I grew up in a conservative American evangelical Christian environment circa 1990-2010. In this context, it was considered a sin to be queer. This is the story of how I became queer-affirming in that environment. This is the first installment of a six-part series.
Come As You Are, Just Don’t Be Queer
I didn’t know that Sarah was queer as we walked on a Scottish beach in 2010, talking about the church where we’d first met back in the United States.
Sarah came from a liberal church background but was interning at a more conservative church. At a time when conservative evangelicals were just starting to consider that maybe being gay or lesbian wasn’t a choice, queer affirmation wasn’t even a question for Sarah. Queer people should be treated equally with the same dignity and civil rights as anyone else. Queer Christians should be allowed to be ordained, love who they love, and serve in the church with the fullness of their identities out in the open.
Sarah herself was in seminary studying to become a pastor and was frustrated that the pastor of our mutual church back home wasn’t even open to hosting serious discussions about same-sex relationships.
This church was one of those young, predominantly white, hipster evangelical churches that opened its doors to the doubters, the skeptics, and the people with tattoos–and served them organic, locally sourced coffee to boot. But as has become increasingly common in such churches, the “come as you are” vibes were mostly smoke and mirrors that obscured a strong devotion to heteronormativity and theologically conservative values. If you were queer, you could come as you were and eat and drink and talk and (who knows?) maybe even take communion. But you’d soon learn that you couldn’t teach or serve in leadership positions. And if you wanted to get married to someone of the same sex, you’d have to do it in another church since the church couldn’t condone it.
Ever the reserved and cautious listener, I absorbed Sarah’s frustrations and agreed that churches should, at a minimum, be willing to talk about things and be open to change. Refusing to listen and talk is never the right answer.
But I was conspicuously silent on whether I was queer-affirming. The truth is, I wasn’t sure I knew.
A Big Fucking Party
I was raised in a religious community that believed it was a sin to be gay–though it’s a little anachronistic for me to use that language. At the time, there was no real concept of “being gay” or any of the other identities represented by the initialism LGBTQIA+.
People tended to use terms like “homosexuality” and “same-sex attraction” based on the premise that attraction outside a heteronormative framework was unnatural (=ungodly) and should not be understood as part of a person’s identity. Desire was treated more like an alien invader to root out than a neighbor to negotiate with and hold dear.
In many Christian circles, the term “queer-affirming” is used to describe a church (or person) that believes Christians should accept LGBTQIA+ people without qualification and not view their queerness as a sin or a problem to be solved.
I’m not a huge fan of this term. It doesn’t feel restorative enough or come close to describing how fundamentally personal (and communal) consciousness can and must change as it embraces queer bodies and reorients to cultivate more equitable habits of being.
Nonetheless, it feels important for me to write about how I became queer-affirming in a non-affirming religious context. So many of my friends and former classmates from Bible college have either come out or are negotiating the process of coming out, and they deserve support.
But this isn’t just about them–it’s about all of us. Heteronormativity and queerphobia are rooted in harmful stories that damage everyone, albeit in different ways.
I think that’s why, on a very personal level, this piece has been so hard to write. I’ve moved far away from my initial questions and toward a posture of celebration of queer bodies, coupled with a deep lament for how the heteronormative patterns of our world continue to perpetrate emotional, psychological, and physical harm to real people. These wounds we inflict by participation in the dominant culture’s toxic stories about sexuality and gender (wittingly or unwittingly) are a kind of communal self-harm. These harms won’t be healed apart from the queering of our minds and the justice-oriented transformation that comes with it.
I can’t pretend like the query I started with was any good. The question for me as an evangelical Christian was: Does God affirm queer people or not (and thus should Christians affirm or not)?
“Should we include someone at this table?” fails to interrogate the power dynamics at play. It does not challenge who owns the table or how it was designed to begin with. The question of whether to include or exclude comes from a position of power, from the bodies for whom the table was built.
“Why, yes, I affirm you. I’ll let you sit at this table that was designed for me and is still oriented around me. How big of me to let you sit here. And please know that I value your opinion, just make sure you use your indoor voice and say please and thank you.”
We need to overturn the whole fucking table.
But of course, this was not always so obvious to me as it is now. If it had been, I would have no journey to tell you about. This series could just as well be titled How I Realized My Questions Were Rubbish.
Still, I can’t talk about “queer-affirmation” in the way I would’ve in the past, by whipping out my three higher degrees in theology and biblical studies and giving you an exegetical play-by-play of how my interpretation of specific Bible passages evolved. (If you do want resources that deal with biblical interpretation, though, drop me a line and I’ll help you get find them.)
I can’t return to the old queries when all I want to do is haul in a huge table and help get ready for a dinner party. That’s really all people have been fighting for: A big fucking party with a new table where every body belongs and no one has to constantly argue for their right to exist. (It hardly needs to be said that this party includes basic civil rights and reparations, and lots of nice quiet rooms where queer introverts can celebrate in peace.) It’s a perfectly reasonable demand.
Maybe you’re not ready to pull up a chair. Maybe you’re still uneasy about this party because you, too, were raised in a homophobic environment and undoing that shit isn’t easy. If you are uncomfortable, that’s okay. Well, it’s actually not okay, but also, it is. You are where you are. But what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t invite you to the party? So, please join me, at least for a short while. Have a drink. Look around.
It’s okay if you feel awkward or don’t know all the right words to say. No one does. That’s one of the hard and beautiful things about this party: The language is evolving and we’re learning it together. Many of the old names and ways of talking ended up erasing or alienating people, so we’ve got to keep making new vocabulary and reworking the grammar.
At this party, it’s considered a gift to receive correction, for anyone to pull you aside and say, “Don’t use those words; they contribute to my erasure. Use these other words instead. Here, I give you the name I’ve chosen for myself–speak it. I give you the pronouns by which I want to be called–use them. Together, we will make the world over again.”