The Spiritual Abuse of Queer People
My talk, intended for Restore 2025
In this talk, I lay out two arguments:
The condemnation, exclusion, and demonization of LGBTQ+ people by the white, American evangelical church is rightly labeled as spiritual abuse.
That we cannot end spiritual abuse in the church while we allow it to be done to LGBTQ+ people.
This post is the script from which I gave this talk on YouTube. This talk was not delivered at Restore, which I discuss at the end of the talk.
Spiritual abuse is a horrific experience, as so many of you know.
I left a toxic, abusive church in Spring 2021, and it nearly destroyed me.
I left for many of the same reasons you might have: the church’s failure to fight racism. Their embrace of patriarchy, which systemically treated women as “lesser.” Their rampant controlling behavior in the minutiae of members’ lives. Dishonesty, even slander by leaders. Domineering pastors. Psychological and emotional abuse, including the brutal tactics of gaslighting and DARVO. And in the end, a proven willingness to disregard the Bible when it did not suit their ends, or to weaponize it when they could twist it to support unethical actions.
Like many of you, I lost many of my friends when I left. At the time, I appeared to be a straight man.
When I came out as a transgender lesbian woman, almost two years after I left that church, I lost nearly all of my remaining friends.
I have no interest in playing “who is more victimized”, but I will say this about my own experience: the abuse I have taken by Christians for being transgender is so much worse than any I ever took before.
I have received death threats. I have been called a groomer. People have said that I am a pedophile. People have told me to kill myself. People have called me a child abuser. But the more shocking thing is this: All of those things have been said by Christians.
I would have thought that being their enemy would spark some form of love, but no - the hatred has been more intense than I could have ever imagined.
The result of queer people being treated this way is this:
“Actually, religious involvement reduces the risk of suicide for EVERY demographic in this study EXCEPT queer people. If you flock to the church when you’re suicidal, you are less likely to die… …unless you are queer.” (ellipsis original)
Bridget Eileen Rivera, author of Heavy Burdens, summarizing a 2018 study in June 2023.
And yet… if you read about spiritual abuse, or go to a conference talking about it… you may not even hear LGBTQIA+ people mentioned. In fact, of the original seven books I owned about spiritual abuse, only one mentioned queer people at all.
And that one book mentioned it to explicitly state that condemning homosexuality was not spiritual abuse:
“[A report by the Evangelical Alliance in the UK] reviews a number of cases where the term spiritual abuse is being applied (wrongly) to legitimate church functions. For example, if a pastor declares certain controversial behaviors to be sinful (for example, homosexuality), then some have insisted this is a form of spiritual abuse.” - Michael Kruger (Bully Pulpit, page 23)1
That it’s definitely allowed, and not abuse. Interestingly, this was the first example the author gave of sin that must be called out, and the only example of given for someone who is not a pastor. Not, say, child abuse, or slander, or husband’s who neglect their wives. Nothing that actively harms anyone. Just… being queer.
And so, today, for Restore 2025, I want to correct that. The view I will lay out is this: Using church discipline to punish LGBTQIA+ people for being themselves, or spreading misinformation and fear about queer people from the pulpit or other Christian platforms, is absolutely spiritual abuse. And then, importantly for the broader church: We cannot stop spiritual abuse while continuing to make an exception for it when done to queer folx.
Part 0: They deserve it
Before I get into this, I need to say a word to the non-affirming folx I hope will be watching this.
I want you to think about any other form of spiritual abuse you’ve seen in the church. Whether it’s demands to tithe, prohibitions on styles of dress, or commands to “just do what the leader says”, there is one tactic that enables spiritual abuse more than any other: when the people in the church agree that the treatment is justified, deserved, or even needed. Patriarchal churches normalize treating women as second-class citizens. They would never call it abuse, but it is. White supremacist churches would never call their attempts to make Black people assimilate to the white culture abuse, but it is. Churches that require a strict 10% tithe are full of people who are convinced such giving is right. But that requirement is abuse.
“But we need these rules”, members will say.
Each of you can almost certainly point to a rule that is seen as necessary in a church, but which you can recognize as an abuse of spiritual authority.
And so, for this moment, I’m going to ask you to do a very hard thing for a little bit here. Leave aside whether or not you think it is ethical to be in a same-sex relationship or go through gender-transition.
