Emilie Casey: It’s such a pleasure to be in conversation with you about Born Again Queer: A History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity. I want to begin with the book’s emphasis on historical contingency. Born Again Queer argues that, in the 1970s, both evangelical gay activists and their opponents treated gay-affirming evangelicalism as a real possibility—and therefore as a real threat. Yet from our vantage point today, it often feels as though the movement’s outcomes were inevitable, or even that such a movement never really existed. How does your work invite us to rethink the gap between the sense of possibility people experienced in the past and the way we tend to understand that history in retrospect today?
William Stell: History is most interesting (at least to me) when it not only informs us about what happened but also invites us to consider what could have happened. When I write history, I am aiming to nurture mindfulness of contingency in the past, present, and future. Born Again Queer contends that much of the discourse on the history of evangelicalism and homosexuality, scholarly and otherwise, has been inadequately mindful of contingency. The same could be said, I think, about other discourses on other histories of religion and sexuality. For numerous reasons, religious positions on sexuality often get treated as if they are a given, as if they are a natural consequence of some ostensibly inherent element in a religious tradition.
Such treatment reflects the rhetoric of antigay evangelicals, but it does not reflect their reality. Fifty years ago, as Born Again Queer shows, some of the most powerful evangelical leaders in the United States worried about a budding plurality of views on sexuality within the evangelical movement. They were distinctly worried, I argue, about a network of evangelical gay activists who echoed their own theological languages while espousing a gay-affirming ethic. Would this network gain a foothold, grow steadily stronger, become the dominant view within evangelicalism? These are documented hopes and fears in the 1970s.
That said, I am not inclined to make an especially precise or forceful argument about the probability of those hopes and fears. There are too many historical factors at play for me to claim that evangelicalism could have evolved into a largely gay-affirming movement. Other scholars have made these “it could have gone either way” claims about other wings of progressive evangelicalism in this period, and at times I wonder if those scholars have underestimated the power of conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century. Regardless, for my purposes in Born Again Queer, it is sufficient to demonstrate the budding plurality of views within evangelicalism and the sense of contingency—however justified or unjustified it may seem to us in hindsight—that was felt by gay and antigay evangelical leaders alike at the time. This alone, as I see it, is reason to call for more robustly historicizing discourses on religion and sexuality.
Religion scholars, especially American religious historians focusing on sexuality, have often sought to counter the myth of queer secularity—or what Jasbir Puar describes as the assumption that one’s religious creed or practice marks one’s “subjugated and repressed sexuality void of agency.” Most often, the counterargument to the myth of queer secularity goes something like: Look at this fascinating historical example! See, queer people can be religious, too! Your work, however, takes those interventions one step further. Born Again Queer so persuasively demonstrates how ideas like queer secularity were shaped by neo-evangelical debates, which turned homophobia into a kind of litmus test for Christian faith. Can you say more about how some evangelical leaders constructed religion and sexuality as opposing forces and the consequences—politically, theologically, historically—of that antagonistic framework?
Other scholars have done such excellent work on this front: Jasbir Puar, Melissa Wilcox, Anthony Petro, plenty more. Born Again Queer contributes to the conversation by arguing that many anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical leaders perpetuated the myth of queer secularity in response to their encounters with queer religiosity. In evangelical circles, the notion of queer secularity was not merely a natural outgrowth; it was a tactical implant.
Take the example of Elisabeth Elliot (a leading evangelical antifeminist in the 1970s) and Virginia Mollenkott (a leading evangelical feminist and gay activist in the 1970s). In 1981, in her book The Mark of a Man, Elliot attacked Mollenkott and Scanzoni’s book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? in part by stating that Mollenkott “called herself a Christian humanist,” which Elliot then declared to be a contradiction in terms. Elliot’s readers, she knew, would associate this term with one of evangelicalism’s favorite bogeymen of the day: secular humanism. The problem is that this is not what Mollenkott meant by “humanism.” A professor of English, Mollenkott was a humanist only in the sense that she wanted more evangelicals to take the humanities seriously—to read Dante, Bunyan, Milton. This was the “Christian humanism” that Mollenkott had outlined in her book Adamant and Stone Chips. And here’s the thing: Elliot knew this.
