Andy Wells joins Jeromy to share the cost of trying to be straight, the harm of conversion therapy, and the long road toward self-acceptance as a gay Christian. Together, they explore LGBTQ faith, queer theology, and what happens when Scripture is read through the eyes of those the church has often pushed aside.
What if the part of you the church told you to fight was never the enemy?
In this episode of Untamed Grace, Jeromy sits down with Andy Wells, author of Tried to Be Straight, for a deeply honest conversation about conversion therapy, LGBTQ faith, queer theology, and learning to stop asking for permission to exist.
Andy spent years as a devoted Christian while privately wrestling with being gay. He pursued conversion therapy, lived with the pressure of trying to become straight, and carried the weight of self-rejection, addiction, and spiritual fear. But his story did not end there.
Together, Jeromy and Andy explore what it means to read Scripture through a queer lens, including the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, the blind man in John 9, Psalm 139, and the possibility that the Bible may have been speaking belonging over queer people all along.
This conversation moves beyond simple “affirming” language and asks something deeper:
What if LGBTQ Christians are not just accepted by God, but gifted, needed, and called?
For anyone navigating Christian deconstruction, LGBTQ inclusion, religious trauma, conversion therapy, queer theology, faith reconstruction, or the long road toward self-acceptance, this episode offers a vision of faith beyond fear—and a God much bigger than the one many of us inherited.
Andy's Website: AndyWells.gay
00:00:00 Andy Wells: Trying not to be gay. Trying to be straight was leading me towards death. It almost got me. I can't go back to that. For fifty years we've been trying, from a Christian standpoint, to use the power of Jesus to make people not gay anymore, and it has just been an abysmal failure to the point that the people that founded those movements all walked away saying, this isn't working for anybody.
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00:01:03 Jeromy Johnson: How much of your life can you lose trying to become acceptable for Andy Wells? Trying to be straight nearly cost him everything. His faith, his mental health, his sense of self, and almost his future. Today, Andy joins me to talk about conversion therapy, LGBTQ faith, queer theology, and the moment he stopped asking, am I allowed to exist? And started asking, what has God called me to bring into the world? I'm your host, Jeremy Johnson, and you're listening to untamed Grace. Hey, everyone. Welcome. I am excited. I have Andy Wells on today, and Andy Wells spent years as a publicly devoted Christian all the while privately wrestling with being gay. He is also the author of a book, Tried to Be Straight, and he has another book that's in the works and that's soon to be released. Once he finishes writing some of those chapters. Andy, welcome.
00:02:02 Andy Wells: Great to be here.
00:02:03 Jeromy Johnson: Your book tried to be straight a. I love that title because I feel like almost every gay Christian can resonate with that. And for those who who aren't gay and might be Christians, this is a great opportunity for you to listen, to hear what that struggle looks like. So Andy, what did it. Let me phrase it this way. What did trying to be straight cost you?
00:02:28 Andy Wells: Without being melodramatic. It it it almost cost me my career. I don't think it almost cost my life because I didn't really get that far down my addiction, but it really, uh, it really destroyed me. Let's say it's destroyed my soul. Mhm. The process of of trying to be something other than this gay guy who I was terrified of admitting I was.
00:02:55 Jeromy Johnson: You mentioned addiction, and maybe we can get into that later. Throughout the story, but it sounds like you were relying on other substances to just help you with that disconnect and the, the pain and everything else. I guess you were struggling with.
00:03:08 Andy Wells: When you hate yourself at the beginning. Alcohol can do wonders.
00:03:15 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah, I can imagine.
00:03:17 Andy Wells: Like later on a couple years in not so much, but but in the beginning, it really lets you get a vacation. So for everyone who's considering alcohol as the tool to solve their problem, I would say within a couple of months it was pretty miserable. But when you think about how miserable, when I think about how miserable I was waking up every morning, yet it was still worth checking out every night That might put into perspective the kind of pain that I was going through, trying to be something that I couldn't be.
00:03:50 Jeromy Johnson: And were you feeling that need to be something you couldn't be from the inside of yourself, or was it more external pressure?
00:04:01 Andy Wells: I think it was the inside of myself. I remember looking at pictures of myself as a kid and despising the person that I saw in the picture. When I started out as a kid, I didn't want to be me. Later on, needing to be the person I was supposed to be so that everybody wouldn't feel the way that I felt about myself, about me. I realized that normal guys like girls. I was reflecting on this the other day when I was in high school. The way I chose the girls I wanted to date was finding the girls who everybody thought was were attractive because they weren't attractive to me.
00:04:42 Jeromy Johnson: But they were supposed to be right.
00:04:43 Andy Wells: They were supposed to be. So I never entertained the idea that maybe the fact that I'm not attracted to girls, but I have a crush on the guy sitting next to me. Maybe that means something. I never thought that way. I never connected the two. MM. As soon as a girl who had not been particularly attractive to me was being dated by somebody who I thought was popular and somebody who I wanted to be more like, all of a sudden, that girl became very attractive to me. And that lasted, I think, into my twenties and very short lived relationships, because I was miserable when I was in the relationships, but still needed to be in the relationships. And I remember this thought crossing my mind that, you know, for a straight guy, you sure sleep with a lot of men.
00:05:31 Jeromy Johnson: Well, good. Looks like you gave it a valiant effort. Uh, so take us back, then, a little bit. Uh, when When did you first realize maybe in your in your gut, in your heart that you were queer? And then also, when did you first realize that there was a disconnect between your faith and your sexuality? Those are kind of two different questions, but I don't know. Tell the story.
00:05:52 Andy Wells: Yeah. Realizing in my gut was a process accepting I maybe realizing is different from accepting. Okay. Realizing.
00:06:01 Jeromy Johnson: Let's do two of those different questions. So the first time you realize like, maybe you got a hunch that, yeah, um, I'm gay. And then yeah, when you accepted it because you're right. Those are two different, um, entry points, I imagine.
