The LGBT+ Scots maintaining a relationship with Christianity

SCOTTISH public discourse is increasingly black and white.

We’re sold an image of two types of person; the person who attends pro-ceasefire demonstrations must inevitably also attend pride parades and Just Stop Oil protests, the one who holds signs outside abortion clinics must also stand with “all lives matter” signs and “marriage = man and woman” banners.

And while these aren’t completely baseless generalisations, it’s increasingly difficult to live between the poles; for example, to be someone who attends Pride on Saturday and church on Sunday.

Last month, I met a group of self-described queer Christians, who straddle two worlds that few of us expect to intersect: the LGBTQ+ community and the church. Now, I don’t believe in God anymore, but as someone who was a believing and practising evangelical Christian until the age of 23, I can understand the faith perspective these people are coming from, and the complex discussions around sexuality and gender in the church.

This article is in no way a defence of the church; but it is a defence of the right of queer people to every aspect of human experience, including a religious faith.

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The first thing that struck me was that everyone I met had different experiences of faith. Jonah grew up as the youngest child of a protestant minister, and has always been a practising Christian. Kelsey has maintained a personal faith from childhood even if she wasn’t regularly attending church.

Luke, on the other hand, started to investigate Christianity as an adult, to justify his distaste for it. To his surprise, through his research he was convinced by the historical evidence for the Bible’s reliability, and therefore convinced by what it says about God. Josh grew up in a more casual, “semi-religious” household but became much more engaged in faith when he was diagnosed with MS in 2018.

Jonah, Kelsey, Luke, Josh and their peers also see faith differently. For Luke, it is a philosophical belief based on reasoning. For Jonah and others, it is a simple, deep belief that there is something bigger out there. Josh needs a bigger meaning to life, as well as a moral guide for his actions. Each of them spoke of Christian principles which inspire them; such as kindness, inclusivity, the universal value of human beings and the fact that everyone deserves a second chance in life.

Each of them also had a complex story of the interaction between faith, sexuality and gender in their lives. Jonah, for example, grew up in the church, and was taught what many churches teach.

“People loved to talk about action versus attraction,” he explains. “You can be attracted to someone of the same gender and that’s fine, but if you act on it, then that’s what’s the sin.”

He acknowledges that it could have been worse: “I was never told, fortunately, that gay people should either try and change their sexuality or just either way marry someone of the opposite gender … I know that certainly other people have experienced that but fortunately I
avoided it.”

While he had questions about these views, Jonah truly believed what he was taught as a teenager, even as he experienced gender dysphoria.

“I would say, ‘Look, if I believed that being trans was real then I would be trans, but I don’t think being trans is real, so I’m not trans’ … I was quite transphobic. And I think a lot of this came from the church. I think also it just came from society as a whole.”

But having stumbled upon queer communities online, he began to explore his gender and sexuality in these spaces, while continuing to be the stereotypically good Christian child, even taking on leadership roles in his youth group.

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After leaving home, his views started to shift:

“I remember in my first semester of university someone asking me, ‘Is it OK to be gay?’, and I said, ‘No, it’s not OK to be gay’, and I kind of hated saying it but I was so used to saying it.

Later, another Christian [said], ‘so it’s not OK to be gay’ ... and I argued against her. I didn’t have any theological reason, I just was like, ‘Nah, I’m done with this’, and then started realising, ‘ah, I’m bi’.”

And so came Jonah’s coming out; first as asexual and biromantic, and then as transgender.

“Oftentimes it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, there were a lot more people in the church who were supportive than I had expected,” he says.

There were the rare people who were outright homophobic – one girl gave him a book that explained why being gay is a sin, “as a resource”. Jonah recycled the book without reading it.

Jonah also found that while people in the church wanted to be supportive, telling them he was queer could never be a simple conversation. First of all, given the “action versus attraction” belief in many churches, Christians who Jonah came out to would not assume that he was going to act on his sexual identity.

“I do know Christian people who are bi and are OK with being bi but don’t personally want to date someone of the same gender. So you kind of have to specify your feelings about it, and often [Christians] were shocked,” he says.

After the surprise came the uninvited opinions: “Something that a lot of Christians don’t understand, is that coming out is not giving permission for them to share their opinions on queer stuff. I’m just telling you about my human experience, I’m not trying to get into a debate with you, I’m not a theologian.

