“We’re People of the Good News”: The Queer Case of Ralph Blair

At the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1976, Dr. Ralph Blair launched an organization called Evangelicals Concerned. The mission of this organization was to persuade evangelicals that homosexuality was morally neutral and that churches should affirm (monogamous) same-sex partnerships. Through EC, Blair distributed two quarterly newsletters and a host of booklets, organized regional conferences, and oversaw local chapters across the nation. In the late 1970s especially, Blair was one of several evangelical gay activists who unnerved leaders of evangelicalism. This presentation will analyze EC’s evangelical gay discourse and, in the process, offer several insights about how scholars use the term “evangelical.” Centering historical subjects like Blair—that is, those who have been ostracized by evangelical institutions even as they earnestly identified as evangelical—invites us to conceive of “evangelical” not as a stable, uniform theological construction, but as a dynamic, perennially contested discursive construction.