Jon Burrow-Branine’s 2021 book, Come Now, Let Us Argue It Out: Counter-Conduct and LGBTQ Evangelical Activism, is a boundary-breaking ethnographic study challenging mainstream conceptions of LGBTQ-affiliated Christian evangelicals. Through engaging with allies and members of both Christian and LGBTQ+ communities, Come Now provides a window into the workings of the nonprofit organization The Reformation Project (TRP) and its goal of changing attitudes and teachings toward LGBTQ+ people in the Christian church. Burrow-Branine also examines the complicated relationship between civil rights and Christian evangelicalism in America and TRP as a community of counter-conduct within this fraught history.

Come Now, situated within gender and sexuality studies as well as American religious studies, addresses a lack of scholarship within queer and religious studies. As Burrow-Branine notes, Come Now “intervene[s] in settled narratives that evangelicalism is incompatible with LGBTQ+ people, gender and sexual diversity, or even strategic moments of resistance and subversion” (9). Come Now offers thoughtful and nuanced scholarship on the overlap between LGBTQ+ and religious identity, provides helpful historical context on the ongoing American “culture war” for those concerned about the dangers of intolerant ideology, and considers possible avenues of equity and activism for marginalized Christians.

Burrow-Branine, a humanities scholar, appropriately derived the title of Come Now from the Protestant Bible verse of Isaiah 1:18. The choice of a biblical verse for the title illustrates the way that Come Now is informed by the community it examines, as TRP aims to help Christians navigate their relationship between faith and LGBTQ+ identity rather than feeling forced to choose one side or another. In chapter 1, for example, Burrow-Branine examines how LGBTQ+ Christians and allies work to reconcile rather than “break fellowship” with one another, creating spaces of generosity and education as well as argument and dispute. Burrow-Branine examines how the leaders of TRP do not aim to erase dissent, but rather to equip evangelical Christians to help their fellows find space for LGBTQ+ Christians within the Bible and faith itself. In chapter 2, Come Now traces the history of the Protestant Bible and how it—and evangelical faith itself—came to be seen as inseparable from heterosexuality. TRP takes this history and aims to negotiate it, moving away not from Scripture itself, but from its oppressive heterosexual interpretations.

Chapter 3 overviews the lively debates around LGBTQ+ Christianity from within the community that predate TRP, including the language of affirming/non-affirming, “Side A/Side B,” and “conversion” therapy. Chapter 4 discusses grandness within the Christian community and overviews the way that TRP discusses transgender Christians and aims for greater inclusion of trans people within the community. Chapter 5 takes a similar direction in examining the TRP’s addressing of racial justice as leadership recognizes the overwhelming whiteness of their leadership and speakers, and intentionally includes Black voices, though recognizing there are continual improvements needed to increase diversity. TRP as a whole critiques evangelicalism’s historical and modern complicity with whiteness, nationalism, and capitalism, and continually aims for greater inclusivity through its work.

Burrow-Branine wrote Come Now after a year of observational field work with TRP and utilizes critical ethnography as a methodology for explicating his findings. Come Now details the author’s journey with TRP as he operated, not only as an observer, but as a participant. Burrow-Branine, despite being straight and non-religious, was integrated into the community and worked as an administrator and organizer for committees and conferences throughout his fieldwork. By discussing this community of counter-conduct, Burrow-Branine brings a fresh, nuanced, and helpful overview of this community into conversations around the LGBTQ+ community and the role of evangelical Christianity in modern America. As the so-called “culture war” rages on and the rights of LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people of color, are threatened by mainstream evangelicalism, The Reformation Project’s “third way” may provide the possibility for Christians and those who are LGBTQ+—and of course, folks who are both—to negotiate and navigate faith in a grace-filled and generous space.

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[Review length: 648 words • Review posted on April 1, 2022]