God's Uncloseted Love
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
TW: this article contains conversation about self-harm.
Believe it or not, 47% of American LGBT adults are religious. A recent Gallup poll found that “religious LGBT adults are socio-demographically diverse, live in every region and state, and participate in all religious denominations.” Within the Church at large, AND within the queer Christian community, there is a diversity of beliefs around what God has to say about LGBTQ people (read this Pew poll on Religion in America and Views on Homosexuality). Many, if not most, denominations continue to uphold a belief that homosexuality should be discouraged.
The people in the pews tend to be more accepting than the denominational standards, though. While some believe LGBTQ to be a political or worldly movement influencing people to “choose” sinful, alternative lifestyles, many others have come to accept that people do not choose to be queer (in this article, queer will be used to include all identities in the LGBT spectrum). From there, some argue that even if God DID make you queer, it is sinful to have any queer sexual contact (or to alter your gender expression).
Finally, there are a growing number of Christians who believe that if God made you queer, the love of God in Christ is moving the church to create pathways where you CAN be a faithful disciple AND live fully into your sexuality/gender expression. This author assumes this last option to be true and life-giving.
I am a youth pastor in The United Methodist Church. I am also a gay man who was closeted until I was 39 years old. While the queer and straight kids in MY youth group will grow up in a church environment that fosters true full inclusion, my heart aches for the millions of closeted Christian youths in America and across the world, who want desperately to be loved by God, loved by their family, and loved by their church. One-third of youths who come out are accepted by their families, One-third who come out are rejected by their families, and the other third choose not to come out until they are adults who can survive independently should their community reject them (read more at TrevorProject.org). Queer youths are more than four times likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Anxiety and fear only increases as youth hear about states like Florida, South Carolina, and Texas, where laws are being passed to silence and disable queer people.
“LGBTQ youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.”
For decades, I prayed that God would make me straight. I would literally tell myself, “I’m not gay, the devil is trying to tell me I’m gay.” I followed all of the rules of the church. I was a virgin until I married a woman in my early twenties (right after graduating from Christian college). I believed that homosexuality was an alternative lifestyle choice, something that I was uniquely tempted with, but that Christ set me free to overcome that temptation. I was terrified for anyone to know that I even “struggled” with “same-sex attraction” because I knew people would think less of me and I feared being removed from leadership in the church. I came out to a Christian therapist and he tried to pray the demon of homosexuality out of me. I came out to a spiritual director and he gave me a pamphlet for conversion therapy. The church kept reaffirming that gay and God were incompatible.
So, even though I believed the free grace of God was available to everyone else, I eventually came to believe that maybe salvation was not meant for me. Why else would God not make me straight? I experienced profound anxiety and depression, and yes, suicidal ideation. I kept coming up with excuses for not coming out. I told myself coming out was selfish. It would only upset and hurt the people around me. I would surely lose everything I had ever worked for if I came out. But by 2018, being closeted was literally killing me.
Being gay wasn’t killing me. Hiding who I was was killing me.
So I had to come out of hiding. I had to let people in to see the real me. Whether they knew it or not, they had known a gay pastor for almost 20 years. All along, they had a gay friend, a gay son, a gay brother, a gay dad. Telling the truth was the hardest thing I have ever done. I finally inhabited the scripture’s call to die to yourself and find resurrection life. For the first time in my life, I believed the promise of salvation in Christ included me…ALL of me. And though it was painful to do so, my life and my faith is more rich than it has ever been.
This comic, and this article, is for you queerly beloved children of God. Let the straight world look on and make their own arguments about how to accept you. I am here to tell you that though the Bible has been used as a weapon against you, it is a book of good news for LGBTQ people from beginning to end. The same scriptures that straight people use to comfort themselves are also promises designed to comfort you in all your queerness. Yes, arguments can be made from scripture, and entire theologies can be developed, that are designed to circumcise you of your queerness, that put the Law before the Gospel, that claim that salvation by faith alone is true for everyone else, but you must first conform yourself to their interpretation of the Law. They can discriminate against you. They WILL discriminate against you. And they will fool themselves into believing that they are somehow being more loving by doing so. It will be painful for you. But it does not, it CANNOT, extinguish the light of the Good News.
They’ve got, what, a handful of verses from Paul that they hold up to say homosexuality is wrong. Guess what? Paul’s theology is ripe for the picking on all the ways God absolutely loves your queerness and wants you to thrive in it.
They’ll argue from Genesis 3, and the fact that Jesus alludes to Adam and Eve as “husband and wife” to prove that queer relationships do not fit within God’s design. Guess what? The Old Testament and the Gospels are FULL of promises and theology that prove over and over that God absolutely loves your queerness and wants you to thrive in it.
When they appeal to church history and doctrine and say they are upholding orthodoxy and tradition, I’d use John Wesley’s own arguments against Calvinism against them:
“And as this doctrine manifestly and directly tends to overthrow the whole Christian Revelation, so it does the same thing, by plain consequence, in making that Revelation contradict itself. For it is grounded on such an interpretation of some texts (more or fewer it matters not) as flatly contradicts all the other texts, and indeed the whole scope and tenor of Scripture.”
John Wesley, Free Grace, makes the argument that using scripture to claim that God hates anybody is a violation of the entire Christian revelation.
When they tell you to listen to the testimony of that one Christian they knew who was delivered from the sin of homosexuality (I know there’s more than one out there, but dear Lord, do they love to lift up “Gay Girl, Good God” as diehard proof!), I’d lead you to QueerGrace.com where you can find countless resources that prove over and over again that God absolutely loves your queerness and wants you to thrive in it. I’d also suggest you watch Pray Away on Netflix to learn just how twisted and damaging conversion therapy is and how we are finding out more and more that it is impossible to make a queer person straight.
Queerly beloved child of God, you are on your own journey, but you do not have to be alone. I remain in a denomination that currently says I should not be allowed to marry the person I love, and I should not be allowed to be in ministry. I choose to stay here because I want to work for change and create safe spaces where I can. But you do not have to do that. You are no less brave if you walk away from places that hurt you. You are no less brave if you choose to NOT come out. God knows who you are and regardless of what the world thinks about that, Jesus Christ died for you because you are beloved, you are worth it. His message of free grace is for ALL people, and that most definitely includes you.
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”