Jackie Hill Perry: Stop Telling Gay People They'll Become Straight If They Become Christian
Rapper, writer, preacher and poet Jackie Hill Perry, who once identified as a lesbian, says churches should stop telling gays that they will become heterosexual if they become Christian.
In her newly released book, Gay Girl, Good God, a part of which was published on DesiringGod.org, Perry speaks about what she described as "the heterosexual gospel."
"The heterosexual gospel is one that encourages SSA men and women to come to Jesus so that they can be straight, or it says that coming to Jesus ensures that they will be sexually attracted to the opposite sex," explains Perry.
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"It usually sounds like, 'I know you're struggling with being gay. I can promise you, if you give your life to Jesus, he will completely deliver you from those desires because he loves you.' Or, 'I know a guy that used to be gay and now he's married. Jesus will do the same for you if you trust him.'"
Perry, who used to be a lesbian but is now married to a man and has two daughters, warns that the "heterosexual gospel" is problematic because it "tends to put more emphasis on marriage as the goal of the Christian life than on knowing Jesus."
"What the gay community needs to hear is not that God will make them straight, but that Christ can make them his," she continues.
"Someone trying to pursue heterosexuality and not Christ is just as far from a right standing with God as someone actively pursuing homosexuality. They have put their faith in a new 'orientation' rather than in knowing the living God."
Gay Girl, Good God focuses on the now 29-year-old's personal spiritual journey.
At one point in the book, Perry talks about how she once believed that if she "could just be straight" that "God would accept me and call me His own."
Referring to it as a "delusion," she speculated that such thinking explained why "salvation has eluded many same-sex attracted men and women."
"You will hear them say how they've sought God's help in this manner. They have asked Him to make them straight and He has, according to them, denied them access to the miraculous," she wrote in her book.
"The error is this: they have come to God believing that only a fraction of themselves need saving. They have therefore neglected to acknowledge the rest of them also needs to be made right."
Perry says she was attracted to women "before I knew how to spell my name." She grew up in a fatherless household and was molested by a male teenage relative as a child.
To her, men were "incapable of loving" and "unsafe."
After years of living a promiscuous lifestyle as a lesbian, she was led by the Holy Spirit to repentance and gave her life to Christ at age 19.
Though she ended up marrying a man, she makes it clear in her book that marriage didn't "prove" that she changed. Rather, "the fruit of the Spirit did."
"Presont and I were brought together not so that we could become the standard of what is to become of all gay girls and boys turned believers," she wrote. "We were brought together for the primary reason of pointing to the mystery of God's gospel."
The pinnacle of the Christian faith is not marriage, she stresses. The aim is to know Christ and honor Him.
