There are thousands of young LGBTQ Christians across the country sitting in church pews, overwhelmed by anxiety and shame. Each week, they hear sermons suggesting their identity —something they did not choose and cannot change — is a barrier to…
‘The due penalty of their error’
I have often sat with my older LGBTQ friends and heard their stories of terror and loss during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. This disease spread throughout the LGBTQ community like wildfire, while many leaders in both…
Trump didn’t take his oath on a Bible: What that means
We all saw it: President-Elect Donald Trump raised his right hand to take the oath of office for the second time, while Melania Trump slowly approached him, holding two Bibles. Yet, as Trump recited the Oath of Office, he never…
The Widening of God’s Mercy: A reflection
“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,” says the old hymn by Frederick William Faber, “like the wideness of the sea.” Millions of Christians have sung this song in their churches since it was written in 1862, basking in the magnitude…
The healing ‘heresy’ of Richard Hays
As an LGBTQ Christian, one of the realities that has perplexed me from the very beginning of my journey to reconcile my faith and my sexuality was the insistence of Christians, particularly Catholics and evangelicals, that our theologies of sexuality…
A Christian response to the war in Israel/Palestine
The war between Israel and Hamas has been front and center over the past week. The world watched as violent terrorists shot rockets into Israel, kidnapped civilians and beheaded children in an act of barbarism the world has not seen…
The Bible says nothing about queer people
For far too long the LGBTQ community has conceded Christianity to traditionalists and conservatives, allowing them to perpetuate the narrative that the Bible is clearly anti-LGBTQ and that being queer is a sin. But the truth is that most of…
The death and resurrection of Donald Trump: A warning
It is at once completely unsurprising, but also completely shocking. During Holy Week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R.-Ga., was being interviewed after a rally she held in New York City to protest the arraignment of Donald Trump. In the…
Joshua Bassett’s baptism illustrates LGBTQ+ Christians’ bait-and-switch experiences
Video of openly gay actor Joshua Bassett’s recent baptism at Bethel Church, a prominent conservative evangelical megachurch in Redding, Calif., set off competing responses — including Basset’s. Conservative Christians — who hailed Bassett’s public statement of faith as an example…
The threat of Christian nationalism has only grown since January 6
Last Friday marked the two-year anniversary since the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. On that day, I was living about a half mile away from the Capitol, and I remember sitting in my home, glued…
No middle ground: The culpability of conservatives in queer violence
America has a problem. That’s not news to anyone. But it bears repeating again and again until we, as a nation, awaken from our collective slumber and decide to do something to fix it. A week ago Sunday morning, Americans…
A Southern Baptist saint: Gratitude for the life of Leslie Jordan
When I saw the tweet that read “Comedian Leslie Jordan dead at 67,” I gasped. Then immediately, I felt a tear forming in my eyes — and I never cry. I began scrolling until I found an article that confirmed…