The decision comes as more cities and states require organizations to accept applications from L.G.B.T.Q. couples or risk losing government contracts.
One of the country’s largest adoption and foster care agencies, Bethany Christian Services, announced Monday that it will begin providing services to L.G.B.T.Q. parents nationwide effective immediately, a major inflection point in the fraught battle over many faith-based agencies’ longstanding opposition to working with same-sex couples.
The Michigan-based evangelical organization announced the change in an email to approximately 1,500 staff members signed by Chris Palusky, the organization’s president and chief executive. “We will now offer services with the love and compassion of Jesus to the many types of families who exist in our world today,” Mr. Palusky wrote. “We’re taking an ‘all hands on deck’ approach where all are welcome.”
The announcement is a significant departure for the 77-year-old evangelical organization, which is the largest Protestant adoption and foster agency in the United States. Bethany facilitated 3,406 foster placements and 1,123 adoptions in 2019, and has offices in 32 states. (The organization also works in refugee placement, and offers other services related to child and family welfare.) Previously, openly gay prospective foster and adoptive parents in most states were referred to other agencies.
The decision comes amid a high-stakes cultural and legal battle that features questions about sexuality, religious freedom, parenthood, family structure and theology.
Adoption is a potent issue in both gay and conservative Christian communities. More than 20 percent of same-sex couples with children have an adopted child, compared to 3 percent of straight couples, according to a 2016 report from the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A. School of Law. Gay couples are also significantly likelier than straight couples to have a foster child.
Many Christians are also deeply invested in issues surrounding adoption and foster care. Faith-based agencies play a substantial role in placing children in new families, and four in 10 Protestant churchgoers say their congregations have been involved in the issue in the past year, according to a 2018 survey by Lifeway Research, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
Bethany’s practice of referring gay couples to other agencies was not official, leaders at Bethany say. “It was a general understanding that was pervasive,” said Susanne Jordan, a board member and former employee. But since 2007, the organization had a position statement saying that “God’s design for the family is a covenant and lifelong marriage of one man and one woman.”
Bethany’s informal policy became increasingly challenging for the organization in recent years, as various states and municipalities began requiring agencies to accept applications from L.G.B.T.Q. couples in order to maintain their government contracts.
When a lesbian couple in Philadelphia attended a Bethany information session on foster parenting in 2018, they were told “this organization has never placed a child with a same-sex couple,” one of the women told The Philadelphia Inquirer. They were eventually referred to another agency. Media reports about the incident prompted the city to suspend contracts with Bethany’s local branch and Catholic Social Services, another Christian agency with the same practice.
Some faith-based agencies have challenged new requirements to work with gay clients in the courts. Catholic Social Services sued the City of Philadelphia over its contract suspension, a case that the Supreme Court heard in November. A ruling is expected by the end of June.
Bethany, by contrast, has generally opted to comply. In Philadelphia, the branch quickly changed its policy to work with gay parents, and the city restored its contract. That year, Bethany’s national board passed a resolution granting local boards the authority to comply with state and local contract requirements. As of last year, the organization said, Bethany branches in 12 states were working with L.G.B.T.Q. families, although those changes were rarely publicized.
Bethany’s new approach is something of a tightrope act: an attempt to establish a clear, consistent policy of inclusion that does not rattle its core constituencies, including the churches that are its primary venue for recruiting parents. The inclusivity resolution passed in January eliminated the 2007 position statement on marriage being between one man and one woman. But the new statement does not endorse same-sex relationships — in fact, it does not even mention them.
The policy, which was quietly approved by its 14-member national board on Jan. 21, instead states that “Christians of mutual good faith can reasonably disagree on various doctrinal issues, about which Bethany does not maintain an organizational position.”
The board’s vote was unanimous, but internal discussions have prompted “a few” board members to depart since 2018, according to Nathan Bult, Bethany’s senior vice president of public and government affairs. He emphasized that the current board includes members with “diverse personal views on sexuality.”
Many evangelical nonprofits are familiar with how policy changes like this can go awry. When the evangelical relief agency World Vision announced in 2014 that it would begin hiring Christians in same-sex marriages, donor backlash was so fierce that the group reversed the decision within 48 hours. Mr. Palusky, who arrived at Bethany in 2018, was an executive at World Vision at that time.
Even Bethany’s past partial acquiescence has drawn fierce criticism from some conservative evangelicals, including from within its own ranks. Bethany’s Mississippi branch parted ways with the national organization over objections to the policy change in Philadelphia. And when the organization changed its policy in Michigan in 2019, in response to the state’s announcement that it would no longer fund agencies that don’t accept gay couples, a cover story in evangelical World magazine read “GIVING UP” with an illustration depicting a hand waving a white flag from behind a desk.
Bethany released a statement saying it was “disappointed” in the Michigan requirement at the time. But Mr. Palusky also argued that becoming technically open to L.G.B.T.Q. clients in a few locations would not have a significant impact on the organization’s work.
Over time, however, “it got to a point where it became really untenable to have this patchwork of practices,” Mr. Bult said. “Bethany was ready and Christians are ready.”
Indeed, attitudes toward homosexuality have been shifting in theologically conservative evangelical circles, a trend that accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges recognized the right to same-sex marriage nationally. Between 2009 and 2019, white evangelical support for same-sex marriage nearly doubled, from 15 percent to 29 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
In the coming months, Bethany will offer training to all employees, including those at branches that have not worked with gay families. “We’re opening the door to more families and more churches,” Ms. Jordan said. “We recognize there are people who will not be happy. We may lose some donors. But the message we’re trying to give is inviting people alongside of us. Serving children should not be controversial.”
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