In this episode, we dig into why leaving harmful churches isn’t enough, you also have to unlearn the bad theology you absorbed along the way. We talk about how lingering fear, shame, reactivity, or discomfort around sex, Scripture, or Christian community can reveal where old beliefs are still running the show, even for folks who’ve left evangelicalism, Catholicism, or grew up in progressive spaces without learning how to engage the Bible for themselves. We get into what unlearning actually looks like and why arguing on evangelical terms keeps you stuck. You gotta be able to rebuild your faith (or recognize when to walk away from it) with grounding, nuance, and liberation. We also answer listener questions about the 1946 documentary and where to begin when returning to faith after fear.
Resources:
- Join us and be part of Queering Advent! Find more info here.
This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.
1 (9s):
Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G. Murphy.2 (13s):
And I’m Father Shannon TL Kerns. We’re the co-founders of queer theology.com and your hosts from1 (17s):
Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news, LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how2 (23s):
Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here.1 (33s):
Hello. Hello. Hello. So good to be back in your eras with you today. On today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about the importance of not just leaving bad churches or leaving bad faith entirely, but also unlearning your path theology and this like danger of what could happen if you don’t take the time to un unload, unlearn. And you just sort of like try and pat it aside and pat it set aside and for, and forget about it for a while. We’ll also have a listener question that we will get to at the end of the episode. If you would like to have your question featured on the podcast, you can go to cardiology.com/listen. You can also leave us a voice message or send us a text message to 2 4 0 2 0 0 0 9 2 2.1 (1m 19s):
That’s 2 4 0 2 0 0 0 9 2 2. Okay, and with that said, Shea, what are we talking about this episode and why?3 (1m 30s):
Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the things that we see really, really often, and it’s especially prevalent among former evangelicals or folks who grew up in kind of evangelical or Catholic spaces, but it’s also, we see it in kind of a different way in folks that grew up in progressive and mainline spaces. So we can maybe talk about both of those things, but is folks who you know, are pretty sure that they know what they don’t believe and they have left homophobic or transphobic churches, maybe they’ve even left the church entirely, and yet they haven’t actually unpacked or unlearned the things that they internalized growing up.3 (2m 13s):
And so what happens often is that their faith then becomes either a response to those things of like, well, I don’t believe that, right? Like, I’m just, I don’t believe in hell, I don’t believe whatever. And yet underneath kind of all of those feelings, there is still a sense of fear or shame or anxiety. And so I just talk about like why it’s so, so, so important that not only you leave those spaces, but that you also unlearn the theology, right? Like you have to unpack what is it that I was taught? What are other ways to understand that?3 (2m 54s):
And you don’t have to necessarily stay a Christian or stay in the church or like even believe any of those other ways, but you have to do the work of understanding them so that those hard emotions don’t keep acting out in your life.1 (3m 12s):
Yeah, I sometimes say it’s like you seem scared of a God that you don’t believe in, and I, I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that. And so I wanna find up, I think it was start by talking about like some ways that you might be able to notice that you have still got some like unlearning to do. And then we’ll sort of get into, well then what do you do with, what do you do with that? If you’re like, that’s me. And so I think like one, a one clear sign that you’ve got some unlearning to do is if you find yourself like being reactive in like any sort of discussion of God or religion comes up.1 (3m 59s):
Obviously if like someone is using Christianity to like legislate against your body, you’re like allowed to be angry at that, right? Like that is a very like reasonable response. So it’s, we’re not saying that you have to like have like an absence of any emotion when it comes to religion or God or spirituality. Absolutely not. But like, you know, if you are, if you find out that someone you’re, you know, doing like abortion clinic escorting with like, also happens to be a Christian and you’re like, oh my God, how could you possibly believe in that? That’s all bullshit without knowing anything about the content of what she believes or he believes or they believe, and otherwise they seem like a thoughtful, justice centered kindhearted, you know, person doing good in the world.1 (4m 54s):
