Some Thoughts on Greg Coles’s “Single, Gay, Christian”

Hey everyone, welcome to the Conversations That Matter cell phone edition. Obviously, I'm traveling right now, so I'm going to try to keep it short as much as I possibly can, but I didn't want to miss a day doing podcasts.

I've been for the last two or three months putting out six podcasts a week.

Of course, we don't put out one on Sunday, that's my conviction, but I am kind of tired. I'm actually sleep deprived the last few nights.

I'm working on some good projects, some really good things. I want to announce one of them actually soon, that's exciting to me.

Your prayers are appreciated, and I thank you for that, but I didn't want to miss a day. I thought, before I go to bed,

I'm going to do one more podcast, and this is that podcast. I want to talk about a book that I read a few years ago by a guy named

Gregory Coles called A Single Gay Christian, and if you have kids around, you may not want them to hear this podcast, so just forewarning.

It's going to be about the topic of that book, but Gregory Coles, if you go to his website, this is his description of the

About Me section about Greg. Gregory Coles is a tangle of identities.

That's the first sentence. It starts that way, Gregory Coles is a tangle of identities.

You can imagine, this is a confused person, this is, judging from the book, an insecure person, and it's a very sad book in a way, but because the social justice movement, the way it operates so often is, like right now, just to give you a little background of why we're doing this, it's operating right now primarily along the lines of race or ethnicity, and so it's bad to be white, it's good to be, well, not just black, but Asian or whatever other minority status is designated as oppressed, there's a popularity,

I guess, assigned to that experience, for lack of a better term, and then the goal is to deconstruct whiteness, to bring it down, in their words.

However, it's going to switch, the focus changes, it'll be the Me Too movement, then it'll sort of serve a feminist, deconstructing patriarchy, toxic masculinity, then it goes back to something else, deconstructing, in this case, heterosexuality, marriage, family, et cetera, and so I read this book by Gregory Coles a few years ago, he's been a

Revoice speaker, and this hasn't gone away, and I read something this morning, or no, it was last night, that clued me into the fact that this thinking, this is alive and well, we need,

I haven't talked about it in a while, but I do need to talk about it every now and then, there was a time, and I still think this to some extent, that I thought the real subversion is going to come from this kind of LGBTQ plus Christianity synthesis of some kind,

I mean, this is a much bigger direct threat than Black Lives Matter, et cetera, but the thing is, because of intersectionality, they're all kind of working together in a way.

But I wanted to focus specifically on this, and so I pulled up my notes from a few years ago, because I read an article that referenced this, it gave a glowing review of this book, and I thought, you know,

I've read this book, let me go look at my notes, and it came back, and so I wanted to, and this is, again, the reason

I do these is for you, to help you think through these issues, because you're going to face them if you haven't yet.

If you're, and specifically for Christians in the church who have friends who may be going down this path, or have gone down this path,

I'm not going to give you comprehensively everything there is to know or think about this, but I do have some experience dealing with this directly.

I haven't really talked about it on the show, but I do, and I'm not going to get into the whole story now,

I think maybe in a future podcast, because it is a good story, I will share it, of a gentleman that I did reach out to for months with the gospel, who claimed to be homosexual, that was his orientation, could not change it, wouldn't go to church, and then he was, a few days later, after saying this, was very honest with me about, no,

I do want a wife, I do want a family, I do want these things, is there any hope for me?

So I'll share this story at some point, but it's the

Word of God I'm standing on, it's not that experience that I have, I'm not an expert on this, but what

I'm about to share with you, all I want to say is, this isn't something that I'm bringing to you without having practiced it, or without having thought through, seriously thought through, do

I actually believe what I'm saying? Does this work practically in the real world? Does what the

Bible says matter, is it true? Is there a way to approach this that has a certain sensitivity towards the sinner, but without compromising any truth, and certainly being honest about the wrath of God and these kinds of things that the

Bible clearly teaches. So, all right, so all that to say, I want to go through the book,

I want to give my critique of it, but while we're going along, I want to give you insights,

I want to point out the flaws in Gregory Cole's logic, and in his thinking, and feeling, and then

I want to just encourage you and point you towards a better way of approaching some of these things. So this isn't just to throw rocks at Gregory Cole's, his book,

I should say, but this is to help you think through this by examining his flawed reasoning, and hopefully exuding some compassion for people like him, because there are many of them, and then thinking through, okay, what's a better way?

