Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesĪ Wisconsin school district library reportedly offers books that feature guides about how to view pornography online and engage in gay intercourse, according to a recent report from Libs of TikTok. due to controversy, including "This Book is Gay," in their office on the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie, Wyoming, on August 13, 2022. “I went from organized religion to religion for organizing.Laramie Pridefest board member Tyler Wolfgang displays a stack of books, some of which have been banned across the U.S. “I use religion to create justice in the world by empowering communities to do what’s right,” Robertson says.
But, as he sees it, he’s doing God’s work.
He’s gotten his fair share of death threats and warnings that he’s going to hell. Yet it’s only in the past pandemic year that he’s become the “TikTok preacher,” uniting far-flung progressive Christians in the digital sphere. “The first time the word ‘homosexuality’ ever appeared in the Bible was in 1946,” he points out. In 2016, he spoke at the White House about LGBTQ bullying, and has been working with legislators to draft laws outlawing conversion therapy and combating religious LGBTQ discrimination. Robertson has since attended a liberal seminary, pastored an inclusive church called Mission Gathering, written five books, and moved to Washington, D.C., to pursue work in faith-based activism. 'You Do Not Need Glasses’: A Wellness Coach’s Bogus Claim - And Its 100-Year History “By the time I came to the end of senior year, I knew more certainly than ever that I was attracted to men.” “The idea was that through working through the trauma, I could heal these wounds and my sexuality would be healed.” It didn’t quite work like that. “We would ask God to reveal places of trauma in my childhood and then imagine Jesus stepping in,” Robertson explains. He was called in for six different meetings with the dean and - as a condition of his graduation - spent his senior year attending weekly conversion-therapy sessions with an “ex-lesbian” professor. “But, you know, they believed in evolution.” “They were really quite conservative,” he says in retrospect. He started a blog called Re-vangelical that attempted to kick the tires of his faith, and began inviting “heretical” pastors to speak on campus radio. It was people celebrating who they were.”īy this point, Robertson had started to question his own sexuality, but even more profoundly, to question the brand of evangelical Christianity that prized indoctrination over earnest intellectual and theological pursuit. But instead of seeing sin, he saw something else: “It wasn’t brokenness. “The guise was you would find drunk gays and help them get home safely, and in so doing, also have an opportunity to share the gospel with them,” Robertson says. A pastor later helped pay for his expenses at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, where it was practice for students to venture into the historic gay neighborhood of Boystown at 1 a.m.
A few months later, he came back from worship service to announce to his alcoholic dad and stunned mom, “I got redeemed tonight,” having experienced a type of affirmation and welcome at church that he hadn’t in the Maryland trailer park where he was raised. Robertson first encountered that gospel when his Baptist neighbors invited him to church one Sunday at the age of 12. When this and other such commentary inevitably brought about the wrath of other pastors, Robertson had some TikTok’d thoughts on that too: “On the Sunday after increased violence toward Asian Americans across the country, on the Sunday after a mass shooting, on a Sunday in the middle of a global pandemic, if you took time to preach a sermon about me and my TikTok and my progressive theological views, you don’t understand the gospel of Jesus Christ.” In just 60 seconds of air time, Robertson debunked the “clobber passages” - the verses of the Bible that have been interpreted as a condemnation of homosexuality but were actually, he argues, referring to the sexual practices of pagan idol worship. Within a few weeks of that, he had more than 3 million likes and had become one of the digital leaders of the so-called Christian left, a social-justice-minded counterpoint to the conservative evangelical faction that’s dominated faith-based rhetoric in American politics for decades.
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