Like it’s like, oh, like what is going on there? Because it sounds like you both don’t believe in the same God, but so that, that’s like some, that’s like, that might be like an indicator that there’s something going on there. Another indicator is that if you like in theory believe that it’s okay to be L-G-B-T-Q, it’s okay to have queer sex, but you find yourself like in your body feeling weird about it after you have sex. If you find yourself feeling shame about the type of sex that you’re having, the type of relationships that you’re having, and like maybe you like hook up and then like immediately ghost someone, or you start dating someone for a few weeks or a few dates and then like, it’s all going well on the surface, but like for some reason you like, you can’t quite put your pan finger on, you just sort of like it fizzles out.1 (5m 45s):
This is, that was, this was my mo for the first, like I, I don’t know, five to seven years after I came out, probably if you asked me like, is it a sin to be gay? I was just like, absolutely not. It’s like not a sin to be gay. Like, and also like the way that I showed up in the world was, I didn’t notice this until my, one of my friends was away for a while and he came back and he was like, oh, whatever happened to that guy that Brian was dating. But like, when I left and, and my other friend told him like, oh, you know, like it was going really well. He was a great guy and like Brian did that thing that Brian does and like freaked out. And then it was over. And like when my friend told me like, this is what our other friend had said, I was like, oh, is that a, is that a pattern of, is that a pattern of mine?1 (6m 28s):
Shit, I’ve like really gotta like pay attention to this. I used to like hook up with people, feel bad, block them, I’ll just sit back on Facebook. I blocked them on Facebook. Then like two months later, like the, it was like, I was like in less crisis and I would, I start to get more horny so then I would like unblock them and then I would like hook up with ’em again and then feel bad like all over again. This like this cycle repeated of like, I don’t know why, in my mind I believe that it’s an okay thing to be queer and I wouldn’t necessarily judge my friends who were doing it, but like in my body I was having some sort of response which was different than like, this person isn’t right for you, or like, this situation isn’t safe or you don’t enjoy this thing.1 (7m 12s):
It was like they were good people that we had a good connection with and I was enjoying what I was doing. It was like the aftermath was like bringing up all of this weird shame or I thought that like I had to wait until I was in a certain type of relationship before having sex or progressed my sexual relationship like at a certain pace that was like, I was noticing was like not necessarily based on my like own comfort level of what was comfortable for me, but was like in response to like what I thought like I should do or what was appropriate. And so then when I started paying attention to like, well, why do I think that which we’ll get into later, like it was the, the shoulds. So if you find yourself like thinking that you like should do something or shouldn’t do something as opposed to being drawn towards wanting to do something or wanting to not do something.1 (7m 59s):
Those are some indicators. What other indicators that there’s like some more unlearning and relearning to be done, to be done. Would you, would you add?3 (8m 8s):
Yeah, so I think, you know, some other examples of folks who, who it’s clear, like they haven’t done some unlearning. I I wanna talk about like mainline folks for a second. So folks who maybe grew up in progressive spaces but they like, haven’t actually learned how to read the Bible on their own. And so what they’ve absorbed about Christianity is coming really from culture, right? From what they’re seeing on the news, what they’re hearing about Christianity. And so they have this sense of like, well, I don’t believe that, but I don’t actually know what it is I believe or like how to understand or think about those things. I saw this in with in a lot of folks in churches that I’ve worked at who like were were like dedicated churchgoers, we’re progressive people, but like wanted to throw out the Bible because they didn’t actually know how to read it, right?3 (9m 5s):
And like they would say things like, we, I, we just need to like get rid of the Bible. And it’s like, well I think it’s actually kind of important that as a church that is centered around this book that we maybe grapple with it and learn how to read it and deal with it. And, and I know that like they weren’t hearing those messages from the pulpit of the church that they were in, but they had gotten that information from somewhere, from their Christian bookstore, from other people that they ran into that were part of more conservative churches and they hadn’t quite learned how to parse it. And so, I mean, I think this goes a little bit back to what you were saying about, you know, folks being reactive, but I think that it’s also a real indication of like, of some unlearning that needs to happen about how we understand and think through certain things1 (9m 58s):
That, that, that made me, that made me think of just the other day in Sanctuary Collective, our online community, someone posted and they were like, I don’t know, they were, they were trying to like, like find new meaning in this story of Saddam and Gamo and like parsing through it. And then they just were like made this authentic comment of like, I just dunno, I find a lot of the like older testaments to be like really troubling to me. I’m like down with Jesus, but like, it’s just like hard to read the, the older testament that just seems like there’s like a lot of judgment in there. And I was like, oh, that, like, that is like not my experience of the older testament or the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible. Those are kind of all different things, but like, if you like, but they sort of absorb this cultural message, right?1 (10m 41s):
