Christianity is profoundly queer

As Pride Month unfolds, the Trump administration and its allies are ramping up their attacks on LGBTQ+ communities. 

The Education Department has launched a Title IX probe into Smith College for admitting transgender women, targeted schools that provide education on gender and sexuality, rolled back federal protections for LGBTQ+ students, and erased LGBTQ+ identities from federal agencies and recognition. In state legislatures, bills targeting drag performances, gender-affirming care and same-sex families have proliferated at a record pace. 

Leaders use a variety of weak explanations to justify these policies — that queer people are perverse, that we denigrate nuclear families and make a mockery of American values. But they all rest on a common foundation: a narrow interpretation of Christianity that frames LGBTQ+ identities as sinful, disordered and incompatible with faith.

We are queer Christians who have spent decades studying theology. And we want to say plainly: that narrow interpretation of Christianity is shaky at best. 

When one strips back the politics, culture wars and centuries of institutional distortion surrounding Christianity, something unexpected emerges. At its heart, Christianity is profoundly queer. 

We don’t mean that as provocation. We mean it as theology.

Consider what Christianity, at its core, actually does: It transgresses and disrupts. It challenges prevailing power structures and asks people to reconsider their established notions of right and wrong. 

That was the essence of Jesus’ entire life. In Luke 4, Jesus spends 40 days fasting in the desert, where he is relentlessly tempted by the devil. After overcoming each temptation, he goes to Galilee to proclaim God’s word. He stands up in the synagogue in Nazareth and proclaims release for the captive, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed. 

Jesus wasn’t offering a mild religious sentiment; he was announcing a reordering of the world. That moment was his public debut, and it scandalized the people who heard it. The townspeople rejected him and took murderous action. They attempted to throw him off a cliff. 

Other examples of Christ’s radical love abound. He ate with tax collectors, sinners and outcasts. He touched lepers to heal them. He called upon people to love their enemies, not rebuke them or disparage their existence. 

This is the Christian tradition: questioning inherited norms, unsettling comfortable hierarchies, insisting that the ethical imagination can go further than traditional society allows. That impulse is, at its core, queer.

Queerness, too, is fundamentally transgressive, not as a lifestyle choice but as a mode of being that refuses to let dominant culture dictate one’s core existence. Both Christianity and queerness pose the same question: What if the way things are is not the way they should be?

The long Christian tradition of testimony is itself a response to that question. Telling the truth about one’s life is a spiritual practice. To witness, in the Christian sense, is not to merely describe events. It is to stand before your community and say: “This is who I am, this is how I have been made, and I will not hide it.”

For queer people, coming out carries precisely that weight. It is an act of truth-telling that can be costly, liberating and sacred all at once. The closet is not just a social phenomenon. For LGBTQ+ Christians, it can be a spiritual one, a forced concealment that severs them from authentic relationships with communities they love and were raised in, and with God.

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Then there is the matter of authenticity. One of Christianity’s deepest convictions is that social standing, respectability and material recognition are not the measures of a life. The tradition calls people to shed the performance of acceptability and live from a truer place. 

This is, again, something queer people know intimately. To live openly as an LGBTQ+ person in a hostile culture is to choose authenticity over safety, and truth over social reward. It is, in the deepest sense, a Christian act.

Conservative Christian leaders have curated an overwhelming belief that LGBTQ+ rights are at odds with the fundamental impulse of the Gospel. This prevailing narrative is not only inaccurate, but its consequences are devastating. LGBTQ+ people face constant discrimination and attacks on their rights. In 2026 alone, states have considered nearly 800 anti-trans bills. 

Many LGBTQ+ people feel ostracized by Christian community, preventing them from accessing a network of fellow believers that could offer spiritual grounding and support. 

LGBTQ+ people who do choose to identify as Christian often feel compelled to hide or downplay their religious connections in public, creating a “spiritual closet” that hinders their relationship with the divine, and consequently, with themselves. We’ve reckoned with this firsthand. In our own journeys as queer individuals of faith, we have been questioned and criticized for our sexuality, our spirituality and our challenging of traditional Christian norms. As educators of religion, we have seen students struggle with the damage from the right’s relentless messaging that faith and queerness are incompatible, and we have witnessed the shame, isolation and sense of theological homelessness that they must confront. 

This Pride Month, we are calling on Christian communities to reckon with what their tradition actually says. Not hatred of LGBTQ+ people, and not even tolerance, but a full-on embrace. At its best, Christianity has consistently been on the side of the transgressive and the truth-teller, the one who will not remain silent. 

LGBTQ+ people are not a problem for Christians to manage, and their lives are not the antithesis of American values. They are, in many ways, living out the tradition’s deepest commitments.