'Come as you are': Reflections on queer Christianity

More from the ECR Spotlight Series featuring blogs written in the Academic Writing for the Public workshops held earlier this year. Today, at the end of Transgender Awareness Month, Victoria Amos a graduate student in Anthropology reflects on their changing relationship with Christianity and rediscovering it queerly.

A sign at the annual Metro Manila LGBTQIA+ Pride Parade quotes scripture from Romans 13:10 – ‘Love is the fulfilment of the law’ (Rappler 2018)

Christianity as practiced across the globe has long considered itself incompatible with the expression of sexuality more broadly but that which falls under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella presents a particularly enduring contradiction. The returning tide of religious conservatism across the globe exemplifies how tenuous the acceptance of queer identities still is. In the United States, several well-publicised cases of businesses refusing their services to LGBTQIA+ people have emerged in recent years. These have pit previously ratified notions of equality against the right to religious freedom, with the latter emerging almost unanimously as victor. In the UK, the Catholic high school I graduated from in 2014 was free to teach us that homosexuality was unnatural and taboo as part of our already heavily censored sex education classes; indeed, all British schools of ‘religious character’ are permitted to teach sex education that explicitly frames homosexuality as a sin if this belief sits within its “distinctive faith perspective on relationships”. 

Shifting focus from the Global North to the Philippines, the country my mother is from and where I lived as a child, an anti-discrimination bill aiming to protect LGBTQIA+ people from prejudice and violence has languished in the Senate for over 20 years, continually blocked by politicians who claim that being LGBTQIA+ is un-Christian and by extension un-Filipino. With that said, individuals and communities who unite the concepts of faith and queerness do exist and thrive amidst this conservative rhetoric- but how exactly? What does a queer Christianity look like amidst the political and religious culture wars of 2024? 

My own disillusionment with religion began when I was a teenager trying to grapple with the apparent gulf between faith and progressive ideals more generally, having been raised in the Catholic faith since birth. Contributing to the statistic that over 86% of the Filipino population identifies as Roman Catholic, my mother had insisted on my being christened, confirmed, and attending church with her every Sunday. The walls of our house were adorned with religious bric-à-brac that take pride of place to this day; a small mosaic depicting the Last Supper over our dining table, the Lord’s Prayer painstakingly needlepointed and framed, a rosary with a bead containing earth from the Holy Land. However, my growing discomfort with Christianity’s potential to bebrandished as a tool of oppression only accelerated when I moved away from home to start university, where I was finally allowed to confront my nascent queerness away from my mother’s loudly voiced prejudice towards LGBTQIA+ people. I eventually distanced myself not only from her but any sense of faith I’d had growing up, the two being inextricably tethered in my mind. But despite the intense criticisms I had of the Church as an institution and those who followed it uncritically, I couldn’t seem to stop believing that a God was out there and that they loved me through all my awkward buzz-cut baby queerness regardless of what had been drilled into me by the faith I had been raised with. 

I was still quietly wrestling with these concepts years later when I was back in the Philippines conducting my PhD fieldwork. Religion played such a small role in my life at this point that it had become little more than a relic I had to pick up and dust off when I visited my parents and was cajoled into attending Mass. As my original topic of research began to fall apart for various reasons (along with my hopes of gathering enough data to write a postgraduate thesis), I received an Instagram follow request from an LGBTQIA+ affirming church group based in a city nearby. A quick scroll through their posts revealed a wide range of content promoting religious inclusivity, from videos of congregants sharing personal stories about how they reconciled their faith and queerness to screenshots of the admins' tongue-in-cheek replies to homophobic comments. I immediately emailed the address on their website asking if I could attend one of their Masses in a research capacity, a genuine curiosity bubbling under my professional insistence that the visit had potential as an interesting context-setting vignette at the very least.

What I experienced instead was an entirely new way to be Christian, one that could be playful and innovative and thoroughly queer. A typical Mass for this community started with the affirmation that everyone present was loved by God because of their LGBTQIA+ identity rather than in spite of it, followed by upbeat hymns and even pop songs chosen for their inclusive lyrics. Open conversations about sexuality and gender identity were ubiquitous and reframed as having a natural place in everyday Christian life, a far cry from the derision or outright silence that I was used to on the topic. More than anything, I was struck by the joy that congregants had found in actively trying to harmonise their queerness and their religiosity rather than pitting them against each other, and embracing the discomfort that inevitably arose during this reconciliation as part of their lived experiences. I admired that joy, that acceptance- more than anything I wanted to experience it for myself.

I ended up attending mass every week until I had to return to Scotland about 6 months later and these encounters struck a profound chord in me. While I have by no means reached a place where I can comfortably call myself ‘religious’ again, I was lucky enough to meet a group of people who encouraged me to embrace my discomfort as part of the experience of having faith, as well as further appreciate the joy that community can bring to the lives of queer people. I understand that religion isn’t for everyone, especially LGBTQIA+ people who have been personally targeted by those who see them as an affront to the religious and social sensibilities of society. But if you’re finding it hard to have faith in anything during these turbulent times we’re living through, put it in the community that embraces and guides you through the contradictions we all live through as queer people.

Author bio:

Victoria Gail Bacud Amos is a fifth-year part-time PhD candidate in Social Anthropology whose current research concerns queer religiosity in Metropolitan Manila, Philippines. Their previous research has explored activism, identity politics, and language use amongst LGBTQIA+ student organisations in the Metro Manila area. Although they are still grappling with their relationship to religiosity, they have at least made peace with the aforementioned awkward buzz-cut (i.e. they grew it out).