Disclaimer: The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.
For many of us, discussing the LGBTQ+ community and its relationship with the Adventist church seems unneeded. Either we oppose the LGBTQ+ community based on our interpretation of Biblical truth, or we reject the church’s prevailing viewpoint in favor of supporting them. We know our opinions, and we don’t intend on changing them. In fact, we often view the other side as immoral, so we assert that the truth is obvious and that there is no conversation to be had about the matter. Yet like most social issues, both stances’ morality will always be debatable. If it were not, no divide would exist.
Like Alyssa’s article from last week, I am not here to debate whether or not homosexuality is a sin. Still, if this is your viewpoint, I understand where you may be coming from. For years, I believed homosexuality was sinful. I loved the gay people in my life, but I still believed having gay relationships was a sin. The solution to being gay seemed straightforward. Whether or not God chose to remove a gay person’s same-sex desire shouldn’t affect their walk with God. We are all burdened with a distinct struggle with sin. Walking with God requires sacrifice, I believed, so while some of us deny our tempers, others must deny their same-sex desires.
Growing up in the Adventist church, I became very accustomed to standing firm in what I believed to be right and defending against other viewpoints. But my opinions have since shifted. I have seen the harm the church’s beliefs about queerness cause. Perhaps the time has come for us to reevaluate our treatment of the LGBTQ+ community.
While the Bible says nothing about transgender people, asexual people, and many other members of the LGBTQ+ community, the church’s disapproval of homosexuality somehow bleeds into other categories. At my Adventist high school, even student leaders openly engaged in insulting queer people and their community. When the language we use trends towards division, one side must give ground, and more often than not, it’s queer people who absorb the loss.
Consider the common Adventist belief that it’s alright to be gay as long as one doesn’t act on it. We think that if someone is gay, they would simply choose to be single for the rest of their life, and things would work out. But while some people know they are queer from the very beginning, many queer Adventists repress their sexuality for years, even decades. If, day in and day out, the community says queer people are sinful, the last thing someone would want is to realize that they’re queer.
Is this the ideal situation? If someone is able to live “normally” because they don’t know they’re queer, wouldn’t this solve the problem? Unfortunately, this is not our reality. Repressing one’s identity stalls their life. When someone denies being queer to protect themself from a hostile environment, their relationships with others suffer. Their ability to understand their needs, their emotions, even their goals—suffers. Their self-confidence suffers. After all, how would someone expect others to know them when they don’t know themself? Queer people internalize not only others’ words, but the derision behind them, and because it is impossible to sequester repression to only one aspect of a life, they lead half a life.
Treating queerness as a sin isn’t equivalent to treating something like pride as one. In the Adventist community, pride does not define someone—it’s one aspect of their character. It’s something they can and are expected to overcome. However, being queer is instrinsic to someone’s personhood, unlike pride. In addition, for others, and sometimes for themselves, it becomes their defining trait. Queerness makes someone the bad example despite the heartfelt sermons they preached, the endless hours they poured into Pathfinders, or the way they cherished the Bible stories from cradle roll and on.
At least, with other things the church condemns, people know when they do it: they know when they lie; they know when they have sex out of wedlock. Yet queerness looms like a cataclysmic “what-if.” One day, a person could simply wake up and realize they are what their community has branded as the enemy. Queer people absorb all of this confusion, pain, and silence. This is the human cost of ideology.
The kind of fear the church inspires in queer people is scarring. When someone is queer and Adventist, they cannot think it. They cannot say it. They cannot live it lest the people they love and respect most look at them with fear or pity or something even worse. Undoubtedly, there are statistics citing the alarming rates of suicide for Christian queer people, but sometimes, numbers meant to sober us can simply be numbers. Stand in a queer person’s shoes for a moment. They are hurting.
To open this conversation, we as a church must acknowledge how we have hurt people. I know it’s uncomfortable. It’s easier when queer people remain abstract concepts on television or when they seem normal. No one wants to think they’ve harmed anyone else, and it’s simpler to excuse ourselves when we center it on an inarguable topic like religion when really, I believe it’s an issue of humanity. We need to embrace queer people’s humanity, not just the one gay person we know, but the humanity of the entire queer community. We owe them respect. We must steep in the pain we’ve caused them and understand why so many people are angry. That’s the first step.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.