Gay Marriage, Evangelicals, and Justice

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:02]This past week, fundamentalist apologist Alysa Childers featured an interview with a conservative Christian named Katie Foust. And in part of promoting that interview, she posted to social media a 30- secondond exchange with FA in which Faust explains why she believes that evangelicals lost the debate over defining civil marriage to the gay community. So, we're going to play that clip and then I'll offer some comments on the other side.

[00:00:32]>> The victim determines the policy. Okay?

[00:00:34]And this is something that we say at them before us all the time is whoever you determine to be the victim, the policy is going to wrap around them. So, for a long time, we have said adults who do not get what they want are victims.

[00:00:44]And that was the main way that they drove forth not just legal change but social change in relation to the definition of marriage and parenthood.

[00:00:52]adults who identified as gay, if they could not have their uh relationship legally validated by the law, they were victims. And so the whole game is victim identification and defense.

[00:01:04]>> Okay. So it's very interesting the way that FA frames the issue. She frames it as first of all being rooted in people, adults, not getting what they want. So right there that makes it a sort of subjective desire issue and then she says so it becomes an issue of victimhood that if a person is viewed as a victim for not getting what they want then they've won the debate and the policy will ultimately be formed around them. That is a way of subjectifying the issue to a mere matter of preferring gay people and viewing them as victims. What's interesting about this framing is Fust completely avoids addressing the key issue which is why did a particular group of people come to be viewed as victims because in fact that is the salient point here for example why did women get the vote why did the suffrage movement win a century ago well according to FA's analysis it's simply because women wanted the vote and other people came to view them as victim victims for not having the vote. But of course that completely misses the main issue. Why did people why did women come to be viewed as victims? Because ultimately it was concluded that there were not good arguments to deprive them of the right to vote which means it becomes a matter of justice and that is the salient issue. When it becomes a matter of justice and there are not good reasons to deprive a group of a particular right that becomes a matter of injustice that is where the victimhood flows from. It flows from being deprived of a right because that is unjust and that is where everything starts. not some subjective conception of victimhood, but the objective deprivation of a right and a lack of good arguments to warrant depriving that group of that right. Fast forward to 1967 when the Supreme Court in in the United States determined that interracial couples have a right to marry. At that point, most evangelicals in the United States were strongly opposed to interracial marriage. Uh, and according to FA's analysis, I guess she would think that interracial couples won the right to marry because they were viewed as victims for not having what they wanted. But in fact, once again, the core issue is they were deprived of a right and there were no good reasons to deprive them of that right. And so that's why they won the right, you could say, through the Supreme Court decision of the loving decision to have the right to marry. He was a matter of justice.

[00:04:01]Fast forward to 2015 and to all the social changes around marriage in terms of same-sex marriage, and the exact same issues are at play. It wasn't simply that some group or some individuals that are part of an identifiable group had some desires. they wanted something uh and then people just for no reason came to view them as victims. Rather it was that people who wanted to deprive them of vict of of a right did not have good arguments to deprive them of that right.

[00:04:32]Evangelicals tried for a long time and I talk about this in my book the wideness of the sea. Some of the arguments that evangelicals tried of course were natural law arguments to argue for example well people should have uh should not have the right to gay marriage because those relationships are not naturally fund they cannot produce children or because they somehow violate the natural ends of human beings persons and relationships etc. Um, another area where they argued from slippery slope that if if we allowed gay marriage, it would be a slippery slope to marital chaos and everybody would marry whoever they thought was right in their own eyes. And you'd have fathers marrying daughters and you'd have mothers marrying sons and you'd have nine people deciding that they wanted to have the right to marry. Those arguments also weren't considered to be good. Those slippery slope arguments, they also failed. Um ultimately all that you had left were the Bible tells me so. And it's very difficult just as you can't persuade people in um pluralist society that the Quran or the Book of Mormon should govern particular policies and restrict and limit rights. So you can't appeal to the Bible to restrict and limit rights. That is why evangelicals lost the gay marriage debate.

[00:05:55]Not because of some subjective conception of victimhood and some selfish self argrandisement that I want something and I don't want you to deprive me of that rather because it was a matter of justice and rights. And I'll just conclude with this. We are now in an age of resurgent Christian nationalism among MAGA conservative evangelicals and Catholics in the United States. And what is disturbing to see there is with the failure of public arguments against restricting civil marriage to uh opposite sex couples. The now shift is back to essentially the for the Bible tells me so arguments and to say well this is a Christian nation and that is why you should restrict the rights of people to limit marriage to opposite sex couples. Of course, this is not going to be persuasive in terms of democratic persuasion. Again, just as you're not going to persuade people to see to the Book of Mormon's authority or to the Quran's authority when they are not part of those religious communities.

[00:07:02]So, you're not going to persuade people to ascent to the Bible. So, the only way that they can now assert their authority and power in that manner is uh by a top- down Christian nationalism. And that's the dream of frankly many conservative evangelicals and Catholics. And it's a very disturbing time to hear that rhetoric becoming more and more commonplace and mainstream within American society. So to conclude, I think Katie Fast's analysis here is uh it's an attempt to subjectify the analysis and think it's just about some subjective conception of victimhood when in fact the real issue is an objective issue of public rights.