00:06:15 Andy Wells: There were, there were two moments. One was as a child, I was probably eight years old. We were at, uh, at the church that I grew up in. And I remember seeing one boy in the, in the choir and I remember being really taken by him. Um, this, this feeling of kind of a pitter patter, you know, when people describe butterflies and they they describe the person that they're about to fall in love with. The moment they saw them, they felt butterflies. They felt warm. They felt tingly. They felt. Because at eight I had zero sexual feelings. The next time I felt that was, I think I was eleven. I was at scout camp. The, uh, the senior patrol leader was was teaching me something about first aid. And I remember he, he touched me. I think he touched my my sternum. We were talking about CPR. And I remember feeling this the same kind of butterflies and rush and, and warm, wonderful feeling. And not only did I not know what to do with those feelings, I didn't know that I should do something with those feelings. So it just was kind of a non-issue for me. Later on when things did become sexual because I hit puberty and most people, when they hit puberty, things turn sexual and I was I was attracted to anything that moved. I think a lot of guys were. There were girls and women who I was attracted to. There were boys and men who I was attracted to as a. As a fourteen to sixteen year old boy. I didn't do anything until I was eighteen, had a checkbook, had a car, access to a car, and that way I could get around and to explore my sexuality a little bit. There was a point in my life that I would have been envious of anybody that could just accept themselves and enjoy that part of themselves from the beginning. I was not, I felt like I was doing something I needed to hide, and this is before I became an evangelical. The church I grew up in was performing same sex wedding ceremonies in the nineteen seventies.
00:08:29 Jeromy Johnson: Wow.
00:08:30 Andy Wells: We had queer gay, lesbian priests. It was a landmark, uh, Episcopal Church. And yet I could not accept myself. MM. And so then in my mid twenties, I've been experimenting with, uh, um, some prostitutes. And that came to a head when I went to join the sheriff's department reserves. And they gave me a form to fill out that said, how many drugs have you done? None. How many times have you done this or that? None. How many times have you paid for for sex? Uh. Oh, wow. When was the last time? So so so that was my first major crisis of of life. I was hugely in love with being a, uh, reserve sheriff's deputy because I was on the mountain rescue team, and it was just something that floated my boat in a way that nothing else could. And I mean, my, my pager would go off and within an hour I'm climbing up a trail in the mountains to rescue somebody off a cliff. That's pretty amazing. And the sheriff's department was telling me that because of your of your sexual activity, you can't do that anymore. MM.
00:09:47 Jeromy Johnson: And then when did you first accept that you were queer? And then you said you you later became an evangelical. Yeah. And so I imagine that played into your identity and sexuality as well.
00:10:01 Andy Wells: It did. Right. When the sheriff's department told me no, which most people wouldn't be that upset about a volunteer position that they oh, I can't work for free. Okay, I'll go somewhere else. Uh oh, I'm not accepted for the things I do. Okay. I'll go somewhere where I am accepted for the things I do. But I couldn't do that because I couldn't accept myself as myself. Mhm. I needed other people. I desperately needed other people to accept me. And so as a result of that, I became an evangelical born again Christian because one of my friends, who had been very vocal about his faith with me was a police detective, and I called him up and we sat down at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on the the road that goes around the Rose Bowl. And he shared with me what life was like depending on Jesus for everything. And I thought to myself, I want that. MM. So at that point, I became an evangelical. I stopped going to the to the Episcopal Church and started going to an evangelical church.
00:11:01 Jeromy Johnson: What age was this?
00:11:02 Andy Wells: That was, uh, about twenty six, twenty five, twenty six years old. And then what happened was, well, my next crisis was coming off an all night tryst with a person. And then the next day, going on a date with somebody from my church group at the evangelical church. I had had no sleep. And I was like, what am I going to do? I mean, I've, I've, I've got these two competing beliefs. I was in, I believe at the time I was in seminary, I called a friend of mine who worked for insight for living, which was Chuck Swindells.
00:11:40 Jeromy Johnson: Mhm.
00:11:40 Andy Wells: Radio, radio ministry, book ministry. And they had a list of conversion therapists. And I started going to conversion therapy.
00:11:47 Jeromy Johnson: Because you were feeling this kind of double life, this double disconnect, double.
00:11:51 Andy Wells: Life. Yep. And that lasted about three years. Oh, wow. Conversion therapy. The, uh.
00:11:57 Jeromy Johnson: And so for those who don't know what, what conversion therapy is.
00:12:01 Andy Wells: The biggest term for conversion therapy is sexual orientation change efforts. It has gone through a lot of different techniques and history. The, uh, the techniques stay relatively the same. The names change when they get unpopular. So they went into reparative therapy, conversion therapy, sexual orientation change efforts. Right now, there's a group that's saying that we found that sexual desires can be fluid. So we we can explore those in therapy and try not to make any promises, because we know that nobody can be successful. That's kind of the part that they leave off, incidentally, that there are still organizations that try to say, and there's one or two examples of, of people that are running around saying, oh yeah, it worked, it worked. And then when you ask them, so are you still attracted to guys? They don't give any. They won't answer that question. They'll dance around the question. And then what will happen is we know people that are celibate, right? We know people that are straight, that don't get married. We know people that are perfectly happy not being in a relationship with somebody. So the fact that some of those started out gay went to this program and were perfectly happy not being with somebody that doesn't tell us anything. Yeah, there are almost a million people that have in the United States who have been through conversion therapy in one form or another, whether it's talk therapy, aversion therapy where they. They shock you with an electric shock every time you see a picture of the gender that you're not supposed to like, you know, various things that it the state that I live in now, which is California, was lobotomizing gay men in the seventies against their will.
00:13:38 Jeromy Johnson: Like, gosh.
00:13:39 Andy Wells: So all these different stories about things that just didn't work. They don't work to get somebody to not be gay anymore. So, you know, ten years from now, when somebody, if somebody listens to this podcast, there will probably be a different name for changing your sexuality from one to another. It's kind of like when people who believe that being gay is a decision. This plays right into that belief. You know, it's a failed effort. I'm friends with several of the people that started that movement. The current movement started in in the mid nineteen seventies, and it is nothing but failures and fraud. That's all it is.
00:14:16 Jeromy Johnson: And it's usually Christian organizations. And the underlying belief is your sexual orientation, your sexual draw towards the same sex is a choice. It is something that you can change. And they would probably go on to say like, it is a sin, it's an abomination. And so then therefore, you're not living the life that God wants you to live. You are choosing to live in sin. So we're going to help you with that. Does that sum it up fairly accurately.
