PROTESTANTS AND PROTESTANTISM

The roots of Protestant Christianity reach back to sixteenth-century reform movements in Europe. In opposition to the institutional power exercised by the medieval church, reformers such as Martin Luther argued for the Bible as the sole source of divine revelation. This reliance on biblical texts has contributed significantly to Protestant approaches to sexuality.

The insistence among early Protestants on "private judgment" in the interpretation of Scripture helps to account for the extensive variety of Protestant denominations that emerged from the Reformation, as well as the diversity of approaches to questions of sexual morality. Today, while many denominations are grouped quite loosely under the Protestant label, most of them retain an emphasis on Scripture and a high standard of personal, biblically based morality with its attendant stress on discerning appropriate—in other words, divinely sanctioned—sexual expression.

Interpretation and Application of Biblical Texts

Biblical discourse on sexuality among Protestants typically begins with the creation accounts in Genesis. These biblical texts contributed to the early reformers' rejection of mandatory clergy celibacy, because they believed marriage to be divinely instituted in the act of creation itself, yet buttressed the already well-established prohibition of same-sex sexual relations, as the gender complementarity of the Genesis account seems to demand. While several other biblical texts have played a key role in these debates (Lev. 18:22, 20:13; Rom. 1:27; I Cor. 6:9-10; and I Tim. 1:10) particularly notable is the account of God's destruction of the city of Sodom (Gen. 19). The cause of this divine act of judgement is often assigned to the supposedly homosexual male residents of that city. As Mark Jordan's research has shown, the rhetorical utility of "sodomy" as a broad category of sexual and gender deviance appeared relatively late in Christian traditions (roughly the eleventh century) but has exercised wide-ranging influence in both religious and civic affairs. Early Protestants seized on this category for theological and political confrontations with the Roman Catholic Church. Many Protestants today continue to rely on this biblical material to support, as a matter of divine decree, the dominant Euro-American cultural pattern of heterosexual marriage and family, the strictly defined gender roles of husband and wife, and the procreative purpose of sexuality.

The interpretation and application of biblical texts on sexuality remains a divisive and fiercely debated topic among Protestant Christians. This issue is made more complex by the relatively recent emergence of LGBT identities, which for some stand in contrast to LGBT behaviors, a distinction with which biblical writers were largely if not completely unfamiliar. Modern Protestants tend to mirror this distinction in their ecclesial policies by condemning sexual acts between people of the same sex but encouraging the acceptance of homosexually oriented persons who remain chaste. Positions exist on either side of this view, as some Protestant churches treat both the sexual act and the person as equally sinful, while others openly embrace both the persons and their sexual expressions.

Mapping the intersections of sexually queer experience with Protestant Christianity thus presents a challenge. Common themes do appear, along with general trends, but the diversity of Protestant approaches makes a tidy map impossible to draw. Generally, incidents of publicly known same-sex relationship and sexual behavior were restricted to relatively few (usually notorious) cases from the American colonial period and into the nineteenth century. This gave way eventually to a public, politically galvanizing LGBT liberation movement of the late 1960s, during which key figures and texts emerged in the effort to mobilize a shift in religious approaches to sexual and gender diversity. This shift continues to shape the prospects for wider participation within the life of Protestant churches for LGBT people. Overall, modern and now postmodern Protestant engagements with LGBT experience will likely remain as fluid as our cultural constructs of sexuality and gender, even as religious institutions seem perpetually to lag behind the realities they seek to engage.

Mapping the Terrain of American Protestants

From the Colonial Period to 1900. The biblical predilections of Protestant Christianity arrived on the American continent with the European settlers of New England, a fact that shaped the sexual mores of American colonial life and the subsequent development of common law precedents. Drawing on such biblical passages as Leviticus 20:13 (which prescribes death for "a man who lies with a male as with a woman"), nearly half of the original English colonies adopted capital punishment for the crime of "sodomy." While the death penalty for such acts was repealed after the Revolutionary War, this posture toward "unnatural acts" continued to influence state statutes, legal opinion, and law enforcement procedures well into the twentieth century. (When the U.S. Superme Court overturned the legal proscription of sodomy in its 2003 decision, "Lawrence v. Texas," thirteen states still retained laws prohibiting sodomy, four of which restricted the prohibition to same-sex couples.)

