The ACLU is tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures this year. Five hundred and thirty. In Kansas, a new law immediately invalidated the driver’s licenses of transgender people and authorized anyone, anyone, to sue someone they suspect of being transgender for using the “wrong” restroom.
This is the context for Pride Month 2026. The outrage is warranted, yet the condemnation, the exclusion, the weaponized Bible verses are not fully what this is about. The more interesting failure belongs to the well-meaning church, the churches that put up the rainbow flag and updated the website and added “all are welcome” to the bulletin. I know these churches. I am one of these pastors.
We thought we were the ones with something to give. It turns out we were the ones with something to learn. The theology was the place to start.
Here is the scandal at the heart of Christian faith: God became human. Bodily. Literally. Irreversibly. The eternal, infinite, wholly other God took on a body with skin and bone, blood and breath, hunger and grief, and having done so, did not recoil. God looked at embodied human life from the inside and called it good. Holy. Worth every bit of it.
“The Incarnation is the most disruptive thing God ever did, and the church has been trying to domesticate it ever since.”
The Incarnation is the most disruptive thing God ever did, and the church has been trying to domesticate it ever since. If God took on flesh, then flesh is sacred. All of it. You cannot confess the Incarnation and then declare some bodies less holy, some loves less sacred, some identities less worthy of God’s presence.
If God took on flesh, then queer flesh is holy. If God became human, then trans bodies bear the image of God. To exclude LGBTQ people from the full life of the church is not a failure of hospitality. It is a denial of the Incarnation itself.
This denial has shown the church didn’t have just a hospitality problem. It had a theology problem. And a lot of us still do, but in some cases, we just accessorized it with a Pride flag.
The Pride flag on the door didn’t fix the theology. My friend Stan Mitchell, a pastor who led his Nashville congregation, GracePointe Church, through the journey to full LGBTQ affirmation, puts it with a precision that has helped me see why: “We finally came to realize our job wasn’t to invite LGBTQ people to the Table. For one, the Table didn’t belong to us; for another, the precious people we thought we were inviting — well — they were already there.”
He then elaborates further: “It was we who were finally making our way to the Lord’s Table and not our wrongly judged siblings; they had been there all along while we were the ones lost and astray.”
The church spent decades debating whether queer people were worthy of a Table they didn’t own, set by a Host they didn’t consult, for a meal they didn’t prepare. That’s not theology. That’s a bouncer at the door of someone else’s party.
LGBTQ people never were waiting for our gracious invitation. They already were at the Table, because the Table belongs to Christ, and Christ had already invited them. What we call “affirmation” is not a gift we gave. It’s a confession we made. And that confession starts with language.
I’m a heterosexual, cisgender ally, and the words we reach for matter more than we admit. We talk a lot about “welcoming” and “inclusive” churches, and I understand the impulse. But those words carry a subtle condescension or an implied hierarchy. We are the hosts; you are the guests. We are doing you a favor by letting you in.
That’s not what affirming means. Affirming means recognizing LGBTQ people are not guests at the Table. They’re family. They’re not recipients of our generosity. They’re bearers of the image of God. They’re not people we’re learning to tolerate. They’re people in whom the full humanity of Christ already is present, whether or not the church has had the grace to recognize it.
“Pride is not a party we throw. It’s a proclamation we owe.”
An affirming church is not a church that has learned to be nice to queer people. It’s a church that has learned to see the Incarnation more fully — a church that has stopped trying to make God smaller than God is. LGBTQ people have been teaching the church about the gospel for decades, about grace under pressure, about resilience in the face of rejection, about what it means to live with integrity when the cost is high. The debt runs in one direction, and it isn’t theirs.
The church didn’t do LGBTQ people a favor by becoming affirming. LGBTQ people did the church a favor by staying, by forgiving, by continuing to believe that the gospel is bigger than our failures.
That is the gospel, in fact. And it is worth proclaiming, especially now, especially this month, with 530 bills on the table and a political movement that treats queer and trans lives as expendable. Pride is not a party we throw. It’s a proclamation we owe. A defiant insistence that God became flesh. All of it. Queer flesh. Trans flesh. Every body, every love, every life.
No legislature, no matter how cruel, and no church, no matter how well-intentioned, can give or take that away.
Andrew Daugherty serves as senior pastor of Pine Street Church in Boulder, Colo. He writes at the intersection of Christianity, culture and the common good at andrewdaughertyboulder.substack.com.
Related:
Love led me out of the closet | Opinion by Brandan Robertson
My journey toward LGBTQ inclusion: God still speaks | Opinion by Chris Conley