At this point in time, one may legitimately ask just how sharp the dividing line remains between “Side A” and “Side B,” when it seems almost no expression of gay identity is out of bounds for Side B Christians. This question was openly raised in a Religion News report last year, in which Collins suggested some in the Side B camp might feel they have more “shared ground” with “Side A people who are Christians” than with more conservative same-sex attracted Christians, some of whom might have roots in the old “ex-gay” movement. Collins is not alone in comfortably referring to people on Side A as “Christians.” Wesley Hill has a similar stance toward affirming fellow Episcopal priests, even saying he “could be wrong” in his own commitment to the traditional sexual ethic.

In 2018, Wesley Hill published a report in First Things on a movement that claimed to be breaking new ground in the Christian discourse around faith and sexuality. It was the inaugural year of the Revoice conference, which billed itself as an ecumenical orthodox space for same-sex attracted Christians who wanted to honor a traditional sexual ethic, yet believed the Church’s approach to the issue needed to be rethought—“revoiced.” Such Christians needed more than a “vocation of no,” Hill argued. They needed a way to integrate their sexuality into their Christianity. They needed a “vocation of yes.”
Carl R. Trueman was an early critic of the Revoice project, although he was sympathetic in theory. Despite some concerns, he hoped the movement would self-correct and mature in response to good-faith criticism. But following a World magazine report on the conference’s 2022 convention, Trueman offered a less than favorable updated assessment: So far from self-correcting, the movement had ignored its critics and taken on board all the trappings of sexual identitarianism, from “preferred pronouns” to queer theory to the splintering of attendees into “affinity groups” based on their particular orientation. Cautiously hopeful as he’d once been, Trueman could no longer see anything to salvage. Besides all this, the conference’s inaugural host church, Memorial Presbyterian, recently voted to leave the PCA amid swirling controversy around its LGBT community outreach and its openly gay lead pastor, Greg Johnson.
The speed of this decline naturally prompts a question: Was there ever anything to salvage? In its current incarnation, are we witnessing a radical moral turn? Or are we witnessing the inevitable end of an inherently flawed project?
Before the first Revoice conference, Wesley Hill and Ron Belgau co-founded the group blog Spiritual Friendship in 2012, where they developed their new philosophy together with an ecumenical group of contributors. Catholic writer Eve Tushnet also contributed thoughts at her Patheos blog. As a shorthand for groups with divergent views on the topic, they used the metaphor of a record’s “A” and “B” sides. “Side A Christians” believed God would bless their gay relationships, while “Side B Christians” pursued chastity, some through heterosexual marriage, but most through celibacy.
Yet, even in celibacy, they proposed that they could still accept and sublimate their sexuality as a kind of gift. Perhaps they could even recover a covenantal model of “spiritual friendship” that would offer a chaste relational substitute for marital permanence, even if both parties were same-sex attracted. Tushnet, who first coined the phrase “a vocation of yes,” has recently written about her own exclusive commitment to another woman, the sort of commitment she has argued can strengthen a gay person’s walk with God. They openly identify as “a lesbian couple.”
In developing this philosophy, various Side B writers have rejected the idea that homosexual temptation is uniquely disordered. In his 2017 book All But Invisible, Revoice founder Nate Collins argued that the word “disordered” should apply equally to any sexual attraction outside monogamous male-female marriage. That same year, future Revoice collaborator Gregory Coles published his memoir Single, Gay, Christian, in which he speculated that his homosexual proclivity was not even a result of the Fall. Meanwhile, Hill, Belgau, and Tushnet all consistently normalized certain manifestations of same-sex desire, blurring the lines between proto-romance and “spiritual friendship.”
This normalization has been succinctly crystallized by Revoice charter speaker Grant Hartley, who has asserted explicitly that not all same-sex romance is “off limits” in a Side B framework, only same-sex sex. He goes on to elaborate that some “Side B folks” might “pursue relationships with the same sex which might be called ‘romantic’—the category of ‘romance’ is vague.” Hartley first provoked controversy with his inaugural Revoice talk, endorsed by Hill, which proposed that Christians could mine gay culture for “queer treasure.” For example, he analogizes “coming out of the closet” to death and resurrection. Even in spaces like a gay club, he feels a sense of “homecoming.”
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In the end, Basham desires not to tear the church down but to build it up. She desires to see the pure gospel truth that saved her soul taken up and preached without compromise, without apology. It is that saving gospel, undiluted by political pandering and corporate double-speak, that “still brings dead girls to life.”

