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The Christian Church Continues to Spurn Transgender Clergy

Transgender priests like Father Shannon Kearns even have trouble finding work or acceptance with supposedly liberal or progressive churches.

Photo by Flickr user Jules & Jenny

Reverend Lawrence T. Richardson knew as early as age nine that he was called to ministry. He grew up in a Southern Baptist congregation and went on to attend Liberty Baptist Seminary. Now, he leads a United Church of Christ congregation in Minneapolis, and says he's felt God's love in his life increase tenfold.

Richardson's story is much like that of other pastors—hearing God speak, having great love for the church, and having his calling confirmed by the church, when he became a pastor. But unlike the many other pastors in the United States, Richardson is transgender.

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The dialogue about religion and trans issues almost always pitted churchgoers against the LGBT community. To be sure, there are many Christian congregations that shun trans individuals, preaching that they are living in sin, that they are broken and in need of restoration through a very specific God. But in other instances, the church and the trans community are overlapping circles, with members of both caught in the middle, negotiating both their gender identity and their religious convictions.

While experience as a trans man in the church hasn't been easy, Richardson feels that God has blessed Christians with love and compassion that must be extended to all people.

"Just because a human being assigns a label to what God has made doesn't make it definitively whatever the label defines them to be," Richardson says. "We must remember that the United States is in its infancy and is a nation that was founded on slavery, genocide, and the oppression of anyone who fits outside of white, heteronormative, patriarchal systems. Anything or anyone who falls outside of those norms risks being called sinful by those who wish to maintain these oppressive systems."

Similarly, Father Shannon Kearns, a transgender man who is an ordained priest in the Old Catholic Church, believes that the opposition of religion and trans lives is a false dichotomy. "There are so many things to learn about the world, the church, and theology from transgender Christians, if only people would listen."

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Part of the problem, Kearns says, is that hostility toward transgender people and issues that face gender minorities is still a very sticky subject, even in supposedly liberal or progressive churches. He and his fellow transgender clergy have trouble finding jobs. After he came out as transgender, he says, "I've had to fight twice as hard to get the most basic—and low paying—jobs in the church. This highlights the intense prejudice against transgender people even in liberal and progressive churches. There are many transgender clergy that I know and very few of them are serving in churches mostly because no one will hire them."

This conflict creates a self-perpetuating problem. Churches in almost all denominations refuse to understand or hire transgender people, allowing them to create a narrative uncontested by the presence of trans people, which enables them to say that trans people are not within the church or good to hire.

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Kearns says this is an issue unique to transgender people. Prior to coming out as trans, Kearns was out as gay, and says it wasn't nearly as hard for him to get hired. The recent and growing acceptance of gay, bisexual, and lesbian people in the church has not extended to trans people. It seems the church can accept differentiations in sexual attraction, but isn't quite ready for differentiations in gender identity.

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Transgender people also risk excommunication for being unrepentant about their identities. Most famously, Leelah Alcorn, a young trans woman, committed suicide after her evangelical parents insisted she attend Christian reparative therapy sessions. As a result, many transgender people who come out and have previously been active in the church find themselves having to choose between their church life and their new life as their gender identity.

Kearns says there are upsides, too. "My faith was deepened by my experience of transitioning. I learned so much about myself, and that informed my faith. That unexpected deepening has been such a gift."

Kearns wears many hats as the co-founder of QueerTheology.com, a site dedicated to exploring and understanding Christian queer theology beyond just elementary debates and texts. According to him, exploring queer theology is one of the best ways for cisgender people of faith to support transgender people: "The 101 education is important, but it's not the only thing. Transgender people often have insights into scripture and theology that are rich and enlightening for all people. Give them the opportunity to share those insights."

These insights include explorations into theological areas rejected by the mainstream church, including liberation theologies developed by marginalized people in the Americas. Author and theologian James Cone is a pioneer of black liberation theology in the United States, which explores the idea of Jesus Christ as an exemplar for identifying with the suffering and the marginalized of society. In that vein, queer people within the church have developed their own understandings of scripture that has fostered a sense of queer liberation.

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One interpretation focuses on the relationship of the Trinity—God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—as polyamorous relationship, uniquely giving and receiving love in a triune group. Other interpretations incorporate body studies and body theology in discussions of what it means to be made in God's image (referencing the creation narratives in Genesis). These expansive interpretations, grounded in both scripture and the life experiences of queer people, create new opportunities for worship.

"There are as many ways of being transgender as there are of being Christian." - Austen Hartke

Sarah Moon is a non-binary individual (does not identify as either man nor woman) who will attend a United Methodist seminary in the fall, with the goal of becoming a pastor in the Methodist tradition. But attending a Methodist seminary doesn't restrict her faith to a traditional Protestant view. Moon's faith is more syncretistic: "I have been focusing on studying gnostic Christianity and different types of neo-paganism lately. Though I don't think I'd ever consider myself gnostic, I like the fact that they tell new stories about familiar Christian figures. I believe that is something I can do in my own faith."

Like Kearns and Richardson, Moon views her gender identity as something that draws her closer to God, not apart. "[Gender non-conforming people] can bring unique symbols to the table for understanding the God of the Bible, who at some points has both breasts and a uterus and a penis, who is a mother and a father, who both has no gender, and made men and women (and everyone else) in hir image."

Transgender Christians, as diverse as the denominations of their religion, bring themselves to the discussion of what it means to be created by God, to exist as a "new creation," as the Bible says. Austen Hartke, a trans man who recently graduated from Luther Seminary in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, put it this way: "There are as many ways of being transgender as there are of being Christian. Of the percentage of the world population that identifies as transgender, there are people who identify within the gender binary, and outside of that binary, and people who never disclose their trans status, and others for whom it's a defining characteristic. The one thing they have in common is that they don't identify wholly with the gender they were assigned at birth."

The acceptance of transgender people within Christianity is still hard to come by, but one thing is consistent: transgender Christians are determined to live their faith, no matter how that task works out in their own relationship to their churches.

As Hartke says, "Transgender people bring stories of a God who pursues us relentlessly. A God who wants to know us—the real us—so badly that nothing can get in the way. Trans people's stories are inherently about grace and gospel. I think that cis-normative, hetero-normative churches who don't invite and respond to those stories lose out on a great gift."

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