Instead, I want you to consider the aspects of spiritual abuse and see if you agree with me that the treatment of queer people checks all the boxes.
Part 1: Spiritual Abuse
Chuck DeGroat outlined several characteristics of spiritual abuse in his 2020 book “When Narcissism Comes to Church”
Silencing
Spiritual authority is invoked to silence someone because of their gender, a difference of opinion, or a rigorous hierarchy. Those who speak may be scolded and will likely feel shame around having a voice or opinion.
If we take DeGroat’s first example, women in evangelical churches are frequently welcomed, but denied the pulpit or even any ability to speak to the pastor directly.
But for queer people: we are eliminated entirely. Most evangelical churches would not even allow us to be members. Some would ask us to leave the moment we say, “I have no intention of being any less queer.” And many preach such hateful messages about us that it can be traumatic to just sit and listen to the sermon. As I said before, even conferences about spiritual abuse rarely have a queer speaker.
We get scolded and shamed from the pulpits, and frequently in the belief statements on church websites.
In the end, we typically aren’t just told to be quiet. We are told to be gone, because they understand that our very presence is an act of communication. For an evangelical church or conference to see me, happy in my transition; or see a gay couple celebrating a 10-year anniversary, would be a message they have no interest in allowing, and so we must be eliminated, lest we cause people to start asking: “are we sure those queer people are so bad?”
But beyond this, many churches will excommunicate someone for even being affirming. I know a man who is an elder in his evangelical church. I’ve known him for twenty years. I was in his wedding party, and he was in mine. And when I came out to him, there was immediate distance. He later confirmed that even just saying he accepted my transition, and possibly even just using my name and pronouns, would mean he would have to resign his eldership and probably his membership in his church.
Moralizing
Legalism2 in service of abuse is particularly harmful, as strict codes of behavior or moral expectations are elevated above trusted relationship. The victim will internalize a sense of shame around who they are when they cross the artificial boundaries of a spiritual abuser.
This one should be pretty obvious. Queer people are deeply familiar with being told “the bible is clear”. But I want to focus on the rest of this one.
As with my friend - the trusted relationship we had for years barely mattered compared to the strict codes he and his church subscribed to. While he did ask questions, he also made it clear right from the start that he did not approve. As we discussed, he asked question after question, and I provided answer after answer. And… it made no difference.
Prior to coming out, I felt my gender identity in various ways for decades. And yes… I felt deep shame. Every time I would try on something feminine. Every time I would even act slightly feminine. Shame was preached, and I internalized it deeply - something I am still unlearning.
Of course, Christians regularly call me degenerate, an abomination, sick, disgusting, a freak, or any number of other horrible words. Their goal is for me to feel shame, in much the same way my former pastor wanted me to feel shame for the slightest transgressions of his own rules.
Certainty
A belief system is offered as inerrant and infallible, the only valid expression of the Scriptures, and a member’s good standing requires signing off on the whole of the belieff system. There is often a tribalism3 in which the church or denomination has the truth and the others do not. If anyone deviates or raises questions, they are shamed or ostracized.
Again, I almost feel like I don’t need to say anything here. Once again, “the bible is clear” and any attempt to ask questions is shot down without even wrestling with the points.
This is made particularly laughable by the church’s opposition to transgender people. There simply is no text in the Bible that even comes close to forbidding gender transition, and there are some that could be read to endorse it. But let’s look past the individual. There are several podcasts or forums in what I’ll call the centrist evangelical crowd. These are folx who love the book, Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Du Mez. They probably oppose the current president. They want to learn to be more aware of racism, and push back on it. They probably believe in compassion and generosity towards immigrants. They likely won’t sign up for a patriarchal church.
These podcasts continue to judge queer folx. Not only that, they won’t even interview a queer guest, and in many cases won’t even interview a queer-affirming guest.
The in-group marker of being anti-LGBTQIA+ is so strong that to many, that issue alone marks the boundary of who can be thought of as evangelical. If you become affirming, you are out.
Christians such as Pastor Andy Stanley or Jars of Clay lead vocalist Dan Hasseltine have been subject to mass outrage when they just wanted to be kinder to queer people. These weren’t even statements of support, but they were enough to bring down a storm on those figures.
