All communities and groups, whether they be macro or micro in size, will develop their own cultures, norms, and practices. Within each culture exists blindspots too, with potential or need for development and growth. That is, if there is a willingness to learn. Here are a few things many Christian communities could benefit learning from LGBTQ+ communities.
1. Diversity Warranting Celebration, Not Defensiveness
Within LGBTQ+ communities there has historically been a deliberate and sincere celebration of broader diversity in people. There is a pervasive recognition of diversity being a good thing, which enriches not only individuals, but society as a whole. This doesn't cover, as onlookers often assume, merely matters pertaining to sexuality, gender, etc. It concerns interests, hobbies, the arts, design, lifestyle, ethnicity, and expression.
Tragically, religious spaces have a long record of reacting defensively to anything perceived as “otherness”. The drive for uniformity has become repeatedly entangled in a complete misunderstanding of what unity is. The enforcement of conformity and sameness has lead to a string of atrocities in religious history, ranging from witch-hunts and religious crusades, to forced conversions - and perhaps more “close to home” – the covert and overt demand for uniformity from members within religious spaces.
Typically, the best-case response of religious communities to diversity has been tolerance: a measure to keep in check its own propensity for violence. But tolerance is, of course, not celebration. The knee-jerk reaction to otherness, taking the form of hatred or a misplaced feeling of being under
attack, persists. And in that breeding-ground of fear and policing, sadly, celebration and appreciation is lost. People who believe in a Creator God – whose signature style is clearly wildly diverse – could take inspiration from the LGBTQ+ community to rediscover a celebration of diversity in other people.
2. Supporting Disabled People
LGBTQ+ communities have been deeply attuned to, and supportive of, the disabled in their society. Both groups often have overlapping life-experiences in a world that has misunderstood, demonised, disregarded, or shrugged their shoulders at the needs of its members. There is often a shared experience of being deemed second-class citizens, or a lower class of human. This has manifested in how they are treated in medical care systems, when facing the threat of eugenics, accessibility to public amenities, and the common stigmas they face in public perception. Persecution and extermination at the hands of the-powers-that-be has repeatedly included both these groups, with a large degree of intersectionality.
LGBTQ+ communities have strongly advocated for the rights of disabled individuals in private and public settings. They recognise the disabled as not being disposable, or an acceptable loss in a society that profits from ableism.
LGBTQ+ people have often been miles ahead of the curve when it comes to
understanding certain disabilities, even before the medical community or the general public has officially caught up. They have been better at open-mindedly listening to the voices of disabled people, and meeting them with dignity and a willingness to learn. This includes the conscious effort to avoid common pitfalls such as infantilising and desexualising disabled individuals.
In the West, we live in a society that is obsessed with (what it perceives to be) youth, health, physical attractiveness, and desirability according to a very narrow standard. This type of society demands a large degree of “fitting in” to survive, and fast emulation to whatever behavioural standards are deemed acceptable. The human is seen as a machine that needs to “work right”, otherwise it is deemed as faulty and of no use as a cog in the greater mechanism. The human body is treated as an object that must succeed in being sexually attractive according to the impossible mould. This, naturally, discounts a large amount of the population which cannot fit these requirements.
The LGBTQ+ community has, contrarily, made space for many bodies. It has pushed to humanise the disabled, while also making both mental and physical spaces more accessible. This understanding of the value of human beings diverging from the productivity-demanding, over-sexualised, capitalistic narrative has caused many disabled people to find not only allyship, but connection within LGBTQ+ communities.
Many Christian groups reflect their greater society in exhibiting deeply ableist attitudes towards the disabled, and need to reconsider many common assumptions about health and wellness, while developing an awareness of the danger of eugenics-forward thinking.
3. Having A Better Understanding Of Mental Health
This point is strongly connected to the previous one. The LGBTQ+ community has demonstrated an active pursuit of understanding and respecting mental health; in contrast to a larger culture that is still deeply entrenched in stigmatising mental health and mental illness.