Prior to the nineteenth century, the discretion of same-sex-loving people and the cultural taboos associated with their behavior kept their relationships mostly hidden from public view, especially as protestant preachers continued to condemn the sin of "sodomy" from their pulpits. As Protestant missionaries began to expand their work beyond Euro-American contexts they encountered new forms of sexual diversity, usually in the form of gender nonconformity. Some Native American cultures, for example, honored the tradition of what Europeans called the berdache, a person who adopted either transgender or androgynous behavior within tribal life and customs and whose role in the tribe often included responsibilities the tribe understood as spiritual or otherwise sacred. Colonial and early U.S. authorities had already established a pattern of legally coercing the berdache to dress according to conventional gender standards, but Protestant missionaries took this further by insisting that they do so as a condition for genuine conversion to Christianity.

The nineteenth century witnessed important changes as industrialization, critical biblical scholarship, and advances in the social and physical sciences led to a liberalization of traditional forms of Protestantism. Unitarianism began to thrive, as it shifted from its reliance on biblically based Christianity to one more firmly rooted in Enlightenment rationalism and Renaissance humanism. Still, this relaxation of traditional theological tenets did not immediately alter the taboos associated with homosexuality, especially as both sexuality and gender were brought more securely into the orbit of scientific and particularly medical research where the term "homosexuality" was first coined and perceived as an illness.

The Twentieth Century. The confluence of scientific classification, Protestantism, and cultural class distinctions created new types of engagement with homosexuality in the early part of the twentieth century. George Chauncey, Jr., for example, in his research of the World War I era, suggests that a man's homosexual behavior was at this time often understood as "queer" only if he took the "woman's part" in the sexual act. This kind of gender categorization was frequently inscribed on class, especially, as Chauncey's work shows, in religious contexts. Christian ministers, for example, whose middleor upper-class affectations were perceived as effeminate by the working class, on occasion had to defend themselves against charges of homosexual advances in pastoral relationships they argued were merely "brotherly." At the same time, liberal Protestantism continued to make singificant inroads in various denominations, seminaries and other religious instituions, paving the way for a conservative retrenchment in fundamentalist and evangelical forms of Protestant Christianity.

Evangelical and fundamentalist movements. Evangelicals encompass a wide array of traditions and communities, including the various Baptist conventions, Christian Reformed Churches, some of the regional synods of Lutheranism, the Evangelical Free Church, the Salvation Army, Assemblies of God, and Pentecostal churches. Fundamentalists appear in all of these denominations and others, tracing their origins to a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement calling for a return to the "fundamentals" of Christian faith.

The reliance on preor anti-critical readings of the Bible, together with a general suspicion of modern cultural developments, renders these forms of Protestant Christianity the least likely to welcome openly LGBT members; indeed, many of these denominations remain some of the strongest opponents of both civil rights and ecclesial participation for LGBT people. Historically black churches (such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Church of God in Christ, the Northern Baptist Convention, and a variety of "Holiness" churches), while at the forefront of racial and ethnic equality movements, tend to replicate evangelical and fundamentalist rejections of same-sex sexual practices.

The hazards of generalization. Even where these generalizations prove helpful, the temptation to map American Protestantism along neatly defined liberal and conservative lines deserves resisting. Official statements by a given denomination do not always reflect the views of its members. The Unitarians, for example, after they joined with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, were some of the first to embrace officially the ordination of lesbian and gay ministers and to permit the religious celebration of same-sex "holy unions." Yet a 1988 survey of the undeniably LGBT-positive Unitarian Universalist Association revealed a mix of opinions regarding LGBT people, and even some opposition to their ordination.

On the other hand, some evangelicals, even those who hold to literal readings of the Bible, concede the possibility that biblical writers did not address the modern phenomenon of homosexual identities. Furthermore, between the obviously welcoming and the clearly hostile positions, many churches occupy a broad "mainline" space presenting ambiguous and complex positions on questions of sexual morality.

