Who am I? whom can I love? and why me?: Queer Christians and the spirituality of struggle

Abstract

How do queer Christians navigate the tensions between faith and sexuality? This article points to the spirituality of struggle as an answer. In the context of the Philippines, a society known for its religious and moral conservatism, we define this spirituality as an ongoing process in which queer Christians aspire to discover and fulfill God’s will for their lives. We explain this spirituality in the form of three questions we gathered from our interlocutors: Who am I? Whom can I love? And why me? Taken together, these questions reflect the deepest concerns they have about faith and sexuality. Recognizing the spirituality of struggle offers significant contributions to studying religion and gender in the Philippines: by recognizing queer religious identities as dynamic, negotiated acts steeped in ambivalence and by serving as an empirical counterpoint to the militant Christianity in the country. These insights are drawn from semi-structured interviews with sixty-six young adults who self-identify as non-heterosexual men. They are also from different Christian denominations in the Greater Manila Area.