Christian religious groups have recurrently been behind the curve in understanding and respecting the importance of mental health. Rather, they have often added to the stigma by equating mental health struggles to a lack of faith, weakness of character, a symptom of sin, or even demonic possession. This, naturally, leads to further harm, inflicts deep shame on sufferers, twisted ideas about God, and reduces the likelihood of members being open about their mental health or finding support.
Due to the frequency of bullying, ostracisation, and rejection experienced by LGBTQ+ children, teens, and youth, this group has exhibited high suicide rates and mental suffering. But in response, their community works hard, through individuals and organisations, to promote and de-stigmatise mental health. There is a constant pull to talk openly about mental health, making helpful resources available, to shoulder each other's burdens, and disseminate more sound information. This, in turn, helps break down walls of shame and secrecy, and LGBTQ+ individuals often find support in their friend groups.
A secondary and related aspect concerns neurodivergence. Again, because of the celebration and encouragement of creativity, different minds, and acceptance of deviation from the very restricted “societal norms”, there is more room made for neurodivergent people in LGBTQ+ spaces than in their greater society. People who process the world differently, and express themselves in atypical ways, have a higher likelihood of fitting into a group which is already primed to admit and appreciate this.
Christian communities would massively benefit from making a collective choice to increase understanding of mental health, and fervidly pushing against stigma and taboo culture found within its ranks. A simple and approachable way this can be done is by listening to mental health advocates and voices on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Supportive online communities offer a host of first-hand knowledge, experience, and expertise that far exceeds many other resources.
4. Speaking Out Against Abuse
LGBTQ+ people are more likely to both be victims of, and to be outspoken against, abuse.
According to the HRC Foundation, LGBTQ+ individuals are subjected to much higher rates of intimidation, bullying, and mistreatment, whether that be at home, in school, at work, or in public. These experiences often begin at an early age. Many experience abuse simply because they appear “different”, others because of their higher likelihood of homelessness and poverty - direct consequences of being rejected by their nuclear family and faith community.
The abuse experienced by many LGBTQ+ people is hate-motivated, often violent, and frequently permitted or tolerated in religious spaces since the abuse is viewed as being a necessary “corrective measure” for a behaviour, appearance, or lifestyle which is deemed as twisted and warranting disgust. This has, in many ways, motivated so many
LGBTQ+ people to conclude that the generational and cyclical abuse must stop with them. For example, concluding: “I will not treat my children the way my parents treated me.” There is a true recognition of personal responsibility and a frequent unwillingness to further perpetuate the abuse which they suffered from.
Religious groups and spaces are notoriously heinous in their response to abuse within their communities and organisations. Cover-ups, protection of abusers, and the betrayal of the abused is more common than the alternative. A blend of ignorance about the nature of abuse and how to respond to it, and a practised tolerance of abuse in all its forms, is a cancer at the heart of so many churches, religious organisations, and religious nuclear families. It has become horrifically normalised to turn a blind eye, excuse abusive behaviour, fail to protect victims, blame victims, and pressure victims into performative forgiveness and reconciliation – all bolstered with misapplied teachings about grace and love.
Religion is a perfect breeding-ground for a host of things, ranging from narcissism, and power-hunger, to controlling and coercive behaviour. A very common manifestation of this is something called Triangulation Abuse, which is well worth researching. These behaviours are often justified with false theology and done in the name of God.
The LGBTQ+ community has a deep and storied understanding of abuse, and the unacceptability of it. They exhibit a greater openness to broach the topic, identify it, and denounce it. There is also a greater sensitivity to the subtleties of abuse, which many outside the community would miss or fail to acknowledge as abuse.
Most Christian communities claim to care deeply for families, children, unity, and community. But the health and legitimacy of all these things are dependent on healthy relationship. Trustworthy, communicative, respectful, emotionally developed, just relationships. None of those things can exist if abuse is tolerated in any form, to any degree. Until religious spaces drastically change how they understand and respond to abuse, they will remain unsafe or potentially-unsafe spaces for everyone.
5. More Trauma-Informed & Addiction-Informed Outlook
Coupled with a deep understanding of abuse, LGBTQ+ communities often exhibit a far higher level of being Trauma-informed than Christian religious spaces. (Both trauma with a small and capital “T”.)
