Hard Questions: What does the church actually believe about LGBTQ+ people?

If you've been to other churches, you already know this question carries weight. You've probably heard a version of the answer that came with caveats, or with conditions, or with a kind of warmth that stopped just short of full welcome. You may have heard scripture used in a way that landed like a verdict.

So let's be direct about where The Episcopal Church stands.

The Episcopal Church believes that LGBTQ+ people are made in the image of God, are full members of the Body of Christ, and are entitled to every sacrament, office, and ministry the church offers. That is not a recent concession. It is the church's position, arrived at through decades of prayer, study, and debate, and now encoded in its canons.

The Episcopal Church believes that LGBTQ+ people are made in the image of God, are full members of the Body of Christ, and are entitled to every sacrament, office, and ministry the church offers. That is not a recent concession. It is the church's position, arrived at through decades of prayer, study, and debate, and now encoded in its canons.

In 1976, General Convention affirmed that LGBTQ+ people have a full and equal claim to the love, acceptance, and pastoral care of the church. Over the following decades, the church moved incrementally and then decisively. It added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination canons for ordination in 1994. It consecrated the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion — the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire — in 2003. It approved same-sex marriage rites in 2015. It expanded those rites to every diocese in 2018, including protections for clergy with conscientious objections.

The church's official teaching now includes blessing same-sex marriages, ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy at every level, and welcoming LGBTQ+ people to every leadership role in parish and diocesan life. There is no asterisk.

So where does the Bible fit in all of this?

The tradition didn't arrive at its current position by ignoring scripture. It arrived there by reading it more carefully.

There are six passages most often cited in debates about homosexuality — sometimes called the "clobber passages." Genesis 19 (Sodom), Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1, and 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1. The Episcopal Church's theological tradition, along with an increasingly broad range of biblical scholars, has examined what those texts actually address — the specific cultural contexts, the Greek and Hebrew words involved, the behaviors being condemned — and concluded that none of them speaks to committed, covenantal same-sex relationships.

The Sodom narrative is about violent inhospitality, not homosexuality — a reading with ancient Jewish support (Ezekiel 16:49 identifies Sodom's sin as arrogance and neglect of the poor). The Levitical prohibitions exist within a holiness code governing a specific ancient community, most of which the church has not applied to Christians since the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. The Pauline texts use Greek words — arsenokoitai and malakoi — that have no clean English translation and are understood by many scholars to refer to exploitative practices, not same-sex love between equals.

None of that settles every question. Serious scholars disagree. But the claim that the Bible's position on same-sex relationships is obvious and self-evident is not supported by careful reading of the texts in their contexts.

What that careful reading also turns up — and what rarely gets mentioned in these debates — is that the Bible contains what appear to be same-sex relationships treated with something other than condemnation.

The most textually grounded case involves the Roman centurion of Matthew 8 and Luke 7. A soldier approaches Jesus asking him to heal a servant who is dying. The Greek word Matthew uses for this servant — the one the centurion describes as desperately ill, the one he pleads for — is pais. In Greek, pais can mean "slave," "child," or, as classics scholars have long documented, the younger partner in a same-sex relationship in the Greco-Roman world. The centurion uses doulos — the ordinary word for slave — when speaking generally, but pais specifically for this one. Luke's version, which may preserve an older source, describes the pais as entimos to the centurion: precious, held in honor, dear.

Theodore Jennings and Tat-Siong Benny Liew made this case in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2004 — the flagship peer-reviewed journal of biblical scholarship — arguing that Matthew's Greek, read in its historical context, points toward a relationship that his first-century audience would have recognized. The response published two years later in the same journal engaged the argument on textual grounds. Neither side claimed certainty.

