(RNS) — The Christian right has been emboldened by the Trump administration. Nearly every day, there is a headline highlighting the ways President Donald Trump is privileging conservative, white evangelicals while stigmatizing and even targeting other religious communities that make up the diverse tapestry of America. As a result, there has been a predictable increase in targeting the LGBTQ+ community across the country.
From day one of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order making it the official policy of the United States government to acknowledge only two genders, erasing the identities of an estimated 1.6 million Americans who are transgender. Another executive order revoked federal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans in the federal government, making it legal to fire and refuse to hire federal workers and contractors who identify as LGBTQ+. Transgender service members have been barred from serving in our military, and protections for LGBTQ+ people in health care settings have been revoked. References to transgender people have been removed from national parks and historic sites across the country. And many Republicans have suggested they are seeking to push for the Supreme Court to roll back its 2015 ruling extending marriage equality to LGBTQ+ Americans.
None of these actions come out of a desire to honor the Constitution or to extend the promise of American freedom to all citizens, but they are rooted in the religious beliefs of the Christian right. They see Trump’s presidency as a chance to drag our country toward their mythic version of an American Golden Age — when our country was a Judeo-Christian nation and laws were based upon what conservative Christians believe is the teaching of the Bible.
As a queer Christian pastor and theologian, I am not surprised by these excessive attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. Since the first time I stepped into an evangelical church as a teenager, I heard from the pulpit about how the “gay agenda” threatened to undermine the biblical values our nation was founded upon, and how all true Christians had to defend these “biblical values” in the public square. The Christian right has been strategically organizing to create a moment just like this, when they have an opportunity to create an America that privileges them while marginalizing and harming those they view as enemies.
Yet over the past decade, as I’ve trained for Christian ministry and pursued my education in biblical studies, I have become increasingly aware of just how flimsy the Christian right’s so-called “biblical values” related to sexuality and gender are. While pastors boldly stand in pulpits with their leather-bound Bibles and declare that homosexuality is an abomination, the Scripture they are wielding as a weapon actually says no such thing. For starters, the Bible cannot condemn “homosexuality” because the concept of sexual orientation did not emerge until the late 19th century. That means any Bible translation that uses the word “homosexuality” is inaccurate. Similarly, the scholarly consensus is that each of the six passages in the Bible that refer to same-sex sex most likely refers to the common ancient practice of sexual exploitation and abuse of people of lower social statuses, rather than the consensual, loving same-sex relationships that LGBTQ+ people pursue in our modern age.
And, there are many characters in the Bible who would be considered undeniably queer by modern standards for how they subverted the assumed ways that sex and gender were to be embodied in the ancient world. King David and Jonathan’s relationship in 1 Samuel describes two men whose love for each other “was better than that of a woman” (1 Samuel 1:26). Joseph’s coat of many colors is actually a garment referred to in other places in Scripture as a dress worn by women. And, Jesus’ own embodiment of his gender defied first-century Jewish expectations for how men should live. Not to mention that one of the first people baptized into the early Christian church was a person referred to as an “Ethiopian eunuch” (Acts 8), a dark-skinned sexual and gender minority in the first-century world.
When one digs just beneath the surface of the Bible and engages its stories in their ancient culture and context, it becomes very clear the Bible is very queer. And where the Bible does draw hard moral and ethical lines related to same-sex sex is always rooted in passages condemning exploitation, prostitution and idolatry; there is no condemnation of LGBTQ+ lives or love in and of themselves.
If you ask the average lay Christian or even non-religious American, they are likely to say the Bible condemns homosexuality and transgender identity clearly, simply because the Christian right has been so effective at ripping these verses and stories out of their context and weaponizing them to target LGBTQ+ people. It’s not based on biblical conviction, but pure prejudice.
This is why it is so vital that in this moment of American history, LGBTQ+ people and our allies — Christian or not — need to be ready and willing to wrest the Bible from the grasp of the Christian right and reclaim it as the complex queer text that it is. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to go to Bible study or become Christian, but they need to have a basic understanding of how to subvert the Christian right’s core source of authority for their bigotry and use it as a strategy to protect and defend LGBTQ+ people.
If we concede the Bible to the Christian right, we all but ensure that millions of LGBTQ+ young people will continue to grow up in churches where they only hear the message that their sexuality or gender identity is an abomination. We all but empower local right-wing groups to claim they have God’s blessing to target LGBTQ+ rights and equality in their cities, states and nation. And if we let the Bible be misconstrued as a backward, immoral and irrelevant religious text, we empower the Christian right to continue gaining ground.
For far too long, progressives have been more than willing to write off religion, and in particular, Christianity, as irrelevant to our fight for justice and equality. Yet nearly every major social reform movement in American history has had an understanding of the powerful role of progressive religion in motivating people to take seriously the moral imperative to love their neighbors as they love themselves, and to believe every human being is made in the image of God and thus worthy of equality and dignity. The Bible has been a source of encouragement for many oppressed minorities around the world as it spurs them toward a vision of a day when “justice rolls down like a river” (Amos 5:24) and the “chains of injustice are broken” (Isaiah 58:6).
As people of goodwill across America — and especially LGBTQ+ people and our allies — continue to resist and fight back against the growing tide of queerphobia, we must work to reclaim the Bible and Christianity as the radical socially and spiritually subversive resources they have always been. By doing so, we open a door for people in the pews to see there is a better way to embody their values, and we ensure LGBTQ+ youth know there is a better gospel for them than what they hear in their conservative churches. And ultimately, we expose the Christian right for being not about biblical values, but bigotry. Maybe it will help us chip away at the ground the Christian right is taking and steer our country in the direction of pluralism, liberty and justice for all once again.
Brandan Robertson. (Photo by Samuel Pickart 2024)
(The Rev. Brandan Robertson is the author of the new book “Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table.” His website is brandanrobertson.com. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)