For LGBT Youth, Love is the Whole Story

My parents are really religious. My pastor said being gay was immoral. I heard that God hates fags. My church took collections to stop marriage equality. They told me about Sodom and Gomorrah. They quoted Leviticus. They told me I was evil. They told me I was a sinner. They told me I couldn’t love God. They told me I could change.

Talking to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people, reading their blog posts and tweets, scrolling through the thousands of videos on YouTube’s It Gets Better channel, interspersed among messages of hope and survival, we find stories like these – stories of struggle, stories of hurt, stories where religion is used as an excuse for bullying queer youth and God’s love stops at the closet. 

Luckily, many of these stories end in happiness, with people finding inclusive communities, partners, friends, finding love. But time and again, to get to that love, people leave their faith, and in doing so they are cut off from a tradition, from a family of sorts, adding salt to their already deep wounds. 

Too often, stories of struggle and of heartache from religion (or, more accurately, from people who identify as religious) are not transformed into stories of love. And when that happens, we are left with this divide between being gay and being a person of faith. This divide need not exist.

There are faith communities, like the United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalism, that provide unlimited support and care for their LGBT members. There are even communities – like Dignity USA, an LGBT Catholic organization or Affirmation, an LGBT Mormon community – that provide respite and hope for change within notoriously homophobic faiths. At an individual level, 93 percent of Christian clergy support laws to protect LGBT equality and a majority of Catholics and mainline Protestants support same-sex marriage. An overwhelming 76 percent of those who identify as Jewish also identify as supporters of same-sex marriage. These communities, these individuals know that what preachers have been saying for centuries, “God is love,” holds no less true for LGBT people.

People, especially young people, need information. They need to know the truth about religion and God and being gay. They need to hear from leaders like Archbishop Gene Robinson and, recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu who believe that the wideness, the wildness of God’s love includes all people, gay or straight. They need to know that they needn’t make a choice between being gay and being a person of faith. They need to know that love is the whole story.

When those stories of religious woe are transformed into stories of faithful triumph, the ending is sweet. Take Bryan, a pastor’s son. He shares, “Once I understood how misguided and unfair it is for Christians to use the Bible…against anyone, I was able to cast off that weight and love myself freely – and feel loved by the heavens too.”

Let’s hope that all young people can feel loved by the heavens, and loved here on earth – because love is the whole story.