Until the latter half of the twentieth century, the American churches gave little public attention to the phenomenon of sexual attraction and sexual behavior between members of the same sex. The traditional view of most ecclesiastical bodies condemned homosexuality, finding justification for the condemnation in natural law and in such biblical texts as Genesis 19:4–11; Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10; and Romans 1:27.
The first sign of a re-evaluation of the issue appeared in 1955 with the publication in England of Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition by Rev. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, an Anglican priest. Bailey challenged the Church’s traditional view with current findings from the behavioral sciences and a reinterpretation of relevant biblical passages. His work broke ground for a number of studies published in the U.S. which were sympathetic to gay and lesbian concerns from a religious point of view, beginning with H. Kimball Jones’s Toward a Christian Understanding of the Homosexual (1966).
In 1964 four homophile organizations and two Methodist agencies came together in San Francisco to hold a Consultation on the Church and the Homosexual. These meetings resulted in the creation of the pioneering Council on Religion and the Homosexual, whose primary objective was “to promote continuing dialogue between the religious community and homosexuals.” Such dialog soon became increasingly heated throughout the nation: Five years later the “Stonewall Riots” in Greenwich Village launched the gay/lesbian liberation movement, which during the seventies confronted the churches openly with demands for full acceptance of homosexual orientation and practice.
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In 1969 the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) was founded by the Rev. Troy D. Perry, a former minister of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) who had been asked to leave the denomination because of his homosexual orientation. The UFMCC, affirming homosexuality as a gift of God and welcoming both homosexual and heterosexual Christians into its fellowship, grew quickly in the following two decades to include over 100,000 members in more than 150 congregations throughout the world. Nevertheless, in 1983 the new denomination was denied membership in the National Council of Churches.
Perry’s views, published in the book The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay (1972), were soon echoed in similar statements by professional therapist Ralph Blair (An Evangelical Looks at Homosexuality, 1977), psychotherapist and former Jesuit John J. McNeill (The Church and the Homosexual, 1978) and others. Blair also organized a parachurch group in 1976, called Evangelicals Concerned, to help evangelical Christians integrate their faith with their homosexuality.