Gary David Comstock's research suggests a range of religious responses to homosexuality falling into four possible types: rejecting, semi-rejecting, semi-affirming, and affirming (see sidebar). The nuances of difference among these types infuse any attempt to generalize about Protestant Christianity with significant risk.

From the 1950s through the 1970s: Mobilization for Social Justice

Councils on Homosexuality in the Church. Post–World War II America witnessed an unprecedented surge in LGBT visibility, spurred on by the organization of "homophile associations," new sociological and psychological research, and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, all of which contributed to a re-examination of biblical texts and church practices within Protestant traditions. In 1948, with the help of a Unitarian minister, Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, one of the first homophile associations, which later convened its first national convention, in 1953, at the First Universalist Church in Los Angeles.

The Daughters of Bilitis, an association of lesbians, was founded in 1955 in San Francisco. Two of its founding members—Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin—later worked with Cecil Williams, pastor of Glide Memorial Methodist Church (also in San Francisco), to establish the widely influential, interdenominational Council on Religion and the Homosexual. Organized in 1964 to facilitate dialogue on homosexuality in the churches, the council quickly focused its energies toward advocacy for social justice.

In 1965, the council published its Brief on Injustices to "expose a pattern of social, legal, and economic oppression of" homosexuals. The fact that such a report emerged from the clergy helped generate sweeping changes in the homophobic policies of San Francisco's police department. The work of the council prompted the establishment of similar organizations in Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and elsewhere.

All of these organizations worked closely with clergy and lay leaders from a variety of denominations, including the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church of America, and the Methodist Church. Shortly thereafter, the First National Conference on Religion and the Homosexual convened in 1971 at the Interchurch Center in New York City, with seventy participants from eleven denominations, and captured the attention of a wide range of news media.

Key Publications. The emergence of supportive clergy and advocacy groups was fostered by several key publications. A breakthrough occurred in 1955 with the appearance in Great Britain of Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition by Derrick Sherwin Bailey. This was the first scholarly work to challenge the standard interpretations of biblical passages on homosexuality and to catalogue the social and political oppression such interpretations had generated.

Two years later, the Wolfenden Report, published by the British Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution cited Bailey's work and contributed to the repeal of sodomy laws in Great Britain and in some parts of the United States. In 1960, Robert Wood, an ordained United Church of Christ minister, published Christ and the Homosexual. This was not only the first book to claim that one need not be heterosexual to be Christian, it was also the first book written by an openly gay person using his real name to make such a claim.

Even more galvanizing was Toward a Quaker View of Sex (1963), the first published report by an established, traditional religious organization calling for a reevaluation of Christian teaching on questions of homosexuality. Likewise, in 1967, Norman Pittenger, an Anglican theologian, published Time for Consent: A Christian Approach to Homosexuality, in which he argued for the full acceptance of homosexual persons within the church. This book influenced church discussions well beyond Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church. And in 1972, Ralph Blair, an evangelical minister, published An Evangelical Look at Homosexuality, a pamphlet in which he argued for the compatibility of same-sex sexual relations and the practice of evangelical Christian faith.

Response and reaction. These fresh ideas on sexuality urged responses in both directions, from those who were impatient for the change that such ideas promised and those who were alarmed by the momentum of that change. In 1968, Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal minister, founded the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) specifically for lesbians and gay men. While he supposed that the need for a separate denomination would gradually dissipate as mainline churches grew more accepting, MCC has continued to exist and to grow (even though it was refused admission as a member of the National Council of Churches), with congregations in every major U.S. metropolitan center as well as in many suburban and rural areas.

The conservative response to such moves was typified in the late 1970s by the "Save Our Children" campaign, spearheaded by Anita Bryant in Dade County, Florida, to oppose civil rights legislation for homosexuals. Bryant's explicitly evangelical Christian rhetoric in this campaign reflected the emergence, at roughly the same time, of the Religious Right in American politics. Television evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, local pastors, and conservative political activists began mobilizing to counter the "decadence" of American morality, exemplified in their view by the increasing tolerance of the "homosexual lifestyle."

