How I Can Still Be A Christian Even Though I am Bisexual - Is There A Need To Reconcile My Beliefs With My Religion?

First of all, it will be helpful if you have a little background on me. I was born in the Midwest to two Lutheran school teachers in the mid sixties. I was baptized at ten days old in a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregation, attended Lutheran schools, was Confirmed in the Eighth grade, and eventually graduated from a Lutheran High School. Because my parents worked for the church, they where often friends with the Pastor and his family, as well as other teachers from their school and schools from other congregations in town. All of these people had attended Lutheran Colleges, and therefore were synodicly trained. It was not an uncommon occurrence to have any number of these people in our home discussing theological matters in my presence on a regular basis. 

Furthermore, we attended church every Sunday no matter what! As soon as I was old enough to understand what was going on, I was expected to listen to the sermon and be part of the discussion regarding it at the dinner table as we ate. By the time I was a freshman at the local Lutheran High School I was required to take an entire year of Old Testament Studies, then an entire year of New Testament Studies as a sophomore. As a junior and senior I often had multiple religion classes a day. One semester during my senior year I actually had four religion classes a day on my schedule. At the time, I found it to be a real drag, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Looking back, I have realized being made to take all those classes opened my mind to religion itself and it gave me the ability to think critically about it. 

While still in High School I had already come to the conclusion the reason there were so many different denominations was because God wanted to cast a wide net in order to have as many followers as possible. Because everyone has different life experiences it will take different things to help each of them believe. Some people need the structure and strict rules and want to be told exactly what to think and believe. Others need a somewhat looser set of guidelines. Yet in the end, whether you need to genuflect and pray to Saints like Catholics, speak in tongues like Pentecostals, or anything in between, as long as you believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins that is all that really matters. Who knows I might be surprised when I get to heaven and find Muslims and Buddhists there too. (As you may have guessed, this doesn’t win me any points with my parents when I bring it up.) To this day I still enjoy having deep theological discussions, and often do.

I gave you all of this information so you understand that while I am certainly no better than any other Christian, my life experiences have given me a greater understanding of religion as a whole more so than the average person. When the vale of my denial broke regarding my same sex attractions, and I finally realized I was a card carrying Bisexual, it devastated me. All of my life I had been taught that homosexuality was a sin abhorred by God and punishable by death. That meant I got myself a one-way ticket to Hell without passing GO or collecting $200.00! So entered crippling internalized homophobia into my life.

To say I struggled with my life long Christian beliefs would be an epic understatement. To give you some insight I am inserting an excerpt from an earlier blog post I wrote titled, “My Journey.”

 A light bulb lit up in my brain. It was as if someone had yelled Eureka! Then a wave of embarrassment washed over me. How in the world could I have been bisexual my entire life and not figured it out until I was 48 years old? I can’t be that stupid can I? I knew in my heart of hearts it was true. It was like all of the pieces of my life had just fallen into place at the same time. I began experiencing a flood of emotions, some were good and some bad, but the over all feeling I had was I was no longer conflicted and that feeling brought me peace.

That peace didn’t last long, however. Now I was dealing with great shame because I knew God was abhorred by me and my homosexual tendencies, the Bible even said so. I didn’t get much sleep the next two nights. The following Wednesday, I went to my church’s Ash Wednesday service in the evening. I walked into the church filled with self loathing and feeling wretched, broken, dirty, unforgivable, scared, but most of all completely and totally separated from God.  I have never felt more alone in my life.

I don’t know what the pastor said that night because I was in the pew praying for God to take the bisexuality from me. I hadn’t asked to be bisexual, and I certainly didn’t want to be if it kept me separated from God! I sat silently, tears streaming down my cheeks, praying, no begging, God for help. PLEASE LORD, take this sinfulness from me! When it was time for communion I shuffled up to the railing at the altar. I must have been in shock at this point because I don’t remember any of it. For those of you that don’t know, Christians celebrate communion to be united with each other and reminded we are sanctified by Christ’s body and blood which washes us clean from sin because, He died on the cross for us.  

