I mean, heterosexuals who are experiencing lust for the opposite sex, you can't always say that the experience of that illicit desire is chosen, right? In other words, I think a biblical anthropology recognizes that we are broken sinners, we've inherited a sin nature, and therefore there's all kinds of ugliness bubbling up from Our nature before we rem making a choice to feel a thing. And so you can't, you have to view homosexual feelings within that framework. Meaning, yes, we're all, we're all born sinners. But that doesn't mean that every sinful feeling that you have is therefore justified just because you were born that way. But that's their argument. Their argument is if, if I was born feeling these things, like say from my earliest days, I remember feeling some sort of attraction towards the same sex. You know, as soon as I was capable of fee of having those kinds of feelings, that's, that's what I felt. And a lot of people who report having homosexual feelings, that's their story. Now you'll find some people with the story that they had some kind of abuse or experience that led them, you know, that awakened in them feelings they never had before. But then you'll have a lot of people say no, from my very beginning, this is what I felt. From a Christian point of view, you can't look at that and say that's nature. If anything, it's your sinful nature. But nature as God created it was not to have those feelings. So the fact that you're having, you know, feelings for the same sex is not a testament to their goodness. It's a testament to how fallen we all are and what the possibilities are in fallenness amongst human beings. So you can't justify homosexuality by saying you were born this way or these feelings feel very intractable and immutable. Just because they feel that way doesn't make them right. And listen, they may feel that they may really be that way to you. They may really be a set of feelings and a pattern of attraction that you don't know how to make go away. That doesn't make it right. It just does not make it right. Also, if you believe in the gospel of Jesus, he can help you have power and victory over sinful patterns and over same sex attraction. Meaning that you may have to wrestle with it your whole life, but you can have victory over it too. You know, even if it never all the way goes away, go into glory, you can have victory over it, you don't have to be a slave to it. So maybe you don't choose your feelings, but you do choose how you react to them. And if you choose to live in accordance with disordered desire, there's going to be a judgment for that and you can't live in accordance with it. And so you will be held morally accountable for that. So yeah, his whole framework is a is premised on a false. The false notion that whatever we feel is normal and should be baptized and received as normal human experience. And everybody has special rights based on whatever their intrinsic feelings are. That's just a. That's not true. It's biblically not true. And frankly, if you pressed him on it, I don't think he would say that it's true. Because what if somebody said, you know, well, ever since I could remember, I've always been attracted to children. I have pedophilic feelings, and that's my orientation. Are you going to say, you know, Matthew Vines, therefore, that's normal? No, he's not. In other words, I don't think they're very consistent with this.
[19:40]
C
But that is almost like he's put himself in the. In the position of the pharisees in Matthew 19. And he's seeing, you know, these things that are either unchosen or, you know, these feelings. And he's choosing to orient his entire life around them. And Jesus is saying, no, God created them in the beginning, male and female. And he says, well, what about these feelings? And Jesus would respond as he did to the Pharisees, but from the beginning, it was not so. In other words, there is a norm that God built into all creation, and the norm is Genesis 1 and 2. That's what defines the norm. Matthew Vines, and here clearly is wanting to redefine the norm to include something that God calls sinful and. And an abomination, clearly in his word. And we just have to play this ideology all the way out. And just even apart from God's divine special revelation, think about God's natural revelation. If what Matthew Vines is selling actually becomes normal, actually gay marriage becomes normal, as in closer to the middle of the bell curve. We're talking about the end of civilization. We're talking about no more children. Every person on planet Earth owes their existence to a mother and a father, including Matthew Vines, including his partner, were born to a mother and a father. Instead of embracing God's norm, they have rebelled against that, and they are no longer propagating human race, the human race, according to God's design for marriage. He wants to call what he's doing marriage. It's not marriage. Marriage is designed in part by God for procreation. What Matthew Vines is trying to normalize would actually be the dissolution of society. He calls that queerness. He doesn't want a part of that dissolution, but he himself is part of that movement. He's been a main instigator of that, a main face of that movement. And if he ever watches this video, I hope he thinks very carefully about his position and repents and seeks the Lord according to his word and according to his norm, not according to these destructive ideologies.
[21:46]
B
All right, well, thank you brothers, and thanks to everybody listening. For more resources on this and so many other topics related to anthropology, please Visit our website, cbmw.org.

