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But What About . . .: The Most Asked Questions on Faith, the Bible, and LGBTQ Inclusion
Not yet published
Expected 17 Nov 26A bold, compassionate invitation to see LGBTQ inclusion as the most faithful expression of following in the way of Jesus.
For centuries, debates over LGBTQ inclusion have circled the same "But what about what the Bible says?" In But What About…, pastor and author Colby Martin—whose bestselling UnClobber reframed our understanding of the “clobber passages”—continues the work of inclusion by answering the next round of questions. With pastoral honesty and theological depth, he explores what Scripture says (and doesn’t say) about topics like marriage, gender, and sexuality, uncovering how centuries of interpretation have often missed the text’s cultural and linguistic heart.
Written with Martin’s signature blend of accessibility, humor, and scholarship, But What About… helps readers articulate a faithful, informed case for inclusion. By seeking to compassionately understand the non-affirming position, Martin offers a framework for reading the Bible that’s both intellectually honest and spiritually liberating—one that sees LGBTQ inclusion not as a departure from Christianity, but as its truest expression.
For centuries, debates over LGBTQ inclusion have circled the same "But what about what the Bible says?" In But What About…, pastor and author Colby Martin—whose bestselling UnClobber reframed our understanding of the “clobber passages”—continues the work of inclusion by answering the next round of questions. With pastoral honesty and theological depth, he explores what Scripture says (and doesn’t say) about topics like marriage, gender, and sexuality, uncovering how centuries of interpretation have often missed the text’s cultural and linguistic heart.
Written with Martin’s signature blend of accessibility, humor, and scholarship, But What About… helps readers articulate a faithful, informed case for inclusion. By seeking to compassionately understand the non-affirming position, Martin offers a framework for reading the Bible that’s both intellectually honest and spiritually liberating—one that sees LGBTQ inclusion not as a departure from Christianity, but as its truest expression.
- GenresNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication November 17, 2026
About the author
Colby Martin
4 books99 followersColby Martin remains obstinately hopeful that the church can change the world.
Having experienced his fair share of pain and rejection from mainstream Christianity, Colby is awake to the flaws, tragic missteps, and misplaced earnestness that too often define the direction of the church. But God’s vision for creation as revealed in Jesus still compels him - a window into a way of being human that fosters wholeness, and can move communities away from shame into vulnerable, flourishing connection.
As author of “UnClobber: Rethinking our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality” and, “The Shift: Surviving and Thriving after Moving from Conservative to Progressive Christianity,” Colby has emerged as one of the leading voices of the Progressive Christian movement.
Together with his Co-Pastor and wife, Kate, they founded and lead Sojourn Grace Collective in San Diego, CA, while enjoying life with their four sons.
Colby is passionate about carving out a space within Christianity that includes:
a whole-heartedly affirming posture toward LGBTQ individuals,
a broader acceptance of other spiritual practices and religious perspectives,
an agreeableness toward science,
and a commitment to always growing, transforming, and trusting that the best days are yet to come.
Colby is currently partnering with other progressive Christian churches as a co-director for Launchpad Partners Inc, an organization committed to planting and resourcing similar faith communities all across the country.
It is Colby’s deeply held belief that when people are reminded they are loved children of God, wholly and exactly as they are, they begin to live from a place of freedom. His work as author and pastor aims to point us toward that freedom, stubbornly, hopefully, until we believe in it. Until we can live in it, that the church - fully loved, liberated, and empowered - may continue the long work of changing the world.
Having experienced his fair share of pain and rejection from mainstream Christianity, Colby is awake to the flaws, tragic missteps, and misplaced earnestness that too often define the direction of the church. But God’s vision for creation as revealed in Jesus still compels him - a window into a way of being human that fosters wholeness, and can move communities away from shame into vulnerable, flourishing connection.
As author of “UnClobber: Rethinking our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality” and, “The Shift: Surviving and Thriving after Moving from Conservative to Progressive Christianity,” Colby has emerged as one of the leading voices of the Progressive Christian movement.
Together with his Co-Pastor and wife, Kate, they founded and lead Sojourn Grace Collective in San Diego, CA, while enjoying life with their four sons.
Colby is passionate about carving out a space within Christianity that includes:
a whole-heartedly affirming posture toward LGBTQ individuals,
a broader acceptance of other spiritual practices and religious perspectives,
an agreeableness toward science,
and a commitment to always growing, transforming, and trusting that the best days are yet to come.
