From Neighbors to Outcasts: Evangelical Gay Activism in the Late 1970s

When accounting for the rise of antigay fervor among evangelicals in the late twentieth-century United States, historians have overwhelmingly focused on the influence of the Christian Right, with its framing of homosexuality as a radical threat to American families and a secular attack on the nation’s Christian foundations. In addition, historians have almost unanimously associated Christian movements for gay rights in the late twentieth century with “liberal churches” and “liberal Christianity,” variously defined. Notwithstanding these historiographical trends, a small but influential group of evangelical gay activists emerged in the 1970s, and this group’s work became one of the catalysts for the rise of antigay fervor among evangelicals toward the end of the decade. I make this argument through an analysis of evangelical authors Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Mollenkott’s 1978 book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? and its reception among evangelicals. Although the book initially elicited many positive responses, powerful evangelical figures and institutions not only labored to counteract that success, but ultimately helped to engender the conditions under which future historians would fail to notice the evangelical gay activism in which the book partook