History of the Christian Right scholarship after the 2016 United States President Election has focused primarily on evangelicals as a conservative voting bloc but do not typically dedicate much focus to the politically liberal undercurrent of the religion in the United States. This project seeks to understand how and why American Christianity resisted the gay liberation movement in its own halls. Christianity has historically had a stranglehold on the discourses related to sexual morality in the United States. As sexual mores changed in the wake of the gay liberation movement starting in 1968, Catholic and Protestant denominations found themselves in a decades long struggle of faith: to either hold to an older orthodox understanding of sexuality in the context of Pauline natural law, or to submit to emergent, secular, and queer understandings of gender and sexuality. Regardless of which side of the theological debate churches and thought leaders would take, there was a common understanding that homosexuals needed their own ministry. Starting with the emergence of the first gay-centered church in Reverend Troy Perry’s living room, the gay Christian movement took the latter understanding of gender and sexuality and founded a new theology based on it—a theology which conservative Christians would only group with the secular gay liberation movement and treat only as an oppositional front in the culture war. Even as groups like Lutherans Concerned, Dignity Chicago, and Perry’s own Metropolitan Community Church struggled to find fellowship with other Christians, they worked tirelessly in their own communities to provide spiritual connection to gay and lesbian communities ravaged by AIDS and condemned by their churches. On the other side of the theological coin was ex-gay and celibate gay organizations like Exodus and Love-in-Action, which both similarly promised community to an ostracized minority, but promised changes in sexuality which were at odds with the prevailing understanding of homosexuality’s immutability. As tension between pro and ex-gay organizations continued through the decades, both organizational poles changed their strategy multiple times to consolidate their respective positions. In either case, homosexuality was a thorn in the side of the conservative Christian movement, and gays and lesbians either had to neutralize themselves by annihilating their own identities in the closet or be cast out and condemned by AIDS.