Colby is currently partnering with other progressive Christian churches as a co-director for Launchpad Partners Inc, an organization committed to planting and resourcing similar faith communities all across the country.
It is Colby’s deeply held belief that when people are reminded they are loved children of God, wholly and exactly as they are, they begin to live from a place of freedom. His work as author and pastor aims to point us toward that freedom, stubbornly, hopefully, until we believe in it. Until we can live in it, that the church - fully loved, liberated, and empowered - may continue the long work of changing the world.
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Peter Has the Clipboard, but God Has Already Let Everyone In
Colby Martin’s “But What About . . .” Takes Apart Christian Objections to LGBTQ Inclusion, Then Discovers That the Examiner May Be the One Who Needs the Lesson
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 14th, 2026
Dramatically, the most important person in Colby Martin’s “But What About . . .” is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer. It is Peter, pausing at the threshold of Cornelius’s house in Acts with a religious map that tells him where holiness resides and whom God has placed outside it. Martin’s sharpest reading of the scene is also his sharpest reversal: Cornelius does not need Peter to admit him into God’s family. God has arrived first. The revelation is for the gatekeeper. At that point, the book stops merely defending LGBTQ inclusion and begins asking what happens when a believer discovers that a boundary long defended as divine may have been drawn by believers themselves.
Early on, however, Martin agrees to play the old game. “But What About . . .,” a sequel in argument to his 2016 book “UnClobber,” gathers the questions he has heard for years in churches, workshops, email, and direct messages: What about the Bible? Adam and Eve? Two genders? Biblical marriage? Ex-gay people? The “gay lifestyle”? “Love the sinner, hate the sin”? Jesus? Martin, a former conservative evangelical pastor who lost his church job after embracing LGBTQ affirmation, once believed versions of these objections himself. That history gives him fluency in the fears hiding underneath them.
Martin’s imagined reader is not usually the hardened opponent warming up for a cage match over Leviticus. It is the Christian whose head and heart have fallen out of step – the parent whose child has come out, the believer whose gay friend has become impossible to reduce to doctrine, the LGBTQ Christian wondering whether faith and self-recognition can occupy the same life. Such readers need more than counterarguments. They need room to reconsider without experiencing reconsideration itself as apostasy. Martin understands that changing one belief can rattle everything attached to it: family, church, salvation, memory, even the story a person has told about being good.
Even the friendliest chapters are doing more than answering objections. Martin is building a bridge sturdy enough for frightened believers to cross without feeling that Christianity has fallen away beneath them. Genesis becomes theological narrative rather than scientific minutes; marriage shifts from supposedly timeless form toward covenant, companionship, mutuality, and care; ex-gay testimony becomes one person’s story rather than a rule for everyone else. His treatment of “love the sinner, hate the sin” shows the method at its best. He reconstructs why a Christian might think the phrase loving, then explains why the recipient may hear little except the hate.
The prose makes the same pastoral move: lower the temperature, then move the furniture. Martin writes like an experienced speaker who can feel a room tightening and knows when to let in air. His sentences are usually medium-length and conversational, broken by rhetorical questions, contractions, quick jokes, pop culture, and metaphors that do not pretend to be mysterious. An autocorrect mishap turns “love the sinner, hate the sin” into “love the dinner, have the son.” Elsewhere there are Jenga towers, golf slices, cave shadows, breadcrumbs, and aliens auditing contemporary Christianity. Martin is not after lyric ambiguity. His images are handrails.
Read beside Rachel Held Evans’s “Inspired” or Peter Enns’s “How the Bible Actually Works,” Martin is less exploratory and more tactical. Evans could leave a reader inside the difficulty; Enns often makes ambiguity part of the lesson. Martin usually wants ambiguity to get us somewhere. The result is momentum and, occasionally, too much confidence. He is most persuasive when an inherited interpretation becomes one possibility among several, and less so when that spaciousness snaps shut around his preferred conclusion. A book wary of interpretive certainty can sound strikingly certain about where an open-hearted reader ought to end up.
In Part I, “Answering the Questions,” Martin lets non-affirming Christianity set the exam for nine chapters. The interlude changes the terms: removing harmful ideas is not enough; something nourishing must replace them. Part II becomes “Asking the Questions.” The change in heading quietly changes who gets to interrogate whom. If Part I asks whether LGBTQ people can survive Christianity’s scrutiny, Part II begins asking whether Christianity’s scrutiny deserves the authority it has assumed. That is not just tidy organization. It is the book taking the clipboard away from the examiner.