What's a better way than the way Gregory Cole's would like us to approach this? So, needless to say,

Single Gay Christian, it's semi -biographical, but Gregory Cole's is encouraging

Christians to kind of soft -pedal their views on LGBTQ, especially homosexuality.

And I'm going to go through a few categories here. Epistemology. Gregory Cole's elevates feelings as tests for authentic faith and love.

If you're not feeling that you're attracted to someone, even if you're trying to kiss them, and he tells this story, then it's definitely not love.

You have to have, there's a warm fuzzy that has to come with it of some kind for it to be real love. And he says something here, too, he says,

I could be wrong about everything. That's a direct quote. There's some kind of a radical subjectivity in Gregory Cole's approach, and I think that's why there's some insecurity.

He doesn't really know what he believes, yet he wants to preach at everyone. He wants them to know something, but he could be wrong about everything he claims to know, and this is just, you can't get started when you're on such a false foundation.

Obviously, he doesn't believe that because he doesn't think he's wrong about being wrong about everything. That's self -contradictory. It's a self -refutation.

But his faith is very contingent on his feelings. Does he feel like he's close to God? And you see this in the book.

So there's sort of, what I wanted to convey is that behind everything, it seems there's sort of a root insecurity, just with his relationship with God, his relationship to reality itself.

Can he even trust his sense perception? These kinds of things are running in the background as he's dealing with such a hard question of identity.

Someone, he has struggles to some extent, I guess, for lack of a better term, with same -sex attraction.

And so you want to have some firm foundation if you're going to approach this. And that's what

I would encourage people to start with. You have to start with some truth, some common ground. You've got to build a foundation.

And once you have a foundation, you can start getting deeper. But if there's no foundation, and you just have these ethical disagreements with someone, then you're probably not going to get very far.

When it comes to ethics, Gregory Coles believes that praying to be straight while sexually experimenting with girls, or I should say in his biography, he prays to be straight while sexually experimenting with girls and porn to no avail.

And kind of concluding, well, I guess I'm homosexual. I mean, I'm not attracted to this stuff like I should be, like other guys my age are.

And that is not the way to go about it. I think he'd probably admit that too, to an extent. But it's like, this was somehow a confirmation in his mind.

Trying to go for more of a sinful, lustful heterosexuality and concluding, well, that didn't work for me.

You're stepping outside of God's plan already. Sin is not going to reap righteousness.

You're not going to have ordered desires because you went with a disordered desire that wasn't quite as disordered as the desire that you currently have.

He gave up trying to be straight and the dreams of marriage and family.

Now, this is a dangerous thing. This shows you, and this was kind of where the gentleman that I was referring to earlier that I worked with for a little bit was at, where he'd just given up on that stuff.

Well, I guess I'm never going to have it. But he never really did because he always knew that's the norm.

That is what I should want. That is something I do want. And so he struggled with it. And Greg Coles is no exception.

He hasn't given up on it completely. He says he has, but there's an inner struggle going on.

And that's not a good ethical thing, by the way. Especially when it comes to, if you really believe in the power of God, why not?

Why can't that happen? He flatlines homosexual desires by claiming all sexual desires are fallen and before the fall, he wouldn't necessarily have been heterosexual.

So he's open to this idea that even if Adam didn't fall, there would still be homosexuals.

Even though that's contrary to the created order, this is not something,

I mean, just read Romans 1. I mean, you really, that's the only passage you need to work your way through that one.

But this is, the effort here is to flatline it, to downplay homosexual desires. Hey, all desires, all sexual desires can be somehow warped in some way.

Therefore, homosexuality isn't really that bad compared to everything else. But the thing is, there's different levels of ordered and disordered desires.

And I think we all believe this to an extent, whether we admit it or not. Pretty much every, you know, things like bestiality or child, you know where I'm going with this.

I'm not going to get into the details because I don't need to be saying this on the podcast, but you know where I'm going. We would all agree that there's a certain level of depravity that is, there's a greater level of depravity in some of these things than in a warped heterosexual lust of some kind.