00:14:44 Andy Wells: For the fans of systematic theology? The system starts with God hates sin. God will empower us to overcome our sin. Identifying as LGBTQ is a sin. Supporting people who identify as LGBTQ as a sin. But because we know the first couple facts that we've got in our system, God will help us conquer the sin. Overcome the sin. So we're going to rely on that system to say to our queer friends, God will help you overcome this. Just have faith in God, and the Holy Spirit will come in, just like the Holy Spirit has done with how many reformed. Fill in the blanks. Do you know how many reformed thieves, people that come out of prison with this relationship with Jesus that empowers them to not be that way anymore, and they're successful? Yeah, it's statistically proven. It's statistically supportable that people with faith live better lives. Just if you look at the at the mental health statistics, the more they're active in their faith, the more their mental health statistics improve. That's a demonstrable fact. Another demonstrable fact is there's one group of people that that's not true for. And the one group of people that that's not true for are LGBTQ folks. The more an LGBTQ person engages their faith, statistically, the more likely they are to suffer in the in the mental health department all the way up to and including self-harm all the way up to and including the permanent self harm. That's what that's how conversion therapy and faith and all of this fits in. And that's how the system of theology breaks down. Because when the the next thing that I would encourage Christians to do is ask that question, how's that working for you?
00:16:33 Jeromy Johnson: And part of your work is to help the queer community to rediscover that they are needed in faith and that their faith can be flourishing and that their life can be flourishing. Say faith, and maybe we can get get back into that. Yeah. Because you were you mentioned earlier that you had an addiction to alcohol, and then you were also queer. And people would liken those things to be the same. You're choosing alcohol. You're choosing men like they're the same thing. So we're, we're gonna fix your alcohol. You go to twelve step program, right? You go through therapy and it really oftentimes works, right? And so then they try to apply that same thing to your sexual orientation. So you've experienced both of those things. Contrast those.
00:17:18 Andy Wells: It's a good place to go. Um, I think twelve step programs have a very low success rate. If you're thinking of how many people would stay sober five years. They have a five percent success rate at that the last time I checked. And yet that five percent is good enough for people to hang their hat on the twelve step program. The success rate in conversion therapy is unmeasurable. It's never been demonstrated. It's still this idea that it might be possible. There's only been one study that hinted that it might be possible, and the person that wrote that study withdrew it. It's been published or whatever you do with studies that are taken away because they just don't meet the scholarly rigor. Um, there is one other study that says that it might work. And that was done by Joseph Nicolosi, who was kind of the, the secular leader of conversion therapy. So it's kind of like the guy who makes his living on conversion therapy says conversion therapy works for sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
00:18:21 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. There's no conflict of interest there.
00:18:24 Andy Wells: Oh, no. Yeah. You know, so it doesn't work. Um, the people.
00:18:28 Jeromy Johnson: That requires those who. And it requires those who've gone through it to be brutally honest. Right. And like you were saying to like, well, are you still attracted to guys? And they, they just him and ha, they can't answer that question and stuff. So there's.
00:18:40 Andy Wells: It's a shell game.
00:18:41 Jeromy Johnson: And if they're told like, hey, you're gonna basically go to hell unless you change this about yourself.
00:18:46 Andy Wells: What you were hinting at earlier was there's a bridge we cross from. Is it okay to be gay? And I say gay. I mean, everybody queer, LGBTQ plus. Is it okay to be queer? And many of us spend a lot of time trying to answer that question. I stopped trying to answer that question because if the answer's no, I'm screwed. Because trying not to be gay, Trying to be straight was leading me towards death. It almost got me. I can't go back to that. So if you tell me it's not okay to be gay, I can't listen to the next thing you tell me because you have nothing for me. For fifty years, we've been trying, from a Christian standpoint, to use the power of Jesus to make people not gay anymore. And it has just been an abysmal failure to the point that the people that founded those movements all walked away saying, this isn't working for anybody. The most notable, I think, was in twenty, I want to say twenty fourteen or twenty twelve. Alan Chambers was the president of Exodus International, which was the largest, longest running ex-gay organization in the world. And he said, nobody changes. And he apologized, and then he shut their doors and closed down. And a few people were really upset with that. So they kept going with their, their little tiny splinter organizations. But basically the, the, the president of the biggest organization that's supposed to do this says it doesn't work. So now what if you're going to tell me that I can't be gay or I shouldn't be gay? Or some people believe being gay is doesn't exist. Like gay people don't exist. It's just a, you're a straight person with a few flaws. You know, you're it's a result of the fall. It's the fall of Adam. It's so.
00:20:34 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.
00:20:34 Andy Wells: So all of that. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It condemns me to a life of misery and then death, and it cannot work for me. So I'm left with the option of how do I live out my life as a gay man? And the next thing is, am I going to spend the rest of my time trying to look for permission to be the person that I know I can't be anything other than. Or is there a place in God's plan that I have a unique and special role in? And that's what I've discovered over the last few months, is this real Imperative that LGBTQ Christians have in God's plan and in God's work in the world. And that's what I'm writing my next book about, which I'm which. And that's why I'm so excited about it, because I'm not looking for permission anymore. I'm looking for my calling. I'm looking for my impact. When you start discovering that stuff, that's where the good stuff is.
00:21:33 Jeromy Johnson: You mentioned something just a few minutes ago about when you tried to be straight, uh, the impact on your life. I forget exactly how you phrased it, but it was incredibly negative. Can you take us back there? Can you maybe get a little bit, uh, if you can personal with like, what did your actual life look like? Um, as you were trying to be straight?
00:21:56 Andy Wells: I was a, uh, I was working for a fire department. I was a, uh.
00:22:02 Jeromy Johnson: Oh, well, there you go. Well.
00:22:05 Andy Wells: You know, I think I was.
00:22:07 Jeromy Johnson: Those calendars they get you every time.
00:22:09 Andy Wells: I, I, I was, I was thinking about, uh, um, what one of my cop friends, uh, at one point, you know, cops and firefighters, they exchange jokes about each other. And one of his jokes was, why would you want to be a firefighter? They all sleep together. Uh.
00:22:27 Jeromy Johnson: Uh.
00:22:27 Andy Wells: But, uh, I was a fire inspector for this large fire department. During that time. I was also I was, I became a pilot, I was a windsurfer. I competed, competed internationally in windsurfing. I was a scuba diver. I was doing every macho thing I could do. Yeah.