Peter and Cornelius are where this design reaches full force. Martin emphasizes that Peter receives a revelation about purity before entering the Gentile’s home, yet the abstraction becomes transformation only in relationship. Cornelius is not waiting empty-handed for Peter to deliver God. God is already there. Martin connects this to Christians whose theology begins to crack when someone they love comes out. The supposedly excluded person has not become more worthy; the observer has discovered that the old category was too small. The convert is the person at the door.
Across these chapters, “But What About . . .” proves more interesting as a book about the mechanics of theological change than as a comprehensive work of affirming theology. Martin’s individual arguments vary in strength, but the psychological sequence is remarkably coherent: objection, permission, destabilization, reinterpretation, reconstruction, recognition, action. He knows that showing a reader how a conviction might be relinquished without relinquishing Jesus can matter more than winning a verse. His cheerful idiom can make the work look simpler than it is.
Part II’s problem is that its affirmative arguments begin to behave like members of the same choir. Martin assembles “breadcrumbs” of inclusion, argues for a divine preference for diversity, revisits Gentile inclusion, asks whether beliefs have displaced love at the center of Christianity, distinguishes calling oneself Christian from living in the way of Jesus, and finally grounds human identity in belovedness. Inclusion confirms good fruit; good fruit confirms love; love confirms Jesus; Jesus confirms belonging; belonging confirms the interpretive trajectory that produced inclusion. The accumulation persuades, but after a while the witnesses corroborate one another almost too neatly.
At several points, Martin takes a defensible distinction and states its maximal version. He is right that ancient biblical writers did not possess the modern category of sexual orientation as we understand it, and right that translation involves interpretation. But when he announces that the Bible has “absolutely nothing to say about homosexuality,” the rhetoric outruns the distinction. Ancient texts can lack a modern category and still be invoked in later ethical reasoning. Martin’s narrower case is stronger: Scripture does not directly address contemporary gay identity or mutual same-sex relationships in the conceptual terms by which modern readers know them. His eagerness to close the case occasionally makes the case easier to reopen.
Doctrine becomes another pressure point in Chapter 13, where Martin asks whether Christianity has become too much a machine for sorting correct from incorrect beliefs when the point is love, trust, mercy, and imitation of Jesus. It is a useful rebuke to doctrinal border patrol. It is also hard to square with the existence of this very book, which depends on beliefs mattering enormously. Beliefs determine whether parents bless weddings, whether churches permit leadership, whether gay people are told to remain celibate, whether trans people are treated as truthful interpreters of their own lives. Martin’s stronger idea is already sitting inside his argument: beliefs must answer for the kinds of love and harm they make possible.
In writing from outside LGBTQ experience, Martin is candid about the limits of his position. He is a straight, cisgender man, and he does not pretend otherwise. He recounts LGBTQ people telling him that his position can make his advocacy unusually effective because people like him have historically inflicted much of the harm. That candor matters. But it also creates an awkward economy in which LGBTQ testimony sometimes certifies the usefulness of the straight ally who will interpret LGBTQ lives to other straight Christians.
Martin should not be faulted merely for speaking as an ally. The people whose theology excludes LGBTQ relatives and congregants are precisely the people who may need a guide fluent in their language, and a book addressed only to the persuaded would accomplish little. The harder question is whether one can center the conversion of the gatekeeper without recentering the gatekeeper. “But What About . . .” does not always manage it. LGBTQ lives sometimes become evidence of “good fruit,” case studies in flourishing, or occasions through which hesitant Christians achieve moral clarity. The people being debated can remain secondary to the drama of those doing the debating.
In places, Martin’s protective instinct shades into paternalism. Protection can flatten the protected. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer lives do not form one interchangeable pastoral constituency, and an umbrella acronym cannot erase differences of embodiment, desire, transition, family, doctrine, danger, or community. Martin acknowledges this more often than his architecture can accommodate it. The strain shows most clearly in the trans chapters, where dysphoria, congruence, and homecoming are asked to carry not only lived experience but Martin’s larger theology of wholeness. The intention is affirming. The symbolism is not always his to hold so comfortably.
