{"id":38577,"date":"2018-09-06T08:38:39","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T12:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=38577"},"modified":"2018-09-06T08:38:39","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T12:38:39","slug":"gay-girl-religious-taboo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html","title":{"rendered":"Gay Girl, Religious Taboo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Christianity Today<\/em> recently published an article by\u00a0Jackie Hill Perry titled I Loved My Girlfriend\u2014but God Loved Me More<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>Perry, an African American writer and hip-hop artist, writes about being a gay Christian and about giving up her girlfriend\u2014for God<\/em>. Perry is also the author of\u00a0Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Perry\u2019s story is an excruciatingly painful read. Perry was only 19 when she became convicted that following God meant giving up her girlfriend\u2014and that continuing to date the girlfriend she dearly loved would lead to her death. Perry\u2019s story brings to mind the centrality of religious taboo in Protestant Christianity\u2014and its consequences.<\/p>\n

\n

God knew he wouldn\u2019t get my attention in a church. Churches didn\u2019t care too well for people like me. Me, being a gay girl. A gay girl who knew better than to let my feet take me where I didn\u2019t feel welcomed. So God came to my house. I was having a very \u201cunspiritual\u201d kind of night. The TV was on. The morning was hours away. My thoughts were boring and typical until they turned on me. As suddenly and randomly as Paul was struck blind on the Damascus Road, I had the unsettling thought that my sin would be \u201cthe death of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior to that moment, the sin I wore on my sleeve was that of a lesbian: a label I had the courage to give myself at age 17. This label described an affection I noticed before I knew how to spell my name. When it happened on the playground, I didn\u2019t know what it<\/em> was. I didn\u2019t quite understand why girls made me feel different<\/em>. \u2026 Where it came from made no difference to me. I liked girls, and I knew it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The writers at Christianity Today<\/em>\u2014and evangelicals in general\u2014present stories like this as proof positive that homosexuality is sinful and that it is possible to change\u2014or at least leave the \u201clifestyle.\u201d The trouble is that these stories never occur in a vacuum. Gay individuals\u2019 choices, in these stories, are always pre-laced (and pre-seeded) with homophobia.\u00a0Perry may have always known she liked girls, but she grew up in a homophobic family and church.<\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n
\n

I\u2019d heard more times than I cared to count that what seemed to me a natural enough expression of love was, in fact, unnatural and flat-out abominable.<\/p>\n

I had grown up in the traditional black church, where sermons were presented in a Mount Sinai kind of way, both loud and heavy. I\u2019d heard the preacher speak for God when he, with fire and frenzy on his tongue, read to us from Romans 1 about God giving his creatures over to the sinful desires of their hearts, which included men and women \u201cexchang[ing] natural sexual relations\u201d for \u201cshameful lusts\u201d toward members of the same sex (v. 26).<\/p>\n

In fact, having seen God\u2019s words for myself, I never once had felt the need to question whether what he said was true. So when my thoughts spoke of my sin, which I knew to be a prompting from God and not my subconscious behaving unnaturally, I wasn\u2019t offended by the idea of my identity being a product of sin. What offended me most was that idea that it (my sin, my kind of love) was to be the death of me. Because if that were true, then surely I would be asked to lay it aside for the sake of life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In other words, even as she was dating a girl, Perry had never challenged the idea that homosexuality was sin. She believed it absolutely was a sin<\/em>. She just did it anyway.<\/p>\n

That late night when Perry became convinced that if she continued dating girls it would \u201cbe the death of her,\u201d her thought processes were fueled by the hate-filled messages she had heard growing up. She was only 19. All those sermons she had heard preaching about how unnatural and sinful same-sex desire is finally got to her.<\/p>\n

This story is deeply, profoundly tragic.<\/p>\n

\n

I loved my girlfriend too much not to be appalled at the prospect of laying aside not only the way I loved but also who<\/em> I loved. To do what I assumed God would have me do meant leaving the woman whose voice and body and mind had been mine to hold and keep. To those who had heterosexual eyes, our love was a strange thing. To us, it was a normal, \u201cwhy would I do anything else\u201d kind of thing. I loved her, and she loved me\u2014but God loved me more. So much so that he wouldn\u2019t have me going about the rest of my life convinced that a creature\u2019s love was better than a King\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The more time goes past the less sense homophobia makes to me, on any level. The love between two people is the same whether those people are man and woman or woman and woman or man and man\u2014they are all still people. This seems an odd thing to care so much about\u2014who a person loves, who a person chooses to live life with. And yet here we are.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>

\n

Shortly after that pivotal night, I was doing the painful work of breaking up with my girlfriend. Her tears were too loud to listen to without regret. She knew how much I loved her, how childish my face got when she was around.<\/p>\n