That like parts of the bible are like bad or scary or irreconcilable and the sort of like way to deal with that is to like wanna cut it out, want to throw it out, want to avoid it. And so like if you find yourself avoiding parts of the Bible, like that also might be an indicator that there’s sort of like more like unlearning and relearning to do like, not, like, not that like every part of the Bible is glorious. Like I think like parts of the Bible are troubling, but like I don’t, you don’t have to be like intimidated by the troubling parts. You can be empowered to say like, yeah, that shit’s fucked up. But also like if you find yourself painting like in broad strokes like all of the Old Testament is hard, you’re like, probably that’s probably coming from a place like you were saying Shea of like either reactivity or just like a lack of understanding about how folks actually engage with those texts because oh my goodness in the Hebrew Bible is all sorts of love and justice and like embodied connection with God and care and concern and all that good stuff.3 (11m 41s):
Yeah. Yeah. And then I, I think the other piece is if you are in a space where fear keeps coming up for you, and again, I think that this is like right there is a, there is a world in which you actually have done some work and intellectually, you know, for instance like that there are lots of ways to believe about salvation or hell or the rapture or that the rapture isn’t real like any of those things and you still feel fear coming up sometimes that is just a, you’re still in a process of learning how to comfort and soothe your body and like convince your body that your head is right.3 (12m 23s):
And so like that is one thing and we can, we’ll probably talk in a, in a future episode about like how we work on that mind body connection. But there’s another piece of that where if you are someone who just like continuously feels afraid, afraid of God, afraid to read the bible, afraid to go into a church, it, there’s probably something in there that that is saying like, there’s still some more unlearning to do and this is different than a trauma response, right? Like I, I wanna also name that for some folks there is like a, a complex trauma or A-P-T-S-D because of harm that has happened in churches. And so like you should maybe avoid those spaces or, or like seek out some therapy to, to figure out how to navigate that this is something different.3 (13m 12s):
This is like a, just a sense of, I don’t know, doom or dread. Like this isn’t something where you’re, you’re talking about you’re having a panic response, but this is like a, I’m like afraid to read the bible because what if I read something that upsets me or sends me spiraling, I’m afraid to pray, I’m afraid to engage with Christian community because like I, I don’t want it to, to send me off the rails. And I think that all of that is, is usually a pretty good indication that you haven’t unlearned the theology and learned something new to take its place.3 (13m 53s):
And I think that this is, this is a moment to say again like, you don’t have to stay Christian or stay in the church or have faith. And also I think it’s really important if you grew up hearing certain things that you understand and learn the counterpoints to that right? That that is what gets us out of fear and whether or not you like choose to continue to engage in that is totally in many ways irrelevant.1 (14m 26s):
Yes. I think, I think like one of the things that we come across in our work is folks that are no longer Christian, either like explicitly no longer Christian or like kind of Christian, vaguely Christian, but it’s like not super important to them and they don’t wanna like do a lot of work around it but that have these like lingering beliefs about maybe they wouldn’t call it god anymore, but like the way the universe is gonna like get them back or fear or like just sort of like disconnected from their bodies, like shame, right? And that like actually sometimes like if it’s like if, if you want to stop being a Christian, sometimes like the best thing that you can do is like spend four to eight to 12 weeks like studying Christianity so that you like excise all of that from you and so that you can then like leave while we talk all the time about like, we wanna help folks who want to stay Christian, like do that really well and we wanna help folks that want to like leave Christianity, like do that well as well or who folks want to like do something else or reimagine their, their faith that like, but you gotta, in order to move on to like the best version of what’s next, you gotta make sure that you like leave all of the bullshit behind.3 (15m 39s):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is also like, it’s more in depth than just learning the like progressive counter to evangelicals talking points, right? I see this a lot too of folks who have left evangelicalism, but they’re still arguing against evangelicals using the rules and the terms that evangelicals have set up about like what the Bible is and what it means and how to read it. And I think that too gets us stuck in a cycle of being reactive, of being influenced and informed by evangelical theology and thinking, right?3 (16m 20s):
There’s this idea that, that they somehow hold all of the power in the conversations and that we’re like just responding to them and that we have to respond in that way. And, and one of the biggest things for me was, was learning that like, oh actually the rules of they rigged the rules of the game. So like me continuing to engage with them in that way actually helps to elevate how they’re thinking about scripture and how they’re thinking about theology and like, I’m not willing to do that anymore. And that was when I started to like get free because it was like, oh, there’s actually a whole other way to read the bible, to understand theology that doesn’t at all even give credence or any elevation to evangelical thinking and theology and like that’s where we need to be spending our time.1 (17m 12s):
Yeah, it reminds me of those passages and I know Matthew and Mark maybe at somewhere else also where Jesus is telling his disciples, like if you go somewhere and they like won’t listen to you, like leave and shake the dust off your sandals. I know we’ve covered that in my podcast a number of times. He isn’t like, if they don’t listen to you well then try to like meet them where they are or like try to like put them in like language that they’ll understand or like argue on their terms. He’s like, no man, like come preach the gospel like on our terms and they won’t hear it like peace. And I think like there is some power in in doing that so that we don’t, like you were saying by it’s kind also when I was doing media training from glad they were, were like you, if someone asks you like a problematic question you like don’t, you’d like don’t answer it on their terms, you respond, you don’t answer, you don’t like repeat problematic framings of things.1 (17m 59s):
Yeah. ’cause like sometimes like really like messy or problematic or harmful assumptions are like baked into the questions that you’re asked or the like the ways in which that scripture or theology is engaged with. And so like it is impossible not to affirm harmful theology if you answer on those terms. And so you just gotta like jet us in all of that together. Yeah. So if you’re3 (18m 23s):
Hearing all of this and you’re thinking, yeah, that sounds great and I’ve got some stuff to do and like, where the hell do I start? We’ve got you covered. You can go to cariology.com/resources and find resources on all sorts of things. Whether your biggest thing is that you’re still feeling shame around sex or you are wondering how to read the bible better and you know, starting to, to get some progressive theology in there, we’ve got you covered. So go to queer theology.com/resources if there’s something in particular that you’re looking for, you can always send us an email connect at queer theology com. We’d love to point you in the right direction.1 (19m 2s):
Alright, and now let us turn to our listener question. Just a reminder, if you have a question that you would like answered, you can send us a text message or leave us a voicemail at 2 4 0 200 0 9 2 2. That’s 2 4 0 2 0 0 0 9 2 2. If you prefer, if you’re international or you prefer to do it on the web, you can go to queer theology com slash listen and you can leave us a voice note or send us a text-based message there as well. So with that, let’s take a listen to our first question.4 (19m 38s):
It was a Brent, she I was just wondering, so I wanna say like a year or so ago, I ended up watching that 1946 movie, the documentary that was like posted online. They had it like circling at like, like movie festivals and stuff and I watched it and it was really good and then I commented on somebody’s page on like TikTok and stuff and they were saying that that actually is all false and that it’s really just like progressive Christian stuff and that like everything that they said in there was not true and all that stuff. So I just wanted to ask you all and because you actually like, you know, studied the bible and like the history and stuff and I just wanted to get your take on it.4 (20m 26s):
I know that this is probably a big thing and I’m sure you’ve maybe even have mentioned it before, but I just wanted to put it out here suggests that other people can also know too. And yeah, so thank you so much for your time and I hope you and everybody out there have a really blessed day. Thank you peace. Much love.3 (20m 43s):
Yeah, I love this question. I think it’s so, so important and interesting and the like short answer is it doesn’t matter slash you’re both right and the longer answer is a little bit more complicated. So the, the first thing to notice is that the folks who made the 1946 documentary are correct that, you know, in the English translations of the Bible, we didn’t have the word homosexuality inserted until 1946. The problem with that is that like, that doesn’t suddenly make the Bible homophobic, right? Like people were using the bible to be antique well before the insertion of that word.3 (21m 29s):