And it's not that both of them aren't sin, they both are sin. It's that you have to make, there's a certain depth of usually choices being made accompanying this that lead to other choices, that lead to other choices that warp the mind even further, et cetera.

Gay marriage, and this is a big one guys, gay marriage might be okay. And this is, it's a game,

I see this played a lot where it's kind of like a wink and a nod with, well, I'm orthodox, I believe all the orthodox things, but I'm open to this idea that gay marriage might be okay.

Not even, he even says it's, he insinuates it's not even as important as infant baptism. Like the disagreement over infant baptism is a bigger disagreement than the disagreement

Christians have over gay marriage. He says a married lesbian can be in love with Jesus, said he'd still love a friend who entered into a gay marriage, and that love wasn't a rebuking love, it was an accepting kind of love.

I accept you and your lifestyle, and you're a Christian, and you can fall deeper into love with Jesus while being engaged in a same -sex relationship, which just warps the

Christ, and if the marriage is Christ and the church, then this is, this is not a picture of Christ in the church anymore.

It can't be, it can't be an authentic marriage, but he's open to that. Why? Why is he open to that?

And he doesn't ever really quite comes out and says it, but then he insinuates it, and you gather that that's, that is what he believes.

His metaphysic. He believes he is a sexual minority and compares the identity to racial minorities, etc.

So he, again, downplaying here, but he takes sexual minorities, and he basically categorizes them.

He reinterprets them as, well, that's like, that's like racial categories, that's like a vocation, that's like all these other identities we have, except it's not.

There's sin, there's a, there's a sinful desire attached to this. He downplays disordered desires by assuming they are part of his nature, so they're part of my nature.

If that's who I really am, right, I was born this way, then they're not really disordered. He actually likens them to Paul's thorn in the flesh at one point, too, which,

Paul's thorn in the flesh was not a part of Paul's nature, so that's, so he's grasping anything he can find, really, to sort of justify these things, but Paul's thorn in the flesh, we don't have any indication that this was some kind of a sin, though.

Paul, in fact, just the opposite. It was, God's not the author of sin. God's not sending sin to Paul.

You need to bear with this. You need to sin. That doesn't make sense. He also says the point of sex is to know community, which is another way, it's kind of like downplaying the aspect of sex that is complementary, that there's a female and a male coming together, and it just, it's humans getting to know each other in community, and I don't know why he does this exactly, maybe a sour grapes kind of,

I'm not sure what's motivating all of that, but there's kind of, there's a subtle attack on heterosexuality, and I don't think most people are going to actually read that when they're reading this, but there is an attack on the created order in this book.

This is a very dangerous book, guys. I believe that to the core of my being. This is a very dangerous book, and the revoiced theology, which is, it is all very dangerous, because if you actually imbibe what they're saying, if you listen to what they're actually saying, they are attacking heterosexuality by downplaying it, by ripping out the things that make it what it is, by elevating homosexual desires to the same level as heterosexual desires, and it's just, it's not good.

It's not biblical. And I think the core of a lot of this, if you really, this is Romans 1.

I was having a conversation the other day with, a very good conversation with a dear brother and his family in Lynchburg, and they had my wife and I over, and we got on the subject of homosexuality, and we kind of agreed, we were talking about Romans 1 a little bit, and just how, in Romans 1 you see this fundamental worship of the creation instead of the creator.

There's a truth exchange going on, to take Peter Jones's line about it. And this is what happens in,

Gregory Coles demonstrates this, this is what happens in homosexuality. There is an obsession with himself, a worship of himself.

His focus on himself is just insane and through the roof. He focuses on the hardship of enduring self -hate and the critiques of others.

He almost acts like a martyr for the sacrifice he's making. He's making such a sacrifice. Low self -esteem.

He only has friendship. He doesn't have sex if he's going to live a celibate gay Christian life, which is kind of where he winds up.

There's a kind of love that he says he's forsworn.

He can't have a certain kind of love. He can't indulge in what all the heterosexuals are indulging in because he's homosexual and he has to follow the

Bible and the Bible says not to have sex, but he has these desires and they're legitimate in some way.

The reason I say that is because he even says homosexuality isn't by definition, you can't say that's love.

