Wesley Hill, Rosaria Butterfield, Greg Johnson — Christians who experience same-sex attraction and hold the traditional biblical sexual ethic, while calling the church to do far better in its pastoral care. The traditional ethic is held by serious biblical scholars. The pastoral failure of many communities to hold it with compassion is a genuine failure.
Key claims
—Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: the most important account of same-sex attraction within orthodox Christian conviction
—Same-sex attraction is not the same as same-sex behavior. Being tempted is not sin — Jesus was tempted in every way (Hebrews 4:15)
—The traditional sexual ethic is the most naturally supported reading of the relevant biblical texts (Genesis 1:27, Romans 1:26–27, 1 Corinthians 6:9)
—The call to celibacy is genuinely costly — the church that holds the ethic without providing genuine community has failed its calling
—The gospel is not primarily a prohibition list — it is that Jesus came to save sinners, which includes everyone
Few struggles in the contemporary Christian life carry more personal weight than the experience of same-sex attraction in a community that holds the traditional biblical sexual ethic. The person who experiences same-sex attraction and also holds the biblical conviction that marriage is the covenant of a man and a woman is not experiencing a minor inconvenience — they are being asked to embrace a call to lifelong celibacy that goes against the grain of their deepest desires, in a culture that tells them this is both unnecessary and harmful, while belonging to a community that has often handled this struggle with more condemnation than compassion.
This section addresses that struggle directly. It also addresses the broader questions about sexuality and biblical teaching that have become sources of both internal struggle and external pressure for many Christians.
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The experience — named honestly
The person who experiences persistent same-sex attraction, who has prayed for it to change and found that it has not, who has loved and followed Jesus through years of obedience, who carries the struggle privately because the community around them does not create safe space for it — that person deserves to have their experience named honestly rather than either dismissed ("just obey and stop thinking about it") or celebrated ("affirm who you are and pursue a same-sex relationship").
Wesley Hill's book Washed and Waiting (2010) is perhaps the most important and honest account of this experience from within orthodox Christian conviction. Hill is celibate, same-sex attracted, and a committed Christian. His account of what that life looks like — the loneliness, the beauty, the difficulty, the grace, the cross — is one of the most valuable things in contemporary Christian literature on this subject.
I am a gay Christian. More precisely, I am a Christian who experiences same-sex attraction and who is committed to living faithfully in accordance with traditional Christian teaching on sexuality. These two facts about me — my homosexual orientation and my Christian faith — are not in competition. They are simply both true, and I have to learn to hold them together.
The person in this struggle needs to hear several things from the community around them:
Your struggle is real and it is not shameful. Same-sex attraction is not the same as same-sex behavior. Being tempted in this direction is not a sin — Jesus himself was tempted in every way (Hebrews 4:15) and did not sin. The temptation is not evidence of inadequate faith or spiritual failure.
The call to celibacy is genuinely costly. The church often communicates the traditional sexual ethic as if it were a minor adjustment to someone's life plan. It is not minor for someone who experiences persistent same-sex attraction. Asking for this level of sacrifice without being willing to provide genuine community, genuine friendship, genuine belonging — without addressing the loneliness that celibacy can produce — is a profound pastoral failure.
You are not a "single-issue Christian." The person navigating same-sex attraction is a whole person — with gifts, vocation, friendships, ministry, relationships, and a life with God that is not reducible to this one dimension of their experience. The church's tendency to treat this as the defining feature of a person's identity is itself a distortion.
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The biblical sexual ethic — what it actually teaches
The traditional Christian sexual ethic holds that God created human beings as male and female, that the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman is the only context for sexual expression, and that all other forms of sexual activity — including same-sex sexual relationships — fall outside God's design.
The relevant biblical texts are: Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 (the creation account establishing male-female complementarity and the one-flesh union); Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 (Mosaic law prohibitions on male same-sex intercourse); Romans 1:26–27 (Paul's description of same-sex relations as a departure from natural design); 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 (Paul's list of those who will not inherit the kingdom, including arsenokoitai and malakoi — terms associated with same-sex activity); and 1 Timothy 1:10 (similar terminology).
The "affirming" position — that biblical teaching does not prohibit loving, committed same-sex relationships — requires arguing that these texts either mean something different than they appear to mean, or that the cultural context of their writing makes them inapplicable today. The scholars who make these arguments are not unserious — Matthew Vines (God and the Gay Christian), James Brownson (Bible, Gender, Sexuality), and others have written extensively. But the majority of serious biblical scholars, including many who are sympathetic to the pastoral situation of gay Christians, have concluded that the weight of biblical evidence points toward the traditional position. N.T. Wright, Richard Hays, Denny Burk, and many others who are not simply traditionalist by cultural default have engaged the "affirming" arguments carefully and found them insufficiently supported by the textual evidence.
This section does not argue that question in full — it is a question for serious biblical scholarship, not a Foundation page. What it argues is that holding the traditional position is not the same as being hateful, and that holding the traditional position does not determine how a person navigating this struggle should be treated by the community around them.
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The pastoral failure and the call to better
The church's track record on this has been poor. The person experiencing same-sex attraction has often encountered:
Condemnation rather than compassion when the struggle is named
The implicit (sometimes explicit) message that they are less welcome than other Christians
Promises that prayer would change their orientation — and devastating shame when it did not
The expectation that they should be "fixed" before they are fully included
Silence from pulpits that makes them feel invisible
None of this is consistent with the gospel. The Sermon on the Mount is for the person struggling with same-sex attraction. The parable of the prodigal son is for them. Romans 8:1 — "there is therefore now no condemnation" — is for them. The church that communicates anything other than this has departed from the pattern of Jesus, who consistently and specifically reached toward those the religious establishment had pushed to the margins.
A community that holds the traditional sexual ethic while creating genuine belonging, friendship, and pastoral care for those who struggle within it — that is not an impossible ideal. It is what the church is supposed to be. The failure of many communities to achieve it is a calling to do better, not evidence that the ethic itself is wrong.