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The Opinions
My Gay Son Changed My Understanding of Evangelical Christianity (Re-Air)
00:19:23
Bill White thought being gay was a sin. Then his 15-year-old came out.
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Timothy White
This podcast is supported by GiveWell. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead, but what.
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Bill White
About real impact on people's lives?
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Timothy White
For 18 years, GiveWell has independently researched the highest impact opportunities around the world. Over 150,000 donors have confidently used GiveWell's.
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Bill White
Research, collectively saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more.
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Timothy White
Find out more and make a tax deductible donation today@givewell.org select podcast and the Opinions at checkout.
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Podcast Narrator
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
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Bill White
My name is Bill White and I'm an Evangelical pastor in Long Beach, California.
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Timothy White
My name is Timothy White. I grew up in Long Beach, California in the early 2000s. My dad Bill was an evangelical pastor from the time that I was born and before I was even born, my dad wrote a letter to my future wife. But he didn't know then what we both know now that I'm gay.
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Bill White
April 1999 Dear daughter, our son Timothy is about to be born, God willing, in less than two months. And as I've been praying for him, I've started praying for you. So I wanted to write you a letter to give you on your wedding day. Of course I don't know you, I don't know your name, I don't know if you have even been born yet. As we've been praying for our son, we've also been praying for his future wife. I pray that you would love Jesus more than you love our son. Even though we already love our son more than the whole world. We look forward to meeting you with great love and affection and many prayers. Bill. Our church was a standard conservative evangelical congregation where we believe that Jesus saves you from your sins. The Bible is the word of God that all people are made in God's image. All people are sinful. And we certainly believed that being gay was a sin and should be changed. When Timothy turned about 8 years old, our our church had gone through some learnings around manhood and our head pastor at the time had a saying that all men are namby pamby navel gazers and kind of this that men are passive and need to step up and be leaders. And so we read a bunch of books around the Christian men's movement and so I took upon myself to raise a Christian man. So Timothy and I started on a tradition of doing these becoming a Man events where we do long hikes and do hard things and have conversations about sex and hormones and marriage and all these things. The men's movement just had a lot of allure. It connected to me viscerally. And because of that, I wanted to raise my son to be a man. But Timothy did not fit that mold very well at all. He didn't play contact sports. He palled around with friends who are girls. And he was kind and relational and was not bro at all.
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Timothy White
My dad and I first talked about sexuality when I was young, maybe 7, 8, 9 years old. He did the birds and the bees with me. He taught me about what it meant to be married and to love and cherish and protect your wife. And so we had a very open and honest relationship about growing up, about sexuality and about sex. One that I think is probably sort of unusual for maybe some evangelical pastor's kids and their dad. It meant that I always felt comfortable with him to bring up weird things or hard things for me.
- [04:44]
Bill White
There were two kinds of Christians. There were these people who said they were Christian and they thought the Bible was kind of interesting. Jesus was a decent moral teacher and homosexuality was just fine. And then there were real Christians who believed in the Bible as God's truth, who loved Jesus with all their heart. And they said homosexuality was a sin. And so for me, this was a life or death question because I was not about to give up my Jesus just for a few gay people. This was core to my existence as a human, at least how I saw it, how I lived it and had been for decades. From my journal on May 25, 2013, when Timothy was 13 years old, on Wednesday, Timothy mentioned to me that he'd like to take another walk to Starbucks. I figured he had something pretty significant to share if he was initiating. When he brought up a conversation I will remember the rest of my life. He said he was noticing how a lot of the guys had friends that they could be buddy buddy with and mess around and do guy things with. He said his issue was he wanted to explore some things like horseplay and pranks that he might be able to do if he had a group of guy friends. We processed that for a while and talked about how he needed some space to explore things like that and that it was normal and healthy for a young man his age to do so. And he said, at one point I wondered if I was gay. I shared that I had met a man earlier in the week who had said that he wondered the same thing at Timothy's age. And yet he turned out that he was straight and that he ended up marrying, etc. I was honored by Timothy's trust in me, and I was aware of your presence with us, empowering me not to react, not to recoil, and not to push, prod, or judge. Father, thank you for being with us. And yet I'm as sad as I've ever been. My heart is devastated. I told Katie last night that it feels like someone crushed my sternum and was pounding on my heart. Perhaps 20 years from now, I'll look back with disdain at these feelings, and surely others would if they knew. But I will not disguise to you what is going on in my heart and soul and mind. I think deep down, I hate homosexuality. I hate it more than just about anything else in the world. I hate it because it seems sometimes to be stronger than you. God, yes, that's what I said. It seems that way. I'm sure there's plenty of good in the gay community, but my experience tells me otherwise. I see the isolation, the craving, the insecurity. Father, you have to spare Timothy from that. You have to. I remember when I wrote that entry, I was crying because for me, my world was ending. All the gay people I had known, every one of them had left the faith. And there's nothing more important to me than my faith. And so to see my son sort of becoming gay in front of my eyes, it was the worst thing I could imagine.
- [08:32]
Timothy White
You know, it's hard to hear your parent say that seeing you act or behave or become something is the hardest thing that they could have imagined or the hardest thing that they could have to deal with. It's sad, but I have this split reaction because it's also almost bizarre or impressive to me to think about my dad saying watching my son develop and grow into something that I am scared of is the hardest thing that I could possibly imagine while at the same time reflecting on those years. And sure, we got in fights and we had conflict, and I was a stupid teenager and he was occasionally overbearing, but I also just felt so much love from him at that time. And it did not feel like he was going through the hardest thing he could have ever gone through in that conversation.