Sometimes, a book comes along that creates irreconcilable differences between sociopolitical factions. Other times, a book comes along that diagnoses them. Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale is the second kind of book. According to its critics, it’s a shrill, dissident right propaganda screed, designed to foment civil war within the evangelical church. But to anyone who hasn’t spent the past decade in a particular kind of echo chamber, Basham’s thesis will ring true: Civil war has been upon evangelicals for a long time, whether it was welcomed or not.
To say the book has hit a nerve would be an understatement. Its heated reception was inevitable, given its audaciously wide scope; chapter topics include antiracism, the #ChurchToo movement, Covid, LGBTQ issues, and more. Much of the material was not new to me, because I have been independently logging these rifts in real time, not just among evangelicals but within my own Anglican tradition. (Parts of the LGBTQ chapter follow my First Things article on the many errors of the “Side B” movement.)
Despite the juicy title, not everyone in the book’s large cast of evangelical characters will emerge as a pure heretical sell-out. This has been a common critique, but Basham herself pre-empts it in the introduction, where she acknowledges that people’s motives can be complex, and degrees of compromise can vary. As she’s documented, big leftist money has certainly changed hands, yet not every commentator will follow David French to the point of stumping for Kamala Harris, and not every pastor will follow Andy Stanley to the point of guiding his flock over a cliff into blatant heresy. Even so, there remain many ways for a “shepherd” to be stubbornly blind.
Basham’s highest-profile rebuttal so far has come from megachurch pastor J. D. Greear, who appears in several chapters. The chapter on “critical race prophets” details how he participated in a witch-hunt against members of First Baptist Church Naples who rejected a black pastoral candidate. Their swift and ruthless excommunication as racists, cheered on by multiple high-profile Southern Baptist voices like Greear’s, is the most shocking injustice Basham documents in her book. Greear pleads ignorance in his long complaint, claiming that he accepted the account of church leaders “in good faith.” In a detailed reply, Basham responded, “No. One cannot in good faith publicly label ordinary members of a church racists without clear evidence.” Their exchange vividly demonstrates why the loss of institutional trust among rank-and-file evangelicals is so profound, and most likely irrevocable.
One way to crystallize Basham’s thesis is that for far too long, certain “elite” evangelicals have seen themselves as a kind of Protestant magisterium, delivering wisdom to the rank and file while mutually refraining from in-house criticism. Meanwhile, they themselves have uncritically deferred to people who claim “expert” authority, whether on behalf of an “oppressed” group (immigrants, women, black people, gay people) or on behalf of science (environmental science, epidemiology). Not every member of the new magisterium has been equally vulnerable on every issue, but all have sought approval in the eyes of their preferred experts, and all have bought into some manifestation of the leftist logic that if one doesn’t subscribe to a particular political solution, one must not care about the problem it claims to solve. Whether as dupes or as willing collaborators, they opened all manner of doors that should have been firmly shut, and ordinary churchgoers have reaped the consequences—
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Christians also face intense persecution in African nations like Nigeria, making the witness of athletes like Rasheedat Ajibade especially powerful. In one Instagram post, the young soccer star shows off a T-shirt with the words “Jesus Revealed, Jesus Glorified, Haleluya.” Another shirt reads simply “Thank You Jesus,” with a reference to the prophet Isaiah. She writes, “Beyond my desires, beyond everything in and around my life, I JUST WANT TO SEE JESUS REVEALED AND GLORIFIED” (caps original).

The International Olympic Committee charter bars athletes from displaying religious symbols of any kind, but that didn’t stop Rayssa Leal from coming up with a bold and ingenious workaround. Just before earning a bronze medal, the Brazilian skateboard prodigy smiled at the camera and sent a message in sign language: “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Leal went viral at age 7 when she executed a perfect heelflip in a blue princess dress, catching the attention of legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk. She grew up attending a Baptist church, and at age 16, her faith remains strong. Her Instagram is full of Scripture verses. After her win, she told the media that she signs Scripture at every competition. For this medal, her second at the Paris Games, she says, “Once again, thank God.”
It’s been 100 years since Eric Liddell won Olympic gold without compromising his deep Christian convictions—particularly his Sabbatarian convictions about competing on the Lord’s Day. Today, young Christian Olympians like Leal are willing to be similarly bold in an even more hostile and secularized West. And many, perhaps even most of the open believers competing at the Olympics, are non-Western. Many are African and Asian—the fruit of faithful gospel preaching by missionaries like Liddel.
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People can underestimate the impact that a simple, vulnerable testimony can make in the public square. There is something particularly refreshing about the hopeful joy of a new Christian that simply can’t be captured in the well-worn arguments of a seasoned apologist. A changed life is its own apologetic, its own witness to a watching world. Arguments have their time and place. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in the right place at the right time—and headed in the right direction.

