My Cost of Being a Straight, LGBT-Affirming Christian
When I was 13, the first of my friends came out to me as gay. I was Christian, so I thought I was an interesting choice.

The gal who told me was one of my best friends, and I was the one of the first she told. So I did what every good church kid does. I went to my youth workers and asked them what we thought about this stuff. My memory of the conversation was that those adults looked a little taken aback that I had even asked, and although I am sure they gave me an answer, I wasn’t convinced enough to take it as the solution then and there. What followed was nearly a decade of trying to figure out my response.
My parents were (and are) excellent at modelling how to critique politics, sermons and the world around us. They taught me to look at both sides and do my research. So I did that. I read Christian blogs, listened to sermons and asked Yahoo Answers. I went to a Christian conference and headed over to the bookshop, where in the hundreds of books, I found one about LGBT theology, entitled, “Walking With Your Gay Friends.” I wasn’t convinced. I tried to find a book with the opposite opinion, but this was 2007. In my relatively small Christian world, I didn’t know any adults with such rebellious opinions. At least ones who would own up to it. Amazon existed, but I wasn’t let loose with a card and an account until almost 5 years later.
My parents saw me avidly reading the book and doing my research and took my brothers aside and asked them if I was gay. In their defence, the friend mentioned earlier was now dating my other best friend, so I did spend a good chunk of my time talking casually about ‘homosexuality’ as well as consuming more and more research.
By 2012, I still hadn’t reached a clear conclusion when the consultation on same sex marriage was opened by the UK government. It feels so bizarre, writing this in 2018, that gay marriage was never not legal, but it’s only looking back that I see how clearly my high school friends were not supported an openly gay couple, even in huge areas as such as marriage. Civil Partnerships had only been introduced a few years before they started dating, and the consultation was not looking clear cut years later.
Whilst the consultation was going on, I had changed my mind a couple of times how I felt theologically, and had even told my LGBT friends so. (They had asked me what I thought, but I am still shocked at how frank I was.) One week at church, a group of us youngsters were sitting in a line when one of our church leaders asked everyone to stand up and pray that same-sex marriage would not be legalised in the UK. We were horrified. I think we realised that there were people in our church who didn’t support gay marriage, but the assumption that there was no-one in the hundreds of people there who disagreed was shocking. We resolutely remained seated. A few of us cried.
I think it may have been easy as a lifelong church going Christian to accept my church leader’s perspective and move on. I’m not entirely sure how I didn’t. I was still struggling to find any scholars, pastors or teachers who gave me an alternative view in my networks, social media or at the whole variety of Christian events I went to each summer. Two years afterwards, Steve Chalke’s well respected charity, the Oasis Trust, was escorted out of the Evangelical Alliance for their affirming view, but the conversations which followed that event hadn’t even begun. I was mostly stumbling around in the darkness trying to find a resolution by myself.
I think it mostly came down to this: I loved love. I was a wholesale consumer of romantic comedies, in the era which did them best. 27 Dresses, The Ugly Truth, Leap Year: they were beautiful, and irresistable to me. I loved the idea of love. I fancied myself an excellent Elizabeth Bennet, reading far too much, stating my strong opinions and striding all over Manchester, even in the driving rain. I couldn’t wait to find my Darcy, and I couldn’t fathom the idea of the loving God I knew closing that option off to so many good people. So I carried on searching.
The following year I went to theological college. Surrounded by pastors to be, I stuck my head into looking at it from an academic perspective. I challenged one of my lecturers in class when he suggested, “I just don’t understand why they just aren’t happy with civil partnerships.” He was one of the smartest people I had ever met and I was the youngest at the college and I was terrified to disagree with him, but just kind of shouted my response out to the class part way through his sentence. He thanked me for my response and said it gave him food for thought. I was silent for the rest of the lesson, shocked I had managed to get away with it.
Here I met my first people who believed it made more intellectual and logical sense to be LGBT affirming. I went to my first queer theology conference; a mixture of drag renditions of bible referencing musical songs, conversations about BDSM and a lot of language which I had to google during the seminars to understand what was going on. I also made many more friends who were LGBT, wrestling with these questions firsthand. For a while, my conclusions were settled, and could rest.
Then I got in a relationship. A crazy, Hollywood style story of different time zones, songs penned, many Love Actually airport arrivals and Paris at New Year. It was everything I had watched in movies, and it was finally mine for the taking. There was just one problem.
