By Adam Curtis. This post is excerpted with permission from A Better Love: 18 Stories of Meeting Jesus in the Tension of Faith and Sexuality, a collection of stories published by the UK-based ministry Living Out. To read more stories like Adam’s, you can purchase the ebook here.
When I was a teenager, I believed a lie.
This lie seeped into my subconscious thinking and came to define me. I believed that God hated gay people, and that was a problem for me because no matter how many girls I kissed, I only ever fancied boys.
I’m not sure where this lie began in my thinking. Maybe it came from the fact that I grew up when New Atheism was on the rise. Richard Dawkins, along with many others, shouted as loudly as they could that not only was God not there, but that the God of the Bible was evil and homophobic. Maybe it came from the fact that I honestly didn’t know a single person who believed in Jesus and was also gay. Maybe it was born from all the images I saw in the media of Christians holding up gay-hating signs. Or maybe it was all these things combined. But whatever the genesis of the lie was, I believed it.
I grew up going to a church that wasn’t scared of questions. They encouraged us to think and to engage with the Bible intellectually and honestly. This church was filled with lawyers, doctors and those who had been to university, so the idea of blind obedience wasn’t an option. The people there actually cared about me and took an interest in my life.
Yet I never wanted to express my doubts to anyone there. The lie had taken hold of me. I thought that if I told anyone about my sexual desires, I would be driven out of the church with a pitchfork.
As is the case for many young people, university was my chance to choose for myself what sort of person I was going to be and what sort of life I was going to live. During my first year at Cardiff University, I kidded myself that I was straight. By halfway through my second year, I was exhausted because I honestly knew that I wasn’t. After accepting this, I decided that enough was enough. My sexuality was set, and if God hated gay people, that meant God hated me. As I couldn’t change my sexuality, God had to go. I literally put my Bible in the bin and vowed to give it all up.
The only problem was that even though I wanted to give up on God, he didn’t seem to want to give up on me. It was like he had a lasso round my heart, and he kept on drawing me back to himself. This happened in so many ways. In conversations, friends would remind me of the reasons why Christianity is true. On long walks alone, I couldn’t escape the idea that a life without God was a life without any meaning or purpose. God kept on confronting me with my need for him. It didn’t take me long to take my Bible out of the bin.
Running away from God quickly became impossible—so I decided to take another route. I had heard about a brand of Christianity known as Queer Theology that had a different understanding of marriage. So, I decided to start reading their top thinkers. I should have been an easy convert. I believed in God but I didn’t like the traditional sexual ethic. But yet again, I ran into a problem. For me, the Bible was a precious book that reveals to us the thoughts of God. It didn’t seem that way for the Queer Theologians. Some didn’t take it seriously, while others used complicated arguments to try and justify why we shouldn’t do what it clearly said. The more I read, the less I liked. Soon, I came to realise that I could never sign up to this form of Christianity because I simply didn’t think it was true.
All of this left me in a difficult place because I still believed the lie. God hated gay people, but I couldn’t seem to get away from him. Thankfully, God is an expert at saving his people from difficult situations. In 2011, I ended up telling a Christian friend that I was gay. I hadn’t really wanted to, but I was feeling such deep anguish that I just had to get it all off my chest. I thought, “This is it—the end of our friendship”. He was going to get his pitchfork and hateful sign, and that would be that.
Instead, he told me that this didn’t change the way he looked at me. After that conversation, I ended up telling a mentor at church, other friends and then my family. It is remarkable. The media had made me so scared of talking to Christian friends about my sexuality, but after all these years I have never faced rejection. I have experienced homophobia in my life, but never from anyone in the Church.
As I started to open up to people about my sexuality, I quickly realised that there are actually lots of people in my life who are same-sex attracted and followers of Jesus: some young and some old, some from Wales and some from England—even popular Christian writers whose books I had read! I thought there was no-one else like me in the Church, when actually same-sex attracted followers of Jesus are everywhere.
God doesn’t hate gay people. He loves us. Dawkins was wrong, and I was a fool for believing the lie he helped spread. God the Father loves us so much that he would send his one and only Son, Jesus Christ, down to earth to save us. That is not the action of someone who hates me. That is the work of someone who loves me.
Jesus Christ loves me! He loves me enough to die on a cross in my place. He loves me enough to pay the consequences of my sin and guilt. He loves me enough to bleed and suffer so that I can go free. This is not a cheap love that tells me I’m okay just as I am. This is a costly love that brings about new life and transformation in me. This love is why the Church is already full of people like me.
God loves gay people, and Jesus Christ has the scars to prove it.