The book’s usefulness and its discomfort are, inconveniently, twins. For a reader already at ease with being gay and Christian, or simply at ease with being gay, there is something wearying about watching one’s ordinary life repeatedly placed on a theological examination table so that someone else can decide whether the instruments were calibrated incorrectly. Martin eventually rejects that permission structure, but he must inhabit it long enough to dismantle it. A reader can finish grateful for the work and tired of having been made its occasion.
Religious institutions have made the book’s private argument public. Churches and denominations still argue over marriage, ordination, gender, pastoral authority, and what counts as faithful revision. Families discover that doctrine sounds different when it acquires a child’s face. Martin writes from this messy middle, after many Christians have changed their minds but before institutions have agreed on what such change means. The older question underneath the current dispute is harsher: what happens when a religious community discovers that what it called an eternal boundary may have been an interpretation, and what does it owe the people kept outside while that discovery took its time?
Of Martin’s recurring metaphors, Plato’s cave is the most revealing. The escaped prisoner learns that familiar shadows were not reality in its entirety and returns to people who think his new vision looks like blindness. It is an elegant account of deconstruction as expanded perception. It is also suspiciously convenient. Martin gets the sunlight; his opponents remain chained to projections. The image catches the temptation his book does not fully escape: humility about former certainty can become confidence that one now occupies the higher ground.
Precisely because Martin understands fear so well, his ending works. Instead of producing one final verse that makes every doubt disappear, he invokes the Jewish tradition of Nahshon stepping into the Red Sea before the water parts. The hesitant reader may never achieve perfect theological certainty. At some point, interpretation becomes action. Step forward anyway. Let love lead. That is wiser than pretending moral life can wait for omniscience. It is also where the book’s contradiction becomes clearest: Martin asks readers to loosen their grip on certainty while assuring them that the evidence for his destination is already sufficient.
One can admire the bridge without mistaking it for the destination. “But What About . . .” earns 78/100 and 3/5 stars. Its prose is inviting rather than distinguished, its architecture stronger than its repetitions, its emotional intelligence stronger than its evidentiary restraint. Matthew Vines’s “God and the Gay Christian” and Karen R. Keen’s “Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships” have worked some of this terrain with different emphases and, at times, greater compression. Martin’s particular strength lies elsewhere: he understands the emotional engineering required for someone to cross from inherited prohibition to affirmation without believing they have abandoned Jesus on the far bank.
Underneath every “but what about,” then, sits a quieter question: who is being asked to explain themselves to whom? Martin begins by answering Christians who want LGBTQ people justified verse by verse. He ends by insisting that LGBTQ people were never applicants awaiting admission. The most beautiful moment in the book is therefore not a successful defense but a failed gatekeeping operation: Peter reaches Cornelius’s house and discovers that heaven has beaten him there. The harder question Martin leaves behind is how long the people already inside should have to wait while Peter stands on the threshold, working up the courage to notice that the door was never his to unlock.
Colby Martin’s “But What About . . .” Takes Apart Christian Objections to LGBTQ Inclusion, Then Discovers That the Examiner May Be the One Who Needs the Lesson
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 14th, 2026
Dramatically, the most important person in Colby Martin’s “But What About . . .” is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer. It is Peter, pausing at the threshold of Cornelius’s house in Acts with a religious map that tells him where holiness resides and whom God has placed outside it. Martin’s sharpest reading of the scene is also his sharpest reversal: Cornelius does not need Peter to admit him into God’s family. God has arrived first. The revelation is for the gatekeeper. At that point, the book stops merely defending LGBTQ inclusion and begins asking what happens when a believer discovers that a boundary long defended as divine may have been drawn by believers themselves.
Early on, however, Martin agrees to play the old game. “But What About . . .,” a sequel in argument to his 2016 book “UnClobber,” gathers the questions he has heard for years in churches, workshops, email, and direct messages: What about the Bible? Adam and Eve? Two genders? Biblical marriage? Ex-gay people? The “gay lifestyle”? “Love the sinner, hate the sin”? Jesus? Martin, a former conservative evangelical pastor who lost his church job after embracing LGBTQ affirmation, once believed versions of these objections himself. That history gives him fluency in the fears hiding underneath them.
Martin’s imagined reader is not usually the hardened opponent warming up for a cage match over Leviticus. It is the Christian whose head and heart have fallen out of step – the parent whose child has come out, the believer whose gay friend has become impossible to reduce to doctrine, the LGBTQ Christian wondering whether faith and self-recognition can occupy the same life. Such readers need more than counterarguments. They need room to reconsider without experiencing reconsideration itself as apostasy. Martin understands that changing one belief can rattle everything attached to it: family, church, salvation, memory, even the story a person has told about being good.