Summary5 min read

The CBMW Podcast

Episode Title: Gay Activist Too ‘Conservative’ for Today’s Left
Date: July 30, 2026
Host & Panel: Jonathan Swan (Host), Denny Burk (CBMW President), Colin Smothers (CBMW Executive Director)
Main Theme:
A critical discussion of Matthew Vines’ recent New York Times article "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters," analyzing his stance on ‘gay’ versus ‘queer’ identity, the implications for the future of the gay rights movement, and the biblical response to his arguments.

Episode Overview

This episode explores the surprising backlash Matthew Vines—a leading advocate for the legitimacy of "gay Christianity"—faced from the left when he called for a return to "normalizing" gay marriage, distinguishing it from the broader, more radical "queer" ideology. The CBMW panel breaks down Vines’ arguments, the New York Times reader responses, and provides a biblical critique of his efforts to make gay relationships theologically acceptable.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Matthew Vines’ Argument in the NYT

Summary:
Vines differentiates between being ‘gay’ (wanting to normalize same-sex marriage within mainstream, even conservative, frameworks) and ‘queer’ (embracing anti-normativity, radical gender/sexual redefinitions).
Intent:
He warns that the radical "queer" agenda is undermining support for gay marriage by alienating moderates and that success was originally achieved by appealing to mainstream, conservative values.
- “He’s arguing that basically the way we got Americans to adopt gay marriage is by appearing to be moderate and normal... and giving it a legal status that we call marriage.” (A, 02:26)
Statistic Noted:
Cites dropping support for gay marriage in America post-Obergefell.

2. Panel Reactions: Critique of Vines’ Thesis

On Vines’ Position:
The panel argues Vines is missing that the "anti-normativity" was always embedded in gay rights activism and that his attempt to draw a sharp line between ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ is revisionist.
- “This is a person who has hitched his wagon to a movement that he does not understand ... and he is trying to rescue it...but he is on this crazy train and... he should have known what he got on…” (C, 08:13)
Historical Note:
Matthew Vines’ 2014 book God and the Gay Christian is cited as a catalyst for evangelical acceptance of same-sex marriage, and its influence continues to be seen as highly destructive by the panel.

3. Biblical Response to Vines’ Arguments

Scriptural Basis:
The panel appeals to Old Testament passages (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) to define homosexuality as “an abomination.” Emphasis is placed on not losing the ability to use the language Scripture uses for sin.
- “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” (A, quoting Leviticus 18:22, 13:03)
Message of Repentance:
Asserting that downplaying the sinfulness of homosexual acts prevents people from coming to Christ.
- “When you tell people that they don’t need to repent of something that’s sinful, you’re keeping them from Jesus.” (A, 13:52)

4. The Innate/Immutable Desire Argument

Vines’ Claim:
Homosexual desires are unchosen and therefore should not be morally condemned.
Biblical Counter:
- The panel agrees not all desires are chosen, but this does not make acting on sinful desires right; all humans inherit a sin nature, and many desires are disordered.
- “...just because you were born that way… that doesn’t mean that every sinful feeling is justified.” (A, 16:16)
- “Maybe you don’t choose your feelings, but you do choose how you react to them.” (A, 18:45)
Slippery Slope Concern:
The panel likens Vines’ logic to potentially justifying other sinful desires, such as pedophilia, by similar "born this way" reasoning.

5. Sociocultural & Theological Implications

Queer Theory’s Threat:
The panel agrees with Vines that "queer" ideology is corrosive to societal norms but argues Vines is complicit in this shift.
- “If what Matthew Vines is selling actually becomes normal... we’re talking about the end of civilization. We’re talking about no more children.” (C, 20:16)
Marriage Redefined:
They insist marriage is inherently tied to procreation and God’s design, thus cannot be stretched to include same-sex couples legitimately.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Appealing to Normie Americans:
“That was a very, a conservative appeal, as it were. It was radical at the time, but it had the rhetoric of conservatism around it…” (A, 02:49)
About the Fallout among the NYT Readership:
“Some unhappy campers... The readers of the New York Times do not like what Matthew Vines was selling.” (A, 05:41)
Historical Perspective (Wichita, KS):
“This is a little bit personal... This is Matthew Vines’ hometown… He went to Harvard. He gained some credentialism by his attendance there, and then went on this crusade…” (C, 09:17)
Scripture Cited Directly:
“You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” (A, quoting Leviticus 18:22, 13:03)
On Vines' Biblical Method:
“He was trying to get... conservatives, who believe the Bible, who believe in the authority of Scripture, to believe that you can affirm homosexuality while affirming the authority of Scripture.” (A, 11:22)
Slippery Slope Warning:
“Are you going to say, you know, Matthew Vines, therefore that’s normal? No, he’s not. In other words, I don’t think they’re very consistent with this.” (A, 19:19)
Summary Call:
“He’s been a main instigator of that, a main face of that movement. And if he ever watches this video, I hope he thinks very carefully about his position and repents…” (C, 21:39)