Instead of Trauma being the topic of a half-informed, thirty-minute seminar for the congregation on a Sunday evening, Trauma-informed care, communication, and understanding is a deeply discerned topic in many LGBTQ+ communities. Individuals will often carry out extensive personal research on the role Trauma plays in a person's life, the importance of breaking cycles which perpetuate Trauma, and the type of support which is needed for the traumatised. There is an equal understanding of both the personal things which cause Trauma and the need to dismantle systemic causes of Trauma. (Examples such as poverty, exploitation in labour, treatment of immigrants, racism, etc.)
Accompanying this, is a recognition of the inherent link between Trauma and addiction.
Addiction has often been treated as a moral failing in religious communities. The overt or covert “treatment plan” generally applied has been along the lines of a call to greater discipline and faith, isolation, secrecy, denial, condemnation, “sin” labelling, self-punishment, and so on. But the LGBTQ+ community promotes more open conversations about addiction: a topic so often shrouded in shame, thus further deepening addiction's hold on sufferers. The community advocates for addicts, perceiving that connection, and not isolation, is the path to healing; just as connection is healing to Trauma.
6. Being Social Justice Activists
Many people in the LGBTQ+ community are deeply passionate and actively involved in social justice matters – to a greater degree than the average populace. Quite surprising
to some, this involvement concerns the rights and defence of minorities other than themselves.
With frequent cases of intersectionality, many LGBTQ+ individuals see how injustice committed against one group is the responsibility of everyone in society - and it ultimately affects us all. The allyship to other marginalised groups is viewed as a human responsibility. Thus, historically, the LGBTQ+ community has been very vocal in the demand for equity and just treatment of black people, immigrants, the undocumented, the plight of indigenous populations, the disabled, women, and action in the environmental crisis.
Protest and civil resistance is not considered a
luxury, but a duty. This allyship and support of
oppressed groups and minorities is ongoing, not performative activism. It grows from a shared understanding of what it is like being marginalised, and both the importance of, and need for, unity and cross-cultural support.
7. A Healthier Understanding Of Gender Roles
Many Christian communities have internalised a surprisingly secular understanding of gender roles. Though this understanding is utterly secular, it is often mislabelled as “Christian”, “biblical”, or “How God intended it”.
Ironically, much of the thinking which impersonates an Edenic ideal, finds its actual origin in a deeply misogynistic ideology, growing from secular, patriarchal, oppressive system. Many see this ideology quintessentially portrayed in the 1950s, white, American, middle-class ideal. This ideal is also an inheritance from Victorian and Puritan roots. In turn, this “ideal” picture of man and woman is superimposed on the biblical text and made to seem ancient and divinely predestined. Many of the tactics historically used to oppress women is reframed as being the original will and intention of God. In many Christian communities, internalised misogyny and sexism (in both men and women) is so incorporated into every layer of hermeneutics, language, social norm, and personal identity, that the suggestion of any alternative seems like pure perversion.
Naturally, a cascade of evils flows from this deep-rooted problem. Unhealthy relationships, the limiting of women's voices and role in ministry, workplace discrimination, toxic masculinity, machoism, marital expectations which lead to either suffering, abuse, or termination of the marriage. The list is endless.
The rigidly-assigned roles forced on each gender are so thoroughly ingrained in the theology and thinking of particularly “traditional” or “conservative-leaning” religious factions, that hatred, bigotry and mistreatment are completely overlooked or passionately rationalised. They are even seen as "doing God's work" and "protecting core, biblical values". And again, these prejudices and assumptions lead to wanton Isegesis when consulting Scripture.
The LGBTQ+ community challenges the rigid gender roles upheld by patriarchal, oppressive culture. The banal and absurd restrictions on what behaviour is deemed acceptable to each gender is questioned and confronted. Challenged stereotypes include: men have to be more aggressive than women, boys/men shouldn't be as emotionally expressive or cry as much as girls/women, girls/women are expected to be more emotionally mature from a young age, all women should want children, men are more suited to physical jobs, certain household chores and tasks belong to one or the other, and so on. The absurdity of these restrictions has gone as far as to assign certain "acceptable" colours to each gender. What so many fail to see is that toxic masculinity and a patriarchal systems doesn't just harm girls and women: it harms boys and men. Men are victims of their own system. So much of the mental illness and suffering which boys and men struggle with in our society are precisely a result of being harmed and oppressed by the very system they uphold.
