Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:2 (Fall 2022)
Article: Dangerous Affirmation: The Threat Of “Gay Christianity”
Author: Rosaria Butterfield

Eikon 4.2 (Fall 2022) p. 117

Dangerous Affirmation: The Threat Of “Gay Christianity”

REVIEWED BY

Rosaria Butterfield

Rosaria Butterfield is a pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and author of The Gospel Comes with a Housekey (Crossway, 2018) and Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age (Crossway, forthcoming 2023).

M. D. Perkins. Dangerous Affirmation: The Threat of “Gay Christianity.” Tupelo, MS: American Family Association, 2022.

While walking our dogs together last week, my neighbor Malcolm wanted to know why I do not support gay marriage. Did I not understand, he whispered, that it is part of the Fourteenth Amendment? The Fourteenth Amendment is one of the three amendments passed during Reconstruction to abolish slavery by granting citizenship and “equal protection under the laws.” I asked him how he knew that gay people were a protected category under the Fourteenth Amendment. I also asked him to stop whispering. He told me that people are born gay, that sexual orientation is genetic, and that denying gay marriage is the moral equivalent of supporting slavery.

Did I mention that Malcolm is a socially conservative history teacher at the local high school, a member of the local evangelical megachurch, and a life-long Republican?

Eikon 4.2 (Fall 2022) p. 118

How did we get to a place where gay marriage is considered a conservative constitutional value and a moral good?

We got here when segments of the evangelical church went along with the world’s deception and started to believe and teach the idea that sexual orientation (a nineteenth-century category mistake) and gender identity (a twentieth-century category mistake) are basic categories of personhood. A new measure of the man was born with these category mistakes. Whereas the Bible records two kinds of people — men and women — “Gay Christianity” has added a third: gay people. And with “gay people” come all the other letters in the alphabet soup, LGBTQ. And do not forget the + sign. We have arrived at a place where common knowledge proclaims that sexual orientation is immutable and biological sex is a matter of psychological choice. Malcolm and whole segments of the broad evangelical church agree.

M. D. Perkins, author of Dangerous Affirmation, is a Research Fellow of Church and Culture for American Family Association, and a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Perkins’s denomination is hotly divided by the heresy of “Gay Christianity,” for now, in its Side B/Celibate variety. Perkins’s book sounds the alarm from a faithful Christian husband and father who knows first-hand the dange...