I Feel No Contradiction: Confessions of an LGBTQ+ Christian

by Crispin Reese in Journeys

Faith came before fear

Some of my earliest memories are of going to church.

I remember my grandmother taking me every Sunday. She taught me to have faith, to love God, and to worship Him. Before I knew anything about sexual orientation or identity, I knew about God. Faith came to me before fear did. I was a Christian long before I realized that I was gay.

Other people seemed to notice that I was different before I did.

When I was six years old, my aunt suggested that perhaps I liked boys. I did not understand what she meant. I was not even old enough to have experienced romantic or sexual attraction. I did not know what being gay was. Like every boy around me, I assumed that one day I would meet a girl, settle down, and raise a family with her. Every man I knew had followed that path. I had no reason to imagine that mine would be different.

Two years later, when I was eight, some children my age told me that God hated me and that I was going to hell.

I did not understand what they were saying. I did not understand why they were saying it to me.

Years passed before those moments acquired meaning. In my mid-teens, I met a boy I could not stop thinking about. I wanted to see him constantly. I felt longing, affection, attraction, and a desire to be near him. Through those feelings, I realized, to my horror at the time, that I was gay.

Suddenly, the past rearranged itself. I understood what my aunt had been suggesting when I was six. I understood what those children had been reacting to when I was eight. Other people had recognized something about me long before I knew what it was or knew it about myself. I must have been giving off strong gay vibes.

Feeling distant from God

But the realization brought no relief. It brought dread. I remember the shock that gripped me. I remember the desperation of wanting to be straight. I did not want to become one of those people who were joked about, bullied, and rejected, and whom I had been taught God hated. I wanted to remain close to God. I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted faith to feel as natural as it had when I followed my grandmother into church.

I wanted to be how they thought God should have made me, not how God actually made me. That was the beginning of the wedge.

What I had been told about being gay changed the way I related to God. As a child, I had approached God with trust. Now I approached with shame and uncertainty. I no longer came before God simply as myself. I came before God wishing I were someone else.

During my late teens, I struggled not only with my sexuality but also with my faith. I continued attending church, Bible study, and Christian events with my peers. I prayed with them, listened with them, and stood among them as though nothing separated us.

But fear followed me into every room. I worried that they would discover that I was gay. I worried that they would realize there was a “sinner” among them. I was afraid they would discover that I belonged to the group of people they spoke against.

Christian events began to fill me with anxiety. I could participate, pray, and listen, but part of me remained guarded. I could not stop wondering whether the people around me would see me differently if they knew the truth about me.

Eventually, the strain reached my faith.

Am I an atheist?

Late in high school, I was exposed to people with atheistic beliefs. The idea that there was no God became comforting. It was too difficult to bear what I had been taught to believe, that God hated me before I had even experienced my first kiss. I was a late bloomer. Nothing happened until my mid-twenties.

Yet I had already spent years carrying guilt for a life I had not lived. It was easier to believe there was no god than to continue relating to God through fear. Atheism offered relief. It removed the possibility that the God I had loved since childhood might look upon me with hatred.

Looking back, I know that being gay did not push me away from God. What pushed me away was what I had been taught to believe about being gay. Their words drove the wedge between God and me. I had been taught that being gay and being Christian were incompatible. I had been told, directly and indirectly, that I would eventually have to choose one over the other.

But being gay was never a choice. The choice I wanted to make was to be a devout Christian.

For years, however, I lived without faith. I tried to leave God behind, but something in me continued to turn toward God. The faith of my childhood had been buried beneath shame, fear, and disbelief, yet it had not disappeared.

Finding my way back to God

Then I faced a hardship from which I believed only God could deliver me. I developed schizophrenia.

I reached the limits of what I could endure on my own. My mind became a place of suffering, confusion, and fear.

I prayed. I cried. After years of distance, I turned again toward God.

The strength to endure the trial was granted. Deliverance arrived. God gave me the strength to survive it.

That experience did not merely restore my belief. It restored a relationship. I did not return to God because someone had persuaded me through argument. I returned because, in the moment when my own strength failed, I reached for God and found the strength to continue.

I believe I was meant to rediscover my faith and my love for God eventually. I believe that God gives many people an innate sensus divinitatis, an awareness of the divine that can be buried but not completely destroyed.

My faith had been wounded, but my love for God had not disappeared.

After a decade of living as an atheist, I returned to God.

Practicing my faith on my own, away from the voices that had once defined it for me, I discovered something that surprised me.

Being gay and Christian does not feel contradictory to me.

It feels right.

This is who I am.

I am at peace when I embrace both.

The conflict I had carried for so long did not arise naturally within me. It had been taught to me. I had been instructed to see a contradiction where I felt none. Once I stopped allowing others to define my relationship with God, the contradiction began to vanish.

What remained was faith.

What remained was love.

What remained was the person I had always been.

I don’t need anyone’s permission

I no longer listen to the voices that once drove the wedge between God and me. I no longer ask other people to tell me what my relationship with God is permitted to be. I prefer to focus on God.

Some people and institutions have taken upon themselves the role of deciding who may seek the mercy and love of God. They think of themselves as mediators, as though they possess the authority to determine who may approach God.

But I learned that a relationship with God requires no human mediator. That’s Jesus’ role.

My relationship with God is between me and God.

I need no one’s permission to pray. I need no one’s permission to worship. I need no one’s permission to give thanks for my blessings. I do not need anyone to approve of me before I can seek God’s mercy.

No one can prevent me from turning toward Him.

Every Sunday, I pray for mercy and forgiveness for myself, my family, and the world. Being gay does not stop me from seeking God. It does not stop me from loving Him. It does not prevent me from asking for His grace on behalf of those I love.

The child who followed his grandmother into church did not disappear.

He grew frightened. He lost his way. He spent years believing that the faith which had once come naturally to him could no longer belong to him.

But he found his way back.

I was a Christian long before I realized that I was gay. I was born gay, and I have rediscovered my faith.

I am an LGBTQ+ Christian.

I feel no contradiction within me.