The LGBTQ+ community has brought liberation and belonging to so many individuals who were looking for an alternative to a culture they couldn't fit into – and indeed, rightfully shouldn't. How gender is expressed is constantly being challenged, and in turn, much oppression dismantled.
8. Advocacy For Women's Rights
A large part of being aware of the misery which comes from patriarchal oppression, is recognising the need to advocate for women's rights and equity. Whether that be in the home, workplace, in politics, or other public spaces.
The LGBTQ+ community has been deeply empathetic and involved in this advocacy. And unlike the rest of the populace, the call for equity and anti-chauvinism has not mainly come from women, but from all other sides of the queer community. This active backing has ranged from normalising openness about female health, menstruation, and diversity in bodies, to civil action against government policy which harms and threatens women's
human rights and bodily autonomy.
Many religious circles are still tremendously bogged down in rampant taboo-culture when it comes to women's bodies, menstruation, sexuality, and their demand for girl's and women's fair and just treatment is glacial at best.
9. De-stigmatisation Of Men's Health
The LGBTQ+ community has been leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to openness and better communication about men's health – both physical and mental.
In a society where toxic masculinity has caused many men to still have limited knowledge/interest in their own need for medical check-ups, a healthy lifestyle, personal hygiene, community, and general physical care, normalising things like going to the doctor can drastically improve their wellbeing and downright save lives. For example, if the culture of “getting help is for the weak” is set aside, it allows more serious and
preventable illnesses and conditions to be caught earlier, ranging from STD's to cancer.
The stigma surrounding men's mental health is a massive and dense issue which lays like an iron blanket atop our society, with men far more likely to die from suicide than women. And male violence continuing to result from that stigma and lack of accountability.
Societal pressures, cultural norms and beliefs cause many men to suffer in confusion, in silence, and alone. Toxic masculinity, and its integration into church cultures, makes support from other men rare or impossible, erroneously spiritualises some struggles, and infiltrates male friendships in a detrimental way – causing further loneliness.
The LGBTQ+ community has a far superior track record in openly sharing about men's mental health, and offering resources that might suit a far greater spectrum of sufferers. The community also has a longer history of appreciating alternative or out-of-the-box types of support and therapy approaches, since mental health support was not accepting of, or open to, its members for many years. Alternative or unconventional support is often preferred by men, since it is removed from the more stigmatised, mainstream therapy and support systems.
Christian spaces need an overhaul in their relationship to mental health. Psychology is still often labelled as a "secular" practice, treated with enmity and suspicion. Religious groups' relationship to mental health is a nebulous and deeply complex issue to broach because much of the stigma is caused by larger oppressive systems such as misogyny, white supremacy, and a patriarchal system, . Yet it is possible to begin. It is necessary to begin. It is worth doing.
10. Supportive Of The Arts
A major outlet and sanctuary for many LGBTQ+ people has been in the arts. Art, music, design, drama, and performance has often allowed room for members to express and explore more freely where they otherwise could not, and to tell narratives otherwise silenced. Our society has benefited from a deep well of creativity and beauty flowing out from the LGBTQ+ community.
Religion often has historically had a pendulum stance on art and beauty – swinging wildly from desiring and utilising art, music, and design to glorify God or the religious institution, to condemning such things as vain, vapid, trivial, or sin-inducing. Christianity oscillates between Renaissance and Puritanism, excessive lavishness and self-denial, the grandiose and cruel austerity. Beauty has often induced a panic-reaction, being over-sexualised or associated with a sinful carnal sensuality. Ironically, this panic has often revealed the true culprit: an internalised objectification of women, and the lack of self-control and weakness of those decrying art and beauty the most.
