In my last column for Baptist News Global, I wrote a sentence I want to come back to: “I am a trans man who grew up in the church and loved it until it threw me away.”
Some readers may have understood that as a departure. A trans person deciding to walk away from faith. I need to be specific about what happened, because the difference between leaving and being thrown out matters.
I did not leave. I was put out.
Liam Gent
College Station, Texas. Around 2006. I was in my early twenties, attending a large nondenominational church. I was in a small group. I was engaged to a man headed to seminary who is now a Southern Baptist pastor.
I was struggling with what I understood at the time as same-sex attraction. I had been born female. I was attracted to women. I believed that was a sin, because that is what I had been taught. I do not believe that anymore, and I do not think the Bible in its original Hebrew and Greek supports that reading. But in 2006, I believed it. So I did what the church tells you to do when you are struggling. I brought it to my community. I asked my small group for help.
They asked me not to come back.
“I asked my small group for help. They asked me not to come back.”
The following Sunday, I walked into that church. The week before, these people had been my friends. They had invited me to hang out after service. Seven days later, nobody would look at me. Nobody would speak to me. I had not done anything. I had said something. And the cost was everything.
A friend of mine worked at that same church. She also was wrestling with her attraction to women. She was not acting on it. She was trying, like I was, to be straight. The church fired her. Not for anything she did. But for what she felt. She is now a happily married lesbian. I am now a transgender man. There was nothing wrong with either of us. But that church decided we did not belong.
If you have more than five queer people in your life, you probably already have heard some version of this story. These stories are everywhere. They do not make the news. They happen in small groups and fellowship halls and parking lots after service, and the person it happens to carries it for decades.
This is not only my story. This has happened so many times it should have its own liturgy.
A friend told me about a church in the South, back in the 1960s. The town was still divided. Black street and white street. A Black woman came through the doors of the white church on a Sunday, sobbing. Her life had fallen apart. She walked to the front, asking to be saved. The deacons told her if she wanted to be saved, she should go to the Black church down the street.
A woman on the worst day of her life walked into the house of God and God’s people sent her away. The decade changes. The population changes. The mechanism does not. A person in pain arrives at a place that calls itself a house of healing and is told: Not you. Not here.
I keep coming back to this. Christians, especially conservative Christians, say it is the church’s job to care for people. Not the government. Not the schools. The family and the church. That is the line I have heard my entire life. Fine. Then where was my church when I asked for help? Where was the church for my friend who got fired for her thoughts? Where was the church for the woman crying at the altar?
“If the church insists it is the safety net, the church has to catch people.”
If the church insists it is the safety net, the church has to catch people. All of them. Not just the ones whose struggles look respectable.
Love your neighbor as yourself. Your neighbor is not only people who share your race, your orientation, your politics, your pew. Your neighbor also is your enemy.
The command is not complicated. It is just costly. And most of the churches I have been in are not willing to pay.
The same impulse that cleared me out of a small group in College Station is being written into law across this country now. The theology of rejection has found a second career in legislation. That deserves its own conversation. But the root is the same.
I am lucky. I know that. In College Station, there is a small church called Friends Congregational Church, United Church of Christ. They became open and affirming in 1996, the first in their conference to do so.
The first Sunday I attended Friends, the senior pastor, Dan De Leon, said something from the front of the church that I never had heard a pastor say: God loves you if you are gay or straight. God loves you if you are cis or trans. God loves you if you are Black, white, brown, yellow, red, purple, orange or polka dotted. God loves you if you are an Aggie or a Longhorn.
He said it every Sunday. Every single Sunday.
I do not know if I would be writing here today if that kind of love had not been spoken out loud, every week, in a church in the same city where another church had put me out.
For years, Friends was part of an organization that housed homeless families one week a month in the church building. The families they housed had children. The children were hungry. They were getting into the food the church had stored. Some members raised the question: Do we lock the food up? Do we close the kitchen?
They put out a table of food every night instead. So the kids who had been sneaking what little they could would not have to sneak anymore. They could just eat.
That is what church looks like when it means what it says.
The story we are telling on Sundays is about a God who showed up in the rooms nobody wanted to enter. Who sat with the people the religious establishment had written off. Who said, plainly, that what you did to the least of these, you did to me.
I am not asking you to leave your church. I am asking you to look around. Who is not there? Who used to be? Did they leave, or were they put out?
Every person you have put out, you put yourself out with them. That is not poetry. That is the command. Love your neighbor as yourself. What you did to the least of these, you did to me.
Is your church preaching radical love? Or radical hate?
I did not leave. And I am far from the only one.
Liam Gent lives in North Texas with his spouse, Sarah, and is an advocate and educator for the transgender community.