Love
Joy
Peace
Patience
Kindness
Goodness
Faithfulness
Gentleness
Self-Control
If you grew up in the church, we probably read those words with the same tune in our heads. You probably even pictured a room full of VBS students singing along to it as well. I fear that most Christians, at least in American evangelicalism, associate these words more with children than they do the Holy Spirit. And given how we have often seen children disregarded, mistreated, and even abused within the church, that’s a serious problem.
We teach children these songs, but do we listen to them ourselves? Do we listen to the words? Do we apply those words to our own lives as adults in the church? Or do we chalk them up as the watered down naivete of children’s songs to kill time in Sunday School? I think these questions are answered in the most resounding way every June in America. Then again, I believe the answers are merely amplified during June, but you can discern the answers at any point given how toxic the church has become towards LGBTQIA+ people on a daily basis.
Pride month is here. I would argue there is no time of the year that evidences a startling sparsity of fruits of the Spirit than what we see during June. Love is replaced by hatred. Joy is replaced by bitterness. Peace is replaced by hostility. Patience is replaced by rejection. Kindness is replaced by meanness. Goodness is replaced by vitriol. Faithfulness is replaced by condemnation. Gentleness is replaced by coarseness. Self-control is replaced by rashness. This is why I, and many queer people…including queer Christians, experience every year. Every day.
But it need not be this way. I know this because that used to be me. I know the hollowness and joylessness of a life that bears the rotten fruit of hatred and bitterness. It’s a fruit that led me, at one point in my earlier life, to determine in my mind to harm the next gay person I found. Thankfully, though, that internalized homophobia did not materialize into concrete action. It took me a long time, but I eventually found my way out of that prison. For me, finally discovering the Christ who was crucified and resurrected changed everything. I grew up in the church, and had been baptized three times by the time I was 18. But I never met Christ until I was in my 30’s. Had you asked me throughout my 20’s, I would have been like so many and claim that I was a Christian. But if you knew me, you’d have seen none of the fruits we dismiss as nothing more than the lyrics of a children’s song. Ironically, though, it was during that period that nobody would have questioned the sincerity of my faith. I was angry, violent, and racist.
But that all changed when I met my old preaching minister, Aaron. He showed me a Jesus, not just with his sermons, but with the clear evidence of the Spirit’s fruit in his life. It was undeniable, and you saw it not just with him, but also his family. It permeated all they did. I wanted what he had. I wanted that joy and kindness. I wanted that gentleness. I wanted that goodness that led him, many years later, to text me after I came out. To tell me he heard, he loves me, and to affirm me as his sister-in-Christ.
So, for me, I finally embraced Jesus. I embraced the Jesus of children’s songs. Despite all the abuse, all the harm done to me in the church…physical, mental, and spiritual harm…despite all of this, I chose to turn more into the Jesus that was modeled to me by Aaron. Many, though, do not. And honestly, I can’t blame them. I was raised hearing repeatedly that the “church is a hospital for the wounded”, but that’s not what I saw and experienced. What many of us saw, whether we were girls/women assaulted by predatorial pastors or queer kids ostracized, condemned, and beaten, was a church that was more torture chamber than hospital. I certainly cannot blame anyone for walking away.
As Bridget Eileen Rivera discusses in her amazing work titled Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church, studies reveal that queer people who stay in the church are 30%-55% more likely to die by suicide. This isn’t because queer people simply can’t live with who we are. Or that it’s this internal knowledge that we are an “abomination”. No, it’s the abuse of those who relegate the fruits of the Spirit down to nothing more than a children’s song.
I know because I’ve been there. I’ve been the one to cause this harm. I’ve been the bully. I’ve been the one “speaking truth in love”, which is very rarely truth and even more rarely done in love. I’ve been the one who turned the church into a torture chamber. I know how empty and dark their soul feels because I’ve been who they are now. I know the immense weight on one’s soul that is the result of being driven by hatred and bitterness. That’s driven by fear of those you don’t understand.
Pride is a month of celebration. A celebration of survival and overcoming. Pride is a month of reflecting back on the price paid by our queer ancestors who have made today possible. And this year, seemingly more than any other since the first Pride, it feels like a period of lament and protest. But not just lamenting the violent rhetoric and legislative efforts to eradicate us or to drive us back into the darkest recesses of society. But also lamenting the emptiness that those who hate, especially those who mask their hate and bitterness with a veneer of Christianese and faux piety, must experience daily. I weep for them. I mourn for them. Why? Because I was them. There, but for the grace of God go I.
But, to those conservative Christians who have hurled hate (even though you claim it was done in “love”), Pride month can be to you what it has been for the LGBTQIA+ community. It could be a period of liberation. For you, a liberation from hatred and anger. A liberation from “there is no hate like Christian love”. And it’s so simple, yet so hard. All it will take is to become a child again. The group you dismiss as naïve or unwise due to limited life experience is the group you need to become like in order to escape the prison of your own making.
Or, as Jesus Christ said, “unless you change and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”