From homophobic to out and affirming, LGBTQ+ Christian advocate | Aubrey Brolsma | TEDxHopeCollege

when i was in middle school my parents gave me a book called the ordinary princess by mmk it's about princess amethyst or amy for short who is destined to be the most beautiful and most graceful of her sisters as each princess is supposed to be more amazing than the last at her christening though an old crotchety fairy bestows upon amy the gift of ordinariness and so she grows up and she's not beautiful her hair is mousy and her nose is turned up and she's not graceful constantly stumbling and dropping her crown her parents are exasperated trying to find her suitor and plan to put her in a tower with a dragon so she runs away she builds a home in the woods and starts working at another castle she makes friends with other maids and falls in love with another poor ordinary servant she finds out later that this servant is actually the king of this castle and they live happily ever after the end it's not an extravagant story there are only four chapters but i was obsessed with this book i read it over and over again i kept reading this little children's book all the way through high school and i would ask myself why is this little simple story so important to me in middle and high school my church community meant everything to me i led in the worship team i went to small groups and worship and services both all sunday my youth pastor was the theological authority to me i started to question my sexuality in eighth grade though and i started identifying as bisexual my sophomore year of high school not that i told anyone though i just knew in my heart whenever homosexuality as a concept was discussed with me growing up it was always it's okay to be gay acting on it is the sin but during this time i started to question those things people had always told me i would ask is homosexuality really a sin one sunday i was sitting in my high school service ready to hear my youth pastor's message and he said he wanted to talk about homosexuality and i thought great i've been struggling with this i'm starting to think it isn't a sin after all maybe i can actually be open about who i am with this community he stood on stage and told us he had been on a journey of discovery and deep research for months he had been wrestling with this question and after those months of research he felt he could confidently stand there and say to all of us teenagers that homosexuality was definitely a sin he spoke for about 20 minutes and within those 20 minutes he broke me it wasn't his intention but what i heard as i sat there with a little rainbow flag already flown over my heart was that i was not welcome to be myself and i internalized it i shoved down my feelings i ripped out the rainbow i started to say that i universally believed homosexuality was a sin i hated that part of me i was disgusted by it and i held homophobic beliefs for three years after that embedded in bigotry because of one sermon when i got to college my heart was all tangled up i knew i was bi but i knew it was a sin so i was just choosing to not like women but my freshman year was wild i got an amazing group of friends who i still love so much i tried to find a new church to go to but nothing really felt right so i just stopped going during this time i started taking a religion class and getting to know one of my friends who is a religion nerd which i didn't know existed these two challenged the things i had just perceived as fact i thought every christian believed what i believed i was wrong i felt insane like everything i had accepted as reality suddenly wasn't and i couldn't find any answers i trusted from any side i was going through what's commonly understood as religious deconstruction basically deconstruction can happen when someone's first on their own and making their own faith decisions or it can happen because of deeper faith research for some people they begin to doubt the credibility of the bible or it can begin with that eternal question if god is good then why is there so much pain in the world for me it meant finding out that my beliefs were not universal i started to doubt the mission of the church and the viability of interpreting the bible 100 in its english translation fast forward a bit though the pandemic hits my freshman year gets cut short but the college announced we're coming back to campus in the fall and we were all so excited my friends and i had a group chat and it was buzzing then on august 2nd of 2020 my kind strong intelligent religion nerd friend came out to us all as trans she knew that i was non-affirming but she was incredibly brave at that moment something that was broken in me began to heal none of it mattered to me anymore all i cared about was my friend and that she knew that i loved and supported her and i was going to be there for her she didn't know it at the time but my friend had started me on the journey towards accepting myself i continued to deconstruct my beliefs i studied and i prayed i took classes in biblical greek and i watched queer pastor sermons online and i came to the conclusion that despite what everyone had told me growing up being gay was not a sin it took until college to figure out why the ordinary princess was so important to me for so long this story is about a girl who has a gift everyone sees something wrong with her only when she goes away does she find other people who love her gift to share her gift she lives happily ever after my queerness is a gift but it has taken me a really long time to be able to say that growing up nobody else saw queerness