Hey everybody, welcome. We're so glad you've joined us tonight. I'm very excited to introduce you to my guest

Beckett Cook tonight. We're going to talk about our public witness as Christians on topics related to sexuality, marriage, and specifically how that public witness has been playing out in regard to contemporary Christian music artists. So those of you who are regular viewers may know that I come out of the CCM industry. I spent several years as a part of the teen pop group called Zoey Girl. So when there's news related to CCM and culture,

my ears perk up just a bit and I've been noticing that there have been several CCM artists just over the past several years who have changed their stance on sexuality. They've come out possibly in favor of gay marriage and relationships, whether they've said that really explicitly or been more implicit in their affirmation. And of course since its inception, the contemporary Christian music industry has grown into a multi-million dollar industry.

And I wonder if that's one of the reasons that the waters have become so murky on what individual CCM artists believe. If you want to take a look back into the archives, I did a discussion with Jeremy and AD Camp and John Cooper and Corey Cooper of Skillet about this whole phenomenon of deconstruction and CCM artists and what they believe and why maybe we're seeing so many of these changes of their minds on this.

And so with public stories of deconstruction and several of these CCM artists changing their minds on the historic Christian ethic on sexuality and gender, I think it's left a lot of people really confused.

So tonight Beckett Cook is going to join me to share his story because he's got a very unique perspective on this topic to help me speak to this as well.

We're going to take questions live both from Facebook and YouTube. So if you have a question, please write the word question in all caps that will help us to see that it's a question and it won't get lost in all of the other comments.

And so I'm going to bring Beckett on here to talk with us. Beckett, so glad that you joined me again. You've been on the podcast before but it's good to see your face this time.

It's great to be on and we're live, which is, which is scary. We're live. Yeah. Yeah. It's like no editing. We're this is it, right?

Yeah.

So Beckett, you have a unique perspective on the topic of Christianity and the historic sexual ethic of the church.

Now, I want to tell everyone watching that you and I have done an episode before on my audio podcast and that was more of a, you know, a kind of a deeper dive into your story, which you do chronicle in your wonderful book, a change of affection.

So everybody go get that book, a change of affection. There it is. Good. He's ready to go with it. And I've said this before and I don't mean to embarrass you, Beckett, but it's really one of my favorite books.

I found myself reading it and I said this to you before, but I found myself jealous as a lifelong Christian to read your story of being so radically transformed so quickly by the power of the gospel.

I was jealous that I never had quite a radical experience like that, just kind of what seemed to be out of nowhere. So I'd love for you to share how you came to know Jesus and what your life was like before that happened.

Yeah, so as a very young guy, when I was in elementary school, I started to understand that I was attracted to the same sex, which was very much forbidden in the 80s and Dallas, Texas.

And I was raised in the Roman Catholic church. And so it was by cultural standards, by my family standards, by everything, it was it was very taboo to be gay.

So having these having same sex attraction was a very kind of strange phenomenon. I didn't really know what to do with it.

But I kind of I somehow managed to navigate it sort of well. And and then in high school, that's when kind of things took off. I ended up becoming best friends with somebody who was dealing with the same thing.

So suddenly I had this best friend and we could talk about everything with each other. We could talk about our feelings and what was going on. And we actually, I was very perccious and we went out to gay bar.

I was 15 years old, like going to gay bars, going to night clubs and Dallas, going to all kind to going to drag shows drag, you know drag queen shows and which one I the first one I went to it was so shocking to me.

Whoa, this is crazy. But so I had very early on, you know, in high school, I had a lot of kind of experience in the in the gay world. And again, I was so young and I not only was I 15, but I looked even younger.

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