So he hasn't actually forsworn a kind of love. He should still be open to heterosexual love.

That's really who he is. That's who everyone is. That's who God wants them to be. That's how God designed them. That's the creator's intention.

That's what we go with. That's worshiping the creator, Romans 1. Instead of the creation,

I'm going to redefine myself. I'm my own creator. I get to say who I am.

I live on my own terms and my own terms are that I am homosexual and that's it.

And so this is Romans 1. Gregory Coles is in the midst of this. Now a question

I had when I was going through this, what about heterosexuals with unfulfilled desires? He assumes that straight

Christians have given themselves a cross that's too easy. It's literally in the book. Have they given themselves a cross that's too easy?

How many heterosexual Christians do you know, Christians who desire to be married in the way that God intends, legitimate desires, and it doesn't happen, or it's not happening, or there's a delay?

They still have to mortify those lusts. He puts heterosexuality on this pedestal where they have it so easy compared to him.

But there are single heterosexuals out there. Anyway, he's so consumed with himself that he can't even see that.

There seems to be some kind of a sour grapes. He talks about his strengths. At least he's not afraid to look unmasculine.

That's not a good thing. You should want to look like the biological sex that you are.

This is... 1 Corinthians talks about this. There is a way, there's an assumption within scripture that men should look like women, men should look like men, women should look like women.

Yeah, it's not Sports Illustrated, it's the Bible. He's so self -deceived.

He wants people to know things. For instance, he says at one point, there's a bunch of examples of this, one of them that I think is so clear.

He goes, I don't usually tell people that I like Justin Bieber music, except you just published it in a book that I'm reading.

The book is really an expression of himself. Now, I want to go through just a few things here about the

Bible, God, the gospel, and the church. Here's something he says about the Bible. Bumper sticker hermeneutics leaves us helpless where the

Bible seems to contradict itself. How do we respond when the order of creation changes between Genesis 1 and 2?

When kidnapping and enslaving people is condemned, but slaves are told to obey their masters? When Paul appears to forbid women from filling leadership roles in the church, and then speaks highly of women who have taken on leadership roles.

The logic of surface meaning forces us to read dismissively, to overlook or explain away whatever doesn't seem to fit.

We miss the opportunity to read holistically because we're too busy regrouping, cutting our losses, trying to protect the Bible from itself.

I say this not to defend revisionary readings of the Bible's approach to homosexuality, but to defend the instinct that makes us bold enough to raise the question, if we truly love

Scripture, we have to love it enough to let it prove us wrong. Guys, please.

This is all the examples he gave. Genesis 1 and 2. Different order of creation?

No, that's higher criticism. I'm sorry. No, it's the same. It's just Genesis 2 is more specific, talking about one day.

Kidnapping and enslaving people is condemned, but slaves are told to obey their masters. There's no inconsistency there. Yes, the

Bible teaches in the Old Testament you should not kidnap. That doesn't mean that there's not a way to obtain slaves without kidnapping.

Anyway, there's just no contradiction there. I mean, when Paul appears to forbid women from filling leadership roles in the church and then speaks highly of women who've taken on leadership roles, yeah, no.

Paul's being very specific that women are not to usurp the authority of the pastorate.

They're not to be preaching. Yes, women can take certain authority roles, but it's not the authority roles that Paul's outlined.

It's not even authority. They can take authority roles, but it's not spiritual authority over men, that kind of thing.

Anyway, grown men. He also says at one point, he talks about Bible verses against homosexuality.

That was it. There's only six Bible references of homosexuality. That was all I needed to explain in order to hang on to my faith and still have everything

I wanted. I just want to point out, what he's ignoring is that the Bible is,

I think Michael Brown had made this illustration once, that if there's a gluten free cookbook, and you say, hey, gluten is not mentioned in this cookbook.

He'd be like, yeah, because it's the gluten free cookbook. Well, the Bible is a heterosexual book. If you say, well, you know, homosexuality, it's only mentioned six times.

Well, yeah, because it's a heterosexual book. The commandments given to fathers and mothers and wives and husbands assume gender roles.

It assumes heterosexuality. So his views, his theological views here,

I mean, it's false teaching, guys. I have no problem saying that. He denies God's plan. He denies God's power.

