Before anyone opens a genetics study, there is a prior question. When you argue about whether people are born gay, do you hold your own evidence to the same standard you demand from the other side? Most people don’t. The cause is rarely plain dishonesty. More often the conclusion feels too important to lose, and the standard quietly shifts to protect it. This guide helps you find where your standard shifts. You can work through it alone with a pen, or with a group over one or two sessions. Have people finish the written exercises before anyone discusses them.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Rasheda Likely, a biologist who read the published research for herself. Her findings deserve their own treatment. This guide focuses on how she reasoned, because her method is the step most of us skip.
Write your sentence first
Before reading further, write one sentence stating what you believe science shows about sexual orientation. Don’t polish it. Write what you would actually say if the topic came up at work tomorrow. Then answer these questions underneath it:
- Where did I first get this idea? A study, a news story, a sermon, a friend, a show?
- Have I read any research on this question myself, past the headline?
- If my sentence turned out to be wrong, what else would I feel pressure to give up?
The third question does the diagnostic work. If your honest answer is nothing much, you can probably read the evidence calmly. If the answer is your faith, your friendships, or your sense of who you are, then you have found the place where motivated reasoning is most likely to operate. Motivated reasoning means letting the conclusion you need decide how hard you look at the evidence. Finding that pressure point does not make you a bad thinker. It tells you where to watch yourself.
Notice where Likely says she started. Before she began reading articles, she describes herself this way: “I was just in the air about it all.” Few people begin there. Most of us arrive with a verdict and go looking for support. The difference matters because it changes what we count as a good study.
One scale, two weights
Scripture has a blunt image for this problem. Proverbs 20:10 says, “Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the LORD.” “Divers” is older English for “different.” The proverb is about merchants who kept one set of weights for buying and another for selling, so the scale always favored them. It is a wisdom saying about honest dealing. Applying it to how we weigh arguments is an extension of the principle, not the verse’s original subject. The extension is still fair, because the fault is the same: a measure that changes depending on who benefits.
Motivated reasoning works exactly that way. Evidence that agrees with us gets weighed on the light scale. Evidence that disagrees gets weighed on the heavy one. The pattern shows up in both directions on this subject.
Someone who wants the born-gay claim to be true may accept a news summary of a study without reading it, and then dismiss any critique of that study as bias. Someone who wants the claim to be false may demand airtight proof from every genetic finding, and then repeat “it’s a choice” without having read a single study that supports it. The conclusions are opposite. The move is identical.
Proverbs 18:17 names the other half of the problem: “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him.” Your own case always sounds right until someone examines it. The exercises below ask you to examine it before someone else does.
The premise doing the hidden work
Ask why so much rides on the science. Usually a premise sits underneath the argument, unstated, doing most of the work. It runs something like this: if orientation has a biological cause, then the moral question is settled. Some people hold the premise in the form born this way, therefore good. Others hold the mirror form not born this way, therefore chosen, therefore wrong. Both forms treat a question about causes as if it answered a question about right and wrong.
Lisa Fields points out that Christians themselves do not reason this way consistently. Some Christians would grant a genetic predisposition and connect it with the biblical teaching that every person is born with a sinful nature. She has in view the language of Psalm 51:5, where David confesses he was shapen in iniquity. Other Christians would answer that same-sex attraction is not how God made people at all. As Fields says, “those are different arguments biblically.” So a genetic finding would not settle the moral question for Christians on either reading. It would not settle it for someone on the other side either. The fact that a trait has a cause does not tell anyone whether acting on it is good.
The mirror form has its own flaw. “Not genetic” does not mean “chosen.” When Likely explains nature and nurture, nurture includes upbringing and environment. Her example is a contaminated river near Jacksonville that can trigger the expression of cancer-causing genes. Nobody chooses that. Environmental influence and personal decision are different things. An argument that slides from one to the other has made a false dilemma.
This leads to the main point of the guide. Jude 3 Project holds the historic Christian sexual ethic, that sexual intimacy belongs within the marriage of one man and one woman. It holds that ethic together with genuine welcome and honesty about how the church has wounded gay people. That conviction does not wait on a genetics result. Once you see that your position does not depend on how the research turns out, you can afford to read the research honestly. When the stakes go down, the scale can balance. If you discover the reverse, that your whole position rests on one empirical outcome that is still unsettled, that is worth knowing too.
Exercise: what would change your mind?
Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns. In the left column, describe a research finding that would make you more confident in your sentence. In the right column, describe a finding that would make you less confident. Be specific. Who was studied? How many people? Compared against whom?