Well, in reflection, there were many. However, this one reared its head the most. We had been battling about it since the evening we met 18 months earlier. He read the same bible as me. But saw something completely different when we closed the pages. He, unlike me, wanted to become a pastor. And pastors don’t generally have wives who disagree with what they preach at the front. At least not in the type of church he was likely to lead. So I went back to my books, and saw if I could see something different, or if I could show him my view.
He never said to me that if I changed my opinions we would stay together. However, whenever we would talk about the future, we couldn’t match up. We broke up, got back together, talked to counsellors, friends, well-known Christian speakers. We just could not build a bridge together to a future where we were together. To me, it was clear, in a relationship which seemingly had everything else, our views, specifically my views, was what was tearing it apart.
One of my all time heroes is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Theologian, leader and fierce opponent of Nazism in Germany, he spoke out and wrote out against Hitler from the beginning of the regime from within Germany. Early on in the war, he was warned of threat to his life, and offered safe passage to Switzerland. He refused to give up the fight. Eventually he would pay for it with imprisonment, and eventually executed, just two weeks before the concentration camp he was at was liberated by allied forces.
I listen to his writings more than most, because they were so clear in how he lived and died. He writes in his most famous book about ‘cheap grace’. You can read the book for free here, and his most quoted extracts are from his opening paragraph in chapter one. He jumps straight in challenging churches and Christians not transformed by their faith, people not willing to make sacrifices to live out their beliefs.
I will never understand what it is like to be an LGBT person in a faith tradition they don’t feel supported by. As a straight person, my relationships will never be scrutinised or judged or have assumptions flung at it like my queer brothers and sisters. And I will probably never be imprisoned or killed for my beliefs, as Bonhoeffer was, or as people of faith are across the world even today.
However, my opinions have not been free of cost. I have had managers remove me from Q+A sessions because someone asked what the church believes about gay marriage, even though I had full intention of presenting both sides. I have had speakers undermine me in front of a group of young people I have been building connections and working with over weeks. I have, more than once, had someone in church ask me if I have read the bible, or a certain part of the bible, or just explained, slowly, as if English is a foreign language to me that God says it is a sin, don’t I know? Those are the measurable costs I can count, but there are many more people who have narrowed their eyes at me, or asked if I respect God at all, and assumed I have no commitment to my faith.
All despite the fact I have studied it and prayed about it and cried about it for over a decade.
And it had almost been that long when I realised that I was going to have to decide whether my opinions were worth giving up my dream for. A little sad, I thought, that a feminist would hold a dream so tightly that was wrapped up in someone else, and in a tradition with a whole bunch of patriarchal baggage. But here I was. I knew that my friends would stand by me, even if I didn’t believe their relationships were the ideal. They had before, when I was trying to figure it all out. And I knew that they would be willing to stand beside me and support me at my wedding, even if I did not do the same for them.
At the time, this decision seemed as simple as that. Now I know it wasn’t, and that the relationship was going to grind to a halt or smash into a wall at some point, whether that be in a month, a year, or ten years.
However, I could not accept cheap grace. I was not called to the path of least resistance. I did not believe that I was given peace and grace by the God I believed in so I could give up on the harder option because it was romantic, or gave me a short cut to what I wanted. So I stood firm, and he ended it. The right decision, may I add, but one I took very hard at the time. I knew that it would be a while before I got so close to a love story like that again.
However, this article is not really about that relationship. It is about all the people who have had to give up something to stand up for their beliefs which support the marginalised in our communities. Many more have given up much more in this journey of giving LGBT people a home in the church. The heroes of Stonewall, every LGBT affirming person in Uganda. Steve Chalke perhaps.
Additionally, I know people who don’t agree with how I read the bible now, who have prayed, read and wept whilst trying to find their way to the truth. I know that there are people who believe different from me yet are more invested than I will ever be.
My story is however one with some smaller sacrifices than those others mentioned above. It is one with a hefty chunk of thought, energy and pain. I hope that as the Church, these are the ways we make this journey. Not with black and white letters, and disdain, and detachment, but with love, and time, and emotion. Because we walk alongside many whose own conclusions, either way, will come with a cost.
If you want some further resources on Christianity and these questions, here are some of my favourite sources (I’m not receiving anything for linking these.)
Permanent, Faithful, Stable by Jeffery John, an excellent introduction to queer theology.
Beyond Inclusion: Lizzie Lowe’s Story, a reflection by a Manchester based church on inclusion after a tragedy involving one of their LGBT young people.
Love Wins: LGBT, a non-profit organisation seeking to equip churches to support LGBT people seeking or involved in faith.
