Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the second installment of a six-part series. The first part is available here.
Divine Binaries
When I think about my conversation with Sarah back in Scotland, I’m not sure I wasn’t mimicking the same behavior of the church I was criticizing. No, it wasn’t exactly “come as you are, and you’ll find out later that you’re not welcome.” It was more “come as you are and hang out for a while I figure out if I should push you away or not.”
I was experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance at the time. Growing up as an empathetic human in evangelical fundamentalism meant I was compelled to lead a bizarre double life when it came to the relationship between love and listening to people. Evangelicalism so often translated “Hear the word of the LORD” as “Don’t hear the words of anyone else.”
Love, as I understand it now, entails both taking people at their word and holding their speech about themselves in tension with the knowledge that their identity is constantly unfolding. You believe them, yet there is also a suspension of belief, not because what they are saying now is necessarily untrue, but because the human self is a universe in flux. The words a person uses today may not be the words they use tomorrow. It isn’t because their words are deficient in any absolute sense, but that no words stand alone and mean something all by themselves–that’s not how language works.
The self evolves through perpetual intercourse with other selves, and so all speech is provisional and contextual, not the final word. There is no ultimate, unchanging authoritative word. Love involves trust in the interpretation of the self that is immediately present, but also expects to be astonished as new aspects of identity bud and flower within love’s line of vision.
Evangelicalism’s message on paper was that God is love and so Christians should love everyone. But evangelicalism also said I wasn’t supposed to believe people if they told me an account of their experience that contradicted or challenged core theological beliefs I already had. More specifically, I wasn’t to believe anything that seemed to go against what the Bible said. The Bible was God’s authoritative, unchanging Word and must be obeyed. The question was always: What does the Bible say about XYZ?
I was to draw near to people but hold them at arm’s length, to play with them but not trust them. Like the love I described above, this version of love also entailed a deferment of belief, but not because the self is a plurality and abundance of speech. It was because the self was knowable to God alone, the ultimate judge and final word on the self. Everyone was moving toward an essential self that would one day be revealed and consequently judged.
As humans, we had the logistical problem of not being God, and thus not always knowing with absolute certainty what was a “right” or “wrong” part of the self. We had the Bible to guide us, but our interpretations were not infallible even if God’s Word was. If it was clear to us that part of a person’s story did not align with how the Bible said they should be, we would reject their witness as untenable.
When it wasn’t crystal clear, we were permitted to suspend our disbelief. But even this was dangerous territory.
So, I found myself in a kind of limbo where I couldn’t listen genuinely to people and let their experiences inform my views unless they affirmed and reinforced what I already believed. I was operating in this binary structure of judgement that divided the world into two categories of human: The saved and the damned.
The self was in flux and this was viewed as an unfortunate but unavoidable reality. Self-fluidity couldn’t be helped, but you were aiming (with divine assistance) to move toward becoming the self that God had assigned you long before birth. That self, once the sin bequeathed by Adam and Eve had been removed through Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross, would be good. In the meantime, no one was absolutely good or bad in a functional sense. Everyone had bits and pieces of good and bad mixed together.
The difference between the saved and the damned was this: The saved recognized that they’d been born with something wrong with them and were trusting God to help them transition into his ideal of a Real Human, the Right Self. The saved knew they’d been born on the wrong side of the good/bad binary and wanted to be rescued to live on the right side. The Real Humans alone would make it into the kingdom of heaven and the rest would go to hell.
That’s where I was when Sarah and I talked. I knew I wasn’t God and didn’t have a complete picture of what a Real Human looked like. I’d been studying the Bible formally for over four years and I knew by then that the Bible isn’t always clear on everything. So, I was letting myself stray into that perilous zone of suspending my disbelief.
I had enough interpretational doubt in my mind not to completely write off queer narratives as incompatible with biblical Christianity. And yet, my theological presuppositions were getting in the way of embrace. Maybe God was queer-affirming, but what if he* wasn’t? Wouldn’t my affirmation of queer people pave the road to their damnation?
*I use the masculine singular pronoun for God throughout this piece for two reasons. In the community I grew up in, God was conceived of as masculine and it was verboten to call God “she.” Using masculine pronouns reflects the exclusively masculine conception of God I was given. For this same reason, I use God with an uppercase G. Also, while there are many ways think about god and gender (I prefer they/them for god, but also see potential in using she/her), uppercasing God goes hand-in-hand with the conception of him as exclusively masculine.