by Kale Anderson
Below is a reflection on Pride month from one of 2BC’s own, Kale Anderson.
We hope you’ll read it and recommit yourself to live a life of inclusion for all.
I heard an interview with the Christian rapper and author Sho Baraka. He mentioned a part of his new book that his publisher made him change for language reasons. In the interview, he talked about how the publisher made him change a section in which he said that a church wouldn’t let in pimps and prostitutes (his words), but would embrace a loan shark dressed in a fine suit bought with the interest charged on a payday loan. He asked which of these people is more welcome in the church, and which of them is in more need of Jesus. The answer to the second question is both of them. The answer to the first question is the point.
The Church as a whole has propagated and nourished homophobia and transphobia. Through legislation, ceaseless social commentary, and even violence. Even as the churches began opening doors for abolition, racial integration, labor unionization and the creation of social services to care for the widows and the orphans, they shut the door on the LGBTQ community.
In 1969, uprisings began around Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York in response to police crackdown on spaces created and curated for the LGBTQ community. These spaces meant safety for gay and trans folks and were birthed to shield the lives of all LGBTQ folks not welcomed in other establishments. Folks had to dress, act, believe, marry, persecute, and live the same as the people around them. The moment they got outted was the moment that they became unwelcome in the secular space. Even more unwelcome in the sacred spaces. This was the birth of Pride.
By now we should all be familiar with the multitude of ways that the Church has failed LGBTQ folks, because it has failed everyone else in the same ways. Most Christians I know have experiences with “church people” and suffered some form of religious trauma. SNL ran the Church Ladies skit. The images carved into our collective psyche of the Moral Majority and the white evangelical with the pastel pencil skirt suit next to the single-breasted blazer with the wide, unpatterned tie. The holders of “respectable jobs” and the land-owning, gun-toting types. We know who they are. The type that Sho Baraka says are welcomed in the church with open arms. If we haven’t been told to leave and not come back, we have all felt the eyes looking down noses and felt the full weight of the “I’ll pray for you”.
Stonewall teaches us that LGBTQIA+ folks want what we all want: to be safe. We need communities of people where we can be fully ourselves, fully human. The Bible tells us that the first effect of sin for Adam and Eve was hiding from God. That the first feeling of sin was shame. Why do we allow a church to require us to hide parts of ourselves? Inclusion and affirmation of LGBTQ+ folks isn’t just about LGBTQ+ folks. If it was, it wouldn’t be very inclusive. It is about ALL of us, equal in our human-ness and mess before a loving and gracious God, being able to find sanctuary in God’s church. To be safe, to be human, to be seen and to be open with God. When we fold LGBTQ+ folks into our lives, we open ourselves to the richness of their human experience. We stop denying the image of the Creator God in the creation and we stop placing barriers between children of God and their Father’s blessings.
We have allowed the church to deny the love and blessings of God to some of us and have lived in fear that maybe we will be denied next.
Pride is about being able to exist in spaces that long slammed the doors in LGBTQ+ faces. It is liberation for LGBTQ+ folks to exist in public, without hiding, to enjoy the benefits and rights of full personhood, and to feel embraced in places that they would have suffered violence in before. It is about finding sanctuary, freedom, and sacred humanity. The same things we are supposed to celebrate in Christ.
Our church is a sanctuary. It is full of humans, sinners, pimps and prostitutes, and lenders. It is a safe community for people to share in common humanity, to experience the love of Christ, and to live without pretense, judgment, or shame, growing together as followers of Christ.
I came to Second Baptist the first time in 2014 because I saw the history of the church on the website. I stayed because I felt a connection to the people of the church. I moved away around the time that Second started its discernment process about how to welcome and include the LGBTQ+ community. I have been through churches where sisters were not allowed to hold leadership roles over men, and brothers were ostracized for believing differently about evolution. I have discussed a young earth, and a literal hell. I’ve been told to stay silent because I asked preachers if God really hated the gays. I asked if so, could that same God love me.
I am happy that I was able to come back to Second Baptist, a church that allows God the space to love with abandon, encourages His followers to grow in that love and life, and that I know accepts me, fully, as I am. But, I hope and pray that LGBTQ+ inclusion doesn’t stop at Second Baptist. I pray that churches across our nation will open their eyes, ears and hearts and see the Spirit of God moving and working within us, not in spite of who we are, but because of who we are. That they’ll stand in solidarity and pride as God draws all people, including those who are LGBTQ+, to community and to God’s self.
-Kale Anderson, 2BC Member