Spiritual Identity Reconstruction among Australian LGBTQA+ Christians from Evangelical Traditions

Abstract

This article explores the spiritual journeys of LGBTQA+ people seeking to reconstruct their faith as minorities within, or excluded from, evangelical traditions. Twenty-four queer individuals with histories in evangelical settings took part in in-depth interviews. Twenty-two participants had restructured traditional Christian doctrines to integrate their religious and queer selves. In the process of reconstructing religious or spiritual identities, participants’ understanding of God took on a more enigmatic form, larger than the boundaries that traditional orthodoxy had placed on the nature of the divine. It was found that LGBTQA+ individuals began to ‘take God out of the box’, showed a willingness to approach ‘heresy’, and attempted (with varied success) to separate religion from spirituality. This reimagining of God from the margins is theorised as an expression of spiritual resilience and a lay-led form of queering theology that can benefit the broader church.