00:22:42 Jeromy Johnson: Sounds like it.
00:22:43 Andy Wells: Kind of hold up this straight persona. I was a leader, not just a member of. I was a leader at an evangelical and giant evangelical church back in the nineteen nineties. Four thousand members was a big church. I was going to seminary at one of the most conservative schools in in California. I had a bunch of ministries going, I was busy. I was really, really busy. One day I left my house and my roommate, who would use my computer to look for work because he was in between jobs and he was a member of my church and he was on the worship team. I also played trumpet in my worship team. So here, this roommate of mine, a good friend, and I realized I hadn't clicked on clear my browser history before I left, and I realized that he probably saw all the things that I was doing the night before, all the websites I was going to, and it scared the heck out of me. And that was, uh, that was when I decided to quit church.
00:23:41 Jeromy Johnson: Did he ever confront you with that or you just assumed he just. He just saw everything.
00:23:45 Andy Wells: One of my favorite stories is this guy. He circled back with me a couple decades later. And, um, we talked about that and he said, yeah, I did. I saw all the stuff you were looking at that day. And he said, you know, I, I felt it was your story to tell. That's cool. And so I wasn't going to bring it up with you, he says. Andy, I love you. I always have loved you. And this didn't change that.
00:24:11 Jeromy Johnson: Sounds like he held your dignity in that moment.
00:24:14 Andy Wells: He really did. And I remembered back to how petty I was with all of the little things that would irritate me about him as a roommate. I was ashamed of myself for.
00:24:23 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.
00:24:24 Andy Wells: Uh, you know.
00:24:25 Jeromy Johnson: But because of that, you stop. You're saying you stopped going to church?
00:24:28 Andy Wells: Yeah. Stopped church. I moved to Long Beach, where there was lots of gay people. Uh, I worked about an hour and a half drive away, so the people at work would not see or care or understand what it was that I was doing when I was off. And I lived two lives.
00:24:45 Jeromy Johnson: Mhm.
00:24:46 Andy Wells: And the, uh, the next time that I had to confront who I was living two lives was when I got sober, my sponsor said, you're not straight. And it took me a couple of months to even to come out to him. And I said, no kidding. And he said, well, but I gotta hand it to you, man. You tried really hard. You tried harder than anyone I know to be straight and you're not straight. And you got to figure this out because if you don't, you're going to be out there again and it's going to kill you.
00:25:14 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. It was never about the alcohol. No. Like your alcohol addiction was not about the alcohol. And rarely is it.
00:25:20 Andy Wells: Rarely is if, if ever the person that's addicted to alcohol because of alcohol, we would call it a problem drinker. The person who is addicted, who has issues and uses alcohol as a symptom of those issues. That's the people in my in my club. So what? So what happened was, um, he said, you gotta figure out how to accept yourself. And that started about a ten year journey. Was it ten years?
00:25:45 Jeromy Johnson: And what age was this about?
00:25:46 Andy Wells: I was about thirty six years old.
00:25:48 Jeromy Johnson: So ten years later.
00:25:49 Andy Wells: Yeah.
00:25:50 Jeromy Johnson: Okay.
00:25:50 Andy Wells: Yeah, about five to ten years of slowly coming out. At some point I came out to my family. At some point I came out to more friends. I then one night I met this woman who had this son who was in his twenties at the time. But when he was twelve, he came out. They were at a non-affirming church, and she was trying to figure out. They had always been trying to figure out what to do with Jesus and this, this son's sexuality. And through that conversation, I realized that I'm very passionate about this topic, which was surprising to me. I didn't realize that until then. And also that I have a lot to bring to the table because of my conservative training. And that's what really drove my next move, which was to write this book about what to do when you're you believe the Bible and you like your church, and you love Jesus, and you love God and you're not straight.
00:26:41 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.
00:26:42 Andy Wells: Written from a conservative perspective, so that when I quote people, I'm not quoting the liberal as much as possible. I wasn't quoting liberal sources. I was quoting the conservative scholarly sources as much as possible. And, and really, I told people in the book, you don't have to believe that being gay is not a sin to be to get something out of this book. But you still have a big problem if that's the case. And what do we do about that? Do you live a life of celibacy? Do you do conversion therapy? What do you do and what should you do about your church? Should you go to a non-affirming church and just sit in the back row and be allowed to be a member of that church? Through that book, I've learned that if I go to a place where I'm allowed to be, I am robbing God's people of God's gifts because I believe in spiritual gifts. I believe that God has given the church and the world, for that matter, gifts that are in people. And unless I'm able to exercise those gifts, God's gift is not getting to the world and not getting to the church. And I'm not getting the good stuff. The good stuff in my faith comes through acts of love and service. It doesn't come through going to church and hearing good music. It doesn't come through. A lot of the things that we've come to understand our faith to, to mean, if I can't do those acts of love and service in the unique way that God has set out for me, I don't get to live as good a life.
00:28:10 Jeromy Johnson: And people miss out on what you have to bring. I mean, the Bible says the word became flesh. And really until our heart, what we believe, what we stand for, who we are, the gifts that we have become flesh, which means they, they leave our interior self and they go out physically into the world. Whether that's a book, whether that's a podcast, it could be something really small. We, we moved into a house and when we moved in, we had two flag holders on the outside of the house. And I was like, oh, I love that. And so we got two flags and we have a neighborhood, right? And people walk by all the time, and we put one flag with an American flag, and one flag was a LGBTQ plus flag that said, everyone is welcome here on that flag. And I wanted both of those flags because I feel like a. The American flag belongs to all of us, whether you're right, left, queer, straight, it doesn't matter. It belongs to all of us. So I want to fly this one. And then I also want to fly the LGBTQ plus flag next to it. I feel like that sends a very important message. So in a small way, this was us having our word become flesh. Andy. We've had multiple people knock on our door and say, thank you for flying that flag. There's a gentleman who's in his twenties and he's bi. And he came up the other day, rang the doorbell, and we were talking about it. He ended up crying. Wow. And then we just hugged each other and it was like, like a legitimate hug simply because a flag was hung. And so that's just a small expression, I think, of what you're saying is you have a gift. You have something to give out to the world, make that become flesh, make that become real. I want to ask, how much of your struggle, though, was was about sexuality and how much of it was actually about belonging?