LGBT Protestants soon began creating their own caucuses and lobbying groups within their respective denominations. Some of the more prominent of these groups include Integrity (Episcopalians), American Baptists Concerned, Lutherans Concerned, Evangelicals Concerned, More Light (Presbyterians), A Common Bond (Jehovah's Witnesses), Affirmation (United Methodists), and Affirmation (Mormons). In the 1980s and 1990s, similar groups emerged for the opposite purpose: to provide a network of religious support for those wishing to change their homosexual orientation. These were broadly labeled as "ex-gay ministries," and mostly functioned apart from established denominations. They included Exodus International, Homosexuals Anonymous, Regeneration, and Desert Stream.

From the 1980s to the Present: Prospects for Spiritual Practice

Early mobilization on behalf of LGBT people in Protestant churches focused almost exclusively on securing justice in such secular spheres as housing and employment, and rarely on their full religious inclusion within the life of the church. This split between civil rights and ecclesial participation is reflected in the policy statements of some mainline Protestant denominations regarding ordination.

Addressing Gay Roles in the Church. In 1989, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church confronted a crisis in church order after one of its own ordained an openly gay man, Robert Williams, to the priesthood in defiance of the church's 1979 General Convention resolution discouraging such action. After the offending bishop faced a heresy trial (the charges were later dropped), the House of Bishops "agreed to disagree" on this matter. On 7 June 2003, the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire was elected the denomination's first openly gay bishop. A 1986 statement from a self-study committee of the Lutheran Church of America reflects a similar inability to reach consensus: "This church can neither condemn, nor ignore, nor praise and affirm homosexuality." Likewise, the Mormon Church eventually softened its more aggressive 1970s posture of calling homosexuality "an ugly sin" and in the 1980s acknowledged its own lack of understanding in these issues by encouraging only celibacy, rather than reparative therapies, for homosexuals.

Other denominations have been far less ambiguous in their positions. In 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention urged its churches "not to afford the practice of homosexuality any degree of approval," and in 1985, it declared its opposition to identifying homosexuality "as a minority with attendant benefits or advantages" and affirmed its position that the Bible "condemns such practice as sin." At the opposite end of the spectrum, as early as 1972, the United Church of Christ (UCC) ordained William Johnson, marking the first ordination of a publicly open gay man in the history of Christianity (he later founded the gay caucus of the UCC). In 1991, the UCC passed a resolution "affirming gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons and their ministries," and calling upon their congregations "to facilitate the ordination and placement of qualified lesbian, gay, and bisexual candidates."

The urgency of the debate over ordination and on questions of marriage (the blessing of "holy unions") was fueled by a steady stream of autobiographical accounts in the 1980s and 1990s by openly LGBT clergy and those who had been denied ordination. These included Carter Heyward, who was among the first group of women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church; Chris Glaser, who fought unsuccessfully to change the ordination policies of the Presbyterian Church; Rose Mary Denman, who lost her clergy status in an ecclesiastical trial of the United Methodist Church; Antonio Feliz, a Mormon bishop who came out as a gay man; and Mel White, a former speechwriter for Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right, who made headlines in major media outlets when he came out as a gay man. (White went on to serve as dean at the Cathedral of Hope, an MCC congregation in Dallas.)

Toward a Wider Role. Even as the history of Protestant debates on sexuality resist generalization, the trajectory over the last century points to a much wider role for LGBT people within the life of Protestant churches than the World War II generation could have imagined. Many LGBT Christians now seek to move beyond the debates over tolerance and find ways to offer their gifts for the spiritual and intellectual well-being of their churches.

The establishment, in the late 1980s, of the Lesbian-Feminist Group and the Gay Men's Issues in Religion Group in the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional association of religious scholars in North America, has resulted in numerous publications on a wide range of topics in religion, sexuality, and gender. Conferences, retreats, and informal gatherings—such as the triennual ecumenical conference of the Welcoming Church Movement, launched in 2000 and called "Witness Our Welcome"—have likewise appeared to foster a new level of integration and contribution for LGBT Christians. Pioneering work, such as that of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott in Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach (2001), has also begun to appear on the religious implications of transgender experience, a field of study largely overlooked in the history of Protestant debates on sexuality.