Over a decade before she wrote The Mark of a Man, these two evangelical authors had become close friends (though they had a dramatic falling-out in 1975, which I narrate in the book). Their backstory makes clear that Elliot’s denunciation of Mollenkott’s “humanism” was little more than a cheap, bad-faith attack. Such attacks have been a staple in evangelicalism for half a century: anti-LGBTQ+ evangelicals construct and disseminate the notion of queer secularity in an effort to delegitimize LGBTQ+ Christians. Consequently, queer religiosity in many forms is rendered illegible, even beyond evangelical circles. More broadly, our ideas about both queerness and religion become unduly narrow and rigid.
I’m really interested in your concept of hermeneutical determinism and the tendency among scholars to explain evangelical antigay positions through a kind of “the Bible says” logic. You write, “The more we… historicize evangelical discourse on homosexuality, the less tenable it will seem to make the move of hermeneutical determinism… often reducing explanations to ‘biblical literalism,’ ‘biblical inerrancy,’ or ‘biblical authority’” (61–62). One of the things I take from Born Again Queer is that appeals to biblical authority have been leveraged toward radically divergent political projects. You really historicize how evangelicals have read the bible, theologized its inerrancy, and variously appealed to biblical authority. How does the concept of hermeneutical determinism change the kinds of questions we ask about evangelical history? And what is at stake in naming biblical inerrancy as a flexible rhetorical strategy?
As I define it, hermeneutical determinism occurs when we treat the actions and positions of religious subjects as if those actions and positions are an inevitable consequence of the hermeneutical principles and approaches that those subjects purport to apply when reading their scriptures. I have written elsewhere about why hermeneutical determinism yields variously problematic and inherently insufficient historical explanations. To summarize, such explanations often uncritically replicate the hermeneutical assumptions of the religious subjects in question, obscure the breadth and depth of hermeneutical contestations within religious traditions, and confuse rhetorical strategies with underlying motives.
To illustrate what I mean by the last of those three, Born Again Queer argues that what gets called “biblical inerrancy” should be understood not as a stable belief about scriptures but as a malleable rhetorical tool that enables evangelicals to proclaim that their scriptural interpretations are inerrant. To my eyes, this is simply what the history of evangelicalism teaches us—not just because both gay and antigay evangelicals have wielded this tool toward divergent ends, but because even antigay evangelicals can’t avoid the instability among themselves. Spend any serious amount of time with, say, the archive of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, and it will become apparent just how much interpretive diversity exists among self-described inerrantists, just how stuck they are in their own power plays. I recently heard a theologian quip, “What good is a doctrine of inerrancy without an inerrant interpreter?” The question makes a good point, but in a way, it also misses the point: much of the doctrine’s value lies precisely in its ability to help evangelicals play the part of inerrant interpreter.
This concept of hermeneutical determinism challenges us to think more critically about language of evangelical belief (a move that multiple scholars of evangelicalism have made in recent years) and to ask more questions about evangelical rhetoric. What is at stake? Understanding how evangelical power works.
Embedded in this larger story is a history of evangelical media—magazines like Christianity Today and other forms of religious print culture that helped circulate these debates over sexuality. Can you say more about the role of evangelical media in shaping how these conflicts were understood and amplified at the time?
You cannot tell the history of evangelicalism in the twentieth-century U.S. without talking about evangelical media. Of course, this is a vast category, and there is much in it that Born Again Queer does not engage. For instance, besides one iconic episode of Tammy Faye Bakker’s show and a few bizarre moments from Jerry Falwell’s show, there is no televangelism in this book. Much of evangelicalism’s sprawling print culture goes undiscussed as well, and like other scholars, I have been constrained by what print sources have been made digitally accessible.
One of the more well-known print sources, Christianity Today, figures quite prominently in the book. I will grant that it is easy to overstate the influence of this magazine, easy to take its editors at their word when they claim to speak on behalf of the evangelical movement at large. Certainly, many people who would be classified as evangelicals did not subscribe to Christianity Today or any other self-identified “evangelical” periodicals. That said, many of their pastors did. Evangelical leaders in church and parachurch contexts have long made up a disproportionately large percentage of the readership of evangelical periodicals—and especially so with Christianity Today, which roughly 150,000 pastors received free of charge for years, thanks to the financial backing of oil tycoon J. Howard Pew. So, it is safe to assume that the influence of Christianity Today exceeded its subscription numbers.