And so like the, the idea that like that was suddenly how we got homophobia in our churches is like just not true. And so I think that the, this, this leads to a more nuanced conversation about like what do we do with both those verses and with the understanding of like a progressive view of sexuality. Like how do we make sense of that? And then even further than that is also like how do we deal with the kind of the rhetoric that’s like, no, that’s just like wishful thinking, it’s actually wrong and like they’re just making it up and, and that kind of what you’ve called many times Brian, like the hamster wheel of Yeah, I was thinking that and, and of like reading theology.3 (22m 18s):
And so like I think that that is actually a more important place to sit and wrestle with anything you would add to what I’ve said.1 (22m 26s):
Yeah, when, when I was listening to this question, I immediately got a flashback to when I was figuring out that I was queer and like researching like what does the bible say? And obviously like however long ago, everybody, like 20 years ago this movie didn’t exist yet, but a lot of the same arguments were were being made there about like, this is a mistranslation of this word. And, and so then I would just go back and forth. So like I would, I would read about how these words were mistranslated, how the translation changed, how the word homosexual didn’t appear until the forties. Then I would, I then I would read some other article about saying like, all those, all of those arguments are like bs. And then I would read a third one about how the, the anti-gay argument was actually incorrect and the the original one was correct and I was just, it felt like I could, like never, I was just like, I could never get a, had a spy answer on either from either side.1 (23m 16s):
And I think that gets back to what we were talking about earlier in this episode that it’s like about more than just like, what does this one word mean? Because I baked into the question, right? Is that if this word means homosexual, then definitively homosexual is like not a sin, it like is a sin. And it’s like, well a like it was written Greek, so like we don’t even, I’m like homosexuality as a concept didn’t exist. And so I think think like we, we, what you find yourselves getting into is like you get into the weeds, right? About like, well homosexuality is a concept didn’t exist. So of course like, it’s not an exact translation, but it’s like it’s a close enough translation and it, you know, we have to update our translations to modern times, which is like not wrong, right?1 (24m 1s):
To your point, even if the translation didn’t mean homosexual, like there’s other verses that people can point to, right? Or there’s just more like a general sense of like, well there aren’t queer people in the Bible at all. So, so then what? And I think like if you, if your sense of it’s okay to be queer hangs on like a definitive reading of these seven passages and or of like David and Jonathan being gay, this ur and his like servant slash slave being gay, that’s like a really fragile thing to hang your, the love of yourself on. And it, it is just as fragile I would say as like evangelicalism, like you shay you all for years and years have been saying like it’s a house of cards.1 (24m 46s):
Like, and so if you, if you just blow on it, it all comes tumbling down. And I think like you, we want you to have a stronger faith foundation than like, I just hope that this translation of this like 2000 year old made up word is correct. Like, ooh, like that is a shaky foundation. And we, we have found over and over and over again is that like, that is like an unfulfilling argument for queer people that leaves us sort of like in a shaky place and it like is generally not gonna move homophobes who like are committed to believing that queer people are living in sin, that we gotta find some other way to move those, these like highly academic arguments are not the thing that moves the needle.1 (25m 29s):
And so I wanna pull back and say like, how do we read the Bible in totality? What are the messages that are trying that are being told? How does scripture like speak in a, like where does speak, where does scripture agree with itself? Where does scripture disagree with itself, contradict itself, wrestle with itself, argue with itself for, for folks who are Christian, like what does Jesus like say, what does Jesus do? How does like the early church in scripture understand Jesus? How does the church beyond like the, the Bible understand Jesus? And this is like that all what I just said, just explaining the process, let alone actually doing the process takes more time than like the homosexual and the fornicator shall not inherit the kingdom, right?1 (26m 17s):
It’s like not a soundbite, right? Yeah. But I do think that like you are made in the image of God that like God desires right relationship with you that like there’s, you have some internal sense of like the divine speaking to you and working with you, whether that is like still small voice from the Hebrew Bible, whether that’s the Holy Spirit from the Christian Bible that like the fruits of our theology manifest themselves like in our lives and in our world that like we can trust ourselves in some way. All of those things like come together to, we make a really beautiful and profound case, not just for, for like queer acceptance, but for like the importance of like justice work in general.1 (27m 7s):