00:30:04 Andy Wells: I think it was a struggle of self-acceptance. And that's neither belonging nor nor sexuality. I will say that one of my favorite people in this movement, that we have, this gay, queer Christian movement, is a guy named Justin Lee. He wrote a book called torn. Justin said, imagine if your wife and your kids one day were taken away from you, and every picture of them was taken away. Every evidence that they had been in your life was taken away, and they were moved somewhere else, and you were never allowed to talk to them or hear about them, or see them, or see evidence of them ever again. Now just imagine that. And now I want you to think about the things you would miss about not having them in your life. And now I would like you to think about how far down that list would sex be for some people? Because we're all different. For some people, sex would be at the top of that list. I don't think it's a lot of people, though. It's not mine. Yeah. The idea that that this is a sex thing is one of the big lies that I think gets told, because the people telling the lie haven't bothered and really just don't care to understand the people they're talking about, all they see is sex. The interesting thing is when you think about sexual obsession, those are the folks in my mind who are obsessed with sex because all they worry about is this, you know, insert thing A into receptacle B, and that becomes the big important thing. Whereas for people in my camp, it's no, I'm physically attracted. romantically attracted. I'm life attracted to a person who's a man, and I want to share my life with this person, not just my body parts, because I'm not sex obsessed. That's what I can say. But the other people are saying, no, no, no, it's all about sex. Well, there the sex obsessed ones. And by the way, they're the fundamentalist Christians. Sorry.
00:32:11 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. Or they're like, uh, what? Thomas J. Ord and, uh, you guys can listen to the another episode with him where he talks about the impact on his life of coming out to support the queer community was pretty detrimental. But he said, it's the theology of yuck.
00:32:27 Andy Wells: Yeah, the the word.
00:32:29 Jeromy Johnson: So they may not be even sexually obsessed, but they're just grossed out at the thought, right, of a penis going into a butt.
00:32:36 Andy Wells: And two guys.
00:32:37 Jeromy Johnson: Kissing. Yeah, not even that. Just two guys kissing. I know. I, I had, I had an image of two guys kissing and it wasn't even like open mouth kissing. It was just just a beautiful kiss. And people were like, oh my God. It was like, But most of those people have a problem with two women kissing just.
00:32:51 Andy Wells: There's there's a word in in the Old Testament used and it's translated abomination in Leviticus eighteen and Leviticus twenty. And those are two of the three places in the Old Testament that people will point to, to say, oh, the Old Testament says that it's a sin. When you look at the word to Eva in the Hebrew, as it would have been understood at the time, it really meant yuck. It didn't. It didn't mean this abomination. Like we in English, we hear abomination in our twenty first century English, we think it's an abomination. And it's like, yeah, it's an abomination. What did it mean at the time? And it was that thing you just don't do. It's kind of like showing up to someone's house without a little gift for them. We just don't do that. I mean, most a lot of people don't do that. Well, it's, it's a yuck. It's a, it's an expectation that we have these norms. And if you don't show your host a little appreciation, it's really a yuck. That's the kind that's when you look at that word that's used over one hundred times in the Old Testament. That's what it really means. So when you hit that word, yuck, you're absolutely right. For a lot of people, it's yuck. And I'm not going to try to fix that.
00:34:06 Jeromy Johnson: No. And that's okay. Like, yeah, it can gross you out, right? Just like there's other things that gross you out. Um, bananas gross me out. But I'm not going to tell people like, don't eat a banana.
00:34:15 Andy Wells: Just get out of my living room.
00:34:17 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. Just don't eat it in my car where I can't breathe anything else. Well, and it's funny, we think of abomination, and what we read into that is the thing that sends you to hell. Like, that's how strong of a meaning we put into the word abomination. Like, this is the unforgivable thing. You're going to hell because of an abomination.
00:34:40 Andy Wells: The key to understanding a different way is to understand that many of us grew up in theological systems that use the Bible and believe the purpose of all sixty six books of the Bible was to give us a roadmap of how not to go to hell. Yeah, it's either sin and or not sin. And so what we're looking through there is to parse, this is sin. This is not sin. This is what you do when you sin. This is what you do when someone else sins. This is how you. This is how you not sin. This is what's important. Why it's important not to sin. Every sentence in the Bible has to do with sin. Now, the sentences that deal with Jesus, of course, are more about Jesus in relationship to what Jesus did for sin. So if we can identify that if we if, if the people listening are fans of the Bible still, and you can take that idea that has been programmed into many of us and programmed so well that we don't realize it's there, and say, maybe the person writing the psalm wasn't giving me a roadmap of how to get to heaven. Now I have a chance to to actually understand what God actually meant when. If you believe that God helped write the Bible, what the writer of the of the Scripture actually meant when they were writing it.
00:36:00 Jeromy Johnson: And that's a big part of, I guess. Retranslating your faith is putting on a different, well, a giving yourself permission to put on a different lens that you can read Scripture through. And you've done that. And part of it is you've, you came across that story of the eunuch, but you have a different understanding of that story. Can you walk us through that?
00:36:21 Andy Wells: Yeah. You know, when I when we say a different story of the eunuch, I think my problem with the eunuch was I thought about a person who. And I'm going to use body part language just for those of you who are concerned about that sort of thing. Yeah, we're adults, but the definition, the definition of a eunuch is, is a person who was born with a penis and testicles, and the testicles were removed in using first century medical technology, which wasn't very good. So here's a person that has been mutilated. They are typically mutilated because they are slaves. But that was about as far as I got with the eunuch. Oh look, a eunuch. So depending on my perspective, and this is where I like your idea of this lens, depending on your perspective, you're going to look at the story in acts about the eunuch, and you're going to focus on various parts. People who like baptisms are going to focus on the fact that the eunuch was baptized in a puddle on the side of the road. Uh, the eunuchs, the eunuch came to faith. And so here's the story for those who aren't that familiar. Philip, who was later called Philip the Evangelist, Philip is hanging out and is visited by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit says, go and go down this road, and the road is about sixty miles long. Philip is a Christian believer, and he's he's going down this road. He comes across this eunuch where the Holy Spirit says, go talk to that person. So he.
00:37:47 Jeromy Johnson: Does. He's being led. He's being led in his spirit. Go talk to this person.
