I had a serious talk with a Christian friend about this recently. He and his wife are deeply involved with their church, and his wife’s job is actually working with Christian students on campus as a mentor figure. And one of the big things they’re committed to is trying to bring more queer people and poc into the church. Like, it’s a big thing for them. They want their church to have a message of inclusivity, to make marginalized people feel welcome, and they do a lot of work to make that so.
Yet when I asked my friend “what does your church do to make bigots feel unwelcome? is there any way in which your church explicitly calls out bigotry in a way bigots will recognize as referring to them?” he didn’t have an answer. When I asked him how the church arbitrated cases of a bigot making someone feel unwelcome in the community, he told me that the system required the victim to first bring the issue up with the instigator privately, then again with a mutual acquaintance as a mediator, and only then could they bring it to church authorities. (We had a loooooong talk about why that’s a problem). When I asked if the church explicitly invited marginalized members to give feedback on church authority’s conduct and assistance, he said no. Did his church do sermons on how to specifically be accepting and welcoming or merely say “love everyone”? It was the latter. Did my friend know of anyone who had been kicked out or otherwise reprimanded for not being welcoming of marginalized members? No, for domestic violence yes, but not for that.
What had they done? Well they’d preached the message of universal love very strongly, emphasized that god doesn’t hate anyone, and just generally not been discriminatory.
So, I told my friend as gently as I could, you’ve done nothing. And you fundamentally do not understand the marginalized experience or, for that matter, the point of church.
The point of church, I reminded my devout friend, as opposed to private study of the Bible, is community. I mean, that’s the point of any social space, but specifically in churches the point is unconditional community. It is meant to be a place where everyone can automatically assume that everyone else there will accept them, shelter them, and care for them. Celebrate your accomplishments, commiserate your problems, and just generally be interested in your life. Like, that’s The Point. It’s what holds churches together.
But if you haven’t explicitly and without exception purged your church of bigoted members? (Yes, even “I love you and I’ll fight for your rights, even if I think it’s not God’s plan” members). If you haven’t done that, your church cannot offer unconditional community. That ceases to be a perk you can offer. At least not to marginalized members. When your flock is a potential landmine of people who will give you the cold shoulder if you mention your SO or narrow their eyes if you bring up a racial injustice you deal with, you don’t have an unconditional community. You have a conditional community at best, a social group you hold yourself at a remove from most likely, and an active threat to your safety at worst.
This isn’t a function of what a church preaches, but what it curates. What it tolerates within its ranks. What it seeks out and puts a stop to. An inclusive church is not a church which says “everyone is welcome” but a church which is not afraid to lose bigoted members to protect marginalized members.
So, I told my friend, is it actually all that surprising you can’t keep queer members? That your church is basically all white? Because it sounds to me like you’ve been focusing more on making sure folk know how accepting you are than actually protecting vulnerable people from those in your own ranks.