To leave her, us, our love, made no sense apart from the divine doing of God. She was both my woman and my idol. She was the eye Jesus said to gouge out and the right hand he commanded me to cut off (Matt. 5:29\u201330). Though it was as painful as the extreme act of removing a part of the body, it was better for me to lose her than to lose my soul.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just . . . gotta live for God now,\u201d I said with a tear-broken voice. A new identity was to come after I hung up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This whole framing is so broken. Perry\u2019s words hurt to read. I want to cry for her, 19 years old and afraid that who she loves might send her to hell. By all accounts, Perry\u2019s love for her girlfriend was a healthy love, a mutual and caring love. In fact, from what she writes here, her love for her girlfriend was beautiful<\/em>. But Perry had been lied to so many times that she had come to believe it\u2014that her love for her girlfriend was something shameful.<\/p>\n

Perry refers to her girlfriend as \u201cher love and her idol.\u201d This phrasing caught my eye, and I finally figured out why. I\u2019ve heard it before. It\u2019s the same framing applied when a woman dates a man who is not a Christian. That man, the framing goes, is her idol<\/em>. She needs to give up that love\u2014to give up that person\u2014for God<\/em>. God\u2019s love matters more.<\/p>\n

Here, this framework is applied not to specific individual women but to any woman Perry might ever date.<\/em> A straight woman who gives up an unbelieving boyfriend has the potential to meet someone else. A lesbian woman who gives up ever having a girlfriend does not.<\/p>\n

Perry concludes with this:<\/p>\n

\n

I had no idea what would come next or how I\u2019d have the power to resist everything I\u2019d once lived for, but I knew that if Jesus was God and if God was mighty to save, then surely, God would be mighty to keep. And 10 years later, he is still keeping this girl godly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve often thought of Protestant Christianity as a religion of words and beliefs\u2014you get to heaven by believing and saying the right things, after all. You do not earn your way in by works. Similarly, Protestant Christianity has very little in terms of ritual\u2014services are simple, and even communion is practiced only a few times a year, and without pomp.<\/p>\n

There are many religions that are more about carrying out certain actions\u2014participating in elaborate religious ceremonies, leaving food at temples, heck, visiting<\/em> temples. Wearing certain religious garments, eating or not eating specific things. I\u2019ve always thought of Protestant Christianity as different\u2014as based on the mind\u2014on what you believe and profess\u2014and not on what you do\u2014rituals or actions.<\/p>\n

To be clear, I have never thought this made Protestant Christianity better<\/em>\u2014in fact, one thing that attracted me briefly to Catholicism was the ritual. I liked it. I\u2019ve also sometimes referred to the sinner\u2019s prayer as \u201csaying the magic words,\u201d because a salvation system based only on belief and words\u2014and not on action or inherent value\u2014seems off to me.<\/p>\n

But reading Perry\u2019s words, it strikes me that while Protestant Christianity may not be particularly ritualistic\u2014and while its salvation system may be based on thoughts and words\u2014Protestant Christianity\u00a0is<\/em> heavy on religious taboos. This is one of them: Staying godly, for Perry, means not touching a woman. What a woman does with her body\u2014what she touches, and how\u2014has deep religious implications within Protestant Christianity.<\/p>\n

Reading Perry\u2019s story, I\u2019m struck by the reality that LGBTQ support groups in schools can only go so far, that LGBTQ-friendly churches and religious leaders can only do so much. There will still be girls raised in churches like Perry\u2019s, girls who, like Perry, believe all the things they\u2019re taught there despite themselves. And the result is grief, pain, and trauma.<\/p>\n

I have a <\/b>Patreon<\/b><\/a>! Please support my writing!<\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Perry’s story, I’m struck by the reality that LGBTQ support groups in schools can only go so far, that LGBTQ-friendly churches and religious leaders can only do so much. There will still be girls raised in churches like Perry’s, girls who, like Perry, believe all the things they’re taught there despite themselves. And the result is grief, pain, and trauma.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":38630,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[110],"class_list":["post-38577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-lgbtq"],"yoast_head":"\nGay Girl, Religious Taboo<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Reading Perry's story, I'm struck by the reality that LGBTQ support groups in schools can only go so far, that LGBTQ-friendly churches and religious leaders can only do so much.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gay Girl, Religious Taboo\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Reading Perry's story, I'm struck by the reality that LGBTQ support groups in schools can only go so far, that LGBTQ-friendly churches and religious leaders can only do so much.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Love, Joy, Feminism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-09-06T12:38:39+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/166\/2018\/09\/couple-2594749_1920.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"768\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"512\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html\",\"name\":\"Gay Girl, Religious Taboo\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2018-09-06T12:38:39+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-09-06T12:38:39+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\"},\"description\":\"Reading Perry's story, I'm struck by the reality that LGBTQ support groups in schools can only go so far, that LGBTQ-friendly churches and religious leaders can only do so much.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/09\/gay-girl-religious-taboo.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Gay Girl, Religious Taboo\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/\",\"name\":\"Love, Joy, Feminism\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\",\"name\":\"Libby Anne\",\"description\":\"Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the Christian Right. 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