Gay Activists in the Churches: Seventh-day Adventist Kinship, International, Inc.
by Ronald Lawson, Ph.D. | 07 March 2019 |
This month I will be uploading four articles, one each week, to my website (RonaldLawson.net) that address the situation of LGBTQ Adventists in their church. This week’s article, written in the late 1980s to present to a meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, deals with the situation of gay Adventists before the launching of the Gay and Lesbian Movement in 1969 following the Stonewall Riot in New York, and then tells the story of the founding of Seventh-day Adventist Kinship International in the late 1970s, its purposes and reception by Church leaders, and the strategies it has used to further its goals and their impact on the Adventist Church and its members.
Here are the segments to this paper:
The Earlier Decades: Adventism as a Repressive Environment
The Origins of Seventh-day Adventist Kinship
Kinship’s Goals
Kinship’s Strategies
Kinship’s Impact
The Adventist Church and its Homosexual Members
You can read the paper in its entirety at this website.
Ronald Lawson is a lifelong Seventh-day Adventist, and a sociologist studying urban conflicts and sectarian religions. He is retired from Queens College, CUNY.
