On March 20, 2012, a college student named Matthew Vines posted a video to YouTube titled “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality.” This video, and the ensuing dialogue, would prove to be a watershed moment for LGBTQ evangelical Christians.

Vines grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where he and his family attended a conservative evangelical church. Vines didn’t even know what a gay person was until middle school, and it wouldn’t be until his sophomore year at Harvard that he would come into his own sexuality.

Vines told his parents that he was gay over Christmas break of that year. They were devastated. Vines’ father was deeply concerned with the Bible’s six “clobber passages” used by evangelicals to condemn the LGBTQ community. He loved his son, but how could he go against the Bible? And here, Vines encountered the same quintessential problem every gay evangelical Christian must eventually face: In an evangelical context, where the Bible is the ultimate authority, one needed a biblical argument for LGBTQ acceptance.

No such argument existed. So Matthew Vines created one.

Vines took a leave of absence from Harvard the following semester and began drafting a Bible-based argument for LGBTQ acceptance. He and his family pored over all the literature they could find, from scripture to conversion therapy guides to pro-LGBTQ scholarship from more progressive denominations of Christianity. In addition to the social imperative of his work, Vines was motivated by a deeply personal one — the love of his family was at stake.

“After about six months, my parents changed their minds and became affirming and supportive,” Vines recalls. “That formative experience helped me to both be hopeful about the possibility of creating change and also to not assume that every Christian who is against same-sex relationships is a hateful bigot. Once I navigated that process with my parents, I wanted to replicate it on a broader level.”

He started with his own small-town church. Though his yearlong campaign was ultimately unsuccessful in changing the leadership’s position, Vines succeeded in a larger sense: He learned how to effectively communicate with conservative evangelicals. “There are very particular ways of interpreting the Bible that you learn in an evangelical church,” Vines tells me. “There were some resources on this issue, but not resources oriented toward conservative Christians. My goal was to create a resource that a child, coming out to their father, could use. I wanted to make things easier for people coming along after me.”

In March 2012, Vines delivered a lecture based on his work and posted a video of the event on YouTube titled “The Gay Debate.” It quickly went viral. The speech — which currently has more than 1 million views — is a combination of personal storytelling and rock-solid biblical scholarship that diffuses the anti-LGBTQ interpretation of these six notorious verses.

Vines begins his lecture with a recontextualization of the Old Testament “clobber passages.” In Genesis 19, God sends a pair of male angels to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities overrun by sinners. In an act of intimidation, a group of men from Sodom threaten to rape the angels. Vines argues that the text condemns “gang rape of men by men,” which was “a common tactic of humiliation and aggression in warfare…in ancient times. It had nothing to do with sexual orientation or attraction.” The idea that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality was not the original interpretation of the text, but rather one that developed in the Middle Ages.

There are more explicit arguments against same-sex intercourse between two men in Leviticus verses 18:22 and 20:13, which read in part, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” But Vines reminds us that Leviticus is part of the Old Testament, and “much of the New Testament deals with the issue of the place of the Old Law in the emerging Christian church. As gentiles were being included for the first time into what was formerly an exclusively Jewish faith, there arose ferocious debates among the early Jewish Christians about whether gentile converts should have to follow the Law.” The debate is resolved in Acts 15, when church leaders decided the Old Testament Law would not apply to gentile believers. This is why, for example, Christians don’t follow a kosher dietary code. Vines posits that for this reason, there is no need to cling to the Old Laws of Leviticus regarding sex between two men.

But what about passages from the New Testament that contain explicit mandates for Christian life? Paul, when describing the sins of those abandoning God for false idolatry in Romans 1:26–27, says in part, “Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.” Vines argues that the use of the word “natural” in this text implies that these individuals are heterosexual, and therefore choosing same-sex desire would, in fact, be unnatural for heterosexuals. But what about homosexuals? Vines says that if we interpret the text literally, the passage takes on a totally different meaning: “If applied to gay people, Paul’s argument here should actually work in the other direction: If the point of this passage is to rebuke those who have spurned their true nature…then just as those who are naturally heterosexual should not be with those of the same sex, so, too, those who have a natural orientation toward the same sex should not be with those of the opposite sex.”

