Pride as Sacred Resistance.
Pride as Sacred Resistance
I often talk about how, despite being straight and holding the conservative Christian party line for many years on all things queer; LGBT inclusion (or rather the awful lack thereof) was the first thing to go as my confidence in church, and then faith unravelled. And I deliberately didn’t include QIA+ in that acronym as they weren’t words I really knew how to talk about.
I used to wonder how many of my Christian friends actually knew a gay person. I couldn’t understand the incredible disconnect between the way we framed our lives around a God of love, yet that love seemed so very conditional.
The Collision of Identity and Belief
For so many queer people, faith and identity are at odds. While religion can be a source of deep comfort, community, and meaning, it can also be a place of rejection, shame, and internal conflict, especially when teachings marginalise queer people. This tension often leads to religious trauma: the emotional and psychological wounds left behind when spiritual spaces have harmed rather than healed.
As we move through Pride Month, a time that celebrates authenticity and love in all its forms, it’s also a time to acknowledge the complex journey many queer folks navigate when reconciling their identity with a faith tradition that may have (let’s face it, probably, excluded them.
What does Religious Trauma look like if you’re queer?
Rejection by family or faith community.
Teachings that frame queer identity as sinful or broken.
Internalised shame and fear of divine punishment.
The loss of spiritual practices that once felt nurturing.
People who experience religious trauma often struggle with anxiety, guilt, low self-worth, and a lingering sense of spiritual disconnection. For queer individuals, this trauma is compounded by societal messages that still, explicitly and subtly, reinforce the idea that they are “other.”
Pride as Sacred Resistance
Pride is more than rainbow flags. At its heart, I understand it to be about self-love and community care. For those healing from religious trauma, Pride can also be a form of spiritual reclamation. It invites us to say: I am worthy. I am beloved. I am whole.
This declaration runs counter to the messages many of us received in religious spaces, and yet it echoes a deeper spiritual truth, that every person is inherently valuable, just as they are. For some, this means finding affirming faith communities; for others, it means creating entirely new spiritual paths or letting go of religion altogether. All choices are valid and take immense courage.
Moving Toward Inclusion and Healing
If you've experienced religious trauma, know that you're not alone. Healing is not about “fixing” yourself, because you were never broken. It’s about learning to trust your inner voice again and reconnect with the parts of yourself that were silenced.
Here are a few gentle steps toward healing:
Acknowledge the Wound – It’s okay to grieve what was lost. Your pain is real and deserves space.
Find Safe-enough Community – Seek out queer-affirming support, whether through therapy, peer groups, or spiritual spaces that honour all of who you are.
Reclaim Your Narrative – You are the author of your story. You get to decide what spirituality looks like in your life.
Practice Self-Compassion – Healing is not linear. Allow yourself the grace to move at your own pace.
For Allies and Faith Communities
True inclusion goes beyond tolerance. It means actively creating spaces where LGBTQIA+ people feel seen, heard, and valued. For faith communities, this includes:
Publicly affirming queer identities in leadership and teachings.
Listening to and centring queer voices.
Acknowledging and repenting past harms.
Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ members.
Inclusion is not about compromising beliefs, it’s about embodying the core spiritual principle of love without conditions.
I couldn’t continue to pretend that it was ok to consider queer folks as being depraved, I wanted my gay friends to be truly seen and known as they were, not as projects for salvation.
A Pride-Filled Path Forward
As we talk about Pride this month, we hold space for the grief but also the joy, the celebration and the healing. For those walking the long road of recovery from religious trauma: your story matters. Your existence is sacred. And you deserve to be embraced fully by your community, your faith and most importantly, by yourself.
If you’re navigating this journey and need someone to talk to, we’re here. All of our practitioners are queer affirming and many have lived experience. Our resource section has lots of great books and podcasts, articles and more for queer folk to benefit from and see their experience reflected in.
We’ve been posting on our socials this month, Elise and I from our vantage point of allies who have done 180 degree turns from where we once were in our conservative beliefs; and of course Sam whose lived experience has been painful and liberating.
We’ve done book reviews and like the 5 Stars I gave to Steph Lenz’s In/Out memoir and our event highlighted so many wonderful queer voices and hosted important conversations.
Together, we make space for the pain, the questions, and most importantly, the hope.