Like many evangelicals, I practiced the “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach to LGBTQ people for many years. I wouldn’t have said it exactly that way, but the sentiment was the same. Which was an easy and popular perspective to hold for a straight woman living in a conservative, southern community that’s also predominantly evangelical.
I didn’t have any family members, friends or neighbors who were gay, so practicing “love the sinner, hate the sin” cost me nothing.
On the other hand, if I openly supported LGBTQ Christians as equally deserving of fellowship in the church and basic human rights that the rest of us take for granted, it could cost me a lot:
— the respect of my family and my church community
— a sense of belonging
— a long-held narrative about who was in and who was out
— a narrow interpretation of scripture that upheld a million other facets of my life and identity.
I wouldn’t say that I was fully conscious of weighing these pros and cons, but I only talked about inclusivity topics with very close friends or in small groups. In these conversations, as I tried to shore up my existing worldview, I was often the most vocal opponent of the gay community’s right to acceptance by the church. Still, I felt no closer to the ‘truth.’
Because even though I didn’t agree with or understand gays, I knew well enough the sting of judgment, condemnation, and rejection in all its most subtle and not-so-subtle forms. I knew the emotional cost first hand, and no matter how I dressed up “love the sinner, hate the sin,” it didn’t feel very loving.
Who wants to be part of a community that says they love you but finds everything about you abominable?
Human beings are made for community. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, belonging and a need for inclusion are just above our need to eat and be safe. Not everyone wants to belong to a church, of course. There are many ways to find community and meaning in life.
Many though, myself included, have found fulfillment in belonging to a supportive spiritual community. I couldn’t imagine being discouraged or even openly denied inclusion by people who claim to represent God.
So I began to listen to the stories of gay Christians and what they’d experienced from the church. I wanted to discern the outcomes, or the spiritual fruit, of “love the sinner, hate the sin.”
I also took Jesus’ admonition to “love my neighbor as myself” seriously with exercises in empathy. I put myself in the shoes of a gay person embraced by “love the sinner, hate the sin” Christians. Would I feel loved?
— I imagined my parents telling me that they love me but that they couldn’t possibly accept who I was or the person I wanted to spend my life with.
— I imagined coming out at a church and having the community that once felt warm and safe tell me I needed to change if I wanted to continue to belong, hide who I was, or risk being either rejected or treated as ‘other.’
— I imagined getting to know a straight Christian friend and feeling ‘loved’ and accepted only to discover that they ‘hated’ an essential part of my identity.
— I imagined one of my kids coming out to me and how I would respond lovingly and what kind of support I would want from my church community.
When I put myself in the shoes of LGBTQ believers and their family members, not only did “love the sinner, hate the sin” not feel loving, it felt downright un-loving and painful.
My, admittedly limited, exposure to the stories of LGBTQ believers confirmed this narrative. They told stories of intense pain, rejection, and separation that left many of them not wanting anything to do with God, the church, or Christians.
The picture of the church I had held for more than three decades began to unravel. For people like me the church was mostly a safe, comforting place of belonging. For many others though, the church was a source of judgment and condemnation, pain and rejection, isolation and separation.
Still, the issue didn’t affect me personally. I had the option of staying under the radar. Lying low and fitting in.
Thank God I also had forty years of moral training based on the teachings of Jesus, who boldly loved people that the rest of his community called undesirable. I had the example of Paul, a pharisee of the pharisees, a man who knew how to play the religious game that would win him the respect of his tradition and chose instead to listen to another voice.
When I finally left my church, the experience was as painful as I anticipated. But I found other examples of faithful interpretations of the same scriptures that I was taught condemned LGBTQ people. And I found a new community of gay and straight believers who served and worshipped and did life together. Watching them, learning with them, belonging to them, I also found freedom from the burden of my own judgment.
This is what has perhaps surprised me the most over the past few years. The benefits of inclusion and acceptance are for everyone — gay and straight. When we judge our fellow human beings and reduce them to an issue or what we see as a problem, we hurt them deeply, but we also diminish ourselves and our own view of God. We are saying that we believe there are aspects of our humanness that overshadow God’s goodness. I don’t believe that, and I don’t think any good Christian should.
I’m not writing this because I love controversy. I really don’t, though I believe strongly in speaking up for what’s right and for those who have been overlooked in my own community. I’m not writing this because I’m a paragon of social justice or an expert on LGBTQ rights or a theological ninja.
But I once thought that the only people who believed in LGBTQ inclusion in churches came to that stance by going around scripture or because they needed to justify ‘sin’ in their own lives or the lives of the people they loved. I’m just one example of how that’s not the case. I came to my conclusions by following Christ’s example to its natural conclusion — unconditional love.
I also write this because I know there are many Christians who are still struggling with the disconnect between “love the sinner, hate the sin” and their own experience with God. They’ve been told by any number of well-meaning authority figures that the most loving, Christian thing they can do is look the other way.
And yet they just can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right.
So I offer a question that I had to ask myself when I started this journey:
What if inclusion of LGBTQ believers is just the right thing to do? What if it isn’t an example of the world infiltrating ‘our’ churches but a move of the Holy Spirit calling us back to something holier and more complete, a love that makes brothers and sisters out of strangers?
That’s something that I for one want to be part of.
Thanks for reading—
Christa
If you enjoyed this story and are interested in reading more like it, check out my series, “Leaving Church, Losing Religion and Other Spiritual Traumas.”