Which is not to say that like there aren’t problematic passages or hard passages or passages like worth wrestling with in the Bible, but like this idea that we just have to accept passages that trouble us at face value is like a very modern understanding of how we’re supposed to engage with scripture and with God. And like, just ’cause like some people, some types of Christians are like saying it very loudly does like not actually mean that that is a faithful way to engage with a bible.3 (27m 40s):
Yeah. I I I think that also goes back to what we were saying earlier about like this argument about the, this word being added in 1946 is very much like predicated on on the idea of the Bible as infallible and in errand, right? Like it’s, it’s an argument designed to hold up how evangelicals understand scripture, which I would, I would say is like not the way that we want to engage, that we instead wanna be saying, no, actually infallibility and inerrancy are really, really new and modern inventions. And like there’s a, a more faithful way of reading all scripture.3 (28m 24s):
And that like, all scripture becomes much more interesting when you read it with nuance and with and and, and as in conversation with itself as opposed to this text that is clear and tells us what to do and is this like, you know, checklist for how to be, how to believe and behave.1 (28m 47s):
Yeah. And like it’s this word in particular, it’s like a 2000 year old word, it is like a made up word that is like an amalgamation of like two other words that were like everyone doing a translation is trying to like discern what it means from like how it was constructed and like this scam other places it was used. And so it’s like, that’s just like an unsatisfying response. It’s like that is like always going to be unsatisfying for queer people and for anti LGBT people. Like, they’re like man bigotry is a hell of a drug, right? So like if they’re coming into it already thinking that like queerness is like sick and sinful, like of course they’re not going to trust like this sort of like really nuanced academic arguments about this word.1 (29m 33s):
We’ve got to figure out how to move them like on a systems level, on a heart level so that they can then get to a point where they can like actually look at the data and be like, oh yeah, it probably doesn’t mean that. And like even if it does, like that’s like, that’s wrong. And so like if, if this sort of stuff is resonances to you, either you’re like a queer person and you’re like wanting some more affirmation and assurance about the Bible and whether or not it condemns queerness or you’re someone who wants to figure out how to like engage with others more effectively, definitely check out our resources page as Shea was saying earlier, queer theology.com/resources. I wanna flag two workshops I think would be particularly helpful for you collaborating the collabor passages, which is all about the passages that have historically been used against LGBT people and how you can sort of like unlearn and relearn around those we share, you know, not just the sort of like traditional arguments as you would hear in the, in the movie, but also our sort of take on how you can really, truly want and for all, like let go of the power that they have over you.1 (30m 41s):
And then also active advocacy if you wanna definitely for straight cisgender folks to like be a better advocate and ally for LGBT LGBTQ people folk. But also if you are a queer person yourself, you might get something out of that just in terms of like how to effectively organize and some like pitfalls and obstacles to avoid.3 (30m 58s):
Yeah. Alright, we got one more question. This person writes, hi, I’m a bi latina person. She, they wanting to return to my Christian roots and embrace what I felt scared to do growing up. I feel stumped over where to start and what resources to use. How can I overcome this fear to revisit God? What are the steps to start?1 (31m 18s):
This is a great question. Like you said, Shea, I, there, I’ve got like two high level places that I think you, you would start. One is, I guess kind of more like advice to the journey. And that is I think to make things like, make whatever it is that you’re doing, very small and very simple. This was something that came up for us when we were running our queerness everyday challenge a little while ago. The tasks were like super small, unachievable. This is also inside of Ox Up Your Faith program. We break things down into like this, into like the smallest, simplest chunks so that you can, so that you can actually like, make movement If you’re feeling fear, if you’re feeling resistance, if you’ve like been watching this for a while and you haven’t been able to figure how to get started, it’s probably because like the task feels too big.1 (32m 11s):
So rather than trying to go from this like place of fear right now to like next week feeling like a thriving prayer life and a like a community where you feel totally connected with and like nothing but like joy, no fear all joy, right? That’s like a huge, that’s like a huge chasm to to, to jump over. And so like, how can you make things smaller? It might be that like the first step is to like, you know, we always say this, it’s like journal and meditation, but like, it might be that the first step is to like, pay attention to the questions that you’re asking yourself to figure out like what exactly are you afraid of?1 (32m 50s):
