Search
Close this search box.

Into The Second Closet: Christian Families With LGBTQ Children

A funny thing happens when you’re a Christian pastor, and LGBTQ Christian students or their Christian parents find out that you aren’t going to treat them the way Christian pastors have normally treated them: they start talking.

They reach out to you.
They let down their guard.
They confide in you.
They cry to you.

Over the past two decades, I’ve come to hear scores of stories of these families, and of their horrific years spent living in The Second Closet.

You see, when students are both LGBTA and Christian (and yes, you can be both) they often live knowing that they have to hide everything all the time in their faith communities. They become experts at concealing attraction, at hiding visual cues, at steering conversations away from potentially awkward moments at youth group or with their Christian friends.

It isn’t like they haven’t been warned.

They’ve sat through the worship services, heard all the sermons, know all the weaponized Scripture passages, and they’ve seen all the protests. They realize that in most cases, coming out is simply not an option and so they stay hidden in the closet: alone, isolated, suffocated.

And even when they do come out, they usually don’t get out.

If these young people, in moments of strength, exhaustion, anger, or complete desperation, do share that deepest of secrets with their Christian parents, and even if those parents do choose not to disown them or expel them, something else happens almost instantly. The whole family goes into the closet together, into a second kind of hiding.

Once they learn the truth (or have the long-feared truth confirmed to them) parents so often realize that they’ve inherited the stigma of their children’s sexuality. It’s as if they discovered that their child had some contagious illness and now they’re basically quarantined along with them; collective victims of the devastating distance that the Church has so easily and willingly created with individuals in the LGBTQ community.

Families in the Second Closet share similar patterns: they begin to skip church outings, they stop attending small group meetings, they more frequently opt-out of Sunday services, not because they no longer want those things and not because they don’t have a hunger for deep community and spiritual nurturing, but because they fear (often rightly) that they no longer belong.

A child’s sexuality often makes the entire nuclear family, feel like discarded orphans in their spiritual family. The emotional toll on those in the Second Closet is incalculable, especially the LGBTQ students themselves. Not only do they bear the burden of their own personal secret, but they get strapped with the additional millstone of guilt, for shoving their parents and siblings into the shadows as well.

And one of the saddest things of all, is that I know many Christians reading this couldn’t care less. I know that you’re skimming through these words without any real concern or empathy. You’re preparing your go-to Scripture passages and your theological justifications against LGBTQ teens, and if you’re doing that—well you’re completely missing the point.

The point is not to debate Biblical interpretations of sexuality, it is that cisgender, heterosexual Christians with seemingly cisgender, heterosexual children, begin to understand the reality of those families who live in secret shame and who have been told, not in so many words (or sometimes in so many words) that their silence is a prerequisite for participation in the Church; that to be accepted they must never be honest.

Nothing healthy grows in the darkness—ever.

Faith communities where all members aren’t able or welcome to be fully authentic still haven’t been saturated enough with Jesus yet. He talked about knowing the truth that “sets you free”. We need churches where all people can speak truth freely, too. This kind of truth sets them free in a very different way.

If you’re a Christian, I may not be able to change your mind on how to treat teens and preteens who are LGBTQ or their families, but at least I’ll have peace knowing that I’ve shared the reality that these families are there; maybe in your Sunday School class or in the row in front of you in worship or in your small group, maybe in your kitchen this Sunday afternoon.

More likely though, they used to be in all those places but no longer are.

Now, they’re all living together in the Second Closet away from the Church and away from you and away from experiencing the love of God you claim to believe in.

But they don’t have to be.

 

Order John’s book ‘If God is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk.’

Share this: