Pride isn’t arrogance; it’s love

Shae Washington, a Black queer Christian woman, struggled to reconcile her sexuality and her spirituality. Her church had always taught that you cannot be both Christian and queer. After years of praying about her struggle, one day she heard God say, “I have already set you free on the cross. Why are you still in the closet? Come out, be who I created you to be.” That day, when Shae chose to trust God’s authority over her own certainty, she said she felt a tremendous peace from God. That peace kept her grounded as former friends now demanded she show them where in the Bible it said this was okay and as church members charged her with arrogance for elevating her own experience over years of tradition.

Shae was among those living on the frontlines of the so-called culture wars—conservative Christians who are also LGBTQ+. Some of the things that make a lot of their lives hell make a lot of other people’s lives hell, too, in less direct ways. We all gain by understanding their situations. As we think about pride this month, the lives of LGBTQ+ conservative Christians can help us to see the link between pride and humility, and how both are necessary for love and justice. Knowing that you are a human being, worthy of love, is the kind of pride that a lot of straight, cisgender people take for granted. It is often denied to LGBTQ+ people. That is the pride we celebrate during Pride Month. As Shae’s story illustrates, many LGBTQ+ Christians find it is their humility that helps them recover or develop a healthy sense of pride: the belief in their fundamental worthiness of love and belonging.

Many LGBTQ+ conservative Christians have had loved ones cut them off from all connection out of fear that they are not just sinful, but dangerous to those they love. They are accused of “turning their backs on God,” even though many have begged and pleaded with God to take away the feelings that they thought made them unworthy of love. Still, many LGBTQ+ Christians stay connected to their faith communities, and more and more are being honest about who they are and engaging with their churches. LGBTQ+ Christians who are also people of color may need church as the one place where they find the support they need to survive living in a racist world from week to week. But unlike straight, cisgender people who may have church support groups to help with their marriages or families, LGBTQ+ people may not feel welcome to talk about their intimate relationships or find support for how to navigate them. And in predominantly white LGBTQ+ spaces, they may be free to express their sexual and gender identities, but might endure racism. Their stories make clear that it’s hard to flourish when you have to hide parts of yourself, and that we thrive when we are unconditionally loved and accepted as whole people. But getting there can be a tough road.

Looking at life from LGBTQ+ conservative Christians’ perspective, we see how actions that look like love might not actually be loving. In our research, we heard about a dynamic we call sacramental shame, where churches required LGBTQ+ members continually to feel and display shame—an emotion that signals they know they are unworthy of love—as a sign that they have not rejected God. This requirement was often shrouded in the language of love, “we love you, but we hate your sin,” and in expressions of affection and care. Being gay, bi, or trans was compared to being a murderer, or cheating on a spouse, or embezzling funds—all things that violate other people’s trust and break relationships. Yet the same people who taught that God could forgive people for these things also taught that being LGBTQ+—which is generally involuntary and doesn’t actually hurt anyone—makes a person uniquely unworthy of God’s love. When you treat being LGBTQ+ itself as a sin—the worst sin—you treat your own understanding of gender and sexuality as greater than God’s love, as a commandment more important than the Ten Commandments (which, Jesus said, all boil down to loving God and neighbor).

There is a particular harm that is caused by treating someone like their capacity to love is dangerous. It can make people feel like monsters. We heard from people for whom life had become completely unlivable because they felt unworthy of human connection and God’s love. They kept friends at arm’s length out of fear that getting too close would condemn them both to hell.

When someone has been treated this way, and comes out of it recognizing that they are not monsters but human beings, they feel alive again. That is pride: knowing that they are worthy of love and belonging, with their gifts and flaws, simply because they are human. In contrast to arrogance or hubris, we call this “relational pride.” Relational pride is taken for granted by many cisgender and heterosexual Christians, because no one ever questions that they deserve love. Knowing they are worthy of love only seems like arrogance to those who think LGBTQ+ people are uniquely unworthy. And yet they accuse LGBTQ+ people of being the arrogant ones.

Relational pride is not the opposite of humility, but its counterpart. Humility is a realistic knowledge of your gifts as well as your limitations. Humility enables us to admit that we might be wrong even when we feel pretty certain; it keeps us honest about our humanity, that none of us is all-knowing and that we need to learn from each other. Shae’s humility allowed her to be open to the possibility that she might be wrong about what she had always thought about gender and sexuality. It allowed her to trust God’s message that she is worthy of love, just as she is. What looked like arrogance to fellow church members was an act of submission to God, taking the harder path of being who God was telling her she was made to be. Shea’s humility led her to a healthy sense of pride—the joy of knowing she is worthy to give and receive love.

Humility also helps those who have devalued LGBTQ+ Christians to reconsider. Conservative Christian parents, pastors, and friends tell stories of the moment they realized that maybe they didn’t know everything about human sexuality and gender. That maybe they didn’t fully understand what the Bible was really saying. They showed humility, which led them to prioritize love over certainty.

Conservative Christians often say their job is to love others, not try to bring about social justice. But there is no love without justice. When we love other people, we are humbly open to learning from them and growing through our connection. We listen to them when they tell us we’ve been hurting them, and because we love them, we work to stop hurting them. Love also means listening when people tell you that your organization’s—or country’s—policies are hurting them, because of their sexual orientation, or gender, or race, ability, or because the policies themselves deprive them of things they need to live. Helping them to thrive might mean working to change those policies—out of love.

We on the left can also be arrogant, dismissing those we disagree with as backwards or even evil. To be sure, there are some pretty evil things happening in the world right now. It can be harmful to try to empathize with someone who treats you as if you shouldn’t exist. But trying to understand the fears behind their actions—when we can do so without personal harm—can help us all to find a way forward, to a society in which people are all treated as worthy of love and care not just from their friends and family, but by institutions and policies. Humility and pride foster solidarity—a relationship of love that works for justice.

^{Featured image by Jason Leung via Unsplash.}