What we can learn from Richard Hays, the antigay theologian who learned to love queer people
https://t.co/cZfEYWNOUaLast week we covered the death of Anita Bryant, the anti-gay crusader who never disavowed her homophobic views… even as her granddaughter came out and married a woman. “I’ve never regretted what I did,” she avowed in a 2011 interview.Well today, we’re going to cover the anti-Anita Bryant.
Richard Hays, the long-time former dean of Duke Divinity School, was a prominent theologian whose arguments against same-sex relationships served as a touchstone for a generation of homophobic Christians.
Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.“Homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose,” he famously argued in his renowned 1996 book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament.But on the eve of his recent passing, he renounced his past words.
In his final book, which he wrote as he knew he was dying, Hays contends a deeper reading of the New Testament reveals that God accepts gay people as they are. “The biblical narratives throughout the Old Testament and the New trace a trajectory of mercy that leads us to welcome sexual minorities no longer as ‘strangers and aliens’ but as ‘fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” he wrote with his son, Christopher B.