00:37:51 Andy Wells: Go talk to this person. So then he goes to talk to this Ethiopian eunuch who was a servant of the Candace. The Candace was basically the queen of Ethiopia. And so here we have the Ethiopian eunuch in a chariot, and they're reading Scripture and Old Testament.
00:38:06 Jeromy Johnson: And we're not in Ethiopia. We're not a foreigner. They're a yes. They're someone who doesn't belong in this land. Right? Yep.
00:38:13 Andy Wells: So Phillip shares the gospel with the Ethiopian eunuch. And then they go off together, talking, and the Ethiopian eunuch looks down and sees this body of water and says, what keeps me from being baptized right here? And Phillip says nothing. And so he he goes and baptizes the eunuch. And then Philip is whisked away to a different place, and the Ethiopian eunuch goes away rejoicing. And that is the end of the story. Depending on your background, you're going to focus on potentially if you're an evangelical Philip the Evangelist, look at him being available for the Holy Spirit to use and sharing the gospel and being prepared with the gospel and, and all of this. And then if you are a, uh, a person that likes baptisms, you'll say, hey, there's a, there's a person that got baptized on the side of the road. So baptisms are important. It's something that should be done immediately. It's believer's baptism versus infant baptism, all these baptism ideas. So the baptism people, no matter what your position on baptism is, they're going to focus on that baptism. I had never answered the question, what's so special about the Ethiopian eunuch? The idea that here is a person who the reason they were entrusted with wealth was they were so low on society's ladder that even if they stole it, they weren't going to do anything with it like they were below. The lowest of the low maleness in that culture was so revered. Maleness was the gold standard of the first century. Mediterranean culture, and maleness came with certain ideas. The things that characterized maleness were things like being hard, inviolable, the inserting partner in a in a sexual relationship, uh, which is, incidentally, why it was so bad to not be the inserting partner in that, in that relationship. So many of the stereotypes that we see today and sometimes today, we'll call that toxic masculinity. All of the ideas that, incidentally, the religious right are pushing down our throats about not only what does masculinity mean, but why is it important? It's that second part that makes it toxic. Masculinity does mean being hard. It's hard and not soft. That's a masculine trait. Why people will pull away from that comment is that today there's an assumed value given to masculinity. And so people who are not hard versus being soft, people who are not predators, people who are who are not inviolable, those are not masculine traits. And it's not okay to not be masculine.
00:40:55 Jeromy Johnson: And so in that culture, if you if you have your testicles removed, it's like the ultimate violation of your masculinity. So he's exactly the lowest of low in this culture and the lowest.
00:41:05 Andy Wells: Of the low. Now here's a couple other facts about eunuchs. They were sexual objects. They were used. Number one, they were gender non-binary. It was gender blurry. We'll say they were used as the insertive partner in taking care of harems because they couldn't get them pregnant and pregnancies and, you know, lines of people and all that. They were important. If they got that procedure prior to puberty, they were used as the receptive vessel for men.
00:41:35 Jeromy Johnson: For these.
00:41:36 Andy Wells: For men?
00:41:37 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. Jeez.
00:41:38 Andy Wells: So here they are. They're sexual beings. They have a very clear gender ambiguity to them. They are at the lowest of the low in society and in act eight. This is the first recorded conversion story in the New Testament. But there were others that are recorded later in acts that happened prior to this story. So think about.
00:41:59 Jeromy Johnson: Its placement is important. It's saying this is the first one. The power there is that Philip accepted and reached out. I mean, what's the what's the moment of how we understand God inclusion and queer theology with this?
00:42:12 Andy Wells: There were times that Jesus would walk through the square and somebody grabbed his robe, and he'd feel the power go out and they would get healed. This was not one of those times. This was one of those times where God said, Philip, take a sixty mile road, go out of your way. Go to this very specific person. By the way, this specific person is gender non-binary. They are in the most oppressed group of people we have, and they are sexually all over the place and share the gospel with them specifically. And then at the end of that conversation, the eunuch did not repent of any of the above. The eunuch rejoiced, did not repent. In a lot of people's systems of theology. The next step in faith is to repent of all of those horrible sins. But the eunuch did not repent of any of those. It's not recorded in the Bible. If that happened, it wasn't important enough to get on the page. What was on the page was the eunuch went away rejoicing. So all I can say is, if you don't believe that there's an affirmation in the New Testament of queer people, if there ever was one, this is it. The very first conversion story was purposeful. It wasn't just, oh, Philip happened upon a eunuch? Nope. This was purposeful. This was meant to send a message to us today that says queer people have a place in the gospel, and it's not an insignificant one. It's the first recorded conversion in acts. That's, to me, something that we've missed, because we've been looking at Philip and we've been looking at baptisms and none of my none of my.
00:43:50 Jeromy Johnson: Or he was a Gentile, right? Like we look at, he was a Gentile.
00:43:54 Andy Wells: A dark skinned from a different country. I mean, all those things wrapped up into one package, which is where God is now saying to us as believers, if you believe that acts is part of God's story and all of this, which I do, part of this story is none of that matters anymore. In fact, all of those people that are other, they now come first.
00:44:17 Jeromy Johnson: Mhm. That's cool.
00:44:18 Andy Wells: They now come first. Sorry, white evangelical Christians, your last live with it.
00:44:24 Jeromy Johnson: Then they would just say, well, the first become last and the last. Absolutely. There we go.
00:44:28 Andy Wells: That's the.
00:44:28 Jeromy Johnson: Point. And that's the point. That's the point. That's the exact point.
00:44:32 Andy Wells: There's and I don't remember where this author, who the author was or where they wrote this, but there was an image in a book I read of all of the outcasts walking into heaven in this triumphal parade with all of the quote unquote good Christians that have been in those comfortable church pews, and there's comfortable cities that have been developed and maintained for their comfort. They will be standing on the sidelines applauding as the first that march into heaven are the people that were outcast. And over and over and over again, Jesus focuses on the outcast.
00:45:09 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.
00:45:10 Andy Wells: The next question becomes, what do we do with this status that God has clearly given us as queer Christians?
00:45:18 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah, I was going to lean into that because a part of your pushback is you push back on this idea that LGBTQ plus people are broken and you claim that they actually reveal something more about God. What do you mean by that?
