Desiring Jesus in a world of queerphobic Christianity

It’s no secret that Christians do terrible things, or that terrible things have been done in the name of Jesus and the Christian God. As a scholar of Christian theology and racism I know that Christianity has some serious problems. But recent events in my life have brought this truth home to me in a deeply personal way, to the point where I’m questioning whether, as a queer person, being a Christian makes any sense.

One of my oldest and dearest friends died at the end of March 2025 at the age of 46. Ben was a gay man who grew up in an evangelical Christian family. His parents kicked him out of the house when he came out to them in his late teens, asked people to pray for him to be delivered from homosexuality, and under their influence Ben submitted himself to conversion therapy. Despite these experiences, Ben spent much of his adult life as a happy, out and proud gay man. By the time of his death, he appeared to have reconciled with his family. But the funeral they arranged revealed they had learned very little from Ben. His friends were excluded from taking a role in the service, and at no point was Ben named as gay. It was an abusive act of queer erasure. Ben’s funeral brought me face to face with Christianity as abuse. In making him homeless and sending him to conversion therapy, Ben’s parents abused him materially, psychologically and spiritually, and their Christian faith was integral to this abuse. Their Christianity led to them cremating him in a closet, unable to name his reality as a gay man.

The cremation service was led by the pastor of an Elim Pentecostal church attended by one of Ben’s siblings. This pastor, who of all the people in the room knew Ben the least, told us that Ben was now more alive than he’d ever been. I thought, ‘he seems pretty dead to me.’ The pastor then had the audacity to use Ben’s cremation as an evangelism opportunity, inviting folk who wanted to learn more about Jesus to speak with him. Ben would have hated this moment. I rolled my eyes so hard my head lolled back in my chair. I thought, ‘Why would I want to know the Jesus you’ve offered me today? A Jesus of silence and shame? A Jesus of denial? A Jesus who stands for queer erasure and abuse?!’ I found what was before me utterly sickening, and in that moment I didn’t want to be a Christian anymore. I didn’t want to be associated with this delusional, homophobic cult. I was so tired of sharing Jesus with these terrible, terrible people.

Several weeks later we were hit by another tragedy. My mother-in-law Rose died after a long journey with cancer at the age of 79. Like Ben’s mum, Rose was an evangelical Christian, but of the Methodist variety. And like Ben’s mum, Rose was gifted with a gay son. This was a gift she initially found hard to accept. She experienced her son’s sexuality a source of shame. Unable to seek support from her Christian friends, the first person she confided in was my mum whom she’d never met. Looking back, it seems to me that she needed to go through a process of ‘coming out’ herself. She needed to ‘come out’ as the mother of a gay son. She gradually came to know that being gay just wasn’t a big deal. I think our wedding was a watershed moment for her. Seeing our love celebrated by all our family and friends banished most of the remaining reservations she may have had about the goodness of being gay. The last birthday card I received from her, months before she died, was to ‘a top-notch son-in-law.’

In the process of clearing out Rose’s house, I was given the task of sorting out her immense library. She kept everything, and her bookshelves reflected the various experiences and aspirations of each stage of her life. Her journey with homosexuality was part of this, and we came across many books by evangelical Christians warning of the dangers of homosexuality. We tore up book after book by the arch-homophobe James Dobson, founder of the rabidly anti-queer Focus on the Family, put them in the recycling bin.

Rose was a dyed-in-the-wool evangelical, the daughter of a Methodist minister and a Methodist local preacher herself. As I extracted the homophobic literature from her library, it struck me that she had come to accept her gay son and his partner not because of her Christianity, but in spite of it. Ben’s mum and Rose were both saturated in a homophobic evangelical Christian culture, and both gifted gay sons. One responded in accordance with that culture, and one learned to resist it. Meanwhile, as someone who grew up in a non-religious family, with parents who only ever wanted me to be happy, I thank God I didn’t grow up in a Christian home.

Amidst all of this I celebrated Easter at my local Anglican church. I cried my way through Taizé chants during the Good Friday service. I cried some more at the Easter Vigil on the Saturday evening. During the Vigil the priest said, ‘May almighty God who has given you the desire to follow Christ give you the strength to continue in the way.’ I asked God, ‘why have you given me this desire, when so many of your churches are places of queer death?’ As a queer person, the desire to follow Christ feels more like a curse than a blessing. The weekend after Easter I attended a trans liberation rally in my city centre, protesting the transphobic ruling of the UK Supreme Court. One protester held a placard with a picture of the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, a gay Christian MP who pushes transphobic policies. The placard read ‘No Hate Like Christian Love.’ How can I commend Jesus to my queer friends when most of his followers are our enemies?

This is a painful, confusing and rage-filled time for me, and it’s hard to make meaning out of it. One thing I’m rediscovering is that the only way I can be a queer follower of Jesus, the only way, is as a Quaker. I became a Quaker because they were the only religious group I knew of who’d accept me as a gay man, and in the face of Christian queerphobia only a Quaker approach to Jesus makes sense to me. The Christianity of people like Ben’s parents is one I just don’t recognise. We both call out to Jesus, but our Jesus’ are so different that one of us will eventually be told ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers’ (Matthew 7.23).

I have generally been an ecumenically minded Christian, but I feel more emboldened to say that any Christianity which treats the Bible as a divinely inspired, primary source of authority is highly suspect. The Bible contains passages which, on a plain reading, are highly dangerous for queer people, and so all Christianities that idolise the Bible will tend towards queerphobic abuse. From their 17^th-century beginnings, Quakers have said that Christians get it wrong when they look for guidance primarily in the printed words of the Bible or the authority of bishops. Our most reliable guide is Christ the Living Word who is found within.

I’ve been reading the work of Elisabeth Bathurst who wrote a brilliant summation of Quaker theology in 1679. She writes that we can’t depend on the Bible as a primary guide because it’s a flawed text vulnerable to misinterpretation that can’t possibly cover all eventualities. God loves us too much to make us depend on a collection of ancient human-made documents. The written word is just too static to be applied reliably to our dynamic and varied lives. The only dependable guide is the Inward Guide placed within us by God: ‘The inward Oracle (which is a Measure of God’s Spirit, whereby we obtain access to him, with Answer and Direction from him in all our Concerns, about which we enquire of him) undeniably is of greater Authority, both to beget living Faith, and order us therein; and a more perfect Rule to guide our lives, than the outward Writings of the Scriptures, which in many things leave us without either counsel or instruction.’[1]

Queer people know this ‘inward Oracle’ well. Many of us grow up in a world opposed to who we know ourselves to be. Queer people know that, to survive, we have to trust this still small voice that tells us who we really are, and that we are loved and lovable. The truth of this ‘inward Oracle’ is the Quaker good news. As a queer cursed with desiring Jesus, I’m holding on to my experience of this ‘inward Oracle’ to get me through. What Quakers today almost always refer to as the Inner Light, Bathurst gives a multitude of names: the Grace of God, the Light of Jesus, a Manifestation of the Spirit, the Glad tidings of Salvation, the Word of Reconciliation, the Law written in the Heart, the Word of Faith, the Seed of the Kingdom, the Stone rejected by many a foolish Builder.

That final metaphor hits hard right now. The Stone the builders rejected.

It’s all too raw to jump to a neat and meaningful conclusion. There’s healing to be done. I’m going to sit with this cold hard Stone and see what God uses it for.

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[1] Elizabeth Bathurst, ‘Truth’s Vindication, 1695 (1679)’, in Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women’s Writings, 1650-1700, ed. Mary Garman et al. (Wallingford, Pa: Pendle Hill Publications, 1996), 353.

Featured image photo by Lukas S on Unsplash