On Strength and Weakness.

To say that I have a complicated relationship with religion is the underiest of understatements. It is, and has been, and will ever remain such a Big and Complex Thing in my life that I’m writing an extensive and involved piece on it and on my experience with it right now.

That piece is why I’ve been absent from this space for a bit. Much of what I would want to be saying here is attached to what I am trying to say there.

But I can’t hold onto this one. Take that as whatever degree of conceit you wish, here we are, and here I go.

I was raised as a person of faith – that specific faith being Roman Catholic. From kindergarten until the end of college, I was educated in religious institutions. From age 4 until 21, I took religion classes alongside standard academic fare. Church history, scripture study, liberation theology, comparative religions, right on down to “Women in the Hebrew Bible.” Expert I am not, I can’t name chapters and verses, but I feel no discomfort in saying that I am very educated in the religion that I practiced for much of my life.

That entire time, I was also a queer person. But I didn’t know it. I didn’t understand it. My entire understanding and concept of myself was set through a religious filter, and my religion made no room for my identity. My religion condemned my identity. And so I couldn’t see it.

I won’t link to the Nashville Statement. Perhaps it’s an empty gesture, but this little slice of digital whatever is my space, and I do not invite those words nor the people who wrote them and/or saw fit to affirm them into my space. You can search it, if you’d like. But I read every word, and in the briefest of summaries let me tell you that if you were to search it, you would find a “proclamation” in several parts stating that God – as defined by Christianity – accepts as valid and good only heterosexual cisgender identities.

That’s the kindest possible bit of paraphrasing.

I don’t have a theological argument here. I won’t be drawing on my extensive religious education to offer examples rooted in text and ideology as to why this is wrong. Unlike the authors of this statement, I don’t presume to speak for the Christian God nor any other.

I speak from and for myself.

Queer people of faith exist. Transgender people of faith exist. And they do not exist to spite their religious communities, they exist because they believe. They believe so powerfully in something beyond themselves that they continue to practice and persevere at great personal risk – a risk that is both physical and psychological.

To point to a group of people and deny their humanity and existence is hateful. To claim divine right in doing so is shameful.

The Nashville Statement is the latest in a long line of hateful, shameful declarations that in the eyes of authors and supporters are a hammer of strength, but that drip with weakness and fear.

It’s the weak and the fearful who close their doors.

And their eyes.

And their minds.

The strongest communities open, and listen, and build, and try to understand. They disagree, and they are unkind, and they fail, and they try to do better. They don’t celebrate themselves – they celebrate each other.

I remain a person of faith, though I do not remain a Catholic. I don’t have a word for what I consider myself – agnostic, I suppose, is the closest. But I feel neither compelled nor inclined to name it. I’m happy in that. Secure in it. I stumble, and I doubt, and I question. I miss some things. I get wildly angry about others.

But I see myself.

Within a religion, or without, we have the power to self-determine without expectation of punishment or reward.

We have the power to see each other, to build with each other, to open. Or we have the power to close – to point to our neighbors and say, “You are not me, and so you are not allowed.” That’s a choice. It’s not on God, not any god.

Any power that would endorse, “Me, not you,” over, “Me and you,” is not worthy.

A power that excludes not on action but on existence is not a power at all.

Every identity – queer, transgender, beyond – rejected by the Nashville Statement, rejected by congregations and organizations of all degrees and denominations big and small across this country, exists. They – we – have always existed.

To ask us to be other than who we are is to ask us to be less than who we are. Worse, it’s to ask us to be that which we are not.

And when people answer, because it’s not as easy as just walking away for so many, you stop knowing them. If you ever really did.