And once again - I suspect that many who care deeply about restoring the church, those who fight against the misuse of power, turned off this video the moment they realized I am transgender. The certainty is so powerful that it has become unthinkable that someone like me would have something valid to say.
Experientialism
The most spiritual people have the most ecstatic experiences, and those who don’t are questioned, marginalized, and made to feel like they don’t have enough faith or aren’t as blessed by God. They are made to feel deficient and wonder why God wouldn’t give them the same experiences.
This one is a little less obvious, but there is an insidious version of it. Evangelicals will hold up the story of the “ex-gay” or “ex-trans” Christian, and say, “look! it’s possible!” These stories regularly include some form of experience like DeGroat describes. Let’s look past the fact that many of the subjects of these stories will later come out and say “actually I’m still gay, and always was.”
But let’s look instead at the rarity of these cases. In fact, they are so rare that despite the evangelical’s obsession with transgender people, there is no prominant ex-trans person in their ranks. I’m not saying that there are no ex-trans people in the church, but they are vanishingly rare. The effect of this is that the church is telling queer people “you can change if you pray hard enough!” when they know full well that such supernatural change experiences are few and far between. “Pray away the gay” has never been anything more than anecdotally successful, and has regular stories of harm and even many individuals held up as “success stories” end up coming out again later.
Unquestioned Hierarchy
Hierarchy in abusive situations isn’t empowering but disempowering. Those who are not in charge are made to feel small, insignificant, and unenlightened. Some may wonder why they’re not good enough or smart enough to be given some authority or at least be considered.
For queer people, the hierarchy is so disempowering that the queer person is denied authority even over themselves. For me, I eventually wondered why a pastor gets more of a say over who I am than I do.
But you see this in other ways - I have tried, in vain, to speak with various conservative Christian pastors or leaders. Some are in churches, others are influential figures in the broader community. And none of them have even been willing to engage, or at least they put restrictions on such engagement that I could not safely agree to.
Power can be expressed in many ways, but one way is this: the ability to simply never listen to those you have power over.
The people in these systems simply do not listen to queer people when we try to tell our stories. And because of that, they try to force their anti-queer will on queer people and those who might otherwise support us.
Checking the Boxes
It should be very clear from that brief overview that the church’s tactics toward LGBTQIA+ people are familiar to anyone who has experienced spiritual abuse.
Devastation
Like I said before, it has the same devastating effects as other forms of spiritual abuse.
My own story had me trying to live as the wrong gender for decades. The secrets I carried, so deep that at times I hid them from myself, were a source of shame for my entire 18 years spent in Evangelicalism. This was the thing I could not confess. This was the thing that made me feel horrible every time a Pastor would ask us to confess those secret sins, and I could not.
And I tried to be what they wanted, or at least be something useful to God. This made me vulnerable to the high control “church” I eventually found myself in for nearly ten years. It was a big part of why I was so susceptible to their language telling me that God wanted faithful followers to help plant more of their churches. The destruction of my true self was a huge abuse that enabled more and more abuse.
There are so many other ways this harm manifests: gay people entering into straight marriages (to the detriment of both partners), trans women enlisting in the armed forces to prove their masculinity, and the incredible weight of living a life feeling like you are under surveillance at all times.
Of course, this whole campaign for no one to be queer results in depression, anxiety, and suicide. Real costs, for real people loved by God. We are told that this is all because the leaders love us so much, but as Emily Joy Allison says,
“Love the sinner, hate the sin” pretends that there is a way to reject LGBTQ persons and relationships while not contributing to their oppression and death. This is a dangerous fiction.” - Emily Joy Allison (#ChurchToo - Page 112)
This is as good a time as any to say this: I do not believe anyone who says they love me, who then judges me for being transgender without ever listening.
Biblical support
And just like many other forms of spiritual abuse, those doing it will cry “but the Bible!”
As I said before, this is already falling into DeGroat’s critique of certainty. But let’s look at some other examples:
For patriarchy, we might see the invocation of Ephesians 5, “wives submit to your husbands.” Or they might quote 1st Timothy 2:12 “I do not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man.”