Richard Dawkins had come to New York with a simple plan. He intended to convince his dear old friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali that, despite the title of her Christian conversion essay, she is not really a believing Christian. He was all ready to explain that she might be a political Christian—someone who sees Christianity chiefly as a means to the end of fighting off more insidious cultural forces—but that’s not the same thing as believing. As we’ve covered here at WORLD, Dawkins even thinks of himself as something of a “cultural Christian.” He discusses all these distinctions in a Substack written in March, enthusiastically looking forward to his planned May conversation with Hirsi Ali. This seemed to be his way of processing the initial shock expressed in his open letter when she first shared her testimony last year. “Seriously, Ayaan?” he asked. Seriously?
But when the anticipated day arrived, and the two friends took the stage after sharing a warm embrace, Dawkins was in for another shock. With great affection and winsomeness, teasing her “dear Richard” ever so gently, Hirsi Ali explained that becoming a Christian wasn’t just a political calculation for her. It was very real.
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With the spread of anti-life propaganda, parents may increasingly become scared and confused into thinking that a D&C is the only safe approach, and pro-lifers are taking it away. This debate highlights the need for strong definitional clarity. Pro-choicers like Robinson are obfuscating with intent to smear the pro-life side by insistently using the word “abortion” for the removal of a dead body, foisting bizarre positions onto us that we would never hold. She ominously intones that “literally anything is possible” now when it comes to “women’s rights.” Pro-lifers had ushered in the Dark Ages all over again, apparently.

Texas-based radio host Ryan Hamilton has gone viral with the dramatic story of his wife’s recent miscarriage, igniting fierce debate over the definition of abortion, Texas state law, and pro-life legislation in general. According to Ryan’s account, they rushed to the emergency room as his wife was entering her second trimester, in pain and bleeding heavily. The doctor wrote a prescription to induce labor and sent them home, but they had to return for a second dose. As they waited, Ryan reports that he overheard their second doctor saying something shocking in the hallway: “I’m not giving her a pill so she can go home and have an abortion!” The doctor then came in and told them that given “the current stance,” he wouldn’t be prescribing the pill.
Ryan and his wife were able to obtain the medicine at a different hospital, which eventually did its work, though his wife fell unconscious in the process. He believes she should have immediately received a D&C (dilation and curettage) procedure to remove the child’s body in-hospital, and only Texas abortion law stood in the way. He ends his story with a scathing indictment of “staunch ‘pro-lifers.’”
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When it comes down to it, it’s the “absolutist” position (i.e., the truly pro-life position) that gets Maher’s “respect.” Maher and the absolutist understand each other, he thinks, because both of them understand exactly what abortion is. “They think it’s murder. And … it kind of is.” The difference between them, as he succinctly follows up, is that “I’m just OK with that.” There are 8 billion people in the world, after all. “We won’t miss you.”

Abortion is murder, and Bill Maher is OK with that. The comedian told us in so many words during a recent episode of Real Time. It’s not the first time he’s come out with something in this vein, but it’s becoming the most widely viewed. As he discusses the current debate over Arizona’s abortion law with two British journalists, one of them says she finds it “strange” that abortion has become a major election issue, when there are so many more pressing things for Americans to focus on. “Not if you believe it’s murder,” Maher says.
Maher is unimpressed with Donald Trump’s latest political tap-dance around the controversy, trying to take credit for the reversal of Roe vs. Wade while simultaneously making centrish noises. Trump wants to be seen as pro-life, but not too pro-life. TIME magazine has called the move “as insincere as it is smart.” Granted, there’s room for disagreement even among true pro-lifers around federal bans—Maher goes after a straw man when he jokes that leaving abortion to the states means “saying abortion is okay in some states.” (Murder in general is handled state by state, after all.)
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Dawkins’ conundrum, of course, is that all the nice culturally Christian things he enjoys have been brought to him courtesy of “bad” Christians—those dreaded orthodox types who actually took the Bible seriously when it said, for instance, that man is made in the image of God. Dawkins likes the idea of human rights, but he has also decried “speciesism,” which leads him to conclude some humans (like the unborn or the mentally disabled) have fewer rights than others. But why stop there? Why assume Richard Dawkins has any rights?