When I got back to my seat I had the urge to run full speed, down the aisle and out the door, never to return. I didn’t want to feel this way anymore, and I didn’t want to be where I wasn’t loved. However, God took over in that moment and my entire body was awash with a feeling of complete acceptance, peacefulness, and total calm. God made me understand He still loved me no matter what and the gift of His forgiveness was still mine. He didn’t see my sin; He only saw me. I nearly broke down in tears and fell on the floor with relief. My entire body was spent. I felt like I had run a marathon. I was week in my knees and drained of all my energy.

This happened nearly four years ago. As I said before, I was still filled with crippling internal homophobia at the time. Just as Martin Luther had done, I too began to search scriptures for answers. Not only that, I emailed with friends from High School who were now Lutheran Pastors. I read anything I could find regarding the subject online. My goal was to get as much information as I could from both sides of the argument and then make an informed decision for myself.  

Another thing you need to know about me is that for many years now, I have chosen not to be concerned with what other people think of me. I even made a list to help remind myself not to let other’s opinions influence me. The people whose opinions I will allow to influence me and the order in which they effect me are as follows: 1. God 2. Me 3. My boss for obvious reasons. 4. My Family and close friends, however, I only allow them to share own opinions with me, because they are family. After which, I still run them through the filter of how God and I feel about it. I no longer just blindly follow them, in order to keep the peace 5. Everyone else, these people have absolutely no currency with me when it comes to how I live my live. Nor do I care at all what they think about the choices I have made.

My struggle was still weighing very heavy on me because the two people in my life whose opinions mattered most to me, God and Me, and what ever He and I came up with would shape who and what I was to become now that I was without a doubt Bisexual. The only thing I knew to do was keep digging for answers, so that is what I did. The journey to find acceptance from God and from myself took almost 3 years of hard work and included many conversations with multiple pastors, including both pastors from my own congregation.

It was a huge relief when I came out to my Sr Pastor, because I was expecting to be told I was an abomination to God, and I would then be asked to leave the church. I found out my fears were very wrong. In the end, my Pastor was far more understanding and accepting than my parents. He agreed with me that my Bisexuality was most definitely not a choice. He said it was part of my soul. He still believes the Bible teaches against homosexual acts and that I need to try to live a God pleasing life. This is not too different from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s formal written statement on Sexuality in the Church says pastors who are counseling their LGBTQ+ members. It says, not to acknowledge or discuss whether or not same sex attraction is a choice or something that we were born with, but to instruct as follows: It is not sinful to have same sex attractions. However, it is sinful to act on them. In other words, you are only going to heaven if you deny the person God made you to be.

I told my pastor I took great exception with this statement on many levels. First of all, I was taught that all sin is equal, and therefore any sin would damn you to Hell. It makes no sense for the church to then single out one sin (If it even is a sin in the first place. But I will get to that later.) over all others to the point you won’t be forgiven. That goes against everything Christ taught, which is why He died, to forgive all sin.

My pastor responded by saying that the Lutheran Church is really good at making broad statements about doctrine, but they aren’t so good when it comes to instructing individual members. He then assured me I was in fact not damned to Hell at all.

My second issue with the church’s statement is that I don’t believe if I was created in God’s own Image how then could what He created me to be, be sinful? I never really got an answer to that, even though he tried. What really irked me about the whole thing was, instead of the church trying to deal with the fact that God created Queer people to be perfect in His eyes, they just glossed over the whole issue so they wouldn’t have to admit their reasoning was flawed.

In the end I told both of my pastors I didn’t believe that my Bisexuality was a sin and I had no intention of ignoring my same sex attractions. In his response he said, he had no intentions of being my bedroom police and if I didn’t tell him what was going on he wouldn’t have to know. He also told me that every Christian is on their own path and not all of us are at the same place in our journey, nor are we all traveling at the same speed. I think that was his own way of saying that he understood where I was coming from even though he himself couldn’t totally agree with me. Which, I also never expected to hear coming out of his mouth. I greatly respect both of my pastors. I couldn’t have been more pleased with how things were handled, and I am happy to say I am still welcomed there regularly. 