Author and Christian Ethicist David Gushee, in his book “Changing Our Minds”4 discusses how, a century ago, antisemitism was yet another area where “the bible is clear.” And of course, today, many Christian Nationalists are eager to bring back those same views that led to the Holocaust.
Recently, Christian nationalists have been promoting kinism, a view that we take care of “our own” first, which gives them license to not care about immigrants or even just those different from themselves. While it boggles my mind, they too will make an appeal to the clarity of scripture in their argument.
In all of these instances, Jesus’ commands to love our neighbor, to break boundaries, or to accept the “other” were ignored. Some of these views are fortunately fringe views now, others have directly affected those watching right now.
I say all of that because it is critical to understand that “the bible is clear” has been used to support all manner of atrocities. Perhaps even more importantly, those carrying out evil truly believed that they must do so. These weren’t grifters or people cynically misapplying the Bible. They were people who firmly believed that Jesus told them to control women, hate Jews, enslave black people, and alienate immigrants.
And today, having already lost on all of those fronts, evangelicalism continues to demonize and destroy queer image bearers of God.
I haven’t the time in this talk to lay out all the ways in which I believe the “Clobber passages” are misapplied, but I will include high-quality resources in the show notes.
The weapon of Spiritual Abuse
To build on DeGroat’s work, I would argue that spiritual abuse relies on the ability to declare someone to be in sin, with authority and certainty. It then requires the ability to take action on that declaration: to discipline, to exclude, or to demonize those who are so clearly in sin. Moreover, it requires the ability to do this even when the individual has done no harm to the community or people within it, unless of course you view their very presence as “harm” or “danger”5. But that exception would just beg the question - “queerness is harmful because queer people influence others to be queer” is a statement so circular and question-begging that it’s hard to even know where to start.
But, in a familiar pattern to many, it’s so successful because those who could show it to be false are cast out. Last summer, I was in a church service where the pastor applied 1st Corinthians 5 to queer people. In this passage, Paul says to “not even eat with such a one” after giving a laundry list of sins, including greed and slander. On slander, it’s worth noting that I do not believe I have ever heard a Christian leader denounce transgender people without spreading false information about us. And I have never heard one apologize for this, either. On greed, it’s worth noting that I am well aware of many “secretly affirming” Christian leaders who won’t take a public stand because it would cost them their jobs.
Yet I know of no one who would argue that we should not meet with such leaders. I myself have offered repeatedly to meet, but have never had someone take me up on that. Meanwhile, hosts of Christian conferences and podcasts clearly make great effort to attempt to ensure they do not platform people who might support LGBTQ+ people, and certainly would never platform a queer person themselves (unless of course that queer person is going to help the host score points against other queer people). I can only say that I have the absolute utmost respect for any of these leaders who ignore the expectations and go ahead and support LGBTQ+ people anyways.
Information Control, a core tactic of high control groups identified by Steven Hassan, is nearly total when it comes to LGBTQ+ people, such that an evangelical church, or indeed the broader sphere of white American evangelicalism, will never be threatened by their presence. The only exposure many sitting in those pews have to transgender people, or even gay people, are the blatant misinformation coming from their pastor or other influencers. People like me never even get a chance to say, “I’m sorry, but that is not true.” And even when we try, we are ignored or worse.
I hope by now you can see that the tactics used against queer people are the exact same tactics used in so many other instances of spiritual abuse, and I guess I want to pause here and beg the non-affirming among you to consider whether you are absolutely sure that this time is different. That *this time* exclusion and demonization are truly needed. And you must understand as you say it that all of the white supremacists, patriarchists, and antisemites before you have said exactly those words: “This time, we’re right.”
Spiritual abuse cannot end while it is still done to queer people
Spiritual abuse requires a particular collection of tactics. And so long as we say “those tactics are ok as long as you are sure,” there will be people who say, “I am sure.” Recall that in many cases those who inflict spiritual abuse are truly convinced that they are doing right.
In order to end this, we must dismantle the tactics themselves, and restore the dignity of each individual. We must become people who, as Paul says in Romans 14, respect the consciences of others. If someone doesn’t think they would transition if they were me, I may find that annoying, but it doesn’t bother me or prevent me from being that person’s friend. But it’s quite another thing to try to coerce me to live by their convictions.