Breaking news: Area Englishman announces he enjoys eating but is still glad that all the farms and gardens are dying. Oh wait, actually it’s Richard Dawkins, explaining that he considers himself a “cultural Christian,” even though he’s glad that fewer and fewer Westerners consider themselves “believing Christians.” In the full interview, he expresses shock and dismay at the display of a Ramadan message at the terminus in London’s King’s Cross station. Christianity as a belief system may still be “all nonsense,” but if it’s between a Muslim culture and a Christian culture, Dawkins says he will vote “team Christian” every time.
This isn’t exactly a new sentiment for the former New Atheist rock star. Some of us remember the small tweetstorm he impishly ignited back in 2018, when he said he much preferred the lovely bells of Winchester Cathedral to the “aggressive-sounding” cry of “Allahu Akbar!” His love for the King James Bible is also well known—though he once urged his atheist friends to make sure “religion” isn’t allowed to “hijack” that great “cultural resource.” One wonders exactly what kind of “resource” Dawkins thinks the Bible is. A collection of aphorisms? Ten rules for life? The best fairy tales ever? 
Whatever it is, Dawkins thinks it’s sort of, well, nice, and he thinks Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion” by comparison with Islam.
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The new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood spotlights five young men who have decided to tell their stories. Alex, Brian, Njada, Ritchie, and Torren come from a variety of backgrounds. No two of their stories are exactly the same. Each is like a fingerprint, unique to the storyteller. But all five men have something in common: courage.

I would definitely like to have been a woman, because I feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that then everything would have fallen into place. The way I speak, the way I walk, the way I move, and the thoughts in my head would not any longer have been remarkable. They would have been acceptable. What I’m so bad at is being a man. — Quentin Crisp
When transgenderism was a budding fad, some people looked into their crystal balls and shrewdly predicted that a reckoning was coming. It wouldn’t be immediate, of course. It would take time for young people to realize they’d been screwed over. And it would take courage. Lots and lots of courage.
Over the past few years, a number of women have displayed that courage, coming forward to tell their stories and sue the medical professionals who harmed them. A few men have as well. But many more women than men.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Statistically, men are also more reluctant than women to report sexual assault, which also requires a great deal of courage for both sexes. But for men, it carries an extra weight of shame. The same is true when it comes to identifying as a victim of transgender “medicine.” Like telling one’s rape story, it’s not easy for anyone. But it will always be easier for a woman to stand up and say, “I thought I was a bro” than it is for a man to stand up and say, “I thought I was a sissy.”
The new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood spotlights five young men who have decided to tell their stories. Alex, Brian, Njada, Ritchie, and Torren come from a variety of backgrounds. No two of their stories are exactly the same. Each is like a fingerprint, unique to the storyteller. But all five men have something in common: courage.
Their stories are interwoven with reflections from two therapists, Joe Burgo and Az Hakeem, and Irish writer-activist Graham Linehan (who lost his reputation, family, and career after publicly opposing trans ideology). Linehan doesn’t have very much screentime, but his presence is a sad reminder that we’re dealing with a top-down cultural contagion, enforced by people with enough power to completely demolish someone’s social capital.
There is also a sixth young man whom we never see. Instead, we see his father, Steven. Steven tells us how the boy “came out” transgender in his senior year of high school, walked away, and has never come back. He remains “lost.” “The last thing I think about in a day is my son,” Steven says, “and first when I wake up, before I’m even out of bed.”
Although each story is unique, there are certain recurring patterns. One running theme is that the men in these boys’ lives often seemed to be either absent, predatory, or weak. This is not a grand unifying theory. There’s Steven, after all, apparently a loving and present father who reports that he and his wife were “blindsided.” But it ties several stories together. Ritchie Herron, a young Englishman, only ever talks about his “mum” showing up to appointments with him and being pressured to make decisions. But he found plenty of men willing to enfold him into a “community” online. These men, of course, were predatory.
Meanwhile, Torren grew up in a blue-collar American subculture where the men occupied themselves with a narrow range of “manly” interests (cars, beer, hunting), while the women, in his words, “ran the show.” Similarly, Njada’s father tried to push his son towards “manly” interests and tasks, but when Njada drifted into gender confusion, he ironically failed to “man up” to his own wife. Njada recalls how she instantly took the driver’s seat and began to insist, “You better use the pronouns.” Like the women in Torren’s world, she was definitely running the show. These two stories are particularly interesting, because they complicate simplistic narratives of “toxic masculinity.” If anything, they evoke a world in which men become absorbed in “manly” pursuits while simultaneously failing to embody masculine leadership in the home. Thus lacking immediate models of how to be their own distinct selves while still being healthy men, these boys sought guidance from the broader culture. But as they discovered, that broader culture of teachers, therapists, and influencers was not going to help them become healthy men. Quite the opposite.
In the film, Joe Burgo proposes a nuanced third way for how men can properly lead and nurture misfit boys—neither by questioning their manhood if they diverge from rigid norms of masculinity, nor by “problematizing” all distinctly masculine traits, a trend which he believes has increased male depression. If boys do in fact like distinctly “boyish” things, that should be fine. If they don’t, that should also be fine.
I once discussed this in person with Burgo at a cocktail party in Washington. When I asked him what he thought of Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men, which is generally sympathetic to the plight of boys, he said he still disagreed with Reeves’ idea of nudging boys towards more “feminine” trades—teaching, nursing, etc. As a disclaimer, I still need to read Reeves for myself, but I agree that particular idea isn’t going to solve the masculinity crisis. As I put it to Joe, it’s less urgent to mix up more statistically feminine trades and more urgent to re-dignify masculine trades. Here Joe looked up with a little smile, very taken with this, and said, “One thousand per cent.”
The other featured therapist, Az Hakeem, is also very concerned about the masculinity crisis, and he makes a further connection to the co-factor of autism. He’s consistently observed that young male patients on the spectrum followed a certain rigid chain of logical reasoning, based on their tendency to create rigid categories: “To be male, you have to be like this, this, and this. I’m not like this, therefore I’m non-male. Therefore I must be female.” Burgo adds the observation that autistic young people will struggle more than average with the changes their body undergoes in puberty, more likely to feel disgust or a desire to disassociate from who they’re physically becoming.
Several of the young men in this film are themselves either on the autism spectrum or, relatedly, on the OCD spectrum. Depression and anxiety are also recurring themes, as is p*rnography addiction. Yet the “professionals” who should have cared for them bypassed all these cofactors and glibly promised that everything would be “solved” not by treating their mental health, not by quitting p*rn, but by female hormones. All of them took estrogen, though Brian, Njada, and Torren seem to have reversed their process before pursuing surgery. Njada recalls how the therapist he sought out in college informed him that “transition is the typical treatment that makes people feel satisfied with their life.”
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From Ryan Anderson to Jesse Singal, all were guilty in Chu’s eyes of “compassion-mongering” and “gatekeeping,” disagreeing only on “how the gate is to be kept.” Maybe trans “affirmation” surgery would make some people happy, and maybe it wouldn’t, but for Chu, that wasn’t the point. The point was that “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want,” and “no amount of pain” could justify withholding it. 