For Born Again Queer, which is first and foremost a history of discourse, periodicals were distinctly valuable sources for the work of tracing shifts and tensions in how evangelicals have talked about homosexuality. In the case of Christianity Today, we can pinpoint when and why homosexuality first became a topic of discussion (in short, anticommunism was a more evident impetus than was biblical exegesis); we can track changes over time regarding which biblical passages were deemed most relevant to debates about homosexuality (Genesis 19 and Leviticus 18/20 fared quite well at first, less so by the late 1970s); and we can survey a host of interpretive disagreements and contradictions surfacing among antigay evangelicals—even as these interpreters insisted that the Bible is “clear” and “plain” on this topic.
Of course, that insistence was belied by the frequency and variety of evangelical publishers’ lessons about the Bible and homosexuality, particularly in the 1970s. Apparently, evangelicals had to be taught, over and over again, that the Bible “clearly” condemned homosexuality. What’s more, these lessons shifted and clashed over the years. The evangelical media analyzed in Born Again Queer throw those shifts and clashes into sharp relief.
In so many ways, LGBTQ+ issues continue to function as a central fault line in contemporary American evangelicalism and in many churches more broadly. What do you see as the most important stakes of this history for understanding present-day debates?
Over the past fifty or so years, LGBTQ+ issues have become a central fault line not just in American evangelicalism but in global Christianity (in part because of the impact of the former on the latter). This fault line is, to be blunt, weird. There is no self-evident reason why LGBTQ+ issues should be schismatic. In the grand scheme of Christian history, these are quite recent issues, involving a small minority of individuals. This is not like, say, baptism. Why do relatively few people recognize how weird this is?
The main reason, I think, is because evangelical leaders have a very clever trick: convincing their followers that some core element of evangelical and/or Christian theology is compromised by pro-LGBTQ+ positions. Most often, the core element named is “biblical authority”—an evangelical buzzword that too many scholars still use as if it was a valid analytical category. The history of evangelical gay activism confounds this trick by revealing that evangelicalism’s theological vocabulary, including the buzzwords, have long been deployed toward both anti- and pro-LGBTQ+ ends. Furthermore, this history reveals the labor that was—and remains—necessary to make LGBTQ+ issues into a matter of schism. (This is what is meant by “the making of antigay Christianity” in the book’s subtitle.)
So, as weird as the very concept of “evangelical gay activism” will seem to many readers, the payoff of studying this history is realizing just how weird evangelical positions on sexuality have become.
One of the things that strikes me as distinctive about Born Again Queer is its accessibility. For me, its narrative style and relatively short chapters—typically four to ten pages—made it quite a page-turner! It’s easy to imagine teaching it in undergraduate contexts and even in some church settings. Who did you have in mind as the primary audience for this book? And how do you hope it will be taken up in classrooms and beyond?
Because this book builds on my dissertation, and because I wrote it with the hope that it would one day belong in a tenure file, its primary audience has always been fellow scholars. Even this primary audience is broad, though: Born Again Queer makes interventions in scholarship on evangelicalism, on the history of sexuality, on religion and politics in the twentieth-century United States. I hope that these interventions will reach students in a wide variety of undergraduate classrooms.
But there are still other audiences, and I wrote this book with them in mind as well. Over the past five or so years, I have quietly resisted the well-meaning counsel of colleagues who said that a scholar’s first book could not speak effectively both to fellow scholars and to non-scholarly readers. The book’s tone and structure strive to prove otherwise. (Since you mentioned chapter length, Born Again Queer has 28 chapters, but they are divided into Parts I–VI. The first five of these parts were the first five chapters of my dissertation. For the more academically minded readers, then, the parts can function as chapters. Everyone else just gets some additional rest stops along the way. Frankly, I don’t understand why more of us aren’t using a model like this.)
And who are these other audiences? My proposal to Princeton University Press stated that Born Again Queer would appeal to readers with past or present connections to evangelical communities as well as anyone who is interested in conflicts over sexuality in those communities. Many such readers are concentrated in churches of various sorts, and so most of my book talks so far are being hosted by churches. These and other readers will do many different things with Born Again Queer—some of which I am sure will make me smile, others of which I am sure will make me cringe. Perhaps I will smile the widest when readers realize that evangelical discourse is more versatile than they thought, which means that evangelical power is more pliable than they supposed.