“Honestly, it’s just the admin – it’s just a bit … exhausting,” he goes on, describing the meetings he had with the leaders of the church, to work out whether he could continue to lead a Bible study group as an openly queer person.

“This is the thing about homophobic Christians,” he says, “some of them are just pieces of shit, some of them truly are trying to do their best but their best is very ill-informed … in those meetings, [the church leaders] got upset, they did not like knowing that they were hurting someone.”

But eventually Jonah lost patience despite the good intentions of the church leaders – “they would say things like ‘we really love you but we just don’t think you should be, like, leading children’.

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"I would often think it could be worse, they haven’t kicked me out of the church.

"By the final meeting I just came in all guns blazing and was like, actually, I’m not gonna do this whole being very patient and accepting thing.

"The goal of the church, they say themselves, is to help people develop their relationship with each other and with God, and I said, ‘I don’t think you’re doing your job. I think you’ve failed’.”

In the end, due to a mix of work commitments, friends leaving town and frustration with never-ending discussions about his place in the community, Jonah drifted away from that church and has started attending an openly queer- affirming congregation.

Many of the others felt similarly – that interacting with individual Christians was a lucky dip of outright moral judgement, unexpected allies and people who were very obviously conflicted about how to respond. They also feel that talking about being queer forces some Christians to question their theologies.

“You bring it up and people just kind of look at you – you can see the cogs turning in their brain, they’re trying to calm down, they’re working on it internally.” says Kelsey.

Jonah adds: “There were people who would have said before [that they] don’t support being gay, when I came out they were like, ‘oh, but you’re my friend so that’s fine’.”

Most people felt more support from individuals than institutions. A few queer-affirming institutions exist: the group spoke of a university chaplaincy, queer-affirming churches in Edinburgh and Glasgow and even church ministers attending Pride parades.

But as Luke (above) describes, seeking out these communities can be draining.

“It sucks that queer people can’t just go to their nearby church and find a lovely community, there might be a lovely community there but the rate-limiting factor is whether they will prevent you from being an equal member of the church, or try to change [your queerness].

"Actual queer-affirming churches are so much rarer and you have to do trial and error.”

Jonah and his peers also say that telling people outside of the church that they are a queer Christian isn’t easy.

“When I say I’m Christian, they have one evaluation of me, and then I say I’m queer and they have a very different evaluation of me – but oftentimes people are just confused,” he laughs.

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Kelsey spoke about family members who simply assumed she was no longer a Christian when she came out. Especially in queer spaces, these queer Christians often felt unable to talk about their faith.

“In queer communities, there are times that I feel like it’s not appropriate for me to talk about being Christian because people might take offence,” says Jonah.

“I don’t feel super authentic in the queer community, because being a Christian is a massive part of myself and there’s a lot of Christian-hate in those circles,” adds Luke.

Everyone I spoke with described a feeling of living in between two communities.

“The big thing for me has been inhabiting both queer spaces and then religious spaces, there’s a lot of dissonance between the two,” says Josh. “My queer friends have serious and valid reservations about faith so I don’t feel comfortable being Christian around my queer friends, but I don’t feel comfortable being queer around Christian community.

“You can’t really get fully engaged with either community because of boundaries that are up, because you’ve got both identities."

What was different, though, in how the queer Christians I spoke with described negative reactions from the church, and from the LGBT community, was that the latter are based on legitimate grievances. And these are grievances which queer Christians themselves have, too.

While Jonah was spared conversion therapy in his upbringing, Matthew*, another trans Christian, had a much more damaging experience of “loving conversations” with church leaders.

“They were lovely people,” Matthew said about the first church he went to. “They straight away accepted me and through conversations about getting more involved in the church, I mentioned I was trans because these felt like safe people to say that to. Instantly things switched.

“Not that they were mean to me, but [that they said] this is a sin we need to sort out.”

Matthew was immediately prevented from becoming an official church member, being baptised or even taking communion every Sunday with the rest of the congregation.

Church members stopped using any pronouns at all to describe him. Luke explained that for these Christians, using his preferred pronouns would be “affirming sin” (which is not loving if you believe that all sin is bad for people), but he could see that they didn’t want to hurt him by outright misgendering him.

“I could tell that they were conflicted as well, because they could see that I was in a lot of pain, but also their theology did not match up with them trying to love.”