Queerer Together

LGBTQ People and Faith Communities

By Cody J. Sanders

We are sacred and holy sources of wisdom not because we are ‘just like everybody else’, but because we aren’t – because we are queerer than the status quo says we should be.

Growing up gay in South Carolina, my childhood dream of becoming a Baptist minister seemed like a long shot. But church was a magical place for me as a queer kid in a small town: colorful robes, a solid hour of live choir-and-organ music, stained glass, and art. I wanted to be a part of it.

At age five, when I asked my dad and grandfather to build a church for me in our backyard, they thought it was odd, but they built it anyway. When I asked my grandmother to sew me a robe and ministerial stole, she delivered as if sewing tiny clerical robes were her job. The stained glass window we ‘borrowed’ from storage in my real church’s basement cast just the right light on the tiny makeshift altar. The white steeple and bell accentuated the exterior of the tiny sanctuary just as I had imagined.

I never believed the messages I later encountered, which suggested, on the one hand, that people ‘like me’ weren’t fit to be ministers or, on the other, that queer folk should spurn the church because it had first spurned us. It was my faith tradition: it belonged to me and I belonged to it, no matter the messages to the contrary.

I’ve also never been satisfied simply to ‘fit in’ or be ‘included’ or even ‘affirmed’ by churches. The church helped me to develop my queerer self when I was a kid, escaping the typical boyhood baseball games, wearing my robe and playing church in my backyard. Now I’m called to cultivate the church’s queerer self, because we’re queerer together – LGBTQ people and faith communities.

Practicing faith in community can cultivate imagination of the possibility of living life beyond the restrictive dictates of an oppressive status quo. And there’s no richer source of imagination to stretch us beyond where the status quo would have us stay than those who have been there ourselves. Queer folk are imaginative figures that stand at the margins of communities – often because we’ve been pushed there – and beckon others toward other, beautiful possibilities for life.

Many faith traditions have a long history of appreciative attention to the spiritual experiences of people on the margins, of people who’ve spent significant time in the wilderness, of people – whether by choice or by force – who have nourished their souls in solitude. These are important sites of religious experience in myriad sacred texts. If this still holds true, communities of faith have much to learn from their queer teachers. Our lives, our stories, our experiences, our bodies, are sites of important religious and spiritual knowledge.

What lessons can churches, synagogues, mosques, and spiritual collectives of all kinds interested in the cultivation of robust, resilient communities learn from LGBTQ people, who have cultivated community on the margins for decades: carving out social spaces in the face of police repression, caring for loved ones with AIDS when the government sat silently by and literally wanted them dead, and literally saving the lives of so many exiled from their families and schools and towns and churches?

How can communities whose business is the practice of faith be inspired anew by a group of people who’ve been consistently pushed to the margins of faith communities – banished into the wilderness – yet emerged, often with flourishing faith growing wildly beyond the stagnant standards?

For faith traditions that have too often been negligent of the body and the rich connection between sexuality and spirituality, how might queer bodies become sites of sacred knowledge not just about sexuality or gender identity, but about the divine made manifest in our midst, enfleshed in our embodied experience?

For LGBTQ people and faith communities to grow queerer together, queer folk must first listen to our own lives and stories, our own experiences and bodies, with an ear to hear what they say to us about the divine, the holy, the transcendent, the spirited nature of life. We are sacred and holy sources of wisdom not because we are ‘just like everybody else’, but because we aren’t – because we are queerer than the status quo says we should be.

For faith communities to learn from LGBTQ people as sites of sacred wisdom, religious leaders must develop the capacity to think beyond well-meaning but unimaginative projects of LGBTQ ‘inclusivity’ and ‘affirmation’. We must consider how the presence of LGBTQ teachers in our midst is not about the church’s ‘tolerance’ or our ‘fitting in’, but about queering faith through an appreciative reading of the sacred texts of queer bodies for the queer spiritual gifts that will enrich all of our lives. Because we’re stronger together when we’re growing queerer together.

Rev. Cody J. Sanders, PhD, is pastor of Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Harvard Square and American Baptist Chaplain to Harvard University. His books include Queer Lessons for Churches on the Straight and Narrow: What All Christians Can Learn from LGBTQ Lives, and the forthcoming A Brief Guide to Ministry with LGBTQIA Youth.