Giving due attention to the relation between bifurcated gender categories and the discourse on diverse sexual practices represents an important frontier for Protestant theologies, as suggested by Jordan's insights on the social and theological construction of sodomy. And while the full participation of LGBT Christians in every Protestant tradition is by no means guaranteed, American Christianity and culture has clearly undergone a significant shift when many of the twenty-first century voices advocating for LGBT justice come from openly LGBT ministers in Protestant churches.

Bibliography

Chauncey, Jr. George. "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities And The Construction Of Sexual Boundaries In The World War I Era." In Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay And Lesbian Past, Ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. New York: Nal Books, 1989.

Comstock, Gary David. Gay Theology without Apology. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1993.

——. Unrepentant, Self-Affirming, Practicing: Lesbian/Bisexual/Gay People within Organized Religion. New York: Continuum, 1996.

Countryman, William L., and M. R. Ritley. Gifted by Otherness: Gay and Lesbian Christians in the Churches. Harrisburg, Penn.: Morehouse, 2001.

Denman, Rose Mary. Let My People In: A Lesbian Minister Tells of Her Struggles to Live Openly and Maintain Her Ministry. New York: Harper, 1990.

Feliz, Antonio A. Out of the Bishop's Closet: A Call to Heal Ourselves, Each Other, and Our World. San Francisco: Aurora, 1988.

Glaser, Chris. Uncommon Calling: A Gay Man's Struggle to Serve the Church. New York: Harper, 1988.

Jordan, Mark D. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Jung, Patricia Beattie, and Ralph F. Smith. Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Melton, Gordon, ed. The Churches Speak on Homosexuality: Official Statements from Religious Bodies and Ecumenical Organizations. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991.

Mollenkott, Virginia R. Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2001.

Rudy, Kathy. Sex and the Church: Gender, Homosexuality, and the Transformation of Christian Ethics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.

Siker, Jeffrey S., ed. Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994.

Tanis, Justin. Transgendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003.

White, Mel. Stranger at the Gates: To Be Gay and Christian in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Jay Emerson Johnson

see alsoafrican american religion and spirituality; churches, temples, and religious groups; daly, mary; heterosexism and homophobia; homophile movement; jones, prophet; new right; perry, troy; same-sex institutions; sodomy, buggery, crimes against nature, disorderly conduct, and lewd and lascivious law and policy; wigglesworth, michael.

the religious right and anti-lgbt violence

In 1979, Paul Weyrich, a political strategist, joined with Jerry Falwell, a Baptist preacher and television evangelist, to create the Moral Majority, an umbrella network for a rapidly growing number of religiously and politically conservative organizations and congregations seeking to address the "decadence" of American morality, typified by the growing acceptance of homosexuality. This movement quickly grew to four million and attracted members well beyond fundamentalist Christian circles, including Roman Catholics, conservative-minded members of mainline denominations, and Mormons. The Moral Majority even garnered endorsements from some Jewish organizations. Falwell disbanded the organization in 1986, but fellow televangelist Pat Robertson, after losing his bid for the presidential nomination in 1988, resurrected this national network in the form of the Christian Coalition.

Weyrich, Falwell, and Robertson, together with such figures as Lou Sheldon (of the Traditional Values Coalition), James Dobson (of Focus on the Family magazine), and Donald Wildmon (of the American Family Association), represent a broadly based movement variously called the New Right, the Evangelical Right, or simply the Religious Right. Though it no longer received as much media attention as it did in the 1980s and had dissolved much of its national institutional structure, the Religious Right nevertheless continued to exercise significant influence in matters of social policy on the local and state level, including its opposition to legislative measures guaranteeing civil rights for LGBT people, in the early twenty-first century.

Most of the national figures in this movement have stopped short of publicly advocating violence against gay men and lesbians (though Falwell, at the peak of the Moral Majority's influence, declared his intention to "stop the Gays dead in their perverted tracks"); still, many critics believed that their rhetoric, couched in traditional religious language, has fueled a violent posture. The brutal murders of an openly gay man, Matthew Shepard, on the plains of Wyoming in 1998, and of transgender teenager Eddie "Gwen" Araujo, in the San Francisco Bay area in 2002, are just two vivid examples of the kind of anti-LGBT violence in which the rhetoric of the Religious Right conceivably plays a part.

