When Romans 1 is your answer to every challenge

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on May 7, 2025.

Almost every political conversation with white evangelicals today eventually comes down to their fear of saying anything positive about LGBTQ people.

If you have empathy, they’ll warn it’s a slippery slope toward affirming LGBTQ people.

If you suggest women can preach, they’ll accuse you of flirting with affirming LGBTQ people.

If a public school teacher mentions something vague about everyone belonging, they’ll claim Christians are being persecuted over their beliefs about LGBTQ people.

If you attempt to have a conversation about same-sex relationships in light of Scripture, they always ask, “But what about Romans 1?”

“God gave them over to an unfit mind to do things that should not be done,” the author of Romans says. “They not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.”

This single passage is always wielded as a conversation stopper to condemn LGBTQ people and anyone who affirms them.

John MacArthur preaches at Grace Community Church on Sunday, Aug. 16, in defiance of a court order on public health.

“Homosexuals are experiencing the judgment of God, and thus they are very, very sad,” John MacArthur claims. “‘Gay’ is a preposterous term for describing those who have given themselves over to homosexual sin. They’re anything but gay. It’s a lifestyle of hopelessness and loneliness, expended in a perpetual, fruitless effort to bury their massive guilt under a campaign of self-justification. It’s one endless attempt to silence the cries of conscience in pursuit of evil pleasures that cannot satisfy.”

Thus, MacArthur concludes, “When people reject God and suppress the truth of his existence, he gives them up to homosexuality, then he gives them up to a reprobate mind. A reprobate mind means you don’t even function. People go from a sexual revolution to homosexuality and finally to insanity.”

This used to be the theology I espoused. But through the 20 years I spent in the cleaning industry, the LGBTQ people I met in retail stores I cleaned demonstrated through their loving concern for me that these white evangelical scripts about them are complete nonsense.

To the contrary, I began to realize as a white evangelical how my theology was leaving me hopeless and lonely and was burying my guilt in self-justification and silencing the cries of my inner humanity. My characterization of the LGBTQ community was all projection.

So what if we considered Romans 1 not as a critique of LGBTQ people, but of white evangelicals, who applaud the foolishness, heartlessness and ruthlessness of the Trump administration? What if white evangelicals are the ones God has given over to an unfit mind to do things that shouldn’t be done?

White evangelical cruelty revealed in polling data

“The white evangelicals, right?” historian Kristin Du Mez asked on the latest episode of “The Convocation Unscripted” podcast. “Without fail, topping the charts on all … the worst things that this administration is doing. White evangelicals are not just tolerating this, they are not holding their noses here for the umpteenth time … . They are enthusiastically supporting all of these measures, and this is exactly what they voted for. … Seeing those numbers in this survey, it was devastating. It was sickening to see that, just in black and white there.”

Du Mez was referring to the latest findings from Public Religion Research Institute on how Americans feel about Trump’s first 100 days in office. According to the PRRI, 76% of white evangelical Protestants approve of Trump’s job performance in comparison to “one-third or fewer of other religious Americans.”

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