Is "Being True to Yourself" (as a Gay Person) a Form of Idolatry?
Becket Cook, one of evangelicalism's favorite gay-men, says it's idolatry to be true to yourself (aka, to be fully gay). I think he's wrong and here's why.
According to his telling, Becket Cook knew he was gay from an early age.
As the 8th child in his Texan family, with an overbearing mother and a distant father, he slowly came out (to himself and then family) in high school and through college. He also abandoned the family’s religion and chose to be an atheist.
After moving to Hollywood to pursue a career in all-things-Hollywood, and after years of partying with some of the biggest names, Cook had pretty well established himself as a prototypical gay, Hollywood, atheist.
Until one afternoon when he talked with a few folks at a coffee shop who were studying the Bible.
That conversation led Cook to visit their church where he speaks about having an encounter with the Divine that felt for him like a connecting of dots and an answer to questions he’d recently been asking. A few months prior to that church visit he had hit a point of feeling utterly empty, unsatisfied, and lonely. Leading him to think, “I can’t do this anymore. This life is not sustainable.”
Now I think it’s interesting to point out that in the video I’ve linked to, Cook doesn’t clarify what the “this” is. Can’t do what, exactly? As I listened to him share his testimony, here are some details from his life (mixed with things we already know to be true about life in general and Hollywood culture in particular) that might fit the bill for the “this” that he said he can’t do anymore.
Hop from party to party searching for genuine connection?
Chase after a highly difficult career in an uber competitive industry?
Deal with the well known shallowness of Hollywood culture?
Pretend to like people that you don’t?
Throw all your efforts into being famous?
Exhaust yourself trying to make money in a business with a reputation for grinding people down and treating them like commodities?
Flounder in the death jaws of capitalism?
By my estimation, anyone doing any of those things—let alone all at the same time for years—will leave a person feeling empty, lonely, and depressed. So when I hear Becket tell his story and he hits the point of sheer defeat where he says “I can’t do this anymore,” I’m just like, yeah, that checks out.
But I think his implication is, “I can’t be gay anymore,” as though him-being-gay was the sole cause of what led to his utter emptiness. 🤔
While at church that morning, Cook felt as though God met him in his despair, showered him with love, and called him to a relationship with God through Jesus. Since then, Becket Cook has renounced his “gay lifestyle” (though I don’t believe he claims to have been “healed” of same-sex attraction, an important point), rather he is just madly in love with Jesus.
Back in 2019 he wrote a book to tell his story, A Change of Affection, that has become one of the go-to books for conservative, evangelical Christians who want to cling to the traditional stance on sexuality. Cook is, for them, a kind of mascot for, “See! This is what Godly living looks like. This is the path that all gay people should be taking. If he can do it, then so can (and ought!) you!”
I have more to say about all this, and I will soon. (Actually, if you missed it, I did write this article the other day, 5 Responses for When Gay Christians Forsake Their Gayness and Find a Kind of Happiness, which address some of the kinds of arguments people like Cook use).
But right now I’m actually going to return to a series of articles I wrote responding to an article last year from evangelical pastor, J.D. Greear. The article (Downplaying the Sin of Homosexuality Won’t Win the Next Generation) was Greear’s efforts to implore churches to be more clear about their anti-LGBTQ stance. Of course, I agree, but that’s because I want them to be honest and quit doing the bait and switch (aka, “All are welcome! We love everybody! Except… eventually, we’re gonna need you to stop being gay, mmmkay? Thanks.”) Whereas Greear wants churches to be clear because he thinks being more honest about your moral rigidity, judgmentalism, and your view of a punitive God, is better. 🫣
If you’re curious, I’ve done a few different responses to that article:
Being True to Yourself is… Idolatry?
Today I’m gonna engage with it again, but this time I want to spend some time responding to a quote from Becket Cook’s book that Greear used in his article.
Greear was writing about how the cross is offensive because it demands repentance, and therefore (for gay people) that means they must repent of their sin (it’s unclear whether or not Greear would call a person’s orientation sin, or just, you know, doing gay sexy stuff). He quotes Cook, who writes about how he’d been told his whole life to be “true to himself” (in this context that means, “live fully out as the gay may you are”), but then he came to believe that the Bible teaches,
[the self] is corrupted by sin, so why be true to that? The whole idea of [choosing your sexuality] is bound to the exaltation of self. It carries the implication of making yourself your own god. Putting yourself and your desires on a pedestal and worshiping them.
Being true to yourself is nothing short of idolatry.
Okay, so Cook’s contention here is that “being true to yourself” (an idea he previously claimed to embrace as a gay man, and a mantra that certainly rings throughout much of modern, secular living) is actually a form of “idolatry.”
But… hang with me here…
what if it’s not, though?
What if “being true to yourself” is not idolatry?
Idolatry, plainly be put, is the worship of something that is not God as though it is God. And by “worship” here, we might say, “the valuation of something as being Ultimate.”
Therefore, for the sake of brevity, let’s say that idolatry is the act of making something (or someone) the most important thing in our life. We practice idolatry when we make something or someone a kind of “god” (aka, the Ultimate) and we “worship” it (aka, give all our energies to it).
Cook’s claim is that “being true to yourself is nothing short of idolatry.” That it is tantamount to “making yourself your own god,” and placing your desires as the Ultimate, and giving all your energies to fulfilling your own desires.
And why is fulfilling your desires and being “true to yourself” such a bad thing? Because (according to Cook) “the self is corrupted by sin.”
Therefore (the argument goes) giving any kind of credence or respect-to or honoring-of something that is seen to be connected to the “self” is, in theory, choosing sin.
For Cook, a person’s sexual orientation is one of those things that, if given a kind of respect or honoring (aka, if a gay person lives their life doing—I’m assuming—same-sex sex stuff), then that is a kind of “exalting” of the self…
which lands us at idolatry.
I have so many problems with this.
This idea that “being true to yourself is idolatry” is a big, scary, and false claim. Therefore, over the course of the next few days I’m going to push back on this idea.
I’ve got three things I want to address:
It’s misleading and inaccurate to say that the “self is corrupted by sin.”
What makes a person sexual orientation (as part of the self) more or less wrong than, say, being left-handed, or needing glasses, or eating spicy foods?
Loving your Self is not idolatry.
Hope you’ll come along with me.
BTW: If you’re not a paid subscriber to Perspective Shift, then you won’t be able to access the full articles for the remainder of this series. So do yourself a favor (and do me a solid-of-support), and become a subscriber now.
Win win! 🥳🥳
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He is not being true to himself being anything other than what God originally intended him to be. This will more than likely not end well in some way or another. The things he was unhappy about living his life in Hollywood are the same things that can make straight people unhappy.
Being true to yourself is not idolatry, it is authenticity. The opposite of being fake. And in this case being fake so that others feel good about you and can accept you. I read Cook’s book right after I came out and I was so confused about what he was ‘tired’ of living. He never dealt with the ontological side of ‘being’ gay and just seemed to focus on the ‘actions’ of the life he was living out as a gay man. Well of course you can refrain from actions. But you can’t refrain from ‘being’. That’s my main issue with these ex-gay poster child types. They paint an unhealthy and untrue picture of what it means to ‘be’ gay. I am gay just like others are straight. They can’t cease to ‘be’ straight just as I can’t cease to ‘be’ gay. Stop equating actions with being. People like Cook have all these evangelicals and conservatives thinking that we can just choose not to ‘be’ gay anymore. It’s disingenuous.