Here is where honesty requires two things at once. First: whatever the nature of the relationship, it almost certainly did not involve consent in any modern sense. A slave's pais had no vocabulary for refusal. Ancient pederastic relationships operated inside power structures that would be recognized today as abuse, not love. Queer scholars who read this passage responsibly say so. The relationship, if that is what it was, was not a model. Second: Jesus heals the pais and praises the centurion's faith as greater than any he has found in Israel. He does not ask about the relationship. He does not withhold the healing. He does not say anything at all about what the centurion is to this person, or what this person is to the centurion. He simply acts. And what he acts toward is the one the centurion has come desperate and pleading to save.

That is not an endorsement of ancient power structures. It may be something else: a Jesus who moves toward suffering wherever he finds it, without making the nature of the relationship the condition of the healing.

David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel is a different kind of case — older, more widely discussed, less resolvable. Their relationship involves Jonathan stripping his own armor and robe and giving them to David at first meeting. It involves language of souls knit together. It generates a lament, after Jonathan's death, in which David says his love was more wonderful than the love of women. Scholars have read this in multiple ways. Some see covenantal friendship with no erotic dimension. Others — including the historian John Boswell in his landmark Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980) — find the language too charged to read as purely platonic, particularly in an ancient Near Eastern context where such relationships between warrior-companions had recognized social forms. The text does not resolve it. That unresolvability is itself interesting — because what is clearly present is a love between two men that the Bible narrates without shame, without condemnation, and with evident tenderness.

None of this proves a position. But it does complicate the confident claim that the Bible speaks with one voice on same-sex relationships — and that the voice is only ever prohibitive.

What the tradition has consistently held is that scripture must be interpreted through the lens of the incarnation and the cross. The character of God revealed in Jesus is the interpretive key. And what that lens consistently reveals is a God who moves toward the excluded, who crosses the lines others draw, who insists that dignity belongs to everyone.

What queer theology actually argues — and why it matters

For most of church history, LGBTQ+ people have been asked, at best, to be quietly tolerated by theology. What emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century — first from the margins, then increasingly from within mainline academic theology — was something different: the claim that the experience of queer people doesn't just fit inside Christian theology. It illuminates it.

This field is called queer theology, and it deserves more than a dismissive mention.

Carter Heyward, one of the eleven women ordained "irregularly" to the Episcopal priesthood in 1974 and later among the first religious leaders in North America to come out as lesbian, spent her career at Episcopal Divinity School developing a theology built on what she called mutual relation. For Heyward, God is not a distant sovereign issuing decrees from above but the ground of genuine relationship — the power that moves in and through human love when that love is honest, mutual, and just. She called this activity "godding." Her argument is not that queer experience is an exception the church must accommodate. It is that queer experience — with its long practice of loving across social prohibition, its refusal to let fear dictate who deserves love — makes visible something about God that straight theology has sometimes obscured.

Patrick Cheng, an Episcopal priest and theologian who taught at Episcopal Divinity School, built on this tradition in his Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (Seabury Books, 2011). Cheng's central argument is arrestingly simple: Christian theology is, at its core, a queer enterprise. Because what Christianity proclaims is a love so extreme it dissolves every boundary — between divine and human, between life and death, between the holy and the profane. Jesus crosses every line the religious authorities of his day drew. He touches lepers, eats with tax collectors, speaks publicly with women, welcomes the socially unclean. The scandal of his ministry is not incidental to who he is. It is the point. Cheng argues that this boundary-crossing, boundary-dissolving love is exactly what the LGBTQ+ experience has always known — and that queer theology is therefore not a departure from Christian tradition but a recovery of something always already at its heart.

The late Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid pushed further, and more unsettlingly, from the underside. Writing from the perspective of Latin American liberation theology and her own bisexual identity, Althaus-Reid argued in Indecent Theology (Routledge, 2000) and The Queer God (Routledge, 2003) that theology done from positions of social comfort — from the center of heterosexual, colonial, economic power — inevitably produces a domesticated God. The God of "decent" theology, she insisted, is too small. Too tidy. Too safe. The God she was looking for — the God she found in the slums of Buenos Aires, in gay bars, in the margins of respectable society — was something wilder. She asked: What happens to theology when we take seriously the spiritual lives of people who have always been told they don't belong? What if their exclusion has been hiding something about God?