Likely gives you one test you can write into either column. Reading studies of gay men that had no heterosexual men to compare against, she asked, “how do I know that those genes just aren’t linked anyway?” A pattern found in one group means little until you know how common it is in another. Apply that test evenly. Would you accept a study on your side of the question if it had the same gap?
If the right-hand column stays empty, and you cannot name any result that would move you, pay attention to that. It may mean your view rests on something other than science, such as Scripture, experience, or loyalty. Holding a view for those reasons is allowed. Presenting it as a scientific conclusion is not honest.
Now go back to your original sentence and circle any word that assumes the answer before the evidence arrives. Words like “natural,” “normal,” “chosen,” and “born” are common examples. Likely shows this kind of care in her own vocabulary. Describing the comparison group she wanted, she said, “I don’t wanna call it a control,” because calling one orientation the control would treat it as the normal state, and that is part of what the research is trying to find out. Your wording can settle the argument before any evidence is weighed.
The strongest objection: isn’t everyone biased?
A fair challenge comes up at this point. Nobody comes to this question neutral. Likely is a Christian. Why should her reading be trusted more than anyone else’s?
The objection is right about bias, but it misreads the goal. The goal is not to have no convictions. The goal is to name your convictions and then keep one standard. Likely does both. She is open about the tension: “as a Christian that causes conflict because I see numbers and I see other things.” She does not hide the conflict, and she does not let it decide the outcome. She concludes, “I have a duty to present both sides.” She also explains why one-sided presentation is so tempting: “you can skew and make data look like whatever you want it to look like, it’s all in a presentation.” Her verdict on that kind of work applies to dinner-table arguments as much as to journals: “No one will respect your work because you can see straight through it.”
A second objection pushes the other way. If science never proves anything, why take it seriously at all? Likely does say that “science has strongly suggested a lot of things, but we don’t prove anything.” She is not saying science knows nothing. Her own example is gravity: we know that if you jump, you come down, and researchers still study it. “Strongly suggested” is a real level of knowledge. Notice when you reach for “science can’t prove anything.” If you only say it when a study goes against you, you have found another double weight.
What stays unsettled is the scientific question of cause. Likely’s summary of her reading was, “I came out with way more questions than answers,” and Fields calls it “a hypothesis on either side.” An honest position can say exactly that and stop there.
A practice for this week
Fields gives a simple instruction for conversations where someone uses science to end the discussion: “ask them where the study is.” This week, ask yourself that question first. Choose one confident scientific claim you have repeated or heard, on this subject or another contested one, and trace it back.
- Find the primary journal article, not a news story about it. Likely warns that reporters sometimes do this: “They took one line and just ran with it and made an entire news article about it.”
- Write down, in the authors’ own words, what they say their study can and cannot conclude.
- Note who was studied and whether there was a comparison group.
- Put that next to your original sentence. Did your sentence claim more than the paper did?
If you cannot get access to the paper, write that down too. You can then hold the claim only as firmly as a headline deserves.
Leading this with a group
Some people in the room may be personally affected by this subject, whether through their own attractions or through someone they love. Nobody should be asked to disclose their orientation or their family’s story, and the exercises work without that. Before discussion begins, set one ground rule: before anyone responds to a view, they restate it in a way its holder would accept. Fields frames the spirit of the conversation well when she says “we should handle it with sensitivity and we should handle it by being informed.” Keep the discussion on how people reason. Don’t let it turn into a debate about someone’s life.
If someone shares that this subject has brought them to despair or to thoughts of ending their life, step out of the discussion with them. Connect them with a pastor or counselor they trust, and make sure they know the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at any hour.
Questions for discussion
- Compare your two columns. Which was easier to fill, and what does the difference tell you?
- Which word in your original sentence did the most work before any evidence came in? What would the sentence claim without it?
- Describe a time you accepted a weak argument because you liked where it ended up. How did you notice, if you did?
- Why might Christians feel they need the science to come out a particular way? What changes if the moral question is separate from the biological one?
- Likely named the tension her faith created and still presented both sides. What would that look like in a conversation you expect to have soon?
- Where is the line between saying “the evidence is unsettled” honestly and using “it’s unsettled” to avoid evidence you don’t like?
To finish, return to the sentence you wrote at the start. Rewrite it so it claims exactly what you can support, and nothing you cannot. Keep both versions side by side. The gap between them shows how far your argument ran ahead of your evidence, and that is the measure this guide was meant to give you.