Beauty, art, design, music, story – these are all things humankind was made to create and enjoy. They whisper of things beyond the veil of this world. A balance between appreciation and rightful respect of the arts needs to be recaptured in some faith communities – not as a commodity, not as something to be worshipped or condemned, but a joy and freedom, and a builder of community and connection. Creativity isn't superficial, and has value beyond the Capitalism which often stifles innovation.
11. Sex Seen As Not A Bad Thing
LGBTQ+ communities' openness about sex education and sexual health has stood in contrast to the fundamentally shame-based relationship many religious communities have with sex. The higher levels of informedness about sex has stemmed from a greater openness to talk about the particulars of sex among its members.
This resulted in a well of knowledge being shared before school or even medical text books shared this same informed. LGBTQ+ communities have promoted safe and protected sex, instead of pretending that preaching abstinence will eradicate sexually transmitted diseases, guarantee a healthy outlook on sex, or magically eliminate unplanned pregnancies.
Many denominations have a backlog of hundreds of years of sexual suppression, demonising, shaming, as well as numerous profound misunderstandings about sex due to uninformed theology and irresponsible hermeneutics. What is mistaken as reverence for sex can, in fact, be shame. For years, sex has been talked about in hushed tones, where mature adults avert their eyes, grit their teeth, and talk about it in tones laced with taboo and embarrassment.
This has resulted in, among other things, a complete or partial ignorance - even disregard - for female sexual pleasure. Female sexuality has often been spoken of mainly in the context of procreation; the female body is often reduced to functions. Whether willingly or unwillingly, the female body is repeatedly confined to the role of a birthing machine, or an object created for the purpose of male pleasure. The female body is approached simultaneously as a source of great shame, and something which can be rightfully possessed and is a source of temptation.
The obsessive scrutiny of purity culture
poisons the minds of people of faith from all
generations, inducing everything from body dysmorphia, mistreatment of women, coercive marital behaviours, eating disorders, fear of sex, secrecy, and propping up cultures of abuse. It communicates to girls from a very young age that they themselves are somehow dirty, indecent things, yielding internalised shame and self-hatred that is often mistaken for modesty or “simply a part of the female experience”.
Within most Western Christian circles, sex is taught from a white, male, able-bodied perspective. The male is painted as being at the centre of the narrative, as the Initiator and Possessor of power, while the female is portrayed as needing to have a secondary, docile, accepting role.
In many Christian micro-cultures, sex is typically narrowed down to meaning only sexual intercourse, as though this is the whole meaning and point of sex. Furthermore, sex and sexuality are imagined to be the same thing – one equalling the other. And, abhorrently, although the anatomical operation of sexual intercourse is taught in church schools and referred to in religious settings, a majority of the time they teach nothing of consent. This final point is particularly horrendous. Sex education without consent-education is a recipe for abuse.
The LGBTQ+ community has been adept at promoting consent. They have been better at viewing sex as far more than the narrow, utilitarian function of marital duties or producing children. The respect for personal pleasure, different-bodied individuals, and the call to honour the bodily autonomy of each person, regardless of gender or age, is both deeply needed in our society, and beautifully close to the much misunderstood Edenic ideal.
12. A Higher Rate And Concept of Platonic Relationships
Much of the relationships, community, connections, and loyalties of LGBTQ+ people are not contingent on genetic connection. “Christian” culture has claimed to highly value and prioritise the nuclear family, presenting the ideal relationships as being dependent on marriage and children. The insinuation being, that these are needed for true family and belonging to occur. LGBTQ+ communities have focused more on building deep relationship and intimacy which is founded on mutual choice and shared values; rethinking the assumption that nuclear family is the only 'real' family.
Many LGBTQ+ people are disowned by their birth families and treated poorly. For them, friendships and queer communities have taken the place of those nuclear families, and are often built with unbreakable bonds of mutual respect, loyalty, devotion, and acceptance. These bonds are no less real or legitimate than those found in nuclear families, although they are often not understood or recognised as legitimate according to the law, the medical community, or social opinion.
