Can God love everyone – even me?

Picture this: a Christmas Eve dinner with the entirety of my family gathered around the table, sharing an iced cake and discussing the way my grandmother lived when she was a child, talking about the tiny house she used to live in, 35 minutes away from there. Then enters me, the 13-year-old not-so-rebellious teenager, boldly asking my church-hating and  definitely-not-sober grandfather to turn on the TV to watch Christmas mass. I will not get into the details, but let’s say that this day remains a pretty famous fight in my family. It included tears, doors being slammed, guests leaving, and it still gets referenced today when we want to avoid a heated debate (“Are you sure you wanna go there? Don’t you remember the watching-mass-at-Christmas fiasco?”). 

A few years later, I have definitely overcome the “Christian phase” I seemed to be in and I can certainly say that I am all but religious. Still, the “Queer Spiritualities” class that I am taking this semester definitely makes me reflect on how my identity as a lesbian and my former religiosity have intertwined or clashed in the past. 

As the in-class discussion revealed, I, like several students, came to this first class with a few prejudices, undoubtedly related to my own experience of trying to conciliate religion and queerness. My own experiences led me to believe that the two are, for the most part, incompatible. 

I was raised in a completely atheist environment, but around the age of 12 years old, I started to question the existence of an all-knowing creator – God, the universe, you name it. I don’t know if this is a universal feeling, but in my mind, there is an atmosphere so specific to churches, and I felt so safe when I entered a religious building that I thought it must be because I was being somewhat penetrated by a divine being. I ended up Catholic and fervently believing in God for a few years.

I did not practice as a Catholic would usually do, as my family did not go to church, but I would pray every night before going to sleep. This moment of prayer was a peaceful moment I could always go back to at the end of each day. Religion was something that was not controlled or pushed on me by my family, it was a way to separate myself from them, and at an age when you want to do anything but become your parents, it was liberating and comforting. 

---

But as I got older and realized I might not be straight, religion ceased to make sense for me. I heard people saying that being attracted to people of the same sex was fine if you were not acting on it, and so for some time, I thought I was destined to a loveless life. I remember searching for gay churches on the Internet and crying when I learned about the existence of one – even if it was in America, on the other side of the world.

It felt like being accepted, yes, but at the same time, I could not fully adhere to it. There is a quote I stumbled upon a few weeks ago that struck me. It came from the testimony of a religious gay person and it stuck with me because it depicted the exact opposite of how I felt when I believed in God. 

Devout queers like myself each have our own definition of "God" and "gay," and we apply them to our daily lives in hopes of finding common ground between the two

As someone who was terrified of the afterlife and what could be coming next (a.k.a going to hell), I personally failed to redefine my religion to make it fit my queerness, because I felt – and still feel to this day – that it is “cheating”. I am trying to change that, but sometimes my first reaction still is to think that redefining one’s religion feels a bit “too easy”. If you get to choose the rules you want to follow, then it is not truly a “real” religion, is it? I understand that for a lot of people, getting to bend the rules of organized religion and practice it as they see fit is a way of knowing peace and reconciling it with their queer identity, but all I could think of was “Shouldn’t God agree to that?”. If you decide on your own to change how you practice your religion, how can you be sure you won’t end up in hell? 

In addition to this sentiment, I also saw a lot of religious anti-gay protests and harsh words, and in my mind, it did not make sense that a community based on spreading love could be so heinous. It mirrored the epiphany that I had about how women were treated in the holy texts. Indeed, as my critical spirit and my frontal lobe started developing, I had started reading the Bible, and instead of it reinforcing my faith, I could only see in Christianity a form of oppression and it appeared clear to me that its only goal was to control women. 

My queerness as a lesbian is indissociable from my identity as a woman, and the more I learned about the scriptures, the less I felt like I belonged to this community anymore. But still, I believed in an all-powerful being, and I could not stop praying because I thought that if I missed one day, I would wake up in hell because of my queerness. Prayers started to become a sort of ritual that I could not escape, and religion a kind of prison that did not provide any solace at all anymore. 

---

To put it shortly, I still find it difficult to conceive that religion and queerness may coexist. While always keeping a non-judgmental attitude towards everyone, my brain finds it hard to fully agree with religious queer people – but only because I genuinely don’t understand how they manage to make their identity coincide with their spiritual beliefs. I hope I get to challenge this mindset and make it evolve, but that’s where I’m at today!

Thank you for reading! I hope this article gave you room for thought; maybe it can act as a starting point for your own reflection? Do not hesitate to reach out if you want to share your point of view, debate this topic, correct me, or give me your opinion about this article. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! 

PS: I took some time off writing for this blog because moving abroad was a hectic and time-consuming experience, but I will see you very soon :) 

Malou