Not everyone will follow Althaus-Reid all the way. Her work is deliberately provocative, and she knew it. But the underlying theological question is serious: When the church excludes people, who gets excluded from the church's understanding of God?

The Baptismal Covenant and human dignity

The Episcopal Church's Baptismal Covenant, which all Episcopalians renew regularly, commits us to "respect the dignity of every human being." That is not a modern imposition on an ancient text. It is the logic of the gospel read straight. And queer theology — at its best — is an extended argument for what it actually costs the church to keep that promise. Not just politically. Theologically.

The church's journey on LGBTQ+ inclusion has not just been a matter of becoming more culturally tolerant. It has been a theological reckoning — a slow recognition that the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people was not only unjust but was distorting the church's understanding of God, of love, of the body, of grace.

A word of honesty about where the church actually is in practice

The Episcopal Church's canons are clear. Individual parishes and dioceses are something else. The church's own Task Force on LGBTQ+ Inclusion, established in 2022, is conducting an audit of how the church has lived into its stated commitments — which implies, honestly, that the commitments and the reality don't always match.

At Sts. MM&M, we have tried to close that gap. Our welcome is not conditional. It is not extended pending further study. It is not qualified by which parts of someone's life we're comfortable blessing. We celebrate same-sex marriages. We support LGBTQ+ leadership. We're not working toward inclusion — we're trying to practice it.

We don't say that to earn points. We say it because people who've been hurt deserve to know exactly where we stand before they walk through the door.

What about people who read the Bible differently and have genuine convictions?

They exist. They are not all acting in bad faith. The Anglican Communion — the global family of churches to which we belong — is deeply divided on this question, with many Global South provinces holding traditional positions. The departure of conservative congregations from The Episcopal Church over the past two decades is real, and the pain on multiple sides of that rupture is real.

We can name that without resolving it. What we will not do is pretend the question is still open at the level of our congregation's practice, or ask people to wait while we discern something we have already discerned.

Here is the question this raises: Has someone used scripture to tell you — or someone you love — that there is a condition on God's welcome? If so, we want you to know that this church reads that same scripture and reaches a different conclusion. You don't have to earn your way in here. You were made in the image of God, and that is enough. If you're still holding wounds from what another church decided about you or your family, you're not alone in this room. And the door is open.

¹ The Joseph narrative offers a related though more speculative case. Theodore Jennings argues in Jacob's Wound (Continuum, 2005) that the garment Jacob gives Joseph — identified by the same Hebrew phrase used for princess Tamar's royal dress in 2 Samuel 13 — suggests a gender-transgressive reading of Joseph's identity in the ancient text. The same caveat about power and consent applies: ancient gender arrangements were not built on modern categories of identity or freedom. But the questions Jennings raises about how the text codes Joseph's belovedness are worth sitting with. See his chapter "Joseph as Sissy Boy" in that volume.

Sources and further reading: Genesis 19; Leviticus 18:22, 20:13; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10 (NRSV). Ezekiel 16:49. Acts 15:1-29. Matthew 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10; 1 Samuel 18-20; 2 Samuel 1:26 (NRSV). The Book of Common Prayer (1979), Baptismal Covenant, pp. 304-305. General Convention Resolutions: 1976-A069; 1994 nondiscrimination canons; 2015-A054, A036; 2018-B012. Theodore W. Jennings Jr. and Tat-Siong Benny Liew, "Mistaken Identities but Model Faith," Journal of Biblical Literature 123/3 (Fall 2004): 467-494. Theodore W. Jennings Jr., Jacob's Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (Continuum, 2005). John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980). Patrick S. Cheng, Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (Seabury Books, 2011). Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (Harper & Row, 1989); Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right (Fortress Press, 1999). Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (Routledge, 2000); The Queer God (Routledge, 2003). Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian (Convergent Books, 2014). William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality (Eerdmans, 2012).