Additionally, I will also tell you I have had many instances in my life where I truly believe God was guiding me on my path. I have seen Him solve more than one major problem in my life after believing He had left me out in the cold. In hind sight, of having Him resolve one major issue in my life; I am certain had I gotten what I thought He should have given me, it would have been the worst thing that could have ever happened to both me and my children. This leads me to believe if God sees my Bisexuality as either a sin or a choice He could have removed it from me, yet He still hasn’t.

It has been a little over a year since my pastors met with me multiple times as I formulated a plan to come out to my parents, and my adult children, along with my brother and his family. However, I still had this nagging feeling I hadn’t gotten to the bottom of the issue regarding whether or not same sex attraction was a sin in God’ eyes yet, so I kept digging.

In my search I found two things to be very helpful in sorting out this whole mess. The first was coming across a YouTube video called “Kathy Baldock – Untangling The Mess” on The Reformation Project’s YouTube channel. Link below:

https://youtu.be/ziCOOdUW8OA

The Reformation Project in Los Angeles is an organization that is trying change the way Christians view the LGBTQ+ community. Kathy Baldock wrote a book called “Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community” which explains in greater detail why the church incorrectly views homosexuality as a sin, based on many factors including the mistranslation of the Bible. (If you don’t want to read the book, I have supplied the link above to a talk she gave outlining her well researched reasoning. Warning, it is an hour and a half video.)

What will be lost on most Protestants and Non-Lutheran alike is that Martin Luther’s efforts to correct inconsistencies in the Bible because of a mistranslation sparked the protestant reform in the 1500s. Now the Reformation Project in California is attempting to do the same thing regarding the LGBTQ+ community. Unfortunately, no amount of Guttenberg printing presses will be able to make the Reformation Project’s message any louder because of the information overload created by the internet.

I then read a paper recently which was written by Idan Dershowitz, a Jewish Biblical translator/scholar, who discovered in the oldest known biblical text, that the verses in Leviticus: 18 had been changed 100 years after they were written, in a subsequent translation. The original text did not warn against homosexual acts at all, but instead of incestuous ones. If they spoke about incest specifically, yet said nothing about homosexuality it begs the question if it should have ever been considered a sin in the first place. I have been told by a seminarian this is not the first time this mistranslation has been uncovered. It was found sometime back in the 1970 and 80s when the world looked down their noses at the LGBTQ+ community so it never got any traction. (See link below.)https://www.academia.edu/36473338/Pre-print_Revealing_Nakedness_and_Concealing_Homosexual_Intercourse_Legal_and_Lexical_Evolution_in_Leviticus_18

Additionally, it wasn’t until a 1955 translation of the Bible was publish that Sodom and Gomorra was destroyed for homosexual behavior. For the prior 1700 or so years, it had been widely believed the city had been destroyed due to their own inhospitality. This brings us back to Kathy Baldock’s book and how societal and psychiatric/medical beliefs at the time the Bible’s translation have influenced added to the problem.

Until I started questioning my sexual orientation and looking for answers I believed as I had been taught by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that the Bible was inspired by God, therefore infallible, regardless of the fact that it had been written by humans. Furthermore, if there were discrepancies God would explain them to us in Heaven. (How convenient.) It is almost embarrassing that I actually believed this schlock for all those years! How can the Lutheran Church say this out of one side of their mouth while preaching that a mistranslation in the Bible by a man which was then exploited by corruption in the Catholic Church and used to sell indulgences was a terrible wrong that needed to be righted? If the Bible was truly inspired by God, and therefore infallible, it should in theory stay that way regardless of translation. Furthermore, the real reason there are so many denominations is due to disagreements on one person’s interpretation of the Bible and its translation over another’s. 

In the end, I am no longer able to blindly believe the Church’s teachings as a whole, especially on the topic of homosexuality. I have found far too much proof to the contrary that makes a case to say otherwise. When you add this on top of the fact that I know with all my heart I was truly born this way as a Child of God, and believe that I have been made in His own image, it makes no sense to me that my same sex attractions would ever be sinful. Therefore, if my same sex attraction is not inherently sinful, neither should it be for me to act on that attraction. Finally, if that is truly the case, then there is nothing to reconcile in the first place.

This finally brings me back to my list of those whose opinions matter to me. As I stated earlier the only two people on the list that hold any true currency with me are me and God, and He has already let me know He loves me just as I am, and it’s all fine with Him.