A Lesson That Church's Still Teach Today: Hate Yourself If You Are LGBTQIA+

 Disclaimers: I don't watch "Good Morning, America" on ABC-TV regularly. I don't watch ABC's "The Bachelor" shows. I'm not a big football fan, whether college or professional. 

However, I read cultures and events as if they were a text book. My Ph.D. dissertation from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was a full-blown ethnographic/anthropological  qualitative study. 

And the story of Colton Underwood got my attention. It was on advocate.com, ABC blogs, towleroad.com, and queerty.com. So, I glanced at the various stories about the latest news in Colton Underwood's life. It appears that the popular, handsome, single, straight-acting bachelor came out of his gay closet. 

And he did so very publicly, with an interview with out lesbian ABC personality, Robin Roberts. 

As I read through the interview, this is what caught my attention, because it sounds like parts of my story as well in the Church:

"Having grown up in the Catholic church, he remembered he 'learned in the Bible that gay is a sin' in Catholic grade school. And during his time in sports, he remembered people using the word 'gay' as a term that held 'a connotation of negativity.'

'I think there's a lot of things, when I look back, I'm like, 'No wonder I held it in,' he said.

Underwood said he has grown "closer to God" in this revelation and said he knows some people will question how that's even possible for a gay man to say.

'I used to wake up in the morning and pray for him to take the gay away. I used to pray for him to change me,' he said, adding that his relationship with God now isn't "conditional." (https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/bachelor-star-colton-underwood-gay-77057551).

This is not unlike comments made recently by the music sensation Lil Nas X who said this: I spent my entire teenage years hating myself because of the s--t y'all preached would happen to me because i was gay. so i hope u are mad, stay mad, feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves" (Clay Cane). https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/opinions/lil-nas-x-montero-video-cane/index.html

Can you see what stood out to me? "I learned in the Bible that gay is a sin." He learned that in a Catholic elementary school. I learned that in a Presbyterian Church youth group, in Young Life, in all parts of life at Whitworth College (including spiritual life folks and student life folks), Intervarsity, Campus Crusade, and Presbyterian Ministry on the campus of the University of Kansas when I was Colton's age. Five groups that I "hung out" with as an adolescent and young adult told me the exact same thing, time and again. 

And, like Colton, I, too used to wake up in the morning and "pray for him (God) to take the gay away." 

I used to bargain with God: "If you take the gay away, I won't look at men the same way anymore."

Heck, I dated and got married to a woman in order to take the "gay away." 

As have many LGBTQIA+ people. 

Here's the scary thing: and many LGBTQIA+ still do. Today. Why? Because their respective faith communities continue to spread the lie: that being LGBTQIA+ is a sin, and that we can pray to the Holy One to take away the "gay," which is a sickness or illness that has to be cured, in order to become straight.

In my work within the OR-ID United Methodist Church Conference as the LGBTQIA+ Advocacy Coordinator I kept meeting closeted LGBTQIA+ clergy, lay leaders, and lay members who were still in their respective, partially church-constructed closet, praying that God would take "the gay away" as they got sicker mentally, emotionally, and some times physically and definitely spiritually in their closet.

And the healing only comes when a closeted LGBTQIA+ person finally knows, deeply, that one is loved unconditionally for who one was created to be as an LGBTQIA+ person, created in the image of God.

May it be so.