“Selfishly, I’m worried about what will happen if I say out loud that I’m uncomfortable with all this God, if I let my brain run its anxious course. If my atheist, queer, bipolar self comes to choir with me in all its unkempt glory, will I lose my safest place?”

“We’re in Lancaster County at Erin’s family’s house, surrounded by plastic Bible quiz trophies adorned with gold crosses and family portraits taken at national parks. My bewildered partner comes to me, face slack, and tells me I need to call my mother.”

“Here was a community where race apparently didn’t matter, because we were all humans, made in the image of God. Where a pacifist, sensitive, caring Jesus was the primary male role model. I finally felt at home. I was promised complete acceptance and understanding, and all I had to give was… well, everything.”

To take back the country for Christ, we needed to outbreed, outvote and outactivate the other side, thus saith The Lord.

“My father has very few admirable qualities when it comes to our relationship: he doesn’t follow through on his promises, he doesn’t compromise, and he has a God complex. “

If we don’t abundantly love each other, we can’t have an abundant relationship with God. I must embrace an interpretation of my faith that requires unconditional love for queer people because any less would be to deny my own humanity and that of my community.

“I didn’t know much about gardens, in general, but what I was working with seemed less like the married person’s vegetable patch the church described and more like a Narnian wonderland full of infinite magical possibility.”

“The fellowship said I was thinking too hard about it, that I was stubborn, and that I was not willing to admit that there were forces bigger than me. What they didn’t get was that I did believe there were forces beyond my control, powers bigger than me. Let’s just take gravity as one of many examples. I just don’t believe that praying to gravity or the radiator or the ocean would cure me of my alcoholism.”

“I was simply a girl who thought she liked girls at one point in her life, but prayed it away, and now life was good. Right?”

La Virgen de Guadalupe has always been dear in my heart and always will be, but the way I view her has changed throughout the years, through various lenses with different interpretations, including now as a queer woman.

My partner and I often navigate the more challenging aspects of our relationship, and lives, using the language of “imagine.” For me, and presumably for her, the word itself feels better, carries less weight than perhaps, “hoped” or “wanted.”

Ever since I went to a Halloween party at my friend’s church youth group in 6th grade, I’ve been almost inseparable from my Christian identity. But on November 4th, 2012, my heart was all the way down in my toes as I got ready to go to church for the first time as a transgender lesbian.

“The summer after I turned thirteen, I decided that exactly two things needed to happen in order for my life to matter: I needed Rosie Collins to like me, and I needed my parents to send me to Bible Camp.”