And that’s how we want leaders and churches to be on a whole host of issues. If a leader believes they have a wise course of action, they are free to make that argument. But first, they must be humble enough to listen to the responses from those who would be affected, especially if they are affected more than the leader. And second, they must accept that some may simply disagree.
Does this make the church messier? Does it bring up more interesting questions? Yes, and thank God for that! The church thrives when it is not all the same, as Paul so eloquently put when he spoke of the different parts of the body.
But today, we have churches who amputate the hand rather than respecting and celebrating its difference. How will the inclusion of queer people benefit the church? Well, to some extent, this is unpredictable. But some ways are obvious:
They are fellow image bearers, with other stories.
The more examples of love we can have, the more we understand what love is.
Queer people challenge so many things about purity culture that it is impossible for it to stand while queer people are included. This is not because queer people are inherently more sexual than others, but because so many “rules” of purity culture are made and enforced with heterosexuality in minds, and not only are they ill-fitted for queer people, in some cases they don’t make sense.
Ask a trans person sometime what they think about the incarnation or resurrection. There may be others who understand transformation like us, but I know you will see such passion.
Breaking our Conscience
I want to share two examples as I wrap up, to show you the damage done to our consciences when we cling so tightly to our fear of queer people.
#ChurchToo
I read a quote by Emily Joy Allison earlier, and I suspect that many of you don’t know who she is. That’s understandable, because she is not mentioned in any of the books I mentioned earlier. But I suspect many of you are aware of the hashtag #ChurchToo. Well, Emily is the woman who launched it. She even wrote a book by the same name. She has been at the front lines of speaking about sexual abuse in the evangelical church since 2017, three years before most of the well-known books came out. And she is queer.
How could books ostensibly focused on the problem of spiritual abuse in the church fail to even mention the woman who kickstarted the #ChurchToo movement, who continues advocating in that space to this day?
Emily says this, in her book:
But we all knew why. #ChurchToo began when a queer woman came forward about her abuse in the evangelical church. A queer woman who wasn’t sorry for being queer, who wasn’t running back to the evangelical church with her tail between her legs promising to be celibate or go to conversion therapy if only they’d accept her. A queer woman who was well educated in the finer points of evangelical apologetics and held a degree from one of their most respected institutions of higher learning. A queer woman who had nothing left to lose.
I was basically the worst nightmare of the evangelical Christian purity industrial complex. And they wanted nothing to do with me.
Joy Allison, Emily. #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing (p. 109).
It’s hard not to agree that she is right.
But consider this: the many people who say they want to end abuse in the church gave up their opportunity to give #ChurchToo more momentum because its creator was queer. It is hard not to draw this sickening conclusion: they cared more about protecting the church from queer people than from abusers.
Let me say that again: There are many who prove by their actions that they care more about protecting the church from queer people than from abusers.
Child Sacrifice in the Modern Evangelical Church
In one of the worst examples I have seen, a nationally-known evangelical group published an article by the parents of a trans girl right before Thanksgiving 2023. The article aimed to tell other similar parents that they not only did not have to affirm their child’s gender identity, but that, to follow Jesus, they must not.
But it got much worse - at one point they acknowledge that their rejection of their child left their child deeply depressed, and they worried that their child would die by suicide.
But then… these parents. These poor parents who so desperately want to love their child… they came to the conclusion that their child’s death may well just be something they have to bear for following Jesus, that it was part of them “dying to themselves.” Aside from them putting the cost of their following Jesus on their daughter, I responded with the following6:
I simply don’t have words for how upset it makes me to see you talk about dying to yourself when your daughter’s literal life is on the line. You are arguing that your obedience to your God demands that you treat your child in ways that the Bible likens to murder and could easily result in her actual death. There is a term for that: Child Sacrifice. Jesus does not ever demand child sacrifices. Ever. If your “love of Christ” is contributing to the death of your child, then you have to know that you’re not walking in the way of Christ.
This is good news. Please hear it for what it is - you really can truly love your daughter. You can have the amazing relationship with her that so many parents of trans kids will tell you has been nothing but a blessing. You don’t have to lose her. And I don’t want you to lose her either to suicide or estrangement.
