The Voices Shaping Your Child's Thinking — And What You Need to Know About Them

You didn't recognize the language at first.

Your son came home from college using terms you hadn't heard — gay Christian identity, Side B, sexual minority. Your daughter told you she'd been reading someone named Preston Sprinkle, who'd helped her understand herself. Your teenager started questioning whether their discomfort with their body meant they were really a different gender — and a well-meaning youth pastor handed them a book by someone named Mark Yarhouse to help them process it.

You love your child. You want to understand what they're thinking and why. And you're trying to figure out who gave them this framework — and whether you can trust it.

That's what this post is for.

Over the last two decades, a small number of voices have shaped how the evangelical church thinks and talks about same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria. These voices have produced books that get assigned in Christian colleges, recommended from pulpits, and handed to families in crisis. And some of the ground they've conceded — quietly, carefully, in language that sounds pastoral — has done genuine damage to the young people who followed their frameworks to places those frameworks couldn't sustain.

You deserve to know who these voices are and what they're actually saying.

Preston Sprinkle — The Most Widely Read Voice, and Why That's a Problem

If your child has been reading anything on this topic, there's a good chance Preston Sprinkle's name has come up. His 2015 book, People to Be Loved, has been given to more evangelical parents than almost any other resource on the subject.

Spend time with his work, and a pattern emerges. Tone is consistently prioritized over clarity. The moments when Scripture makes its most direct and uncomfortable claims are softened — hedged in the name of pastoral sensitivity until the claim itself becomes negotiable. And most significantly: Sprinkle affirms gay Christian identity as a legitimate long-term category. Not merely as a description of what a person experiences. It is a stable, defining identifier that a believer can reasonably adopt and inhabit.

This is a consequential move. The biblical witness does not grant identity status to disordered desire — any disordered desire. It names desire, diagnoses it, and points it toward the cross. When your child reads Sprinkle and comes home saying I'm a gay Christian, they've been given permission to build a permanent home in the territory between their experience and surrender. That is not a pastoral kindness. It is a framework that has a destination — and many young people who began with Sprinkle have followed that logic all the way to full affirmation of same-sex relationships.

That trajectory is not accidental. It follows the logic of the ground he conceded.

Mark Yarhouse — The Clinical Framework That Moved the Goalposts

Mark Yarhouse is a Christian psychologist whose work has shaped how an entire generation of Christian counselors approaches sexual identity. His 2013 book Understanding Sexual Identity introduced a three-tier framework — attraction, behavior, identity — that many counselors now use almost by default. It sounds rigorous. The problem runs deeper than its conclusions.

Yarhouse doesn't begin with Scripture's account of the human person and then bring psychology alongside as a useful secondary tool. He begins with secular psychology's account of sexual and gender identity — a discipline that has, since at least 1973, been operating from explicit ideological commitments on these questions — and then attempts to build theology around those categories after they've already been granted foundational authority.

When a Christian counselor trained in Yarhouse's framework sits with your child, the goal of that conversation has already shifted — not toward what Scripture calls for (the bringing of disordered desire under the lordship of Christ) but toward stability, self-understanding, and the management of experience. Your child may leave that relationship with a clearer sense of their identity as a gay or transgender person. They may not have come any closer to the God who made them.

In 2015, Yarhouse applied the same methodology to gender dysphoria in Understanding Gender Dysphoria. The three-tier model gave churches a structured way to engage a disorienting topic. But the structure imports secular gender theory into the pastoral conversation before the theological questions have been asked. The question of whether your child's felt gender identity is a reliable guide to who they actually are is never raised. It is simply assumed.

Those are the wrong starting assumptions — and a framework that begins in the wrong place cannot arrive at the right destination, regardless of how carefully it travels.

Revoice — When the Language Brings Its Framework With It

In 2018, Nate Collins founded the Revoice conference with the stated purpose of supporting LGBT+ Christians who want to remain within historic Christian sexual ethics. His 2017 book All But Invisible argued that same-sex attraction carries redeemable qualities — even gifts — that the church should receive and honor.