00:45:33 Andy Wells: It's back to that image that we talked about earlier, that I go to a church because I'm allowed to be there, not because I'm I have a specific role there in that church. I just kind of get by in a church that says you have unique gifts and abilities. We want God's purpose for you to become clear. So I'm thinking about John chapter nine. Jesus heals a blind man and it creates all sorts of controversy, and we don't understand it today. When you say looking at Scripture through a queer lens. Yes, there are certain parts of that lens that bring me more in alignment with the people that would have been hearing that message in the first century. Then people in America, or most of the Western world today who live in the most technologically advanced, militarily powerful, wealthy, comfortable society in the history of the planet. And the Bible was, by and large not written to the groups that are in that demographic. A lot of the New Testament was written to people that were struggling just to get by. And yeah, I gotta tell you, I'm not struggling just to get by right now. I struggle, but it's a different kind of struggle than if I miss a day of work my family doesn't eat. And that was a lot of the first century church.
00:46:52 Jeromy Johnson: But in, in general, the the struggle that the queer community has is more in alignment is what you're saying with.
00:46:58 Andy Wells: Absolutely.
00:46:59 Jeromy Johnson: With, with the intent. And so I love Andy. I love that you're, you're sharing more of a queer lens looking at scripture.
00:47:07 Andy Wells: So here's where it happens. In John chapter nine, there's this blind guy and that has a meaning in the first century that we don't understand today. In the first century, they believed that light came from our eyes, and that's how we were able to see the light was generated in our heart, which was the center of our conscience. So if we couldn't see, it was because something was wrong with our heart.
00:47:29 Jeromy Johnson: Mhm. That's fascinating.
00:47:31 Andy Wells: Yeah. This is why Jesus followers said or asked, who sinned? This man or his parents?
00:47:37 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. Because his heart is dark. Absolutely. That's why he can't see. Right.
00:47:40 Andy Wells: The same question we ask in conversion therapy. Who send me or my parents. And in conversion therapy focuses a lot of guilt on the parents raising us wrong. Yeah.
00:47:50 Jeromy Johnson: You have daddy issues?
00:47:51 Andy Wells: Absolutely. So. So who sinned? This man or his parents? And it's the same question. And Jesus had the answer, and the answer was neither. This man is blind, so that the works of God might be known through him. And the healing of that man, that God could be shown through somebody that all society despised. Jesus couldn't do that that day. It had to be this person that God despised. It couldn't be Jesus. And that's where I see at the end of Romans one. You know, Romans one is just this diatribe of horrible, horrible names that they throw at us, including they're worthy of death, including they're so bad, they do all the bad stuff, and then they make up new bad stuff to do. That's how bad the end of Romans one talks about. And the the conservatives like to say, yes, that's talking about gay people. And God takes those people and does something wonderful through them. We minister, we help, we feed the hungry. We clothe the the the poor.
00:48:51 Jeromy Johnson: Amen.
00:48:51 Andy Wells: We do things. And when we do those as queer people, it has a much different message to the world. And it's a message that's unique that only we can deliver. And it's a message that God has specifically said needs to be told. And that John chapter nine story is the example of how that works. And what happened was the religious leaders went nuts. They were not happy with that. And guess what's happening right now when queer people do good things in Jesus name. The religious leaders go nuts.
00:49:23 Jeromy Johnson: You mentioned we were on a phone earlier that the Queer As Church has like the biggest budget or does the most. Tell us a little bit about that. And then and then I want to go into another question.
00:49:35 Andy Wells: So there's this church in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, which is like the rough spot in San Francisco. This church is for everyone. It was the place where the prostitutes went, the drug addicts went, the queers went, the trans people went, everybody went. And that church is now, when people talk about the city of San Francisco as. They'll joke that it's the People's Republic of San Francisco because of the social services that are available in San Francisco. But the largest provider of social services in San Francisco is not the city or the county of San Francisco. It's Glide Memorial Church. They fed almost seven hundred thousand meals last year. They have over seventy different social programs that they operate out of their church.
00:50:20 Jeromy Johnson: Oh my gosh.
00:50:21 Andy Wells: So here's a queer church that is saying, when you do the good that God has for you and you're one of these other people, these outcasts, these Ethiopian eunuch types, you are sending a message to the world that God needs you, specifically you. And that's why I believe it's so imperative that queer people experience their faith and get the good stuff out of it, as they are delivering their God's gifts to the world that can only be delivered through them specifically.
00:50:54 Jeromy Johnson: Can you imagine if every church was like that? I can, or even half the churches I can? That would just be absolutely incredible. Where in every city there's at least one church who does more for the poor and the out trodden and the needy than the government.
00:51:12 Andy Wells: Yeah. Well, that's very possible.
00:51:14 Jeromy Johnson: That's amazing.
00:51:15 Andy Wells: I think our job is to find the church. That's our job as Christians is to find the church that is that is wanting to be part of that story and join that church. Because when you give a dollar to that church, it's going to go to that place that God needs it, rather than bringing in, uh, flying angels on, uh, on Christmas Eve, on the Christmas Eve service, like that one church in Texas. Did you want to spend thousands of dollars on flying angels for your Christmas service while there's homeless people three blocks away? So yeah, find the church that represents this kind of Christianity. And if you're a queer person, find the church that will allow you to grow into who God has called you to be. It is the coolest journey there is.
00:52:00 Jeromy Johnson: If Jesus were to sit down with a queer person who feels rejected, what do you think he would actually say to that person?
00:52:10 Andy Wells: What would he say to that person? Well. I think from reading the Gospels. I would imagine Jesus would say something like, don't you know how important you are to this world? And don't you know that the people who are telling you that you're not important are actually the ones who are sinning? And why are you wasting your time worrying about them when there's so much that you have to do, which is a much different story than you are loved. Passive voice. You are accepted. Passive voice. HMM.
00:53:00 Jeromy Johnson: I wonder too, if it would sound different if he said, I love you, I accept you. And he just embraced them.
00:53:11 Andy Wells: Yeah. something along those lines like, don't you realize how much I love you? Yeah. Don't you realize how much I embrace? You know, it's.
00:53:18 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.