As I said before, while the passages used against queer people at least leave some room for debate, there simply is no biblical basis for standing against transgender people. But these parents have been so pressured into seeing their anti-trans stance as a test of their true faith, that they are willing to sacrifice their daughter, and encourage others to do the same.
And while that may be extreme, is that not the bargain many spiritually abusive churches make? They will say, “We know that this may, or probably will harm those we’re doing it to, but it’s necessary for the gospel.” How can we call that Christ-like?
Repentance Needed
Let me try to wrap this up: we must recognize that the treatment of LGBTQIA+ people in non-affirming churches uses the exact same tactics used for any other spiritual abuse. If we want to truly combat all forms of spiritual abuse, we must dismantle the weapon and cease its use against LGBTQIA+ people.
But how do we do that? Let me offer a few suggestions.
Listen: To break the silencing, we have to listen. The exclusion of LGBTQIA+ people depends on evangelicals not engaging too deeply with queer people like me. We need to practice humbly listening to the queer people around us. I deeply regret failing to do this early in my faith with the one gay friend I had, and then really never had a chance again. This will be uncomfortable, but … that’s how we grow. But in general I find that most queer people are willing to answer many good faith questions (and sometimes bad faith ones). I know I am, and you can reach out to me in the comments below or my other contact info.
Learn quickly: In the past three weeks, the rights of queer people have been under assault by the US Government, and that stance has been primarily driven by Christian Nationalists and other evangelicals. In 2022, I gave myself a deadline: by the end of Pride month, I either wanted to be affirming, or I wanted to be able to state clearly why I was not (which of course I would have needed to hear rebuttals for). Give yourself a clear goal and make a plan. Again, resources in the description, including my article on exactly how I got there.
Repentance and Repair7: Privately and/or publicly - do the work of repentance, and truly make amends. Maybe you aren’t fully affirming yet (please work on that), but you recognize that some of the ways you have treated queer people are not ok. Maybe you’ve spread falsehoods about trans people, even unintentionally, but without having checked the facts first - begin by apologizing for that. You can do this as a process. But this step is so important, because if you don’t do it, you won’t truly wrestle with the harm you’ve likely done.
Advocate: I cannot overstate: a straight person is far more likely to be listened to than a queer person. It’s an ugly truth, but like I said - many people will look at me and say “you’re biased because you’re trans.” And like… of course I am? But that’s a more valid bias than someone deciding my gender identity is invalid when they cannot understand what it’s like to be transgender. Use your voice to amplify queer voices, and to push back when you see harm being done to us.
Beloved
Jenai Auman, author of the excellent book Othered: Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized, and someone I am proud to call a friend, said once, about abusive leaders, “They forgot that before God called me anything, he called me beloved.”
If you travel this road, like all good roads, I can say two things:
Travel is difficult. People will leave you, and I know how hard that is.
You will find yourself getting to witness queer joy.
And with that, I close with this photo, taken at a conference of queer christians in 2024
The joy in that room as hundreds met, worshipped, prayed, heard outstanding teaching was truly sacred. But I was not prepared for the experience of taking communion with them. Rachel Held Evans, who was not queer, once went to the same conference, and here were some of her thoughts:
I spoke at the conference as an ally, but within hours of arriving … it became clear I had little to teach these brothers and sisters in Christ and everything to learn from them. I speak at dozens of Christian conferences in a given year, but I’ve never participated in one so energized by the Spirit, so devoid of empty showmanship, so grounded in love and abounding in grace. As one attendee put it, “this is an unapologetically Christian conference.”
Indeed it was. There was communion, confession, worship, and fellowship. There was deep concern for honoring Scripture and loving as Christ would love, even through differences and pain. There was lots of hugging and crying and praying . . . and argyle.
But what startled me the most was the degree to which so many attendees had suffered, sometimes brutally, at the hands of Christians …
And yet here they were, when they had every right in the world to run as far away from the church as their legs would carry them, worshipping together, praying together, healing together. Here they were, being the church that had rejected them. I felt simultaneously furious at Christianity’s enormous capacity to wound and awed by its miraculous capacity to heal.
Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (pp. 211-213)
Friends. We are your beloved siblings in Christ, eagerly waiting for you to be in community with us, to see us as family. We want to sit around a table and exchange stories and encourage each other and support each other. We want to grieve with you when you grieve, and celebrate with you when you celebrate. We want to love you.
