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

Nearly fifty years ago, in February 1976, the National Association of Evangelicals gathered for its annual convention at the Shoreham Americana Hotel in Washington, D.C. A 40-year-old white man named Dr. Ralph Blair was roaming the halls. He wore a three-piece suit, and his light brown hair was neatly parted. As he struck up conversations with strangers at the convention, Blair handed out copies of a booklet that he had recently written: An Evangelical Look at Homosexuality. 

Blair was a therapist in New York City, a former staff member for the evangelical college ministry InterVarsity, and a former student at three Fundamentalist schools (Bob Jones University, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary). At the NAE meeting in Washington, D.C., he launched an organization called Evangelicals Concerned, whose mission was to persuade evangelicals that homosexuality was morally neutral and that churches should affirm same-sex partnerships, so long as those partnerships were monogamous. Through EC, Blair distributed two quarterly newsletters and a host of booklets, organized regional conferences, and oversaw local chapters across the nation (12 in 1976, 20 by the late 1980s), which hosted their own study groups and social gatherings. While EC’s conferences and other events were primarily intended for gay evangelicals themselves, Blair’s publications sought a wider audience and advanced broader aims: to equip straight evangelicals who were supportive, to persuade those who were uncertain, and to counter antigay opponents.

Although EC’s membership never numbered more than several hundred, Blair quietly built connections with quite a few influential evangelicals: Philip Yancey, Ravi Zacharias, Eugenia Price, Rosalind Rinker, Marten Woudstra, Clark Pinnock, Lew Smedes, many others. Perhaps an awareness of these behind-the-scenes connections was part of what motivated Kenneth Gangel, the president of Miami Christian College, to describe Blair and other “so-called ‘gay evangelicals’” in his 1977 book The Gospel and the Gay as “more dangerous to the whole matter of the gay problem in Western culture today than the drag queens who march through the streets of San Francisco.”

More so than anyone else in the 1970s or 1980s, Blair crafted and honed an evangelical gay discourse. With a fluency that few people, whatever their sexuality, could equal, Blair spoke evangelicals’ own languages. He knew which banners to wave, which bogeymen to condemn, which unofficial saints to venerate, which societal trends to deplore. He mastered the performance of evangelical erudition (though occasionally slipping into bombast) and matched the commanding, self-righteous tones of evangelicalism’s most powerful white men. And yet, like those men, Blair’s tone belied tensions in his discourse. If you listen closely, you can hear those tensions quivering, hear his voice crack. Those cracks, I argue, have much to teach us not only about gay evangelicals but about evangelicalism at large. This presentation will analyze EC’s evangelical gay discourse and, in the process, offer several insights about how scholars and others 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—can illuminate alternatives to problematic belief-based models for studying evangelicalism. These models, often borrowing or building on David Bebbington’s fourfold definition of evangelicalism, cannot convincingly explain why most evangelicals who encountered Blair’s work refused to regard him as a fellow evangelical. Like them, he preached the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross, pledged his allegiance to the authority of an inerrant Bible, emphasized the importance of evangelism and conversion. Moreover, Blair deftly framed these purportedly defining features of evangelicalism in favor of his gay-affirming position, and he defended his theological arguments with copious citations of evangelical scholars whose right to the label went unquestioned. Why then did so many evangelicals, in Blair’s words, “fail to recognize us as the evangelicals we are”? There are good answers to be found. Just not in “the Bebbington Quadrilateral.” 

When we center the discursive efforts of evangelicals like Blair, we begin to conceive of “evangelical” not as a stable, uniform theological construction, but as a dynamic, perennially contested discursive construction. We begin to question the assumptions now baked into discussion of evangelical identity and to think more about the rhetorical processes of evangelical identification. In other words, we begin to ask not what evangelicals believe, but how evangelicals have talked, which evangelicals have succeeded in talking over others, what their discourses have done, and what purposes laying claim to the term “evangelical” have served. Lastly, when we center the discursive efforts of evangelicals like Blair, we confront deep-seated tensions in evangelical rhetoric—for example, simultaneously investing in and divesting from the notion that the Bible is a perspicuous text or simultaneously berating and borrowing from those deemed “liberals”—that all but ensure the endurance of contestation over what “evangelical” means and does.