Important Timestamps

01:27 – Introduction of Matthew Vines’ New York Times article and distinction between "gay" and "queer"
02:00–06:38 – Summary and analysis of Vines’ main arguments, NYT backlash
08:03–11:12 – In-depth critique of Vines’ understanding of the movement and recounting his background/influence in evangelical circles
13:03–15:27 – Scriptural arguments against normalization of gay marriage, discussion of Vines' biblical claims
15:55–19:39 – Analysis of "unchosen/immutable desires" argument, panel’s counterpoints and consistency questions
19:39–21:39 – Further biblical and natural revelation critiques, societal implications of normalizing gay marriage
21:46 – Episode wrap-up

Tone and Language

The panel engages in direct, sometimes emotional critique from a conservative evangelical viewpoint, using scriptural citations and historical analysis to refute Vines’ arguments and to urge viewers to hold to traditional biblical teachings on marriage and sexuality.

For More Resources: Visit cbmw.org

Loading summary

Transcript24 lines

[00:00]
A
Foreign.
[00:08]
B
For biblical truths and your citadel for pure and undefiled complementarianism. I'm your host, Jonathan Swan, executive editor of icon, a journal for biblical anthropology. This journal is produced by the Council on Biblical manhood and womanhood, CBMW. And we are joined by CBMW's president, Denny Burke and executive director of Colin Smothers. Welcome back to the show, brothers, man.
[00:32]
A
So glad to be here and glad to be representing again.
[00:36]
B
A second week with the same.
[00:39]
A
That's right.
[00:39]
C
ICON is the official jersey now.
[00:42]
A
It's the journal of our fair organization. And you can go online and read all of our. Read the current issue, read all the back issues. Icons, a wonderful journal.
[00:51]
B
Denny, did you have any, did you lose some laundry? Is it? Or just you wanting to represent a second week in a row?
[00:58]
A
Well, you know, you know how it is with your clothes. Do you have like, you know, your clean pile and then you're not quite to the pamper pile. Do you have that?
[01:07]
B
It's the halfway.
[01:08]
A
Yeah, it's the already and not yet of your laundry. What do, what do you do with those?
[01:14]
B
We wear them on the podcast in the most public place you possibly can.
[01:19]
A
That's right. That's right. Talking like I'm in college still.
[01:23]
B
Well, you teach college. It's rubbing off on you.
[01:26]
A
Yeah, something, something's going on there.
[01:28]
B
All right, well, today we want to discuss an article in the New York Times written by Matthew Vines. Matthew Vines is a well known and outspoken proponent of side a gay Christianity. They are the side who call themselves Christians who are affirming of same sex marriage. And he's made an argument for gay marriage that has upset the readers of the New York Times. Fascinating. Denny, what does he argue for in this essay and why are they now subsequent to his article publishing letters to the editor?
[02:00]
A
Yeah, so Matthew Vines wrote this article late last month for the New York Times and the title was I'm gay, not queer. It matters. The whole column is about him making a distinction between being gay and being queer and why the way that people talk about these things really impacts the fortunes of gay marriage and whether or not it has a future in America. And he's arguing that basically the way we got Americans to adopt gay marriage is by appearing to be moderate and normal. It was trying to take something that was traditionally viewed as perverse and abnormal homosexuality and then mainstreaming it and then giving it a legal status, the status that we call is marriage. And he said. So we just said, look, it should be just plug and play. We have a thing called marriage. Who cares if it's a man and a woman? Why can't it be two men? As long as two people love each other, they ought to be able to come together and form families too. Oh, and by the way, these people who are gay, they're born that way, and it's a permanent trait. And you can't discriminate against somebody on the basis of, you know, an inborn trait that would be immoral and unjust. So they were making a moral argument and on top of that, just trying to say, look, if you like marriage, why won't you extend it to gay couples? And so. But they were. That was a very, a conservative appeal, as it were. It was radical at the time, but it had the rhetoric of conservatism around it because they were trying to get people who weren't for gay marriage to be for it. And so. But this idea of gay had kind of a cheery appeal to outsiders who were considering whether or not, you know, we should have gay marriage in this country. Now that was a specific tactic that was adopted by the left, I would say, in the 2000s, to, you know, convince normie Americans that gay marriage was something that we needed to have. Now, if you go back to the 1990s, 1980s, that's really not what the gay rights movement was like. They were very radical and they were very openly anti normative. And Matthew Vines is trying to say in this article, this idea of queerness is not the same thing as gay. Queerness is just anti normativity. So whatever norms you have, you think there's a gender binary. No, there's not. There's transgenderism. You think that heterosexuality is, is a norm? No, it's not. You should have homosexuality or, you