First, they said nobody was transing kids. Then, they said it would be no big deal even if people were. You know what comes next, because you’ve seen this movie before: “Now it’s happening, and it’s a good thing.”
“I wrote about what justice looks like for trans kids,” tweets Pulitzer-winning “trans” journalist Andrea Long Chu about his new cover essay for New York magazine, in which he makes “the moral case for letting children change their bodies.” His thesis is shockingly simple: The freedom to change one’s body is a basic human right. Children are humans. Thus, they should have the freedom to change their bodies. (WORLD Opinions editor Albert Mohler covered this story when it broke earlier this week.)
Chu acknowledges that this is different from the common argument that “affirmative” treatments are necessary for “trans” kids’ health. While Chu does in fact believe that puberty blockers will benefit such children, his reasoning is not primarily medical. As his own subtitle states, it is “moral,” according to his twisted definition of “morality.” 
This essay should be read as the logical continuation of Chu’s 2018 essay about his own post-surgical regret, written for The New York Times (which, ironically, he now excoriates as insufficiently pro-trans).
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In an embedded conference lecture, delivered last fall, Vines warns that the goals of queer theorists are at odds with the goals of the Reformation Project. “We don’t need to ‘queer’ the Bible,” he says. “We just need to interpret it more accurately and faithfully. And we don’t need to ‘queer’ the church.” Where the Reformation Project argues for normalizing LGBTQ people in the Church, queer theorists want to do away with sexual norms altogether. 

Twelve years ago, a college student named Matthew Vines exploded onto the faith and culture scene with his hour-long lecture “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality.” The viral speech was delivered to his home church in Wichita, Kan., presenting a revisionist case for affirming the goodness of same-sex romance. Vines had taken two years out of his Harvard studies to research the presentation, which doubled as a personal testimony about growing up same-sex attracted in an evangelical home. This quickly established him as the progressive poster boy in the evangelical “gay wars,” with his work drawing major press coverage in outlets like the New York Times and TIME. He went on to write a book (God and the Gay Christian, in 2014) and found a non-profit (The Reformation Project, established in 2016), which are frequently cited as valuable resources by other progressive voices.
So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that Vines has recently been coming under heavy fire … from the left.
The criticism was sparked by a new statement on the Reformation Project’s website, titled “Reform vs. Revolution.” The statement is crafted to draw a sharp distinction between “affirming theology” and “queer theology.”
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