Pride Month - The Wholeness I Found Outside the Church

9 June

I used to think the opposite of belonging was rejection. But I’ve come to realise it’s something quieter, harder to name, that insidious feeling of having to edit yourself just to stay in the room. That feeling of being “included,” but only if you agree to abandon the parts of yourself they’ve labelled incompatible.

Growing up queer in religious spaces teaches you early on that love often comes with conditions. You learn to scan every interaction for signs of safety. You watch the words you use, the clothes you wear, the way you walk and talk. You become fluent in the language of acceptance, not the kind that nourishes you, but the kind that keeps you palatable.

For a long time, I thought if I could just pray harder, conform more convincingly, and convince God that I was trying, I’d finally feel like I belonged. Like I was whole.

But faith never gave me that feeling. Queerness did.

When Leaving Faith Is the Cost of Survival

Religious trauma is not just about overt abuse or dramatic exits. Sometimes, it’s in the subtle erosion of self. The slow drip of shame disguised as scripture. The way you learn to second-guess your own instincts because you were taught they can’t be trusted.

For many of us, leaving church isn’t just about theology. It’s about survival. Coming out often means coming undone, because what you’re walking away from isn’t just a belief system.

It’s your community.
Your structure.
Sometimes your family.

The loss is staggering, even when it’s necessary.

When I left, it wasn’t because I wanted to. It was because staying meant slowly disappearing.

And yet, as painful as that unraveling was, it opened something I didn’t expect. Without the pressure to perform piety or suppress desire, I finally had the quiet space to ask: Who am I, when no one’s watching? What do I actually believe, outside the walls of fear?

And, maybe most tenderly, what if nothing about me was ever broken?

The Sacredness of Queerness

I don’t use the word “sacred” lightly. But queerness, with all its fluidity, creativity, resistance, and softness feels like the most sacred thing I’ve ever known.

It was queerness, not faith, that taught me how to live in my body.
To listen to my needs.
To explore joy and pleasure without shame.
To question hierarchies and binaries.
To seek out relationships and communities built on consent, honesty, and curiosity.

Where religion taught me to fear myself, queerness gave me permission to return to myself.

Of course, it wasn’t an immediate switch. Healing doesn’t follow a clean arc. There are still days where the old guilt ghosts show up uninvited. Days when the grief of what I lost takes me by surprise. But the difference now is that I no longer see those feelings as evidence of failure. I see them as remnants of a story I’ve outgrown.

Reclaiming Belonging on Our Own Terms

Pride Month is complex for many of us with religious trauma.

There’s joy, of course, but also grief. The music, the flags, the connection; they can stir up old pain and longings. Some of us are still holding the wounds of families who stopped calling, churches that cast us out, or communities that only welcomed us when we kept our queerness quiet.

But this month doesn’t require you to be “healed” to be worthy of celebration.

Pride isn’t just about glitter and parades (though those can be glorious). It’s about survival. Resistance. Reclamation. It’s about the sacred act of saying, “I exist fully, unapologetically, and still here.” For those of us who were told our identities were sinful, shameful, or secondary, that declaration can be revolutionary.

And here’s what I’ve learned: belonging that costs you your truth isn’t belonging. It’s performance.

Real belonging doesn’t demand your silence. It makes room for your complexity. It holds your anger and your softness. It lets you show up unsure, messy, grieving, and still loved.

We Were Never the Problem

Religious institutions are good at convincing us that we are the problem. That if we could just fix our queerness, our desires, our doubts, we’d be fine. But what if we flipped the narrative?

What if we were never the broken ones?
What if the systems that taught us to fear ourselves were always the issue, not our sexuality, not our gender, not our questions?
What if queerness isn’t something to be reconciled with faith, but a portal to a new kind of spirituality, one rooted in embodiment, justice, and liberation?

Some of us might never return to any kind of faith. Others might build a new relationship with the divine that centres love and inclusion. Some of us might still be in the thick of it, not sure where we stand or what we believe anymore. That’s okay.

There’s no right way to heal, no timeline, no perfect theology to arrive at.

What matters is that you get to reclaim your story and your sense of belonging on your own terms.

A Pride Rooted in Truth

So if you’re sitting in the in-between this Pride, not fully out, not sure where you fit, still grieving the faith you lost; I want you to know: there’s room for you here.

You don’t have to be loud or certain or healed. You just have to be real.

This month, I’m not celebrating how far I’ve come as if the journey is over. I’m honouring the fact that I kept going, through the pain, through the silence, through the loss of certainty. I’m celebrating the people I’ve met along the way who remind me that I don’t have to do this alone.

I’m honouring the wholeness I was told didn’t exist outside the church and the truth that I found it, not despite my queerness, but because of it.