Jen Hatmaker’s Millstone: Evangelical Reality Star Favors Gay ‘Marriage,’ But Former Lesbian Objects
By The Stream Published on October 31, 2016
https://stream.org/jen-hatmakers-millstone/
“If I were still in the thick of the battle over the indwelling sin of lesbian desire, Jen’s words would have put a millstone around my neck.” So says Rosaria Butterfield, speaking about evangelical reality TV star Jen Hatmaker. Hatmaker recently told Religion News Service that she supported same-sex marriage because “any two adults have the right to choose who they want to love.”
This was true, she said, “from a civil rights and civil liberties side and from just a human being side.” She added that such couples “should be afforded the same legal protections as any of us. I would never wish anything less for my gay friends.”
Hatmaker, author of a Christian bestseller titled For the Love, starred with her husband in an HGTV reality show called My Big Family Renovation. She is currently on a “Belong” tour and writes a blog that her Amazon author profile describes as “a tightly knit online community where she reaches millions of people each week.” ...
...Rosaria Butterfield’s Response: Love Your Neighbor Enough to Seek the Truth
She would
once have felt Hatmaker’s words were “a balm of Gilead,” writes Butterfield, a one-time lesbian and leftwing professor. Writing on The Gospel Coalition website, the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert explains that she would have
loved to have someone like Hatmaker make her
think, “Yes, I can have Jesus and my girlfriend.”
But the Gospel says something very different. When she met Christ, she says,
“I didn’t swap out a lifestyle. I died to a life I loved.” She found that even though her lesbian life felt “right and good and real and necessary,” that only revealed how “our sin natures deceive us.”
How I feel does not tell me who I am. Only God can tell me who I am, because he made me and takes care of me. He tells me that we are all born as male and female image bearers with souls that will last forever and gendered bodies that will either suffer eternally in hell or be glorified in the New Jerusalem. Genesis 1:27 tells me that there are ethical consequences and boundaries to being born male and female.
...