(Image source: Sojourners. Illustration design by Tiarra Lucas)

In recent weeks, deposition videos of former DOGE employees who used ChatGPT to cut government funding from grants and programs that mentioned words like “Black,” “LGBTQ,” or “women” have returned the spotlight to the Trump administration’s attacks on “DEI.” The publicly-circulated clips made it clear that part of their task included the erasure of anyone who was trans, Black, Indigenous, or other people of color from federal monuments, policies, programs, and public life. As these videos generated press attention, some commentators suggested that, in order to undo the damage done by DOGE and Trump’s administration, Democrats can only win back Congress by focusing on one issue at a time, say immigration, and not, for example, on transgender immigrants. That approach, however, is misguided. Our research shows why efforts to promote social justice must consider all of these areas of oppression at once.

Our book, Choosing Love: What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All about Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2025), shares the stories of queer and trans Christians, focusing on queer and trans Christians of color. These are people who know what it is like when people try to erase them, and to be told from all sides that they cannot or should not exist. Their churches tell them that it is impossible to be both gay and Christian, or that trans identities are not real. Some teach that it’s okay to be LGBTQ, but not to “act on it,” whatever they mean by that. Others teach that people wouldn’t be LGBTQ if they were really Christian. For people of color, their churches may see LGBTQ identities as sinful—or just wrong to act on—but provide them with the sustenance they need to deal with racism. Many liberal churches that teach that God loves queer people may also be predominantly white—and painfully unaware of how they perpetuate racism. Meanwhile, secular queer communities often voice similar messages from the other direction, saying that LGBTQ Christians should leave their toxic religion behind and move on.

LGBTQ conservative Christians, in particular, live at intersections that seem impossible by our society. But they exist. They love Jesus and strive to model their lives on his. They find sustenance in the kinds of churches they grew up in—with the music, the styles of prayer, and many of the Christian teachings that they first fell in love with. When others suggest they join nearby churches that affirm their gender and sexual identities, if there are any such places nearby at all, some don’t feel comfortable in those spaces, or find that those churches don’t fulfill their spiritual needs.

As we discovered when conducting research for our book, many LGBTQ Christians refuse erasure. They are finding ways to heal, thrive, and work for justice—and not just for themselves. They have something to teach the rest of us about how to do the same. Their experiences make abundantly clear that making the world more just includes recognizing that there is something dehumanizing about forcing people, or just expecting them, to hide parts of themselves. Justice requires room for people to live and thrive in what some of our respondents called “the fullness of who they are.” And as they taught us, the movement for justice can’t focus on one issue at a time, because individuals are whole people all at once.

Feeling Fragmented

Based on over 100 interviews and more than 500 hours of participant-observation, our book details the rich stories of people who make it clear why a single-issue approach to justice can’t work. We’ll focus here on one so we can explore some of the subtle details we heard repeatedly, such as how erasure feels violating, and how LGBTQ Christians learn to distinguish the teachings of Jesus from the sometimes-harmful ways of fellow believers.

One person we heard from was Sandra (a pseudonym). We attended a keynote speech she delivered to an audience of mostly LGBTQ Christians. She introduced herself by saying she had moved around often as a military kid. She got adept at fitting in—by hiding parts of herself. When her family lived in Michigan, she was one of only a few Black kids in the area. She endured demeaning questions from white children—“Why is your butt like that?”—and tried to walk differently so they wouldn’t notice her body. When she moved to South Carolina and was called “teacher’s pet,” she asked the teacher not to give her special tasks so she could blend in with the others.

But she never hid her Christianity. Speaking as an adult to a Christian group that promotes LGBTQ inclusion, she remarked, “When I was a teenager, I was so consistent in hanging out with God on a daily basis that my adult Bible study leader asked me to hold her accountable. I was into it.”

Sandra spoke of growing up in predominantly white churches where she stood out for her deep commitment but felt accepted only to the extent that she downplayed everything that made her “different,” meaning everything about her that was stigmatized—her race, her gender, her sexuality. She described parroting the perspectives of white boys and men; she once refused a leadership position she was offered, having internalized so well the belief that she was unfit to lead because she was a woman. As a lesbian, speaking to an audience of LGBTQ people and allies, most of them Christian, she described the ironies of being told that church is for healing and wholeness, but that her own wholeness as a Black, gay woman wasn’t welcome.

Eventually she came to feel like she was constantly “hiding” and silencing her own perspective. She remarked, “Being asked to fit to the image of the white, Western, evangelical world—that minimized my gender, that ignores my Blackness, and rejects my sexuality. That is an act of violence.” Speaking hypothetically to the people in the ministries she had been part of, she continued, “You want to experience the gifts that God has given me, but you don’t want to see me. And that is a problem.”

In the decade that we spent researching our book, we heard countless stories like Sandra’s about the harms that come from treating being LGBTQ as sinful, and about the harms that come from treating white styles of worship as “normal” or “how God intended.”

