How My Dad Reconciled His God and His Gay Son
April 17, 2025 at 06:19PM“Changing your mind in private is one thing,” Timothy White writes for the New York Times, in this fascinating, heartening inversion of a coming-out story. “Changing your mind publicly is very different.” As a teenager, White told his parents he was gay; the revelation shook his father Bill, an Evangelical pastor, and divided his congregation. Rather than forsake his child, Bill spends years reexamining his beliefs—a process he details with exceptional precision in his journals, excerpts from which grant White’s essay a powerful intimacy.
To feel the bedrock of your theology shifting might sound abstract, but it’s almost impossible to underestimate the terror it brings for someone who has made this their whole life. It would be much easier to turn away from the types of questions my dad found himself asking. Instead, he faced that terror and confronted his grief that the world didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, the way he was told it would, the way he had pictured. He took stock of what really mattered to him at his core. And then he reshaped his beliefs, practices and work around that — including recently starting a nonprofit dedicated to helping other pastors and churches think through their own questions around gay and trans inclusion.
My dad recently described going through all this as “being born again, again.” His is unequivocally a religious journey. But I don’t think the qualities that allowed for this renewal are exclusive to faith. We live in dogmatic times; every one of us can learn from what it looks like to go through the process of re-evaluating your entire moral foundation — to do so, with the type of radical honesty my dad did, is to emerge on the other side with a stronger sense of who you are and what you truly value.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/17/how-my-dad-reconciled-his-god-and-his-gay-son/
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