Coming out

How do we think rightly about those who turn from following Christ and articulate that life and their faith is more authentic and mature? Especially when that involves sexuality.

This blog piece helped me a lot.

Here is a taste:

For men who have been confessing Christians, "coming out" stands for the process of crossing over from sanctification's battle against besetting sin to apostasy's surrender to the sin and demand of loved ones and friends that they now accept that surrender as the mark of their new-found authentic personhood.

"Coming out" is a shorthand way of saying that the sin of sodomy has now become the central fact of their existence. No longer is Ray Boltz a CCM star and Christian; he's become a "gay" man. In other words, this brother who had fought his entire life against the sexual temptations that are common among confessing Christian men (although the particularities of his temptations were skewed in an unnatural direction) has now announced to the world that the battle was always dishonest because "who he is" at the very heart of his authenticity is a man who engages in sexual intimacy with other men.

Think of it this way. Imagine another CCM artist of the name John Doe granting an interview to the Toledo Blade in which he "came out" of the closet, finally admitting that all those songs he'd written that went to the top of the CCM charts had at their heart his own struggle with adulterous heterosexual desire. Then, one night, sitting in the kitchen with his wife and children, he'd been asked by his teenage daughter why he was depressed, and responded, "Well honey, all my life I've wanted every woman I've seen walking down the street, but I fought against it. I prayed and prayed that God would change me, but every time I took a walk, drove to the store, or turned on the television, I found myself lusting the same way I had since I was a teenager. It's gotten so bad that I want to die. I'm in counselling, on drugs, and until now, have been afraid to admit who I am. Whenever I performed my songs, I felt somehow I didn't measure up; that I was a fraud. I didn't want to hurt your mother so I never told her who I really was--I kept it all bottled up inside me."

Then, the Blade recounts, came the night when Doe took a small step after a Swinger's Club seance in Detroit one Christmas Eve, leaving one of his CDs with the host for the evening and signing it with his name and e-mail address. He moved to Las Vegas, began hiring call girls, and for the first time in his life he's at peace with himself. Thus he's much closer to God, also. His wife has become active in a prostitution advocacy group, his daughters are learning new words like 'polyamorous,' and everyone's loving everybody more than they ever did before because now the love is based on honesty, authenticity, truthfulness, and so on. For the first time in his life John Doe is able to be the man he's always been deep down inside--a self-affirming adulterous lecher.