know, polyamory and all different kinds of sexual perversions. And so queerness is kind of the catch all term for any kind of anti norm behavior. And he's saying if we adopt the label of queer and everything that goes with that, we're going to lose people. And he cites all these statistics in America among Americans saying that they're showing that there's declining support for gay marriage, even, you know what, these 11 years after Obergefell. And he says what it, what it took to win Obergefell, we're not going to lose because we're moving towards this queerness norm. And so he's exhorting liberals and activists to move away from this and saying we need to. Unless you want to see gay marriage support erode, you need to move back to a more conservative, quote, unquote, conservative form of advocacy. So that's his whole argument. And what caught my eye was that, I don't know, it was, you know, this month, some weeks after he did his column, the editors took letters to the editor in response to his column and man, oh man, some unhappy campers. The readers of the New York Times do not like what Matthew Vines was selling. Matthew Vines was, you know, as far as they're concerned, giving in to the fascists, I think, and you know about it because they just think that he's too. The arguments that he's making are conceding too much to the right. Why, why should we be normative or submit to their ideas of normativity? Why shouldn't we be able to speak these ways? Everybody should be basically, you know, bending the world to match our predilections and tastes when it comes to marriage and sexuality. And so it was really fascinating, you know, you and I would, would hear Matthew Vines and think, this guy's radical. This guy is dangerous. In fact, a Christian false teacher. The readers in New York Times say, no, he's not radical enough and we're complaining about him.
[06:39]
B
One of the things that strikes me in the article is how Matthew tries to normalize gay marriage and has numerous statements to that end contrasting what he's proposing with the radical queer theorists. And I want to read a couple quotes and have you guys react to it. He kind of summarizes the biblical, what his. He calls the biblical case for gay marriage. In this way, he says they were in keeping with a core biblical idea about marriage, that it is a covenant designed to reflect God's self, giving love for humanity through the sacrificial love of spouses for each other. This I admit, far from radical vision of gay relationships, which brings me to queer. He also says this. As a 19 year old, I found freedom by coming to understand that there is nothing inherently radical or subversive about being gay. And then last quote here, the gay rights movement changed the world and changed my life by showing that being gay is not a rebellion against ordinary life. It is a simple one way of living it, every bit as dignified and human as being straight. As support for gay gay rights begins to wane, we urgently need to regain the clarity of that simple transformational message. What say you about his comments regarding how radical or unradical gay marriage is?
[08:03]
C
You know, honestly, it's, it's hard to know where to begin with this article and the responses internally. I'm, I'm tearing my Hair out hearing all of these things, because, I mean, what we're hearing is just complete nonsense and inconsistency on the part of Matthew Vines. This is a person who has hitched his wagon to a movement that he does not understand, a movement that predates him, a movement that has gone way beyond apparently where he wants to go. And he is trying to rescue it, as it were, from wherever he has perceived this thing to go off the rails. But he is on this crazy train and. And he should have known what he got on back in the 2000s and, you know, 2014 when he published his book God and the Gay Christian. I mean, it's unbelievable that someone could be so public in their identification with a movement and not understand that this is where the movement has been all along. As Denny was saying, this is a movement that is anti natural family. This is a movement that is anti God in its very philosophical underpinnings, anti design that God created mankind in the beginning, male and female, for covenant marriage, for procreation, for one another, to fill the earth. And to say that gay marriage could in some way be normal or normalized is to use that word without any meaning whatsoever. And so it, to me, it's just. It's completely baffling that this person. I mean, this is a little bit personal. I'm sitting here recording this podcast from Wichita, Kansas. This is Matthew Vines hometown. He came from Wichita, Kansas, a conservative enclave, was raised in a conservative evangelical church. I know folks that still go to this church. He went to Harvard. He gained some credentialism by his attendance there, and then went on this crusade, very much the public face for trying to get evangelicals tempt as a wolf evangelicals toward their support for gay marriage. And it worked. People were going his direction to. To support the. The overturning of millennia understanding of. Of an institution marriage. And this is where this movement has ended up. Now he is seeing the disaster all around that is being wreaked by. By this movement in the LGBT community, the. The queer movement. We have women's sports absolutely getting decimated. We have polyamory on the ascendancy. We have even things like pedophilia becoming normalized, to use that word. And all of this under the banner of queer. So I totally understand why he would want to distance himself from the word queer, but I'm sorry, you cannot have that cake and eat it too. Gayness, from its inception is itself anti normal, non normative. That was the argument from the very beginning, from the first radicals. He tried to make it Conservative. He tried to make it appealing. I'm sorry, that doesn't work. And you can't get that genie back in the bottle.
