The Land, Sexuality, and the Church: Life & Belonging in Open Spaces

Hi, new friends. I’m glad you’re here. If you’ve found Progressive Rural Theology, I hope you’ll stick around for the articles and conversations that will come. This space is dedicated to rural congregations, theology, and rural LGBTQIA+ storytelling. I hope that you will join in the conversation and add your perspective and opinions. I am hopeful that this will be a space that challenges rural congregations in their mission and ministry and provides support for LGBTQIA+ people in rural communities.

My Commitments

My life’s work is borne out of a desire to interrogate and understand my own story. In my experience, the land, sexuality, and the Church are inseparably interlinked. My doctoral work, simply put, seeks to understand the spiritual resiliency of rural LGBTQIA+ Christians. Or, asked another away: “How have your Christian practices evolved as you have integrated your LGBTQIA+ and rural identities?”

My Story: The Land and the Church

I am doing this work because I grew up with theologies that were inclusive and loving. Early on, I learned from my pastors what it meant to belong and to question and to challenge. My home congregation of 25 years taught me what it meant to endure together and build relationships together. I simultaneously experienced the land as a place that asked much of those that walked upon it. For me and many other rural folks, the 250 acres that my family and I worked upon each day held with it expectations of rigid masculinities and gender and sexuality expressions. In my young mind, I equated following these expectations with morality. Precisely, what it meant to be “good” and be a “man” and a productive citizen.

And, strangely enough, I also experienced the land as a space that gave incredible and deep freedom. I first whispered the words, “I’m gay”, in the hollow of the valley down from my parent’s house at the age of 16. The steep bluffs and valleys of Minnesota’s Driftless Region – the place that I call home – would come to hold my secret for more than a decade.

My Story: Real and Imagined Hopes and Expectations

From 16 to 26, I lived in a state of repression. I tried my best to fit in with the communal norms that I felt were asked of me. It was hard to imagine – what would life on the other side of coming out look like? It was hard to imagine because the state passage of marriage equality felt like it was something happening on the coasts; far away from rural southeastern Minnesota. It was hard to imagine because there were not yet language nor mirrors for what I was feeling and experiencing. Much of what I knew of “being gay” was that it was something secretive and difficult.

To try to fit in, I did what I thought was expected of me: I dated women, I went to college, and for three years was deeply connected with a fundamentalist Baptist church to try and avoid what, inside, was causing deep turmoil. Finally, at the age of 26, I began the process of coming out, beginning with my mom.

Now – it may seem at odds, at first: the words rural, and LGBTQIA+. Both are laden with common preconceptions, among them being:

• Who would want to live in a small town and be openly LGBTQIA+, given the conceptions of rural communities as backwards, hate-filled?
• Why would anyone want to live in a rural community – with their lack of resources and services and social outlets?
• Why would anyone want to be a part of a small rural church – often thought of as beholden to tradition and rigid morality, a picture of life gone by?

Examining More Closely

The answer begins with: well, many people do. According to the Movement Advancement Project’s 2019 “Where We Call Home: LGBT People in Rural America” report, 2.9-3.8 million LGBTQIA+ folks live in rural spaces – and probably many more. LGBTQIA+ folks have always existed outside of metropolitan and urban spaces.

My research participants speak to creating life in their small communities that is inhabitable and joyful: one that takes advantage of nature and solitude and neighbors. In my research, it has been demonstrated that perhaps rural cannot be solely equated with places where “queers go to be killed”, just as urban communities cannot be viewed as salvific or escapist for queer individuals. Perhaps the stereotypes of rural communities, pushed even further since 2016 and the election of Donald Trump, also need to be interrogated. I think rather than assuming metronormativity  – or, assuming the practice of LGBTQIA+ life and culture in urban areas – we can also look to rural spaces too and see that queer life is lived and produced and imagined in full ways.

My research seeks to provide a platform for people who, even in the enjoyment of their communities, still feel a sense of isolation. As much as they have made life in their small town their own, they also feel a profound sense of isolation and disconnection: in the public, communal sphere because of their sexuality or their gender presentation, but also from the Church. My participants have named the challenges around coming out, around being one’s full authentic self, and around gender presentation: how that has shifted relationships or dynamics within their communities and congregations in negative ways. One participant talks about how, to have his first “gay experience”, he needed to leave the hemisphere: he traded his university town in rural northwestern Minnesota for a study-abroad trip in Brazil, where he finally felt free to explore his sexuality.

The Church and Spiritual Resilience

And, yet, when I ask about what gives them hope in the face of their challenges, there is a deep richness to be brought forth. My participants have described how being in the woods helps them to feel closest to God, and how making music for their congregation is a balm for their spirits. They talk of unlearning and relearning theological concepts such as love and belonging and having seminary-level engagement with the Scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament. Significantly, they talk about re-forming themselves. They describe the process of coming to terms with their own identity and finding safe-enough spaces within their communities to begin to do that work. They wonder about what they can contribute to the communities in which they live, and they wonder at the capacities of the Church to create avenues for further freedom and justice.

And I think that those images: of nature, music, and re-forming oneself and re-engaging with scriptural and religious traditions, has a lot of resonance with the rural church. It is my hope that my dissertative and pastoral work both comforts and challenges the rural church: because there are things that we are indeed doing right, but there are also assumptions and questions that we need to challenge ourselves on. Through the described evolution of my participant’s spiritual practice, and through the harm that my participants have faced through the community and congregation, I hope to prove even more so why affirmation and celebration matters. Even in quiet ways, even if it doesn’t look like the Pride parades of urban communities.

Future Work: Relationships that Endure

Celebrating and welcoming who we are for all of who we are helps to create for a richer life, and an increased ministry beyond simply worshiping on Sunday mornings. One of my participants decided to wonder aloud with me: what would it look like for her small church (in a community of 1,500) to hold truth telling events, so that no LGBTQIA+ child would have to wonder how their coming out would be received, as she did? What would it look like for the Church to host sessions for parents on what to say if they are expecting or wondering if their child is LGBTQIA+? What would it look like to teach in the Church, from a young age, the diversity and goodness and rightness of sexual and gender identity so that children wouldn’t have to question whether there was room for them within their theological tradition?

I am calling the rural Church to task because I have seen what rural faith communities are like when they are at their best. Many of my now-former parishioners embraced me when I came out. Both of my previous congregations hosted wedding showers when my husband and I were married. I have seen the rural Church be a space for questioning and conversation and support. I have seen what happens when love and relationship take precedence over dogma and doctrine.

Stay Tuned!

It is this that I will continue to fight for, and it is this that I wish to showcase in my work. Rural communities and their people are complex and multifaceted. And we see that the rebuilding and rediscovery of spiritual practice within my participants speak to a robust inner strength. I believe that can be a model for our congregations and for our people as we go beyond the hateful or superficial and into what is real and lasting and true. That’s all for now, friends. I hope you’ll come back next week, where I’ll be writing about some of the intersections between land and queer joy – a subtopic that has been coming up from my dissertation research. More soon! Peace and good until next time.