A decade after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Southern Baptist Convention wants to roll it back. In June, the SBC overwhelmingly voted to pass a resolution, “On Restoring Moral Clarity Through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family,” which defines marriage as an exclusively heterosexual covenant and calls for the overturning of Obergefell.
For many Americans, gay marriage feels like a settled issue. For Southern Baptists and others who share their theology, the question of the legality of gay marriage is still open. In their view, political and theological opposition is the only possible Christian response to gay marriage, and continuing to challenge marriage equality is a moral duty. The Church they have shaped has no room for the alternative path that many gay Christians have found: not leaving our religion, but embracing our sexuality alongside our faith.
I grew up in conservative, evangelical churches. For my undergraduate degree, I attended Union University, a Southern Baptist school in Jackson, Tennessee. I graduated in 2013, and in the years leading up to Obergefell I saw how the growing cultural acceptance of same-sex relationships was haunting Southern Baptist leaders, who viewed it as an existential threat. Their idea of Christian faithfulness in America became synonymous with fighting for a narrow, biblically literalist sexual ethic to be the law of the land.
The resolution from the Southern Baptist Convention echoes the arguments I heard as a student: Secular laws are meant to reflect God’s moral order, and calling a same-sex partnership a marriage is flatly lying. In one of my ethics classes at Union, the professor insisted that Christians should strongly oppose the legalization of gay marriage as a matter of love for our neighbor. We should not let others enter into something we knew would be destructive, no matter how much they might think they wanted it.
One of my classmates suggested that people might be born gay. Would this require a more compassionate response? The professor was unfazed. “I’m sure there is a biological component, and that doesn’t change my view. You can have cancer that is not your fault, and some people are born with cancer of the soul.”
The threat Southern Baptists perceived was not just to the social order at large. I heard dire warnings that the legalization of gay marriage would become the catalyst for renewed Christian persecution in America. I heard sermons describing a future where our Church would be dismantled because we refused to perform same-sex marriages. Gay marriage was not a matter of individual freedom; the real freedom at stake was our religious liberty.
These predictions have not come to fruition in the 10 years since Obergefell, but the fears persist. In “On Restoring Moral Clarity,” it crops up in references to laws compelling people to “speak falsehoods about sex and gender” and the right of each person to “speak the truth without fear or coercion.” Though churches still have the freedom to refuse to perform gay marriages, ordain openly gay people, or serve Communion to those in same-sex relationships, the idea that Christians are legally forced to accept LGBTQ identities remains a powerful rhetorical tool.
My alma mater also benefits from religious exemptions to nondiscrimination laws: In 2020, Union University rescinded its admission of a student entering its nursing program after learning that he was gay. As it did then, the current student handbook at Union prohibits “homosexual activities” and the “promotion, advocacy, defense, or ongoing practice of a homosexual lifestyle.” Despite national reporting and a flood of stories from gay alumni about the damage these policies caused, the university continues to exclude LGBTQ students.
When I was a student at Union, I did not know I was a lesbian. Maybe it is more accurate to say that I could not know. I believed in and yearned for the God the Church had taught me about. I could not reconcile what I had been raised to believe God wanted from me with the truth of my sexuality.
When I finally realized I was gay, I was no longer in the Southern Baptist Church. After graduating from Union, I joined a congregation in the Anglican Church of North America, a conservative denomination formed in a split from the Episcopal Church over women’s ordination and the inclusion of gay members. My new church’s leaders felt no need to lament Obergefell when it passed, but they still taught that same-sex relationships were antithetical to Christianity. When I came out to them in 2018, the choice set before me was either lifelong celibacy or leaving my beloved community behind. According to my Southern Baptist education, I was also choosing whether to leave God behind.
The evangelical voices in my life framed my dilemma as a choice between faithfulness to God and weakness—a capitulation to secular logic and a selfish desire for pleasure. In Matthew 16:24, Jesus calls on his disciples to “deny themselves and take up their cross.” Gay Christians are all too familiar with these words as weapons. Everyone has a cross, we are told, and it just so happens that ours is living without the romantic partnership we are built to flourish within.
Pastors and mentors assured me that I was following God’s design, so my sacrifice would eventually lead me to “have life … abundantly,” which Jesus promises in John 10:10, no matter how painful the interim. The final sentence of “On Restoring Moral Clarity” says that Christians proceed “trusting that” God’s “ways lead to human flourishing.” No amount of despair, suffering, and death (most literally reflected in increased suicidality among LGBTQ people of faith) experienced by gay Christians has managed to challenge this presupposition. It is a matter of faith that our suffering is godly. We continue to receive counsel to take up our cross in the hope of a distant resurrection.
I spent years telling myself that I could love my Church enough to make up for all the love I would never have. I hoped that the emptiness that burned in my chest could be transformed. It was only one rule. Could I really not follow just one rule?
But that one rule was not one simple sacrifice. It was the total subjugation of my ability to give and receive love, an all-encompassing demand of fealty to the authority of my Church.
The ground shifted under me as I fought to stay in the Church. By the summer of 2020, I was in a deep crisis of faith. I saw gay Christians happily married while retaining their commitment to faith, and I could not in good conscience deny the Holy Spirit I saw at work in these relationships. I realized that the choice was not between God and my desire for a relationship. It was between my church community and my own integrity.
My decision to leave was agonizing. I sobbed through conversations where a pastor recited our Church’s theology of marriage. I prayed for a way forward. In the end, the only way forward was out.
Today I work for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), at a congregation that fully affirms all LGBTQ people. I am effectively estranged from the communities that I grew up in and committed to as an adult. At first, I worried that embracing my sexuality alongside my faith meant choosing a less serious, less disciplined form of Christianity. Instead, I have found that in leaving my Church, I found only deeper love for God.
The cross I took up did not turn out to be forgoing romantic partnership for the rest of my life. Instead, it was listening to the voice of the Spirit within me even when it cost me more than I knew I had. I was not surprised to lose friendships and the network of support that I had had in the evangelical Church. What took longer to accept was the unmooring of my identity, the need to find a new center for my spirituality once I let go of the theology that shaped me. To affirm the goodness of my sexuality, I had to find a new home.
In my Southern Baptist university and the evangelical Churches I grew up attending, I often heard that opposition to gay marriage was a sincerely held religious belief that Christians should be allowed to practice. I never heard this same language extended to Christians who affirmed the goodness of same-sex relationships. I heard only that theological affirmation of LGBTQ identities was a weak attempt to appease secular culture.
For many Christians, affirmation of queer identities is an equally sincere religious conviction. The churches that embrace LGBTQ people as beloved members of the community are motivated by Christian love for God and neighbor. We see the beauty of God’s design in our real, embodied lives, and we seek human flourishing that is more than an abstract promise of finding meaning in the pain.
The gay and trans Christians I know are the most committed people of faith I have ever met. We had every reason to leave, and yet we are still here. We are here because we still believe in Jesus, and we still believe the Spirit works through this beloved, holy, and achingly human Church.
Historically, the Church has seen marriage as a vocation, a calling from God to be formed by a particular way of life. When gay Christians seek to commit their life to their partner through marriage in the eyes of God and the law, they are asking for the religious liberty to act on their sincerely held convictions. For 10 years, Obergefell has protected our right to practice our faith as our conscience dictates. May we continue to have the freedom to love as God leads us to for many generations.
The post I Left My Church—And Found Christianity appeared first on The Atlantic.