He looks forward to the intimacy with God, which is better than sex, but can't trust that maybe God's plan is to change his desires on earth.

So in heaven, God's going to give him real intimacy, but he can't have it on earth. Why not? Does God have a plan?

Is there a creation plan? Why just say that that's not going to happen?

What about God's power? He can implement that plan. And Gregory Coles, he's a young man.

He's got a whole life ahead if he lives his whole life span that he would normally live. Why is he just saying that this can't happen?

He can't become a heterosexual. Why? He can't have those desires, the right in order desires

God wants him to have. Why not? So he denies God's power. He calls...

let's see, he gave up on being called to marriage because of his desires, again, into himself.

So anyway, giving up on God's plan, not trusting

God's power. How about the gospel? He talks about his homosexual orientation as somehow a redemption story because he doesn't act on it.

So he doesn't act on his desires, doesn't go and have those relationships with other men, so that's a redemption story.

Redemption is what Jesus did. Redemption is Jesus taking the sin that Gregory Coles has committed in thought, word, deed, action, whatever, even if it's just thought, and paying for that sin, redeeming him from the sin that he owed.

Anyway, the church. This is where the real attack lies.

This is the main thing of his attack. They're not sensitive to sexual minorities. He condescends,

I should say, to them, and they're misunderstanding because they misunderstand things like orientation, and they have a lack of sophistication.

So in other words, they don't know about Gregory Cole's innate desires too well, and that's not part of their world.

They don't use the language of homosexual orientation, therefore he condescends to them, towards them.

He ridicules the focus on masculine roles and no ministries that are catering, that are for him.

Ministries need to cater to him. Why is there no ministry for people like him? He basically blames the church for his guilt.

That's what I'm picking up. He comes across as guilty, and he just blames the church for it. He has no problem worshiping with LGBT folks, yes, even transgender, so that should be part of the church.

Worship with transgenders. Sing Amazing Grace with transgenders in church. This is all legitimate.

He can't answer straight questions about whether he's in favor of others entering same -sex relationships or not.

It's got to be so nuanced. He seems more ready to praise practicing homosexuals than straight Christians who are ignorant of his desires.

See, it's more of a sin to be ignorant of Greg Cole's desires than it is to be a transgender person.

That's the impression you get from the book. He positions himself, this is a tactic, he positions himself as a moderate.

I'm just a moderate. Meanwhile, all he seems to do is critique traditional conservatives, just critique after critique of traditional conservatives.

He insinuates that straight Christians who encourage celibacy for gay people should feel guilty for enjoying their lives, yet says he can't judge others' hearts.

He says that in the book. I can't judge others' hearts after he spends so much of the book judging others' hearts.

So this is the book, and so this is the critique I have. Now, I want to say this. What Greg Cole is going through is what many people are going through in his particular situation, and it is sad, and we should have some empathy for it.

It is a difficult thing to want things that one cannot have, the things that you deeply want.

At the same time, it's possible to want things that are very bad, very evil, and the goal should be, and I'm reminded of Bobby Lopez, something he told me about this, the goal should be to live within the order, the plan, the orderly plan that God has created for all mankind.

Yes, there are exceptions. There's things like the gift of singleness. I know there's some debate on that, but I'm willing to say that there's...not

saying it's a gift like 1 Corinthians 12 kind of gifts, necessarily, but there is a place for that.

But it's not the norm. It's the creational norm, and even in that, there's...well,

actually, I'm going to get off that for a minute, because that's not even in the ballpark, even close to this category that Greg Cole wants to introduce of homosexuality.

There is a category for singleness. There's not a category for homosexuality, and that's a legitimate category.

And someone like Greg Cole, who has these desires, whether he got them from...it doesn't really matter.

He says he always had them, right? So they must be kind of like an inbred thing.

Whether they are or not, and I'll tell you, I think...I believe what Romans 1 says about it.

I think there is a choice being made, and you see it in Greg Cole's. There's a choice being made to worship creation and not the

Creator, even if he always felt like he had these desires. What he's choosing to do is...where's

the focus of that? I. I always had these desires. It is not an outward focus.

