Panic of proximity: antigay evangelical discourse on the Metropolitan Community Churches in the 1970s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Throughout the 1970s, the largely LGBTQ+ membership of the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) was frequently described as evangelical by its observers, including by some evangelical leaders. Meanwhile, antigay evangelical writers labored to convince their audiences that the MCC was not what it looked like, and its members were not like them. This article analyzes the array of discursive strategies that antigay evangelical writers used to deny, distort, and distract from the MCC’s evangelical factions and features in the 1970s. These writers’ efforts reveal the severity of the threat that the MCC seemed, to them, to pose – if not to any doctrines, then certainly to predominant ideas about sex and gender within evangelical communities. Notwithstanding Religious Right rhetoric from the late 1970s onward about ‘secular’ gay liberationists, the evangelical panic over gay activism in this period was in part a panic over how similar, not how different, some gay liberationists were.