00:53:19 Andy Wells: Jesus was never very easy on his followers. That's why that's why I, that's why I, I go there because it's like the nicest thing to say to that person would be, I love you and I accept you and I want to give you a big hug, which a good friend of mine founded an organization called Free Mom Hugs. That's what they're all about. That's what they're all about. I love you, I accept you, you're important to me. Here's a hug. But I don't see Jesus. I don't see Jesus saying that. I say Jesus saying you're, you're, you're wasting your emotions on people who hate you.
00:53:55 Jeromy Johnson: And like you discovered in like the scripture says, love one another as you love yourself. And a lot of your journey was learning you learning how to love yourself. Yes, you learning how much God loves you and therefore you now have that space inside of you to turn around and love others. If there are those that are out there that are really struggling to love themselves right now, because you don't accept yourself because you don't feel like you're worthy. It starts there.
00:54:27 Andy Wells: You're searching for something that you're looking out from. So you're trying to figure out what it is about yourself that God appreciates. And yet you're looking out from that self. And so it's hard to, to get that's, that's a challenge. I think our quest is being able to answer the question, what is it specifically that God values in me? And I can give that list about myself today. And I couldn't fifteen years ago. Yeah, twenty years ago, I could tell you all the things God didn't like about me. I could tell you all the things that God wishes were different about me, but I couldn't tell you why. Specifically, God really appreciates having me on this planet. And I think that's our challenge in my new book, which is going to be called The Bible clearly says there's a Bible clearly says yes, and it's going to have three sections, the sections of Scripture that were written very specifically to LGBTQ people. As an example, the two, two examples I've given already the blind man, the the Ethiopian eunuch. Psalm one thirty nine is going to go in there, which is where I'm headed with this answer. So Psalm one thirty nine says, you knew me before I was knit together in my mother's womb, which means that there's a non-physical me that's not tied to my body parts. David wasn't praising God for creating good biceps as, as the person I quote in an interview that that was a trans woman who came out, who was a former Assemblies of God pastor and came out trans at the age of sixty one. And she talked about how that charm is what gives her the idea that she's valuable as she is as a woman today to God. And I think Psalm one thirty nine, if we really read it carefully, we get around this idea that you were fearfully and wonderfully made. That means you're a male. That means you have to like women. That means that you have to do these things because of the body parts you have. But that's not what Psalm one thirty nine says. Psalm one thirty nine really talks about the fact that we are not our bodies, and that we are special and unique and wonderful apart from our physical bodies. And that's something that I think queer people especially need to lean into so that they can live the best life that's available to them.
00:56:52 Jeromy Johnson: Andy, I would love to just spend hours with you and maybe I'm, I actually want to have you come back on at some point and we can really dive into the clobber verses because these are verses that traditionally Um, Christian people will pull and use those to clobber the queer community. So that's why they're called the clobber verses. But I would love to dive really more into those, but I want to just hear your story here, where you were at, and I want to give you the last word. So for those who might still be stuck between their faith and their identity, what is it that you really want to say to them so that they can they can hear that.
00:57:27 Andy Wells: I'm going to, uh, I'm going to tell a story about you, Jeremy. Um, okay. What people might not know is that Jeremy and I met for dinner two weeks ago, and I've been to Jeremy's neighborhood as. As evidenced by the fact that we ate dinner. Knowing your neighborhood is not the most liberal part of California. When we think about California, you'll see a lot of red hats in Jeremy's neighborhood. So the act of putting up a rainbow flag is a is a lot more, uh, it's, it's a lot more scary When putting up a rainbow flag in my neighborhood. When you did that, you didn't tell me that you had eggs thrown at your house. You told me that people walked up to your house crying because they were. It was so important that they get a message from you specifically that you love them and that you accept them. Um, I have come out at work and I live in an even more red area. I'm sorry. I work in an even more red area up in the up in the mountains. People constantly come up to me, showing me pictures of their queer kids telling me that they're glad that I'm out because it gives them permission to be themselves. I'm finding that in many cases, coming out, either as LGBTQ folks and living our best lives, or coming out as an ally, is an act of following Jesus. That is, it offers us two things. Number one, it offers us the encouragement and hope of the positive messages. Number two, not everybody has those positive encounters. And for the Christians out there that are looking to follow Jesus in a way that's not available in other ways, this is an area where if you do suffer for the cause of loving the people who God clearly loves, it's one of those few areas in life today where we can suffer for the cause of the gospel, if that's what happens. But by and large, there are people out there that need to see the flag. They need to see the little rainbow pin. Um, I've got a little rainbow ichthus that I wear on my on my lapel when I go out. It's important that people know that whether or not they know that God loves them, it's not, not my job to to shove that down their throat. But whether or not they know that I love them, that's very important. That's very important. And, and so I would encourage everybody to think about taking that step, that courageous step of displaying your love for people in a way that changes their lives. As simple as putting your flag on your house in a neighborhood that's pretty red because it it makes a big difference.
01:00:19 Jeromy Johnson: Well, thank you, Andy, I appreciate that. And it meant a lot to my daughters as well. Um.
01:00:24 Andy Wells: Oh yeah.
01:00:26 Jeromy Johnson: So Andy, thank you for sharing your heart, your wisdom, your experience, and your story with us. I know it's not always the easiest thing to do and, uh, really, really appreciate you and, and coming on.
01:00:39 Andy Wells: Likewise. Jeremy. It's great. Uh, great getting to know you over the last few weeks. And, um, I'm grateful for our friendship. As you leave this conversation.
01:00:49 Jeromy Johnson: May you release the burden of becoming acceptable to people who never had the authority to define your belovedness. May you trust that God is not ashamed of the truth of who you are. May the parts of you that were called broken begin to feel holy again, and may you have the courage to stop asking, am I allowed here and begin asking, what gift has God placed in me for the healing of the world? For every person who has tried to disappear, tried to perform, tried to become someone else just to survive. May you know this. You are not a problem to be solved. You are a person to be loved. So until next time, remember to walk in grace. And if you can share that grace.
01:01:42 Andy Wells: I'm glad you added this. Oh, I don't edit. Although I'm going to say that Murphy's Law of editing says that this will make the final cut by by mistake. Yeah.
01:01:50 Jeromy Johnson: Uh, I've actually been playing with the idea of putting like some, uh, some outtakes at the end.
01:01:54 Andy Wells: That would.
01:01:54 Jeromy Johnson: Be great. So.