It wasn’t just white conservatives who expected people of color to diminish or reject aspects of themselves. White liberal Christians sometimes did too. We heard a story from a Black pastor who had gone to a predominantly white, liberal seminary that was LGBTQ affirming. A group of white seminarians were discussing what they saw as the violence of blood imagery, such as Jesus’ blood pouring out of his wounds at the crucifixion, believing that this imagery detracted from Jesus’ ministry of love and healing. They took a copy of a hymnal and started ripping out pages with the songs that had blood imagery in them, which included all of the Negro Spirituals. They probably didn’t set out to be racist. But by assuming that their own perspectives were complete, they ended up having a truly racist effect, leaving their Black colleagues to feel erased, unwelcome, and attacked.

Over and over, LGBTQ Christians of color shared the same insights: that it’s hard to feel loved by people who ask you to hide, eliminate, or downplay parts of who you are.

We also heard from them about what allowed them to celebrate their wholeness, and what it looked like for them to feel fully seen and loved as the people they are, without having to hide anything from God or other people.

Finding Wholeness

Sandra eventually reached a breaking point, where her life was beginning to feel unlivable. Then she was struck by a passage she read written by the Episcopal priest and scholar Barbara Brown Taylor: “I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was. And it was not until this project failed, that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”

Sandra worked on developing relationships with Christians who believed that God accepted, created, and loved LGBTQ people, and Black women in general. Recalling Jesus’ saying from Matthew 7 about knowing the goodness of someone’s teachings by their fruits, she saw the good fruits of their ministries. She learned to accept her own “human wholeness.” In her speech, she told the crowd:

“All I know is that I’m alive now. [Applause] All I know is that I’m here, and I’m alive, and I would do it again. I would do it again. I never knew I could be this grounded in myself. I didn’t know this was a part of living. I really didn’t…. I’m only here because of the people I know here, that were committed to loving me on the journey.”

As Sandra described the experience of finding herself in community, she made an analogy to playing games with her two-year-old, mentioning that his favorites were those like hide-and-seek and peek-a-boo, which gave him the delightful experience of being found, as in, “Where’s Robbie? There you are!” She said:

“Because he just wants to be seen. I feel like with condemnation or celebration, I feel like a lot of our stories can break into those two categories. You come out, and lucky for me I was in a community where I came out and they said, ‘There you are!’ And there are other communities where they say ‘Go into hiding. Not here, not now, go to this place. Go get fixed.’ And I think that’s the difference. What happens when people come out of hiding? We can celebrate them, or we can condemn them.”

She continued the analogy, asking:

“Why did it take so long for me to look in the mirror and say, ‘There you are?’ Because I had had so many years of investment, and so much investment in my life, with seeds that were bearing fruit, that were going to kill me…. And tonight’s really special, because the people that were a part of me being able to look in the mirror and see—the ones that said, ‘There you are!’—are here, tonight. They’re here. And it’s such a gift, because I couldn’t have done it on my own…. I found people who chose not to be segregated, in order to embrace the fullness of God’s creation…. I found those people, and as a result of this merciful loving community, I found myself.

There is No Justice Without Love

Stories like Sandra’s echoed what Civil Rights leaders and authors have been saying for decades, if not centuries: that there is no justice without love. Loving others in their wholeness counters the dehumanization at the heart of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and biphobia. Loving your enemy doesn’t mean being nice to your oppressor, or pouring more energy into trying to change them, or staying quiet. Loving your enemy means not letting them dehumanize you or drag you into despair, while maintaining the hope that they can renounce hatred as they reconnect with their own capacity for love and connection. It means we can make a future that’s better than the present. And we can only do that in solidarity with each other, recognizing each other’s full humanity, being open to and learning from people who are different from us, those the powers-that-be are trying so hard to erase from history and eliminate from public life.

Efforts to resist the administration’s attacks on trans youth or same-sex marriage must also include efforts to resist its attacks on immigrants and people of color, and the reverse is true as well. All of these must include economic justice, too. No “single-issue” effort will lead to a more just world. And distancing ourselves from the oppression of one group to win favor or political points for some isn’t justice, such as those who give credence to pseudoscience that tries to erase trans identities or who are okay removing trans people from public life.

Pete Buttigieg put this point well when asked in a recent interview about the erasure of transgender people from the Stonewall website and other public spaces. After reminding people that activists who were transgender had fought hard for gay rights, for the rights of people like him, in the 1960s and ‘70s, Buttigieg remarked:

“I get that it would be politically convenient…for people to pull up the ladder after them and leave out others, but that’s not OK. People have to stick together. And that’s not just across the LGBTQ community, it’s like, anywhere somebody is getting beat up or, literally or figuratively, because of who they are, I think everybody else has to stick up for them.”

As we conducted our research, we heard again and again from Christians who understood the Christian message to be that humans, in our seemingly infinite diversity, are created in the image of God. That to be human is to have the capacity for connection with others, and to share in God’s love in the fullness of who they are.

Christian or not, the work it takes to separate another person in your mind from their humanity by stigmatizing them is work that rips you apart from your own humanity. As we think about the better future we want to create, we cannot afford to try to achieve it one piece at a time.

Dawne Moon is a Professor in Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University. She has studied religion, gender, and sexuality for thirty years.

Theresa W. Tobin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. She studies questions about gender, sexuality, emotion, and religious experience.