We’re in an era of rising Christofascism, where mainstream news outlets are interviewing self-described Christian nationalists who want to overturn the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the US and the government is outlawing trans health care, bathroom use, and sports opportunities in a cynical bid to keep the support of Evangelicals by convincing them that being anti-gay and anti-trans is more truly Christian than supporting immigrants and health care access. It can feel like being queer and Christian at the same time is a contradiction, a paradox, an impossibility, and I think that sense of tension takes a particular form for teens and young adults today, who have grown up in a world where same-sex marriage is legal in the US, the existence of trans people is common knowledge, queer visibility is at an all-time high, and the backlash to that reality is also at a fever pitch.
While I’m no longer Christian, I was an out queer Christian for almost a decade, and the reasons I left Christianity aren’t about my queerness; they’re about the difficulty I had finding balance in life while worshiping a martyr and having a personality that tends to take things to extremes. I had the good fortune to spend almost my entire Christian life in Reconciling in Christ congregations, and over the years, I had three wonderful out gay men as pastors, each of whom had a husband. And although I’ve left the church, I still care deeply about progressive Christian communities, and I want to help queer young people in those Christian communities have the best experience possible—to not just be accepted, but to be affirmed and anticipated.
Part of properly anticipating your congregation’s queer youth is making sure that the adults in the congregation already know enough about queerness to use their pronouns, understand their identity labels, and avoid asking invasive questions. If you or other adults in your congregation need more information in order to do that well, I highly recommend the book Welcoming and Affirming: A Guide to Supporting and Working with LGBTQ+ Christian Youth, edited by Leigh Finke. But another part of anticipating your queer youth is giving them books, resources, and opportunities that let them be themselves and see themselves reflected in their faith community. Here are four books I recommend keeping in your church library or youth room, or having in the youth director’s office to be lent to youth who might be interested.
Queerfully and Wonderfully Made: A Guide for LGBTQ+ Christian Teens
Queerfully and Wonderfully Made is a companion to Welcoming and Affirming and is also edited by Leigh Finke. While Welcoming and Affirming addresses adults’ questions about how to interact with queer youth in their church, Queerfully and Wonderfully Made answers queer Christian teenagers’ questions about their sexual orientation, gender, and faith in an affirming manner, reminding teens over and over that God loves them as they are and does not need them to become less queer in order to be acceptable. The book is written specifically for teenagers and is formatted as a Q&A, so it’s very practical and doesn’t require wading through long chapters or even reading the whole thing in order. It’s a good starting point for queer Christian teens, particularly for those who might be struggling with the impact of religious homophobia and/or transphobia.
The Girls Will Be Okay
The Girls Will Be Okay is the only fiction book on this list, and, as its author, I’m obviously biased. But here’s my pitch: the protagonist, Solveig, is a Lutheran girl who realizes over the course of the book that she’s bisexual and has feelings for her lesbian Jewish best friend, Sarah. Both Solveig’s and Sarah’s faith practices are important to them; multiple scenes take place during church services, and most of a chapter is devoted to the Passover Seder that Sarah invites Solveig to attend. It’s rare for young adult novels to feature protagonists who take their religion seriously, and it’s even more rare when the protagonists are queer and their faith communities are supportive and affirming. I made these choices while writing the book because, as a teenager, I couldn’t find any books or movies featuring progressive, deeply religious characters in modern-day settings, let alone characters embracing both their queerness and their faith the way I was. I hope that other queer religious teenagers can read The Girls Will Be Okay and resonate with the characters’ confidence that their queerness is not a threat to their religiosity and vice versa.
Still Stace: My Gay Christian Coming-of-Age Story, An Illustrated Memoir
Still Stace by Stacey Chomiak is a graphic memoir, meaning it’s a full-length book telling the story of the author’s teenage and young-adult years via comic-book-style illustrations and dialogue. Unlike the main characters of The Girls Will Be Okay, Stacey Chomiak did not have the benefit of an affirming religious community, and for a while she tried to become ex-gay because she was convinced that being gay was a bad thing and that she couldn’t be both gay and Christian. This book definitely delves into heavy topics, but it ends with Stacey learning to love her full self and reconciling her sexuality with her faith. To teens from extremely supportive families and churches, Still Stace might feel dated, but for youth who are facing homophobia or transphobia from close family or from current or former pastors and other faith leaders, this book might be exactly what they need to make sense of their situation.
Kissing in the Chapel, Praying in the Frat House: Wrestling with Faith and College
I’ll be honest: Kissing in the Chapel, Praying in the Frat House is over a decade old, and a lot of it will likely feel dated to the people currently in church youth groups. Part of the reason I’m including it is because it came out during my first year of college; I found it in my campus mailbox one day—a gift from one of my theologian mother’s seminary-trained cousins—and it wound up speaking to me in ways that I needed at 18. Despite its 2014 publication date, I think this anthology of essays by folks in their 20s and 30s reflecting on the way that college affected their faith will also speak to some college-bound young folks today. For one thing, the essays come to a whole bunch of different conclusions about faith; one essay is called “After Prayerful Consideration: Becoming a Religious Atheist,” while another is titled “Out of the Closet and Back to Church.” Also, this book was one of the first places I encountered the idea of nonbinary gender identities, and I was very glad to read a first-person essay about a nonbinary person viewing their experience with gender as good and holy. The book as a whole isn’t about queerness, and any Christian student heading off to college might benefit from reading, but enough of it is explicitly about the experiences of queer people wrestling with faith in college that I think it fits well on this list.
Conclusion
While having a church welcome statement that includes sexual orientation and gender identity is a good start when it comes to welcoming queer folks at your church, making queer members and visitors of all ages feel truly welcome is a much larger task. No one book—or even four or five books—is going to make up for the sense of othering that queer teens feel when fellow church members don’t use their pronouns or treat their clothing or dating lives as appropriate topics for question after question. But books like Welcoming and Affirming can help adults in church settings figure out how to understand and interact with queer youth in their congregations, and having the other books on this list on hand can signal to queer teens in your church that you knew you’d have queer youth in your youth programming.
It’s very othering to have people act surprised that you exist (“What? A queer teenager in our youth group?! Well, I’ll figure it out, but I never thought we’d have to deal with this!”). And on the flip side, when people are already prepared for you before you arrive or come out (not “I’m pretty sure so-and-so is gay,” but “It stands to reason that we’ll have at least a few queer kids in our church, if not now then in the next few years”), that can be a huge relief. So if you’re not already prepared for your youth group to include queer teenagers, now is the time to train your staff and volunteers to be respectful and competent when interacting with queer teens, and also to make sure you’re got materials (such as the books on this list) at your church and available for kids seeking guidance on reconciling their queerness with their faith, or looking for stories where faithful queer young folks are represented.