as a gift more like something to be brushed away or fixed but i left and i found this amazing community of people who love and share my gift of queerness too after i came out and after deconstructing i still couldn't bring myself to go into a church and i would ask myself why can't i just do this i looked back at my time at church in middle and high school and all i saw was pain i thought i'd been happy but looking back now i could see clearly in high school i had just wanted to fit in with all these people who looked like they had it together i hid my queer identity with worship teams and small groups i thought back to every moment that someone rolled their eyes at lgbtq plus problems or said that rainbows annoyed them i remembered that any person in my youth ministry who came out would just disappear i knew that if i went back to my old church people would look down on me i knew that if i tried my old church wouldn't let me sing on worship team or lead a small group anymore i knew that they loved a version of me that doesn't exist they would never accept the person i've become my faith was so twisted and its foundation so broken i didn't think i could go back i looked at the church an institution founded by jesus christ a man who championed the oppressed and sought justice but i looked at the church and i saw damage i saw a church that hurt queer people and still claimed to be righteous i saw hate and control and it didn't seem like many of my siblings and faith actually cared i wondered if i should just give up and become agnostic or look into other religions i doubted i almost walked away but at the end of the day i did find my own way back to christianity i rebuilt that faith brick by brick it was excruciating like stripping a house down to its frame and rebuilding it i had to choose what i wanted to stay and what still caused pain there were so many moments when i questioned if it was even worth it but at the end of that journey is a faith built on jesus christ who i believe stands with his queer children i believe that my queerness is a gift from god and no one will make me ashamed of it that being said i do want all of my siblings in the lgbtq plus community to know that if you walked away from christianity that is okay and valid it is healthy to walk away from painful systems you're brave for having done it to my siblings in christ who choose not to affirm queer identities i implore you to do so many non-affirming christians will be looking at me now and saying but i do love gay people i just don't agree with the lifestyle not all of us in the lgbtq plus community believe we were born this way but being a part of this community is who we are it is a culture it is a love life it is a part of us it is us you could come into these conversations using this rhetoric intending love causing damage intention will always be trumped by impact when someone says hate the sin love the sinner what we hear no matter what that person wants us to hear is that that person believes there's something inherently wrong with us we hear that you could never love and appreciate us fully it means we can't share our music our clothes or our movies with you it means you won't come to our wedding we hear that you will always look at us and see something broken that is not love or support or acceptance it's life draining and it hurts your acceptance isn't just nice it doesn't just feel good it doesn't just make our lives better your acceptance saves lives according to the cdc and trevor project 24 of teen suicides are lgbtq plus youth despite us only making up 3.8 percent of the population one in two trans students have contemplated suicide as well as two and five lesbian gay or bi students we are 2.5 times more likely to fight substance misuse depression or anxiety i've been there but there were affirming pastors and friends in my life who pulled me out of those dark places the cdc and trevor project also found that just one supportive adult in a queer youth life can decrease their risk of attempting suicide by 40 percent i could stand up here and tell you every reason why different sexual orientations and gender identities are not a sin but that is a journey you need to go on i would recommend the books queer theology by dr lynn tonstad changing our mind by dr david gushy god and the gay christian by matthew vines transforming the bible and the lives of transgender christians by austin hartke and bad theology kills by kevin garcia seriously there are so many and even more sources for you to dive into i'm not going to stand up here and espouse these theological debates because at the end of the day this this is about saving lives there could be someone in your life right now who is struggling with this and you could be the one person who accepts them and loves them with no conditions or modifiers so what does acceptance mean acceptance is choosing to put your own prejudice aside and choosing to love someone not in spite of who they are but because of it acceptance is doing your own research to be better acceptance is having community with queer people without shaming them acceptance is loud and explicit acceptance is full and it is unconditional acceptance is radical it's hard the road to acceptance is a long and difficult one but i implore you to go down it because you could be the difference between someone's life or death thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 12,258

Keywords: Acceptance, English, Faith, Humanities, Queer, Religion, Sexual Orientation, Sexuality, TEDxTalks

Id: DKMzULeFS98

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022