guest post by Clara Sims, intern MID at First Congregational UCC Albuquerque
In June, churches nationwide celebrated Pride month – affirming that all people in the LGBTQ+ community are our siblings in Christ, beloved, precious, and irreplaceable members of our faith communities. However, our love and celebration this year have been set against an alarming national backdrop of increasing discrimination, hate, and violence toward our LGBTQ+ communities and, especially, toward our trans and non-binary siblings.
This national trend hit home when several faith communities learned of a local church planning to host transphobic speakers after showing the film “What is a Woman?” This film seeks to investigate the gender-fluid movement, though it does so from a decided lens of dismissal, negative bias, and fear. When such a film debuts upon this national stage of violence and fear toward LGBTQ+ communities, from the banning of medical care for transgender youth in Texas to the targeting of Pride events by militant right-wing groups, it leads me and many faith-community leaders in the greater Albuquerque area to ask different questions.
Not “what is a woman?” but “what are we afraid of?” Are we really afraid of allowing people to claim and celebrate the wholeness of their humanity? Are we really afraid of people who feel worthy enough to celebrate who they are – as God made them?
Our faith calls us to question the validity of such fear. It calls us to ask what is at stake when we choose fear over love?
As decades of data demonstrate, people’s lives are at stake. Trans lives, non-binary lives, queer lives. Children’s lives, unborn lives – the very same the recent Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade claims to protect. According to the Trevor Project, an organization that provides crisis support for LGBTQ+ youth, nearly half of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year. Suicide is an epidemic among LGBTQ+ youth. When leaders, from politicians to clergy, use fear-filled rhetoric to stigmatize children and teenagers who are simply seeking to live their lives with integrity, the impact of emotional, mental, and spiritual suffering is deadly.
The Gospel offers much on the validity of fear that stigmatizes entire communities – it has no place in the kingdom of God, no place in the good news we are to proclaim to one another. We are called to love, not to fear. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.” (John 4:18).
The LGBTQ+ community are among the neighbors Jesus commanded his followers, over and over and in no uncertain terms, to love and treat with worth and dignity that the fallibility of our human judgments cannot set aside.
As right-wing political-religious rhetoric doubles down on framing the beautiful diversity of gender and sexual identities and expressions among the LGBTQ+ community as counter to God’s will for creation, may we remember that our greatest commandment is to love one another, without criteria for who counts and who doesn’t. This will take courage and faith in the goodness of God’s community of creation; this will take risking ourselves to the blessing of a world in which everyone is needed, not as some want them to be, but as they truly are.