[11:13]
A
Yeah, and his whole modus from the very beginning was to make an appeal to Bible believing Christians. He was trying to get, not like liberals, he was trying to get conservatives who believe the Bible, who believe in the authority of scripture, to believe that you can affirm homosexuality while affirming the authority of Scripture. And so his whole book, God and the Gay Christian, this came out what, 12 years ago now? 2014. I remember because when it came out, Dr. Mohler got a group of us together on the Southern faculty and we all wrote a response to it and it came out in a little book. We had a book length response, I think, on the day that the book released, because we had an early copy of his book. But we were making biblical arguments based on the authority of Scripture because that's what he said he was doing. So a lot of these Christian people who were affirming of gay marriage previously would say, well, we know what Paul says about these things, but we think he's wrong. That's not what he was saying. He said, no, Paul's right in what he teaches, but you just misunderstood him. And so he's been trying to say, look, yeah, you can be conservative, you can affirm the Bible, you can believe in inerrancy, you can believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and affirm gay marriage. That was his whole argument 12 years ago. And guess what? That book wreaked all kinds of havoc. Now, he wasn't the first one to do this, but he was probably the most important popularizer of this teaching. He was actually mainstreaming some other scholars, but he was popularizing it so that when you hear people like Jen Hatmaker and Rachel Held Evans and these other people who were becoming affirming during those years, they were referring back to his book. There's no telling how many people in churches whose names we don't know were tempted away from the faith once. We're all delivered to the saints by this man's book. And the way he did it was by trying to tell people, no, this is normal. This is Christian. Now I just want to read a verse to you. This is Leviticus, chapter 18. In verse 22, you shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female. It is an abomination. Also Leviticus chapter 20, in verse 13, if there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed A detestable act, they shall surely be put to death. Now, this is the way the Old Testament talks about it. Excuse me. And of course, in the Old Testament, there were civil penalties for breaking the moral law in certain cases. Certainly in this case, we don't have those civil penalties anymore. But you nevertheless have, reflecting there certainly what the moral law of God is. And it views homosexual behavior not as normal, but as an abomination. And we're losing our ability to talk that way, to talk that way about what it is and about the way that God regards homosexuality. Now you're saying, well, that's not very compassionate to talk that way. Yeah, it is. Because there are really people out there who are dealing with homosexual feelings. They need to understand what God feels about that so that they can feel the same way that he does. In other words, so that they can repent of homosexual feelings and walk in holiness and trust in Jesus and be saved. But he's trying to prevent people from having the ability to do that. Because when you tell people that they don't need to repent of something that's sinful, you're keeping them from Jesus. You're leading them away from Jesus. You're not leading them to Jesus or making it easier for them to follow Jesus. You're preventing them from following Jesus. So that's why Matthew Vines teaching was always so destructive from the start, because it was telling people these things are an abomination. You can be received in, you can be affirmed. But the whole thing was premised on making it normal. But his whole project has never been that for anybody who's thinking biblically, anybody who's thinking according to, you know, the way that God designed creation should be able to see that what he is selling is not the truth, but he's selling a lie.
[15:28]
B
Final question here. The major part of his argument in these articles is that queer theory, the anti normativity, undermines what he thinks is a moral justification for homosexuality, which is the idea that our sexual desires are unchosen and immutable. Why does that argument not work biblically to justify homosexual sex acts?
[15:56]
A