If your child has become involved with Revoice or has been shaped by its vocabulary, pay close attention to the language. Sexual minorities. Queer Christians. LGBT+ flourishing. These are not neutral terms. They carry the assumptions of contemporary sexual politics — a politics that begins with the premise that sexual and gender identity is a fundamental, defining, and ultimately authoritative dimension of the self.

When that language finds a home in your child's vocabulary, it doesn't arrive alone. It brings its framework with it. And the framework is not, at its roots, Christian.

Andy Stanley — The Drift That Happens Without a Vote

In 2023, Andy Stanley hosted the Unconditional Conference at North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. The conference featured openly gay speakers in same-sex marriages. Stanley himself has been careful — sometimes conspicuously careful — never to affirm same-sex marriage as biblically permissible explicitly. His formal statements have remained, at least on paper, within orthodox parameters.

But the conference communicated something his statements did not.

This is a pattern worth understanding, because it is the pattern by which a church — or a family — drifts. Not through a formal decision. Not through a vote. Through hospitality. Through platform. Through the quiet normalization of what was previously understood to be outside the bounds of faithful discipleship. Brian Zahnd, Jen Hatmaker, Rob Bell, and David Gushee each began with calls for greater compassion. Each arrived, in time, at full affirmation of same-sex relationships.

The road between compassion and affirmation, when it's not anchored in a deep enough theological account of the person, is shorter than it appears.

The Side B Framework — It Sounds Orthodox, But Watch the Trajectory

Your child may have encountered the concept of Side B Christianity — the position that same-sex sexual activity is sinful, but that same-sex attraction is a stable, defining part of a person's identity that can be acknowledged and inhabited. It sounds like a faithful middle ground. It has not proven to be one.

Julie Rodgers was for many years one of the most prominent voices for celibate gay Christian identity. She wrote with grace and vulnerability and gave many young people a framework for holding same-sex attraction and Christian faith in the same hand. She is now married to a woman.

Her story is not unusual. A significant number of prominent Side B voices have made the same journey — from celibate gay Christian identity to full affirmation of same-sex relationships. When this becomes a pattern, it becomes a theological question.

The framework's failure is a matter of internal logic. The moment same-sex attraction is framed as identity rather than as disordered desire — the moment the question shifts from what do I do with this experience to who am I as a person with this experience — the long-term sustainability of celibacy becomes increasingly difficult. What the heart has been told is its identity; the heart will eventually seek to express.

What All of These Voices Share

These voices don't agree with each other on everything. They occupy different positions and would push back on each other in significant ways. What they share is something more fundamental: a tendency to address the upper layers of the conversation — behavior, experience, identity categories — while leaving the deeper layers largely undisturbed.

The deepest layer is the one that matters most. It's the layer where your child's most fundamental sense of who they are is being formed — where the question, Who am I? is being answered. And every one of these frameworks, in different ways, has allowed that question to be answered by desire and felt experience rather than by the God who made them.

What Your Child Actually Needs

Your child doesn't need a gentler version of any of these frameworks. They need something that goes deeper — a framework that can hold both the dignity of who they are as image-bearers and the honest diagnosis of what the fall has done to their desires, in the same frame, without collapsing either.

A framework that can look them in the eye and say simultaneously: you are beloved, you are not defined by what you feel, and the God who made you is not finished with you.

That framework exists. It's grounded in forty years of clinical practice and a deep engagement with the theological tradition's most serious thinkers on the human soul — Dallas Willard on the renovation of desire, Henri Nouwen on the identity that only the Father can give, Larry Crabb on the community where the deepest healing actually happens.

It's called Icebergology™. And if you want to understand what's shaping your child's thinking — and offer them something truer and more hopeful than what the current conversation is giving them — it's a place worth starting.

Rob Jackson, is the founder of the Icebergology™ Coaching Academy and the author of When Grace Meets Conviction: Loving God and Your LGBT Child.