The power of religious language to fuel social action cannot be overestimated, whether in its more moderate forms ("hate the sin, love the sinner") or its extreme manifestations—as in the case of Fred Phelps, a Baptist minister who garnered media attention in the late 1980s and 1990s by organizing anti-LGBT rallies at the funerals of those who had died from AIDS-related causes, where he declared such persons worthy of divine condemnation and death because of their sexual orientation. The National Religious Leadership Roundtable, co-convened by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was created in the late 1990s to counter the anti-LGBT strategies of the Religious Right and marshal the resources of various faith communities (including Protestant denominations) for proactive, religious efforts to promote social justice and bring anti-LGBT violence to an end.

Ordination Policies in Mainline Protestant Churches

In the 1970s, most mainline Protestant denominations had spoken clearly in favor of guaranteeing civil rights for lesbian and gay people. However, this posture did not automatically translate into "ecclesial rights" with reference to ordination or marriage (the blessing of "holy unions"). The following excerpts, drawn from representative denominational statements, illustrate this split, as well as the ambiguity at work in many of these policies. This ambiguity has caused considerable confusion regarding the status of LGBT people within these churches.

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church, 1979:

There should be no barrier to the ordination of qualified persons of either heterosexual or homosexual orientation whose behavior the Church considers wholesome. We re-affirm the traditional teaching of the Church on marriage, marital fidelity and sexual chastity as the standard of Christian sexual morality. Candidates for ordination are expected to conform to this standard. Therefore, we believe it is not appropriate for this Church to ordain a practicing homosexual, or any person who is engaged in heterosexual relations outside of marriage.

The 1991 General Convention passed further resolutions declaring heterosexuality as normative, yet calling for further study and dialogue at the diocesan level on questions regarding homosexuality.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 1983, adopting a previous statement, in 1978, of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.:

There is no legal, social, or moral justification for denying homosexual persons access to the basic requirements of human social existence…. [Yet] even where the homosexual orientation has not been consciously sought or chosen, it is neither a gift from God nor a state nor a condition like race; it is a result of our living in a fallen world…. Therefore our present understanding of God's will precludes the ordination of persons who do not repent of homosexual practice.

United Methodist Church, The Book of Discipline, 1992:

Homosexual persons no less than heterosexual persons are individuals of sacred worth. All persons need the ministry and guidance of the Church in their struggles for human fulfillment…. Although we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching, we affirm that God's grace is available to all. We commit ourselves to be in ministry for and with all persons…. We are committed to support … rights and liberties for homosexual persons…. Moreover, we support efforts to stop violence and other forms of coercion against gays and lesbians.

protestant positions on homosexuality: sample denominations

A typology based on the research of Gary David Comstock in Unrepentant, Self-Affirming, Practicing: Lesbian/Bisexual/Gay People within Organized Religion (1996).

REJECTING

Based on select biblical texts, both homosexual activity and homosexual orientation are believed to be contrary to the divine purpose in creation, and are therefore considered sinful and condemned by God.

Southern Baptist Convention, Lutheran Church—Missouri and Wisconsin Synods, National Association of Evangelicals, Assemblies of God, Pentecostal and Holiness Churches, Jehovah's Witnesses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon), Church of the Nazarene, Seventh-Day Adventists

SEMI-REJECTING

Rejecting homosexual acts but not homosexual people. Either a reorientation toward heterosexual relationships, or sexual abstinence, is required.

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A., Disciples of Christ, United Methodist Church

SEMI-ACCEPTING

Relies on the primacy of female/male complementarity and the procreative purpose of sexuality to understand homosexual orientation as an acceptable but inferior way of life.

Episcopal Church (U.S.A.), Evangelical Lutheran Church of America

ACCEPTING

Understands homosexuality as a God-given part of nature's diversity, and encourages full participation of LGBT people in the life of the church.

Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, Unitarian Universalist Association, Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), United Church of Christ