Even the friendliest chapters are doing more than answering objections. Martin is building a bridge sturdy enough for frightened believers to cross without feeling that Christianity has fallen away beneath them. Genesis becomes theological narrative rather than scientific minutes; marriage shifts from supposedly timeless form toward covenant, companionship, mutuality, and care; ex-gay testimony becomes one person’s story rather than a rule for everyone else. His treatment of “love the sinner, hate the sin” shows the method at its best. He reconstructs why a Christian might think the phrase loving, then explains why the recipient may hear little except the hate.
The prose makes the same pastoral move: lower the temperature, then move the furniture. Martin writes like an experienced speaker who can feel a room tightening and knows when to let in air. His sentences are usually medium-length and conversational, broken by rhetorical questions, contractions, quick jokes, pop culture, and metaphors that do not pretend to be mysterious. An autocorrect mishap turns “love the sinner, hate the sin” into “love the dinner, have the son.” Elsewhere there are Jenga towers, golf slices, cave shadows, breadcrumbs, and aliens auditing contemporary Christianity. Martin is not after lyric ambiguity. His images are handrails.
Read beside Rachel Held Evans’s “Inspired” or Peter Enns’s “How the Bible Actually Works,” Martin is less exploratory and more tactical. Evans could leave a reader inside the difficulty; Enns often makes ambiguity part of the lesson. Martin usually wants ambiguity to get us somewhere. The result is momentum and, occasionally, too much confidence. He is most persuasive when an inherited interpretation becomes one possibility among several, and less so when that spaciousness snaps shut around his preferred conclusion. A book wary of interpretive certainty can sound strikingly certain about where an open-hearted reader ought to end up.
In Part I, “Answering the Questions,” Martin lets non-affirming Christianity set the exam for nine chapters. The interlude changes the terms: removing harmful ideas is not enough; something nourishing must replace them. Part II becomes “Asking the Questions.” The change in heading quietly changes who gets to interrogate whom. If Part I asks whether LGBTQ people can survive Christianity’s scrutiny, Part II begins asking whether Christianity’s scrutiny deserves the authority it has assumed. That is not just tidy organization. It is the book taking the clipboard away from the examiner.
Peter and Cornelius are where this design reaches full force. Martin emphasizes that Peter receives a revelation about purity before entering the Gentile’s home, yet the abstraction becomes transformation only in relationship. Cornelius is not waiting empty-handed for Peter to deliver God. God is already there. Martin connects this to Christians whose theology begins to crack when someone they love comes out. The supposedly excluded person has not become more worthy; the observer has discovered that the old category was too small. The convert is the person at the door.
Across these chapters, “But What About . . .” proves more interesting as a book about the mechanics of theological change than as a comprehensive work of affirming theology. Martin’s individual arguments vary in strength, but the psychological sequence is remarkably coherent: objection, permission, destabilization, reinterpretation, reconstruction, recognition, action. He knows that showing a reader how a conviction might be relinquished without relinquishing Jesus can matter more than winning a verse. His cheerful idiom can make the work look simpler than it is.
Part II’s problem is that its affirmative arguments begin to behave like members of the same choir. Martin assembles “breadcrumbs” of inclusion, argues for a divine preference for diversity, revisits Gentile inclusion, asks whether beliefs have displaced love at the center of Christianity, distinguishes calling oneself Christian from living in the way of Jesus, and finally grounds human identity in belovedness. Inclusion confirms good fruit; good fruit confirms love; love confirms Jesus; Jesus confirms belonging; belonging confirms the interpretive trajectory that produced inclusion. The accumulation persuades, but after a while the witnesses corroborate one another almost too neatly.
At several points, Martin takes a defensible distinction and states its maximal version. He is right that ancient biblical writers did not possess the modern category of sexual orientation as we understand it, and right that translation involves interpretation. But when he announces that the Bible has “absolutely nothing to say about homosexuality,” the rhetoric outruns the distinction. Ancient texts can lack a modern category and still be invoked in later ethical reasoning. Martin’s narrower case is stronger: Scripture does not directly address contemporary gay identity or mutual same-sex relationships in the conceptual terms by which modern readers know them. His eagerness to close the case occasionally makes the case easier to reopen.