Sending love to each of you.
Thank you for listening.
A Note on Restore
Keen observers will note that this is a video on Youtube shot in my bedroom, and not delivered from the stage at Restore 2025. Let me explain.
I attended Restore in 2022 and it was a wonderful experience. No one knew it at the time, but I was deep in my wrestling with my gender identity, weighing whether or not to transition.
But as a survivor of spiritual abuse, Restore 2022 was such a safe place - one of the first places I had been where everyone just got it.
I left, fully intending to go back in 2023. Sadly, that never happened.
Between those events, I heard that Julie Roys had a history of anti-trans remarks and behavior, and so I began researching. The results of that research were far worse than I feared. Some of it was just your normal evangelical anti-queer stances, which would have been bad enough, but some of it was clearly and dangerously incorrect information about trans people in particular.
I reached out, and to make a very long story short, Roys, a journalist, refused to even correct the incorrect information she had spread. As such, I felt compelled to speak publicly on the matter.
I implored Roys to listen, to make Restore 2023 more inclusive, to include an LGBTQIA+ speaker. I did the same again in advance of Restore 2025, that time explicitly offering to be the speaker. I received no response in either case8.
However, just as I do not believe that anyone has the authority to bar people from Christ’s communion table, I do not believe that Julie Roys owns the charter of Restoring the Church.
And so, this video is my unsolicited contribution to the conference.
I hope that many attendees and speakers watch it. I hope that Roys herself watches it. I deeply hope that future Restore conferences will include myself or one of the many gifted queer speakers who would be a great addition to such a conference. I would treasure time to sit with other survivors as we support each other and heal together.
I grieve that we are not yet at such a time.
To anyone at the conference - I pray that you do not forget that an entire segment of the Body of Christ has been excluded. If you have opportunities to speak up for us, I ask that you consider taking them. But mostly, I pray that your experience at Restore is, well, restorative. That it brings some healing to you, and some hope. Spaces like this have failings, yes, but they are also holy ground where I fully believe God is working.
And while the organizers did not mean to include voices like mine, I can only hope the Holy Spirit is moving beyond even their dreams.
And that’s it for the talk - I would be very interested in hearing stories of others who have seen or experienced the abuse of LGBTQ+ people in the church - if you are willing to share, please feel free to do so in the comments.
From Michael Kruger’s book, “Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church.” I should note that Kruger introduced me to the phrase “Spiritual Abuse” in his 2020-2021 blog series “Bully Pulpit.” It very much helped me escape the toxic church I was in.
My note: “legalism” is a term that can have antisemitic connotations and is better to avoid
My note: “tribalism“ is a problematic word that generally we should avoid in favor of words like “in-group thinking”
Billie Hoard and Paul Hoard have developed the concepts of “Eucontamination” (contamination, but good) and the Theology of Disgust. They both friends of mine, and they are brilliant and you can/should learn more about these concepts here (https://theotherjournal.com/2022/10/queering-as-eucontaminant-reorganization%EF%BF%BC/) and here:
You can read my entire response and find a link to the original article, as well as links to a couple other responses to it, here:
See: Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg - On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (with apologies to other authors, this continues to be one the most impactful books I’ve ever read)
"while the passages used against queer people at least leave some room for debate, there simply is no biblical basis for standing against transgender people." The problem that the whole house (anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-women's ministry, hierarchy in marriage and in the church) is built on sand. And the first course, the bottom level of bricks that is sitting directly on the sand, is transphobia. The waves of the stream of living water that flows from the throne of God (Rev 22:1) beat against that house, and beat most strongly against the transphobic foundation. But once that foundation is swept away, then everything else crumbles: If trans women are women, then when a trans lesbian marries a cis lesbian, is that a Biblical marriage or a gay marriage? On what grounds do you ban gay marriage? But if gay marriage is OK, then what happens to the hierarcy of marriage? Which of the lesbians takes the role of the "man" (the "head": the top of the hierarchy). But if hierarchy in marriage gets swept away and replaced by egalitarian marriage and decision making by consensus, then what happens to the hierarchy of leadership in the Church? Does that get replaced by consensus decision making as well? You see the problem? :-)
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