Well, I mean, I think we would all agree that the feelings that we have at any given moment are not always chosen. I mean, heterosexuals who are experiencing lust for the opposite sex, you can't always say that the experience of that illicit desire is chosen, right? In other words, I think a biblical anthropology recognizes that we are broken sinners, we've inherited a sin nature, and therefore there's all kinds of ugliness bubbling up from Our nature before we rem making a choice to feel a thing. And so you can't, you have to view homosexual feelings within that framework. Meaning, yes, we're all, we're all born sinners. But that doesn't mean that every sinful feeling that you have is therefore justified just because you were born that way. But that's their argument. Their argument is if, if I was born feeling these things, like say from my earliest days, I remember feeling some sort of attraction towards the same sex. You know, as soon as I was capable of fee of having those kinds of feelings, that's, that's what I felt. And a lot of people who report having homosexual feelings, that's their story. Now you'll find some people with the story that they had some kind of abuse or experience that led them, you know, that awakened in them feelings they never had before. But then you'll have a lot of people say no, from my very beginning, this is what I felt. From a Christian point of view, you can't look at that and say that's nature. If anything, it's your sinful nature. But nature as God created it was not to have those feelings. So the fact that you're having, you know, feelings for the same sex is not a testament to their goodness. It's a testament to how fallen we all are and what the possibilities are in fallenness amongst human beings. So you can't justify homosexuality by saying you were born this way or these feelings feel very intractable and immutable. Just because they feel that way doesn't make them right. And listen, they may feel that they may really be that way to you. They may really be a set of feelings and a pattern of attraction that you don't know how to make go away. That doesn't make it right. It just does not make it right. Also, if you believe in the gospel of Jesus, he can help you have power and victory over sinful patterns and over same sex attraction. Meaning that you may have to wrestle with it your whole life, but you can have victory over it too. You know, even if it never all the way goes away, go into glory, you can have victory over it, you don't have to be a slave to it. So maybe you don't choose your feelings, but you do choose how you react to them. And if you choose to live in accordance with disordered desire, there's going to be a judgment for that and you can't live in accordance with it. And so you will be held morally accountable for that. So yeah, his whole framework is a is premised on a false. The false notion that whatever we feel is normal and should be baptized and received as normal human experience. And everybody has special rights based on whatever their intrinsic feelings are. That's just a. That's not true. It's biblically not true. And frankly, if you pressed him on it, I don't think he would say that it's true. Because what if somebody said, you know, well, ever since I could remember, I've always been attracted to children. I have pedophilic feelings, and that's my orientation. Are you going to say, you know, Matthew Vines, therefore, that's normal? No, he's not. In other words, I don't think they're very consistent with this.
[19:40]
C
But that is almost like he's put himself in the. In the position of the pharisees in Matthew 19. And he's seeing, you know, these things that are either unchosen or, you know, these feelings. And he's choosing to orient his entire life around them. And Jesus is saying, no, God created them in the beginning, male and female. And he says, well, what about these feelings? And Jesus would respond as he did to the Pharisees, but from the beginning, it was not so. In other words, there is a norm that God built into all creation, and the norm is Genesis 1 and 2. That's what defines the norm. Matthew Vines, and here clearly is wanting to redefine the norm to include something that God calls sinful and. And an abomination, clearly in his word. And we just have to play this ideology all the way out. And just even apart from God's divine special revelation, think about God's natural revelation. If what Matthew Vines is selling actually becomes normal, actually gay marriage becomes normal, as in closer to the middle of the bell curve. We're talking about the end of civilization. We're talking about no more children. Every person on planet Earth owes their existence to a mother and a father, including Matthew Vines, including his partner, were born to a mother and a father. Instead of embracing God's norm, they have rebelled against that, and they are no longer propagating human race, the human race, according to God's design for marriage. He wants to call what he's doing marriage. It's not marriage. Marriage is designed in part by God for procreation. What Matthew Vines is trying to normalize would actually be the dissolution of society. He calls that queerness. He doesn't want a part of that dissolution, but he himself is part of that movement. He's been a main instigator of that, a main face of that movement. And if he ever watches this video, I hope he thinks very carefully about his position and repents and seeks the Lord according to his word and according to his norm, not according to these destructive ideologies.
[21:46]
B
All right, well, thank you brothers, and thanks to everybody listening. For more resources on this and so many other topics related to anthropology, please Visit our website, cbmw.org.