The LGBTQ+ community has allowed individuals the freedom to experience alternative ways to live one's life in a relationship-rich, love-filled, community-based way, without having to be married or procreate. The choice doesn't have to be: “get married and have children or live a life of loneliness”. There are other options. There are other ways of living one's life outside the imagined "life milestones" inflicted on us all. For example, platonic friendships are treated, not as stand-ins for romantic relationships, but as life-long commitments. Friends are viewed as the family you choose. Platonic friends are increasingly living together, buying homes, adopting children together, creating sustainable lifestyles. Living in groups/communes where resources are shared is on the rise, and is a wonderful alternative when facing a cost of a living crisis. Singleness is more accepted as a life which is not lesser-than, lonely, or abnormal.
Christian communities have a history of misunderstanding singleness (whether singleness be by choice or circumstance). This is revealed in the language commonly used, such as: “God has someone out there for you”, or “You'll meet you're other half one day”. As though a person is not already a whole without a romantic attachment; as though not marrying is a failure of God's will being played out in one's life.
Singleness is often viewed as a temporary misfortune which a church's “single's mixers night” can fix. Even single's ministries are geared towards ultimately ending that "state" of singleness. Marriage is glorified as a rite of passage to become a fully-fledged social member of the faith community. Childlessness is met with no less stigma or harm than it was in the days of Eli and Hannah. A large number of Christians who are unmarried and childless find solace and belonging in LGBTQ+ spaces simply because they are already viewed as whole human beings who can have deep and meaningful connections.
There is a great need for re-examination and re-discovery of the true meanings of relationship, family, and belonging as expressed in Genesis, at the origins of Humanity. It is a vastly misunderstood and misapplied theology which does great damage.
13. Less Blind Loyalty To Organisations & Institutions
The LGBTQ+ community has historically been met with hostility, imputation, and exclusion by both governmental, social, and religious organisations and spaces. Where there hasn't been downright expulsion, there's commonly been heinous mistreatment. Thus, it's members have had to think outside the confines of many manmade organisations and structures. Historically, they have practised less blind loyalty to authority figures or institutions than religious persons have.
Unquestioning support of religious leadership figures, or prioritising the public image of a company, organisation, or congregation is an all-too-common practice among Christians. Mixing up loyalty to God with loyalty to churches is as frequent a pitfall. Frequently, members believe their current theological understanding to be infallible. Naturally, this attitude is notoriously difficult to challenge since it usually leads to defensiveness and further entrenchment on part of the challenged.
Christian groups and individuals often mistake tradition for absolute, divinely-instituted law. As a result, many harmful behaviours are excused, spiritual growth impeded, stagnation ensues, and Jesus' name sullied with the hateful attitudes and actions of people who claim affiliation with him. Blind loyalty is not
only dangerous, but it is contrary to the life human beings were created to live. We were created to be thinking beings with free will, called to constantly grow and move with a dynamic, living God. Blind loyalty to man-made structures is a slippery slope which ultimately leads to tyranny and/or persecution of those who voice disagreement. This persecution is often supported by the larger group, who genuinely believe it is their responsibility to protect and preserve truth itself.
Many Christian communities could benefit from learning and applying the reality that: truth, if it is genuine, is not so fragile as to be damaged by questions, doubt, or critical thinking. We are invited to follow the Lamb wherever he goes – not wherever our organisations, institutions, or religious leader go.
Concluding Thoughts:
There are many cultures we can benefit learning from and listening to.
It would bring liberation to all involved if more Christians pursued some of the values and practises mentioned here, as exemplified in many LGBTQIA+ communities. We might be surprised at how loving, remarkable, worthy, and beneficial these outlooks and actions are. We might equally be surprised at how loving, remarkable, worthy, and important individuals in this community are. We may come to see that, in contrast, many of our religious mindsets are deeply ungodly and reflective of a secular, unloving culture and influence.
We might discover how the spirit of Jesus is very much reflected in people many religious groups have written off, condemned, and painted as purely evil. Much can be learned from spaces we have long misunderstood and demonised, if we have the humility and wisdom to listen with the intent to understand.
Recommended Sources & Resources:
Zach W. Lambert
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