- [09:34]
Bill White
When Timothy was 13 years old and shared with me that he was questioning his sexuality, he didn't actually come out to me that would be almost two years later. But it broke something inside of me because I started to realize my son is gay. And at virtually the same time, I think it was the same week even he and I went to the mall, to the Apple store to get some new gadget and as we walk out of the Apple store, there in the mall are these massive two ads. Huge, 20ft tall, essentially. A naked man and a naked woman. I mean, they were wearing something like whatever they were advertising. And I just felt myself in my, in my little brain thinking, oh, be faithful to your wife. Don't look at that woman, don't look at that woman. Your wife is beautiful. Your wife is beautiful. And I'm looking down and I catch a glance at Timothy out of the side of my eye and my 13 year old boy is staring up as if in worship and awe. Not looking at the woman, but looking at the man. And that's the moment I knew. And it gave me time, which was a real gift, to process everything before he eventually did come out to me.
- [11:15]
Timothy White
In the month leading up to me coming out to him when I was 15, I did start to notice some shifts in him. I started noticing him opening up conversations around sexuality in a slightly more open ended way. I noticed my dad leaving books around the house that were interrogating the questions of LGBTQ inclusion and the church and theology. And so I knew that the conversations were happening. He mentioned that he was thinking about these things. And so when I was thinking about coming out to him, I wasn't worried that he was going to say, you know, God hates you or you know, you can never be who you are or you can know you have to change. So I had asked them a few days before if they wanted to go to Starbucks. This was often where my dad and I had a lot of our most serious conversations. You know, I was a, I was a kid in Southern California in the 2010s, and so important things happened at Starbucks. And when we showed up there, my heart was racing, my mind was racing the whole time. I knew that after this conversation that things were going to be different. But I was also excited because I was ready to start the process of growth and of full self realization. So I knew things wouldn't be the same and I was a little afraid of that, but I was also excited.
- [12:51]
Bill White
My journal from March 14, 2015, when Timothy was 15 years old. Last Sunday, Timothy asked if he could go to Starbucks with me and Katie to talk about something I knew. I asked Katie if she was prepared for what we were going to hear. Timothy got a Tierra Massu frappuccino and we sat around for a minute and then he said, you're probably wondering why I brought you here today. I've been thinking a lot lately and prayed about it. There's been an internal thing going on, and I'm pretty solid on it. And I want to let you guys know first. I'm pretty sure I've decided I'm gay. I told him I loved him. He said he never doubted that. And then we proceeded to talk for 45 minutes about how he's doing, what he's been thinking, how he came to his conclusions, and his plan for coming out to family and friends and the world. That was one of the finest conversations I've had in my life. Father, thank you for it. Thank you for Timothy's courage in speaking to us. He was excited to show the world that you can be a Christian and be gay. He clearly said he wants his identity in God to come first, which was music to my ears. As I reflect on that conversation, I feel hopeful, really for the first time, that you might be working all things together for good and actually wanting to expand your kingdom through Timothy. He certainly thinks so. And I feel a lot of serenity trusting that you are at work. I suppose I also feel some real concern, some anxiety for Timothy that he's going to face judgment and ridicule, both from the right and the left, that will face a lot of pressure to conform one way or the other. And I feel real concern for myself. I know that's selfish, and I don't want to make any of this about me, but the heat will be turned up on me in a huge way when he comes out. Everyone is going to want a piece of me. They're going to seek, perhaps inadvertently, but no less potently, to divide our little church. Father, would you help me? I had done all of this work to get to the point of realizing I love my son and I'm going to stand with him come hell or high water. And I was at peace. The difficulty became after that where I realized I still needed to sort through theology. I still needed to figure out, what am I going to do as a church? People were leaving in droves. People were cussing me out from the left and from the right. People were calling for my ordination to be suspended, trying to defrock me. I was going to lose the church. I was trying to figure out my calling, my job, my relationship with God, like everything was coming apart. It was ugly for a long time. It was so ugly. It was ugly internally, just for me, as I tried to sort through the changes in a system of seeing the world that was so clean, clear, compact, certain, and to expose that to love. Love is not clean and clear, compact or certain. It is messy, and it's awesome. But it is not easy.
- [16:38]
Timothy White
My relationship with my dad changed when I came out because even at that time it strengthened something between us because I knew that he was willing to fight for me and fight for me in an arena both personal, spiritual, professional, financial. He had to give up a lot of to fight for me.
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Bill White
When my son came out I lost everything. I lost my sense of myself. So yes, it was terribly unnerving and yes, it was wonderfully freeing to have lost that rigid certainty, that closed system of belief and to have a more open ended faith that centered on the love of Jesus. Jesus. It was the best thing that ever happened to me and also before that the worst.
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Timothy White
It's really something when your parent or your dad can have the worst thing possible happen to them and then it become the best thing possible in their life. You know, what a transformation and I think there's God in that.
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Bill White
From my personal journal January 26, 2019 When Timothy is 19 years old, as Katie prayed last night, she thanked you for the remarkable gift of Timothy coming out and how we thought it was the end. But it was only the beginning of a full, true, vibrant life in Christ. Father, thank you that you created our son Gay. Forgive me for how poorly I received that gift.
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Podcast Narrator
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur Vishaka Darba, Christina Samulewski and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzik. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saborough and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.