Doctrine becomes another pressure point in Chapter 13, where Martin asks whether Christianity has become too much a machine for sorting correct from incorrect beliefs when the point is love, trust, mercy, and imitation of Jesus. It is a useful rebuke to doctrinal border patrol. It is also hard to square with the existence of this very book, which depends on beliefs mattering enormously. Beliefs determine whether parents bless weddings, whether churches permit leadership, whether gay people are told to remain celibate, whether trans people are treated as truthful interpreters of their own lives. Martin’s stronger idea is already sitting inside his argument: beliefs must answer for the kinds of love and harm they make possible.
In writing from outside LGBTQ experience, Martin is candid about the limits of his position. He is a straight, cisgender man, and he does not pretend otherwise. He recounts LGBTQ people telling him that his position can make his advocacy unusually effective because people like him have historically inflicted much of the harm. That candor matters. But it also creates an awkward economy in which LGBTQ testimony sometimes certifies the usefulness of the straight ally who will interpret LGBTQ lives to other straight Christians.
Martin should not be faulted merely for speaking as an ally. The people whose theology excludes LGBTQ relatives and congregants are precisely the people who may need a guide fluent in their language, and a book addressed only to the persuaded would accomplish little. The harder question is whether one can center the conversion of the gatekeeper without recentering the gatekeeper. “But What About . . .” does not always manage it. LGBTQ lives sometimes become evidence of “good fruit,” case studies in flourishing, or occasions through which hesitant Christians achieve moral clarity. The people being debated can remain secondary to the drama of those doing the debating.
In places, Martin’s protective instinct shades into paternalism. Protection can flatten the protected. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer lives do not form one interchangeable pastoral constituency, and an umbrella acronym cannot erase differences of embodiment, desire, transition, family, doctrine, danger, or community. Martin acknowledges this more often than his architecture can accommodate it. The strain shows most clearly in the trans chapters, where dysphoria, congruence, and homecoming are asked to carry not only lived experience but Martin’s larger theology of wholeness. The intention is affirming. The symbolism is not always his to hold so comfortably.
The book’s usefulness and its discomfort are, inconveniently, twins. For a reader already at ease with being gay and Christian, or simply at ease with being gay, there is something wearying about watching one’s ordinary life repeatedly placed on a theological examination table so that someone else can decide whether the instruments were calibrated incorrectly. Martin eventually rejects that permission structure, but he must inhabit it long enough to dismantle it. A reader can finish grateful for the work and tired of having been made its occasion.
Religious institutions have made the book’s private argument public. Churches and denominations still argue over marriage, ordination, gender, pastoral authority, and what counts as faithful revision. Families discover that doctrine sounds different when it acquires a child’s face. Martin writes from this messy middle, after many Christians have changed their minds but before institutions have agreed on what such change means. The older question underneath the current dispute is harsher: what happens when a religious community discovers that what it called an eternal boundary may have been an interpretation, and what does it owe the people kept outside while that discovery took its time?
Of Martin’s recurring metaphors, Plato’s cave is the most revealing. The escaped prisoner learns that familiar shadows were not reality in its entirety and returns to people who think his new vision looks like blindness. It is an elegant account of deconstruction as expanded perception. It is also suspiciously convenient. Martin gets the sunlight; his opponents remain chained to projections. The image catches the temptation his book does not fully escape: humility about former certainty can become confidence that one now occupies the higher ground.
Precisely because Martin understands fear so well, his ending works. Instead of producing one final verse that makes every doubt disappear, he invokes the Jewish tradition of Nahshon stepping into the Red Sea before the water parts. The hesitant reader may never achieve perfect theological certainty. At some point, interpretation becomes action. Step forward anyway. Let love lead. That is wiser than pretending moral life can wait for omniscience. It is also where the book’s contradiction becomes clearest: Martin asks readers to loosen their grip on certainty while assuring them that the evidence for his destination is already sufficient.
One can admire the bridge without mistaking it for the destination. “But What About . . .” earns 78/100 and 3/5 stars. Its prose is inviting rather than distinguished, its architecture stronger than its repetitions, its emotional intelligence stronger than its evidentiary restraint. Matthew Vines’s “God and the Gay Christian” and Karen R. Keen’s “Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships” have worked some of this terrain with different emphases and, at times, greater compression. Martin’s particular strength lies elsewhere: he understands the emotional engineering required for someone to cross from inherited prohibition to affirmation without believing they have abandoned Jesus on the far bank.
