Kontent Director David Munro’s short video for Underground Advertising and NY advocacy group Believe Out Loud shows a young boy and his two moms catching uncertain glances in church. It carries a simple, seemingly universal message: Open your hearts, and open your parishes. The response among progressive churches and clergy was swift and positive. The spot went viral, netting thirty thousand YouTube hits in just the first week. Pastors screened the video at Sunday mass to loud applause. Gay and lesbian worshippers said they watched with tears in their eyes.

However, the amens hit an unholy snag when Sojourners – the nation’s leading progressive Christian publication – refused to give the video its blessing.

The controversy started when Believe Out Loud submitted to Sojourners a series of web ads with the video’s link to launch their A Million Christians for LGBT Equality campaign on Mother’s Day. The social justice oriented, Washington, DC-based Sojourners promptly rejected it – and the blogosphere erupted, followed by write ups in the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast. Gay and lesbian groups, both Christian and secular, were outraged.

In a letter of response, Obama’s spiritual advisor and Sojourners publisher, Jim Wallis, said his group steered clear of ads that seek to promote “wedge issues” which could create division and disrupt the organization’s primary mission. LGBT Christians shot back asking how love and acceptance in church, of all places, could possibly be divisive, let alone political. They felt especially betrayed by Wallis who has espoused a “big tent” theology as one of evangelism’s few progressive voices. Apparently, the tent was smaller than we thought.

The resulting dialogue, and the profile it has spawned, has likely spread the video far wider than an ad in Sojourners ever could have. Hallelujah for that.

A message from the agency Underground Advertising