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.

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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Written by Samuel D. James |
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
We should contemplate these different fates not as autonomous futures that threaten us, but as different possibilities for how the risen Jesus will empower his church. We can and should pray for a dynamic era of repentance and mission.

The populist movement alluded to in my previous post is closely connected (though not synonymous) with a larger group of evangelicals who stand opposed to what they perceive as liberal progressive sentiment on issues like race, sexuality, and free speech. Most people reading this probably have an idea of who this group is and what they say. For those who don’t, your best bet would probably to read evangelical-themed articles from publications like The American Reformer and First Things. Megan Basham, who I also referred to in the piece about anti-Big Eva sentiment, is also a rising star in this camp.
If this group or their platform mean nothing to you, feel free to skip this post. If you’re tracking, let me share what I think are their three possible fates. I’ve alluded to some of these ideas before, but it might be valuable to make their current and future options more explicit. All three of my points below are my predictions for where the evangelical anti-woke movement will end up in, say, 10 years time, if they follow a particular course.
Fate #1: Success
In this scenario, the anti-woke movement successfully reforms a number of existing institutions and churches, catechizes a generation of faithful churchgoers against secularist ideology, and supplies the American church with a strong crop of pastors and thinkers for the next decade.
While victories in American elections would certainly be an expression of this overall success, a true triumph for the anti-woke would be concentrated in evangelical spaces, particularly touching its seminaries, parachurch organizations, and denominational leadership structures. Changing demographics in American religious life, coupled with the longstanding reality that any meaningful institutional transformation requires cooperation and patience, mean that the anti-wokeness movement achieves this by a careful, mature approach to reformation: building evangelical allies and appealing to a diverse group of Christians, including ethnic minorities. A well-crafted alliance of those concerned with creeping liberalism in evangelicalism push out a number of existing evangelical leaders, but not too many, since the alliance itself depends on leadership and a sense of inside-out reformation.
The end result is that the American evangelical landscape looks quite different in a decade, but also stronger and more able to resist an increasingly intolerant secular progressivism. The gospel is clarified and modeled, and many unbelievers, burned by the sexual revolution and by modern shame culture, find healing in the liberating message of grace and atonement in Jesus.
Fate #2: Failure
In this scenario, the anti-wokeness movement as we know it right now is a colossal failure. A failure to build any meaningful coalition or institutional depth saps the movement of both urgency and vision, and its current spokesmen become little more than online pundits, reigning in insular subcultures that do just enough to get the occasional book deal but are forgotten by the vast majority of American Christians.
The story of failure for anti-wokeness could be a story in one of two directions. First, there would be failure of persuasion. Much like the Emergent Church in the early 2000s, the anti-woke movement fails to deliver that key intellectual contribution. As the cultural mood changes, the things that made anti-wokeness look more interesting and credible begin to disappear, and the movement becomes entirely reactionary. Consequently, it ends up alienating the people it needs to convince, mistaking doubters for enemies, and becomes paranoid and self-referential instead of confident and assertive.
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It was in this moment of intense agony—the worst of her life—that she, being mystified at her husband’s composure, told him to curse God and die.  This was clearly the darkest day of her life.  Therefore, her words came out of intense grief.  Such struggles with God amidst intense grief are natural and to be expected, but becomes sinful when it turns into accusations against God. In exhorting Job to curse God, she was telling him to complain of God not to God, so her expression of grief crossed the line into sin.  

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
-Job 2:9-10, ESV

Why do bad things happen to good people?  That question has been asked since time immemorial and is so central to our understanding of the world that an entire book of the Bible explores it: Job.  In wrestling with this question, Job stands alone as his friends accuse rather than comfort him.  Even his wife turns against him…or does she?  All we see from her is this short statement: “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die” (Job 2:9), which has caused many Christians to view her in a negative light.  This post will examine what that statement, Job’s response, and the context really say about her, which will give us all great reason to hope.
Satan’s 4D Chess?
Why did Job’s wife tell him to curse God?  Some claim it was because she was crucial to Satan’s strategy against Job: “Previously he had pursued his aim by battering Job, but now he insinuates a question into his mind and follows it up by a proposed action—all put into the mouth of Job’s wife!”.[1]  While it is quite possible that Satan tempted her to make this statement, some have taken this to mean that Satan had kept her alive for the purpose of tormenting Job—as if she was a wicked nag who would cause Job more pain alive than dead.  In this view, she is nothing more than a pawn in Satan’s game of 4D chess, but from context it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth.  The first two chapters of Job do not depict Satan as a master strategist playing 4D chess.  Instead, he is revealed to be short-sighted, arrogant, and self-centered.  Since we have previously seen that arrogant self-centeredness is the enemy of God’s people, it should not surprise us to find these traits exemplified by the Enemy himself—and that is exactly what we see in Job.  The only one in Job with a grand strategy is God.  It was God who drew Satan’s attention to Job and then by praising him essentially used Satan’s arrogance to goad him into making a bold claim that Job would curse God if he saw calamity.  When God gave Satan permission to take away all Job had, He was essentially saying “I’ll take that bet”.  At this point, a wise person would see this as a trap—or at the very least a foolish bet—and backtrack.  But since the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), it should be unsurprising that Satan who does not fear God in a way that would lead to wisdom would arrogantly and foolishly stick to a plan doomed to failure.  When that inevitable failure came, Satan repeated the error by again making another bold statement against Job that elicited the same response from God—and the same failure when Job was afflicted with sores.  God proved Himself true and omnipotent while Satan only proved to be a fool blinded by arrogance who had no choice but to fulfill God’s Will.  His game could barely qualify as checkers, much less 4D chess.  Satan may be incredibly intelligent and cunning, but he had no grand strategy for Job.  Therefore it is preposterous to think that Satan had the wherewithal to keep Job’s wife alive for the purpose of tormenting him.  The most we can say is that in his shortsightedness, Satan tempted Job’s wife as a target of opportunity, but that is a far cry from her being part of some grand plan of his.  We can therefore rule out any thought that Job’s wife remained alive to add to his suffering, as that would be unsupported by the text.
Describing Job’s Wife Biblically
What then can we say about Job’s wife?  All we have is that single statement from her, but there is much we can deduce from the rest of the text.  First, Job is described as blameless, upright, and having an appropriate fear of God (Job 1:1).  He also had seven righteous sons who were old enough to live on their own and three daughters who were mature enough to feast with them (Job 1:2,4-5).  It is illogical to think that those ten righteous children were not born and raised by a righteous mother—and equally illogical to think that righteous Job would have married an unrighteous woman.  Furthermore, at the end of the book we see Job blessed with seven more sons and three more daughters (Job 42:13).  There is no indication that his wife died or left him, so we must assume that she bore and raised them as well.  Therefore, from the text we can easily deduce that Job’s wife was righteous just as he was.
What then do we make of her comment?  How could a righteous woman exhort her husband to curse God and die?  The answer is that we are seeing a righteous woman in her darkest moment.  Everything that was Job’s was also hers, so she had just become destitute as he had.  More importantly, she had lost all ten of her children just as he had.  The pain of losing even one child is unparalleled, so the pain of losing ten at once would be unimaginable.  Additionally, we have previously seen that a godly wife’s primary focus is on the home and that the greatest impact most people will have on the Kingdom is their children.  This means that her life’s work for at least two decades was all gone in an instant.  Additionally, she had to watch the man she loved, whom she had been with through thick and thin, suffering while she was powerless to intervene.  Therefore, it is no stretch of the imagination to say that Job’s wife was suffering just as much as he was.
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