Underneath every “but what about,” then, sits a quieter question: who is being asked to explain themselves to whom? Martin begins by answering Christians who want LGBTQ people justified verse by verse. He ends by insisting that LGBTQ people were never applicants awaiting admission. The most beautiful moment in the book is therefore not a successful defense but a failed gatekeeping operation: Peter reaches Cornelius’s house and discovers that heaven has beaten him there. The harder question Martin leaves behind is how long the people already inside should have to wait while Peter stands on the threshold, working up the courage to notice that the door was never his to unlock.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This was an easy five-star read for me.
I wondered whether Pastor Colby Martin could really add much beyond what he accomplished in UnClobber, a book that I found incredibly thoughtful and influential. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Rather than repeating himself, Martin builds on that foundation with fresh insights, more personal stories, and timely discussions—particularly around the transgender community and the questions many churches are wrestling with today.
As an affirming Lutheran Christian, I’ve believed for a long time that faith and LGBTQ inclusion belong together. Even so, I found myself highlighting passage after passage. Martin has a gift for blending careful biblical scholarship with humor, humility, and genuine compassion. One of my favorite lines was:
“Jesus instructed us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. Where in that equation is there any room to treat a fellow human being with contempt?”
One of my biggest criticisms of persuasive nonfiction is that it often ends up preaching to people who already agree with its message. While I certainly fall into that camp, I was pleasantly surprised by how broadly this book speaks. Whether you’re an affirming Christian, a non-affirming Christian, someone questioning what the Bible actually says about LGBTQ inclusion, or even a curious atheist interested in the conversation, Martin approaches difficult questions with grace, intellectual honesty, and respect.
This book thoughtfully explores LGBTQ inclusion, transgender identities, biblical interpretation, and the ways churches have responded to these topics without losing sight of the people at the center of the conversation.
One of the most important Christian books I’ve read this year, and one I’ll be recommending often.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for the eARC. But What About…? The Most Asked Questions on Faith, the Bible, and LGBTQ Inclusion by Pastor Colby Martin will be published in November.
I wondered whether Pastor Colby Martin could really add much beyond what he accomplished in UnClobber, a book that I found incredibly thoughtful and influential. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Rather than repeating himself, Martin builds on that foundation with fresh insights, more personal stories, and timely discussions—particularly around the transgender community and the questions many churches are wrestling with today.
As an affirming Lutheran Christian, I’ve believed for a long time that faith and LGBTQ inclusion belong together. Even so, I found myself highlighting passage after passage. Martin has a gift for blending careful biblical scholarship with humor, humility, and genuine compassion. One of my favorite lines was:
“Jesus instructed us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. Where in that equation is there any room to treat a fellow human being with contempt?”
One of my biggest criticisms of persuasive nonfiction is that it often ends up preaching to people who already agree with its message. While I certainly fall into that camp, I was pleasantly surprised by how broadly this book speaks. Whether you’re an affirming Christian, a non-affirming Christian, someone questioning what the Bible actually says about LGBTQ inclusion, or even a curious atheist interested in the conversation, Martin approaches difficult questions with grace, intellectual honesty, and respect.
This book thoughtfully explores LGBTQ inclusion, transgender identities, biblical interpretation, and the ways churches have responded to these topics without losing sight of the people at the center of the conversation.
One of the most important Christian books I’ve read this year, and one I’ll be recommending often.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for the eARC. But What About…? The Most Asked Questions on Faith, the Bible, and LGBTQ Inclusion by Pastor Colby Martin will be published in November.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
READ THIS BOOK! It offers wonderful and affirming ways to analyze the Bible (even for us non-Christians!), and it provides all of us a much-needed reminder about how to treat people! With love.
Author Colby Martin first digs into the questions homophobes bring up about the Bible (like why isn't it Adam and Steve?? Gah.) and shows how their interpretations of the Bible are misguided and not informed by the events and knowledge of people at the time. This part is really mind-blowing. The historical context is so key! Then he shows us some "breadcrumbs," little references sprinkled throughout the Bible that show that yeah, LGBTIA are children of God, would have been considered as such at the time (had that made sense in that historical era), and should be treated as such now.