With the other two New Testament verses, 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, Vines takes issue with contemporary translations of the Bible that include the word “homosexual” — a term that didn’t exist until the early 19th century. By further grounding his arguments with additional biblical scholarship and historical context from ancient Christian writers, Vines skillfully defangs all six “clobber passages.”

Vines’ radical speech struck a chord among evangelicals. “My video got so many responses and rebuttals from evangelical pastors, theologians, etc.,” Vines recalls. “Even though the responses from many people were negative, I was actually encouraged by them. Because having responses at all is progress over being ignored. I’d created a dialogue.” The New York Times profiled Vines in September 2012; two weeks later, he had a book deal for God and the Gay Christian. In 2013, Vines founded a nonprofit called the Reformation Project, which promotes “inclusion of LGBTQ people by reforming church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

There were, of course, activists who preceded Vines in doing vital work at the intersection of the evangelical church and the LGBTQ community. In 1993, ex-evangelical pastor Mel White founded the nation’s largest LGBTQ congregation at Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, Texas. In 2001, activist Justin Lee founded the Gay Christian Network, an online community that has grown into one of the largest LGBTQ Christian organizations in America. (It has since been rebranded as the Q Christian Fellowship.) But activists like these were often forced outside the evangelical frame by an establishment that didn’t want to engage the LGBTQ community. Vines’ work helped push this conversation inside evangelical circles. “LGBTQ Christians increasingly have more of a public voice,” Vines says. “Moving from being completely silent to acknowledging the existence of the conversation — that’s progress. ”

The number of voices in this discussion has grown exponentially in recent years, representing a diverse swath of LGBTQ Christian activists with intersectional concerns: from transgender Christian activist and YouTuber Austen Hartke, to scholars like David Gushee and James V. Brownson, to Matthias Roberts (host of LGBTQ Christian podcast Queerology), to straight allies like Christian author Rachel Held Evans and TV personality Jen Hatmaker, to gay Christian musicians like Vicky Beeching, B. Slade, and Trey Pearson, to transqueer Latinx scholar/activist/theologian Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, to #FaithfullyLGBT founder Eliel Cruz, to LGBTQ Christian organizations like Grafted, Believe Out Loud, Be Free Stories, Compass L.A., Mama Bears to the Rescue, Convergence, Queer Theology, Generous Space Ministries, and many more.

Many nonaffirming evangelical churches — which wish to appeal to this younger, increasingly progressive generation — have eschewed conversion therapy, quietly adopting a less conspicuous yet equally insidious policy for their LGBTQ members: mandatory celibacy. This has led to the emergence of a subculture of celibate LGBTQ evangelicals within the larger movement.

Through online communities like Spiritual Friendship and conferences like ReVoice, these celibate LGBTQ Christians — often referred to as “Side B” Christians, a term that serves as an antonym to “Side A” LGBTQ Christians, who don’t believe queer sex is a sin — are advocating for visibility of their own. Most Side A Christians I’ve spoken to express compassion for their Side B counterparts and are quick to draw a distinction between the institutions that impose damaging policies and the LGBTQ individuals who adopt them under the threat of eternal damnation.

“Many [LGBTQ evangelicals] believe that lifelong celibacy is their only faithful option. I have empathy for that,” Vines says. “It’s wrong to force celibacy on others — there are too many stories of death and trauma that stem from mandatory celibacy — but if you’re at a place in your personal faith journey where you can’t feel at peace about being in a relationship, that’s not going to be positive for you either.”

Though the wounds inflicted upon LGBTQ individuals by the evangelical church are infinitely varied, the systems that led to these spiritual injuries are always the same and oppress an array of marginalized groups. “It’s important to not only ask people to rethink their views on sexual orientation, but also racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, and classism,” Vines says. “If you change your view on one of these things in a conservative, predominantly white church, that’s going to radically alter how you view the community.”

“We’re on the front lines of a shift,” Vines continues. “I want to live in a world where no one experiences any pain or terror upon realizing that they’re gay, bisexual, trans, or pansexual. That requires us to reach even those little churches in rural Texas. I do think it’s possible to reach all those churches, eventually.”