Changing Our Mind Quotes

“Better is one day in the company of those bullied by Christians but loved by Jesus than thousands in the company of those wielding scripture to harm the weak and defenseless.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: A call from America's leading evangelical ethics scholar for full acceptance of LGBT Christians in the Church

“Make your church a context where parents know that the right response to their teenagers is never to reject them as human beings, never to throw them out.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind

“If what we are talking about is blessing an anything-goes ethic in a morally libertine culture, I stand utterly opposed, as I have throughout my career. But if what we are talking about is carving out space for serious committed Christians who happen to be gay or lesbian, to participate in society as equals, in church as kin, and in the blessings and demands of covenant on the same terms as everyone else, I now think that has nothing to do with cultural, ecclesial and moral decline, and everything to do with treating people the way Christ did.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind

“It says something really terrible when the least safe place to deal with sexual orientation and identity issues is the Christian family and church.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“Yet whether a culture condemns or accepts homosexuality, heterosexuality prevails and homosexuality survives.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“It is also not as simple as saying that Christians accept the moral laws offered in the Old Testament, just not the ceremonial, cultic, dietary, or civil laws—because, as Old Testament scholar Martin Noth wrote, “Here in the Old Testament … there is no question of different categories of commandment, but only of the Will of God binding on Israel, revealed in a great variety of concrete requirements.” [24] Any differentiation of authority in terms of categories of Old Testament legal materials is foreign to the materials themselves. And no clear delineation along these lines is offered in the New Testament. It is also not as simple as saying Christians may not accept all the laws offered in the Old Testament, but we do seek to practice the principles behind them, as Gordon Wenham, among others, has suggested. [25] While this move is often compelling, other times the principles are not clear, and still other times they are clear but we cannot accept them as Christians. Consider the principle of collective responsibility and therefore collective punishment of the entire population of a town for its prevailing religious practices, or the principle that the “unclean” (like menstruating women) should be excluded from community.  If we say that Christians may not accept all the laws or the principles offered in the Old Testament, but we are committed to belief in the core character of God as revealed there, such as the idea that God is holy and demands holiness, this is better. But this does not resolve the question of whether all same-sex relationships violate the character of a holy God.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“practicing homosexuals”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“the term “sodomy” is derived from this story”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“Majority Christian opinion on various issues has sometimes shifted profoundly.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“non-discrimination laws with exemptions for religious employers.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“but whether the Church universal will or should change its mind collectively.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“Christianity, like most religious traditions of any vintage, is inherently conservative.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“emphasize quite strongly the responsibility of all individual Christians to think carefully about issues of faith for ourselves,”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“They fear it will soon happen again, right here in America, and they are readying themselves for a new era of persecution.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“This same standard could one day be applied to Christian colleges vis-à-vis sexual-orientation discrimination.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“140 tweetable characters.)”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“my own beloved sister, who is dearer to me than words can say and who came out as a lesbian”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“religious leader.” Such pride is very dangerous”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“I would name these connections to impress you with the extent to which I am deeply burrowed into the leading circles of my religious community but, well, that would be insufferable in its own way, don’t you think?”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“career ladders in the religion business.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“(theologically conservative Protestant Christian)”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“evangelical (theologically conservative Protestant Christian”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“The creator of an apologia dares to speak personally … autobiographically and candidly and always vulnerably … about his or her engagement with the ideas and progress of ideas being presented.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“Every generation has its hottest of all hot-button issues, the issue that becomes the litmus test of everyone’s orthodoxy and provokes conflicts sometimes leading to schism. In earlier generations it was slavery, or segregation, or apartheid, or Nazism, or abortion, or temperance, or Sabbath or tongue-speaking”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“We need to recognize that unloving speech spackled over with a thin veneer of truth is a religious charade.” —Preston Sprinkle, Theology in the Raw.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“That has excluded those who are unable to fulfill that prescription due to their sexual orientation.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“male/female sexual/gender complementarity.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“certainly will be relevant to our witness to the state. But the fundamental need right now for Christians is to think seriously about whether the Church’s own marginalized sexual minorities will be treated, unequivocally, as sisters and brothers in Christ.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“There are millions of LGBTQ Christians.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics

“C.S. Lewis and Billy Graham once did.”
― David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind: Definitive 3rd Edition of the Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians with Response to Critics