So don't take any of the biblical stories too literally. They are stories and parables meant to help people make sense of the world and their purpose. For example, he references a part in Leviticus (if I recall correctly), about how a farmer must leave part of his plot unharvested so that the poor may have access. Now you could look at this very specifically and think about how much exactly do we leave? How long? Etc. Or we can see it as one of many ways God shows us that we are responsible for all people, their well-being, and the Earth. Basically: "Don't be selfish and help other people."
Be Christian, don't just be a Christian. Christianity is not about having the right beliefs, it's a practice of doing good things and healing the world, just as Jesus demonstrated.
Please read, enjoy, and then share with the religious bigots in your life!
Thanks to St. Martin's Press, via NetGalley, for this ARC.
Author Colby Martin first digs into the questions homophobes bring up about the Bible (like why isn't it Adam and Steve?? Gah.) and shows how their interpretations of the Bible are misguided and not informed by the events and knowledge of people at the time. This part is really mind-blowing. The historical context is so key! Then he shows us some "breadcrumbs," little references sprinkled throughout the Bible that show that yeah, LGBTIA are children of God, would have been considered as such at the time (had that made sense in that historical era), and should be treated as such now.
So don't take any of the biblical stories too literally. They are stories and parables meant to help people make sense of the world and their purpose. For example, he references a part in Leviticus (if I recall correctly), about how a farmer must leave part of his plot unharvested so that the poor may have access. Now you could look at this very specifically and think about how much exactly do we leave? How long? Etc. Or we can see it as one of many ways God shows us that we are responsible for all people, their well-being, and the Earth. Basically: "Don't be selfish and help other people."
Be Christian, don't just be a Christian. Christianity is not about having the right beliefs, it's a practice of doing good things and healing the world, just as Jesus demonstrated.
Please read, enjoy, and then share with the religious bigots in your life!
Thanks to St. Martin's Press, via NetGalley, for this ARC.
August 31, 2026
Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the eGalley to review!
This book is a perfect companion to Broke the Bread, Spilled the Tea by Mitchell Kesller, and gives not just in-depth, ridiculously well-researched answers to some of the most popular non-affirming questions, but provides new questions with which to approach Scripture in a quest to become affirming in one’s spirituality. After all, as we find out, Scripture is chock full of affirming nods. Most importantly, Colby Martin frames all of this in a way that doesn’t harshly condemn non-affirming Christians in an effort to shame them into changing their minds. I appreciate this more gentle approach, which is also epistemological in nature, because people are so quick to shut out anything that makes them feel bad, often making them double-down. This is a great introductory piece for a more inclusive, humanitarian world, and I am absolutely adding it to my personal collection of books to lend to others when they need it.
This book is a perfect companion to Broke the Bread, Spilled the Tea by Mitchell Kesller, and gives not just in-depth, ridiculously well-researched answers to some of the most popular non-affirming questions, but provides new questions with which to approach Scripture in a quest to become affirming in one’s spirituality. After all, as we find out, Scripture is chock full of affirming nods. Most importantly, Colby Martin frames all of this in a way that doesn’t harshly condemn non-affirming Christians in an effort to shame them into changing their minds. I appreciate this more gentle approach, which is also epistemological in nature, because people are so quick to shut out anything that makes them feel bad, often making them double-down. This is a great introductory piece for a more inclusive, humanitarian world, and I am absolutely adding it to my personal collection of books to lend to others when they need it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
"But What About" was an interesting and thought-provoking book. I think the author does a great job of addressing the most common arguments or questions posed by Christians who are non-affirming towards those who identify as LGBTQ. I appreciated that he approached the discussion in a respectful manner towards those who hold non-affirming beliefs.
I think the "love the sinner, hate the sin" chapter is one of the most impactful and important. I also found particularly meaningful the chapter on transgender people and how embracing that aspect of themselves (as who we are is much broader and more complex than our gender identity or sexual orientation) is seeking that sense of wholeness that everyone wants. More significantly, the author makes a compelling argument that the Bible and the teachings of Jesus implicitly support LGBTQ inclusion; one of the core teachings of Jesus is that everyone matters and everyone can belong.
I think the "love the sinner, hate the sin" chapter is one of the most impactful and important. I also found particularly meaningful the chapter on transgender people and how embracing that aspect of themselves (as who we are is much broader and more complex than our gender identity or sexual orientation) is seeking that sense of wholeness that everyone wants. More significantly, the author makes a compelling argument that the Bible and the teachings of Jesus implicitly support LGBTQ inclusion; one of the core teachings of Jesus is that everyone matters and everyone can belong.
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