It might be to like figure out like what you are like most excited about and what you are most like hesitant about. And like, I think like if ever you feel like I can’t do that, figure out a way to make it even make the step even smaller. Obviously, like if you want help breaking all this down, we can go into more depth via email and also inside of Flip Your Faith, which is currently close registration, but it’s coming back soon. So go to queer theology.com/waitlist to get on the wait list for that. But so like, my thing, my first step is like just like smaller and simpler. I have a second idea, but I’d also, I’ve been talking for a minute, so I I can hold that back while if you’ve got something to say Shey.3 (33m 28s):
Yeah, I mean I think, I think for me it’s, it’s making sure that as you’re restarting this journey, that you are restarting it in community and being resourced by folks who are progressive. That the way to restart this journey isn’t to like, go back to the evangelical church or conservative church that you grew up in. It’s not to like dig out your old daily devotional and restart that, right? It’s to get new resources that are gonna speak truth into your life and that are gonna help you understand in a new way.3 (34m 8s):
My biggest concern would be that you would jump back in with all of the resources that you started with. And so figuring out like, what is it that you need, whether it’s like, I need to start with reading a book about how to read the Bible and I’m gonna, I’m gonna go there, or I need to find an LGBTQ plus affirming church so that I can attend a worship service there. Or even just like watch some sermons online to dip back in. But just making sure that you are surrounding yourself with progressive people and progressive theology, which isn’t to say that like you only listen to what you wanna hear, which I know is gonna be the, the pushback to that.3 (34m 49s):
But it’s saying like, you’re in a space where you’re just starting on a journey where your faith is a bit fragile, where you’re relearning in some ways like how to walk in this space. And so you need to make sure that you are listening to voices that you can trust and that you’re not get overly confuse yourself or put yourself in harm’s way because you’re trying to like listen to a multiplicity of voices right off the bat.1 (35m 16s):
Amen to that. So as we’ve already said a few times, we have a bunch of those resources@queertheology.com slash resources. If you would like to hear from folks other than us, we think that’s a great idea. We, and if you’re a reader, we put together a bunch a a bunch of different book recommendations on our bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/ology. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes from all different sorts of perspectives, right? Like Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Re like liberation, like liberation work from like the Latin American perspective. Juliet takes a Breath, which is like a beautiful fiction book, Latina and queer. We’ve got a bunch of nonfiction recommendations, the black, you know, trans prayer book, all sorts of like really great stuff to sort of like start feeding you from a, like a queer perspective, a liberation perspective.1 (36m 7s):
And so resources, I think like, and, and starting to revisit your faith as like an important part of that process. And then I would also encourage you along the way to like pay attention to your body, how your body is reacting, and also how you can like, take care of your body, be gentle with your body and how you can not just like think about things or read about things, but also start to embody your beliefs and practices that is like way more than we can go into here, but in, in the time allotted. But we’ll, you know, I’m sure we’ll be doing like a ance everyday challenge again or something similar in the future and sharing more in depth by email.1 (36m 47s):
So make sure you hop on our email list if you have not already, so that you can go, we go like deeper with you around this because this is like a really important question and hopefully that can help get you started.3 (36m 59s):
Yeah. And so that is it for today. As a reminder, if you want to leave a question for us to answer in a future podcast episode, you can go to queer theology.com/listen and and do a video or text or you can call the Google Voice number. We would love to answer any of your questions, whether they’re about faith and theology or particular bible passages or something else entirely. Hit us with what you got. We would love to, to chat with you more. And that is it for this week. We will see you next week with another episode.1 (37m 34s):
See you soon.5 (37m 35s):
The Queer Theology podcast is just one of many things that we do@queertheology.com, which provides resources, community, and inspiration for BTQ Christians and straight cisgender supporters.2 (37m 44s):
To dive into more of the actions, visit us@queertheology.com. You can also connect with us online on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.5 (37m 51s):
We’ll see you next week.
The post Moving Past Terrible Theology appeared first on Queer Theology.