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A review by cocoonofbooks
God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships by Matthew Vines
3.0
I went into this book already agreeing with Matthew Vines' conclusions, so I was primarily reading this to see whether this was a solid resource I could recommend to others. In some ways, it is. At times he makes very good, coherent arguments, some of which were even new to me after all the reading I've done on this topic. However, because I wanted this to be a well-written, airtight work that I could point others to, I feel a need to offer my critiques of where it fell short.
For one thing, it seemed that Vines couldn't decide who his exact audience was for this book. He says at the beginning that the book is intended for both progressives and conservatives, and I think that's true, but whether it was aimed at refuting Biblical scholars who have written on this topic in detail or at parents and other Christians who are approaching this topic for the first time, he couldn't seem to decide. This meant that the tone vacillated between "Let me introduce you to some new ideas" and "Here's a hundred quotes and footnotes." I found that at times he went very deep into refuting one person's particular idea about something, and then followed that by making a simplistic logical leap to close out the section, leaving him open to easy critiques from those he was trying to refute.
It's clear that Vines has done extensive reading and research on this topic, which is great, but this means that the end result comes off too much like a college term paper at times. Rather than making a straightforward argument from one end to another and drawing on sources for support, he brings in quotation after quotation from various sources to try to showcase how he's covering every possible angle of every Bible passage's interpretation. Even as someone who's fairly familiar with most of the basic arguments for and against Vines' points, I found myself getting lost in the garden path of he said-she said (or most often he said-he said) of the competing references.
As more minor nitpicks, I didn't like that Vines lumped in transgender people with his discussions of same-sex relationships, even though he doesn't actually address gender identity until much later, and then in only a cursory, out-of-place kind of way. Also, one of the reasons I stopped reading most Christian books is that I don't connect with the evangelical tendency to quote snippets of Bible verses here and there out of context to support a point, something that seemed particularly problematic in a book whose entire central portion was dedicated to picking apart the first-glance interpretations of particular passages.
It's possible that for someone from a Christian background similar to Vines' who hasn't spent much time with this topic, this book is exactly the introduction needed. There is certainly a lot of good information here, and he points to a number of other valuable resources. However, unlike I did with Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, I'm not going to rush out to recommend that everyone read this book.
For one thing, it seemed that Vines couldn't decide who his exact audience was for this book. He says at the beginning that the book is intended for both progressives and conservatives, and I think that's true, but whether it was aimed at refuting Biblical scholars who have written on this topic in detail or at parents and other Christians who are approaching this topic for the first time, he couldn't seem to decide. This meant that the tone vacillated between "Let me introduce you to some new ideas" and "Here's a hundred quotes and footnotes." I found that at times he went very deep into refuting one person's particular idea about something, and then followed that by making a simplistic logical leap to close out the section, leaving him open to easy critiques from those he was trying to refute.
It's clear that Vines has done extensive reading and research on this topic, which is great, but this means that the end result comes off too much like a college term paper at times. Rather than making a straightforward argument from one end to another and drawing on sources for support, he brings in quotation after quotation from various sources to try to showcase how he's covering every possible angle of every Bible passage's interpretation. Even as someone who's fairly familiar with most of the basic arguments for and against Vines' points, I found myself getting lost in the garden path of he said-she said (or most often he said-he said) of the competing references.
As more minor nitpicks, I didn't like that Vines lumped in transgender people with his discussions of same-sex relationships, even though he doesn't actually address gender identity until much later, and then in only a cursory, out-of-place kind of way. Also, one of the reasons I stopped reading most Christian books is that I don't connect with the evangelical tendency to quote snippets of Bible verses here and there out of context to support a point, something that seemed particularly problematic in a book whose entire central portion was dedicated to picking apart the first-glance interpretations of particular passages.
It's possible that for someone from a Christian background similar to Vines' who hasn't spent much time with this topic, this book is exactly the introduction needed. There is certainly a lot of good information here, and he points to a number of other valuable resources. However, unlike I did with Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, I'm not going to rush out to recommend that everyone read this book.