It's not a focus on the Creator. It is not looking at the blueprint for how he was made, what he's supposed to do, these kinds of things.

His ways of trying to become heterosexual were all...they were sinful, some of them.

The ones at least that were highlighted. Maybe with the exception of he says he tried to pray for it, etc.,

but he gave up on that pretty darn quick for someone who's as young as he is. So there's a defeatist attitude here.

God's just not powerful. He's not going to...and maybe this isn't even his plan. And there's a discouragement.

Now, for a true Christian who gets stuck in a sin, loves

God, really truly does, and just, man, this sin. It's so hard to get rid of this sin. I love engaging in it, and how do

I stop doing this? That is something to fight, to mortify.

That is something that God does to never give up on. That's something that God brings deliverance from.

And you have to hold on to that. You have to believe that. Even if you're, like Proverbs says, you're the righteous man who gets up seven times.

You give up every single time. Keep getting up. It is the most unhealthy thing and the most lacking of faith thing that you can do to just throw in the towel.

There is true power out there residing in God and the Holy Spirit. We are called to be obedient.

Ultimately, for any sin, really, for whatever finger we want to point at the church or anything external, three fingers are pointing back.

It's our desires. It's ourselves. And we are responsible for those, and there are ways to change those.

And this is where I was reminded of the Bobby Lopez thing. I asked him about this, and he said, because he's someone who came out of that and has a family and everything, and he said, look, it's like, in some ways it's like a diet.

And at first I heard that as a diet. I mean, we're talking about serious sinful things here. He says, look, gluttony is also a sin.

It's like a diet, though, in a way. It's not easy. You think someone who's a glutton, who's, you know, so many hundreds of pounds overweight, it's hard to lose that weight.

But you discipline yourself. You do what Paul said. You buffet your body. So there's an element of, yes, you do need to work hard.

You do need to be disciplined. But the essential thing is you can never stop trusting

God. And I do happen to know many people who I've talked to now over the years who were going way past where Greg Coles is, living in a homosexual lifestyle, a pattern of sin, and are

Christians, have families, do not struggle with that. You know,

Juan Riesco is another great example of someone I just recently I was talking to about this. And one of the things that I've noticed, the hallmark in all these guys, and the thing that sets them apart from Greg Coles, they don't have the bitterness.

They are not blaming everyone else for their sins. They're not trying to get rid of their guilt by passing it on to something else.

They are, Romans 1, worshiping the Creator. They're just accepting this is who God said I am. That's who

I am. End of story. I'm going to live the way that God said that I am. And I'm just going to leave the results up to Him.

I'm going to pray for it. I'm not going to get lost in my own head thinking about what are my desires right this moment?

What am I really thinking? You just move forward, and in that way, it's like any other sin.

There's not, you know, yeah, there's sexual sins against the body, but it's like any other sin.

All sin sends you to hell, ultimately. That's what the Bible teaches. If you committed one sin, and you committed them all in the sense that there's a punishment, and you will incur a punishment, and they're all offensive to God, so I wouldn't...what's

happened right now is, and Greg Coles is playing into it, is there's such a privileged status given to homosexuality, because it's a very popular sin, and it is forbidden to even think of it in sinful terms.

And so he's buying into that to some extent, and not treating it as a sin, and creating a separate category for it.

And for all the talk that, oh, it's the religious right that creates a separate category for homosexuality, I see it far more on the left.

Even for those who claim to be Christians, they create this special place for homosexuality that it's protected, and you can't speak about it unless you know all the ins and outs of the psychology of it, and it's just...no.

God is the one that gave us categories, He defines what it is, and He defines all of humanity.

So anyway, there's...I'm rambling at this point a little, so I'm going to stop the video, but I'm setting this up for some things

I want to talk about next week a little bit. And I noticed a trend this week, the trend is continuing in conservative, even politically conservative circles, what are considered that, like Turning Point USA earlier this week.

There is starting to be an all -out assault on traditional, biblical, just the way

God created it, sexuality. And I think we need to be prepared.

Yeah, you know, Black Lives Matter, I get it. Systemic racism, etc. That's important, but there's something else coming, guys, and it's going to be coming with a vengeance,

I really think. So I hope that was helpful for some of you in thinking through some of these things at least, and God bless.