the
ARTICLE
LGBTQ+ Christians In DC Are Seeking Community. Churches are making it harder to find it.
A D.C. Queer Christianity Project investigation finds that LGBTQ+ Christians look for their next church online, but the majority of D.C. church websites don't cover their LGBTQ+ acceptance practices.
By Neal Franklin and Alexia Partouche
April 29, 2023
All Maggie Micklo really wanted to do was participate in middle school theater.
She'd joined a nondenominational Christian youth theater group hoping to participate in their productions and signed up for their classes and summer camps as a way to get more involved. Before long, she decided she didn't want to be Catholic anymore and began worshiping at the nondenominational church.
But one year after joining the nondenominational church, Micklo started to feel uneasy. When the youth group leaders weren't around, her preteen peers would gossip. Once, she remembers them talking about how one of the Jonas Brothers was "really hot" but might be gay. That was disgusting, they agreed. They decided that they shouldn't listen to his music anymore.
Micklo had close family friends who were gay, and the comments shocked her. But even more pressing to her was that she was beginning to realize that she might be gay too.
"There were a lot of people who went to those kinds of churches or who at least thought it was gross to be gay," Micklo said. "And I felt very torn because I liked having a religion."
Micklo, now 24, is one of the many Christian people in D.C. who have sought out LGBTQ+ affirming religious communities. An investigation by the D.C. Queer Christianity Project, DCQCP, identified 43 churches that publicize that they are LGBTQ+ affirming on their website.
But hundreds more churches don't reference LGBTQ+ issues on their website or include content that is discriminatory, leaving LGBTQ+ Christians lacking the information necessary to find affirming religious spaces.
Daniel Sack, 61, and his husband are both clergy in the United Church of Christ and occasionally preach at Cleveland Park UCC, one of the churches listed as affirming in the project. Sack said that while he was growing up as a Protestant, sexuality was not something the church ever addressed, but he knew that being gay "was not something that a nice boy did." It was only after he left home to attend Northwestern University for college that he met his first out gay person—the university chapel's chaplain.
"Although I was not at that time particularly out to myself, I was sort of aware that was something sort of going on in my life," Sack said. "And having that community as a place where that was okay was a really good and important thing."
Sack felt called to a theological education and chose to attend seminary to pursue youth ministry. After his last year of seminary, Sack became a chaplain at Austin College in north Texas. The environment wasn't affirming for queer people, Sack said, but he did what he could to make LGBTQ+ students feel accepted, like hosting "informal support group" gatherings at his house. To him, finding an LGBTQ+ accepting religious community is important, especially for those who may not be able to find acceptance anywhere else.
"Identity is a complicated thing," Sack said. "And if religious communities can create a place where people can live their identities, I think there's a great virtue to that."
While some may think that religion and queerness can't overlap, the research points to the opposite, said Kerith J. Conron, the research director of the Williams Institute. The Williams Institute is a sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy research center housed in the University of California, Los Angeles. Conron directed a report on LGBTQ+ people and their religiosity by looking at data from the Gallup Daily Tracking Survey.
“I think it's important to enter into the discourse that there are many LGBT people that are themselves religious,” Conron said. “So the idea that people are either religious and maybe don't want to serve LGBT people were, or are LGBT, is artificial.”
Nearly half of all LGBT people in the United States are religious, according to the William Institute's report. Additionally, while people who are older, Black and live in the South are more likely to be religious, LGBT people in religion can be found throughout different age groups, racial and ethnic groups, marital statuses and rural or urban populations.
But although religion may be important to some LGBTQ+ people, finding a space where they can worship and have their identity accepted is more complicated. Among the people surveyed by the D.C. Queer Christianity Project, almost half said that they found their current church by searching online, either through a search engine or database. But 358 of the 546 of the D.C. churches identified by the project did not reference their positions towards LGBTQ+ acceptance on their websites.
Another 63 D.C. churches were categorized by the project as discriminating due to marriage restrictions or derogatory references towards LGBTQ+ people listed on their websites.
Many churches, especially Catholic parishes, have restrictions on who can get married and quote Bible verses saying that marriage is between a man and a woman. Gay marriage, which was legalized in 2015 by the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, is not recognized by many religious institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church.
Churches that aren't openly affirming of the queer community could also be pushing away worshipers who don't identify as LGBTQ+. Layla Heimlich, 53, said that the well-known homophobia in some denominations of Christianity made it even more important for her to be part of an explicitly accepting faith community, even as someone who is not queer.
"It was important to me to be a member of a faith community that was explicitly saying that that was not what they believed Christianity was about, that was not what they believed a faith community should stand for," Heimlich said.
Heimlich said that after she had her son, it became even more important to be an active member of an accepting church. She said she wanted it to be clear to him that not all religious communities are intolerant, even if he chose not to be a part of one in the future.
"It was very important to me to have a faith community that sort of expressed the same values that I was trying to teach him," Heimlich said. "And that I could say, 'When you become an adult, you can choose whether or not you're going to be part of a faith community. But you need to know that not all faith communities are what you see in the news of being bigoted.'"
The DCQCP found that 35% of survey respondents said they left their previous church because of issues of LGBTQ+ acceptance. However, over half of respondents said they found a more accepting space when they transitioned to a different church. About 65% of respondents said they were attending a very accepting church.
Micklo said that the disconnect she felt between her sexuality and her spirituality has been bridged after transitioning churches, in part because she's been able to interact with more queer Christians. She attends Cleveland Park UCC, where she said there are multiple queer couples, and everyone knows and accepts that she has a girlfriend. It makes her feel like her "whole self" can show up to church.
"I now feel like I really have a spiritual community," Micklo said. "And it is amazing. Like I don't even know how to describe it, I guess. It's really nice to be able to talk about God with other people."