f2PointEight

The Faith That Formed Me

I grew up in Jamaica, in a society that has never been famed for its tolerance of non-heterosexual identities, inside a conservative, fundamentalist denomination that codified my religious imagination long before I ever chose what to believe. I learned early on that “gay” was an insult, a punchline, a pejorative to fling at boys who didn’t perform masculinity properly. I learned that “one man, one woman” wasn’t just a Godly ideal, it was the only legitimate expression of romantic love. I learned to feel disgust at people who lived and loved differently.

It has taken me decades to realise that what I had learned was not “biblical truth” but a particular, colonised and colonising form of Christianity. Its insidious machinations displaces, marginalises, and defames people as broken in order to see itself as whole.

So, when I watched a recent two-part live series on YouTube (here and here) about “decolonising faith,” something in me stirred. The panel, made up of Seventh-day Adventist pastors, academics, and Diversity & Inclusion advocates, spoke passionately about Western colonialism, race, power, patriarchy. They named how empire still shapes our theology, our institutions, our pews. And they articulated an optimistic view of how decolonising faith can be achieved in the small, disparate spheres of influence we each inhabit.

During the conversation however, I typed a question into the live chat:

If we’re serious about decolonising Christianity, are we prepared to include the people the church has historically marginalised and not just along racial and gender lines, but also LGBTQIA+ people?

The question never made it to the stage. I don’t think that was malicious, there was a set agenda and limited time. But the silence was haunting. Because this, to me, is the central question:

How can we talk about decolonising faith while refusing to affirm the worth and value of queer people, who have been colonised by theology as surely as others have been colonised by empire?

I say “we” loosely. I no longer consider myself a Christian in the classic sense. I’d call myself agnostic now. And yet, Christianity has lived in my bones for so long that I’m still in conversation with it. I still feel compelled to challenge it, to hold a mirror up to it, to ask it to be better than it has been to so many people.

I didn’t set out to become a critic of Christianity. But I’ve also rarely chosen silence where I see wrong. I include myself as the focus of that critique, because for too long I was complicit in it. I don’t write this through any pretence of being more enlightened, or better than the Christians it challenges. I write it precisely because I’m not. I write this not as any kind of expert in the sciences that govern sexuality or gender expression. I write it as a testimony of unlearning, of watching the mask slip, of seeing love where I was told there was only sin, and of recognising how I peddled harm and called it holiness.

A Bigot at the Door

I remember the day my bigotry knocked back.

Around the late noughties/early twenty-tens, I had been supporting the outreach efforts of a South London church and had been paired with another young person to go door-to-door in the nearby community. We were inviting residents to a week-long series of meetings at the church. It was the standard evangelistic script. Knock, smile, introduce, invite.

At one door, a man answered. After introducing ourselves as being from the local church, I asked whether he had any plans that week, because we’d love him to attend our events.

He said quietly, “Your church won’t want me to come.”

I responded with the line every Christian knows by heart: “Of course we do. We welcome everyone.”

He replied: “I’m gay.”

And immediately, I knew he was right.

Because fundamental Christianity hasn’t just failed to welcome LGBTQIA+ people fully, it has actively constructed a world in which they can only ever belong conditionally, if at all. In the theology I had been raised in, people like him were not simply “sinners”, they were embodiments of an abomination. Everyone else’s sin was something they did. His was something he was.

He invited us in and we talked. He didn’t need to shout. The quiet precision of his pain was enough. I couldn’t argue with anything he said, that he wasn’t allowed to be a full participant in worship, that he would always be treated as a problem to fix rather than a person to love, that no amount of “hate the sin, love the sinner” slogans could undo the fact that his very existence was framed as a moral threat. For the first time, I couldn’t hide behind doctrine. I was sitting in front of a man who was excluded by a God I claimed was love. And I knew, with a sick sort of clarity, that if he walked into our church, the welcome we advertised would soon wear thin and become apparent for what it really was. A lie.

If that door-knock cracked the façade, what happened next took a sledgehammer to it.

In December 2015, Reggie Yates’ Extreme UK: Gay and Under Attack aired on BBC. I watched as in one scene about eight or nine minutes in, Reggie sits across from Pastor Michael Njagi Mbui, who was then the pastor of a church I had attended, and where my membership was held. Discussing the topic of sexuality and religion, Reggie asked “If your daughter was to come out, would you still have a relationship with her?”

Pastor Mbui responded that if his child chose that “lifestyle,” she couldn’t live in his home. He went on to further add “If you, along the way, choose to live a life different from that [the expectations of the SDA church on sexuality], you can’t be part of an Adventist faith community.” I remember being horrified, not just as a viewer, but as someone who knew this man as a spiritual leader. The message was chillingly clear. My love, my home, and my God are all off-limits to you if you’re gay.

This isn’t an isolated view. On paper, Adventist churches will say “everyone is welcome,” provided they’re “law-abiding” and not a danger to others. In practice, the welcome is conditional. You can attend, yes, but your full participation is constrained by whether you fit a narrow moral script. For LGBTQIA+ people, that script usually boils down to compulsory celibacy as the only “legitimate” expression of their aberrant sexuality.

The church’s doctrine explicitly codes non-heteronormative sexual expression as abominable, sinful, and dangerous to the “Edenic” ideal of family. Church culture takes it further, even where leaders deny that people are “born that way,” they know on some level that queer identity is not simply a hobby you pick up and put down. So, it becomes the worst kind of sin, not just an act to repent of, but a self to repudiate.

You feel that in a thousand little ways. In the disproportionate outrage. In the whispers. In the sermons that linger with relish on Leviticus while breezing past economic injustice or abuse of power. That’s why I find it naïve to talk about marginalisation as if it’s only about racialised moral superiority or patriarchy. Even if those were the only barriers (they aren’t), using sexual orientation as a baseline qualification for spiritual authority, while ignoring actual competence, integrity, or pastoral skill, is discrimination in its purest form.

And yet we dare to call this love.

God, The Ultimate Abusive Partner

Shortly afterwards, in an attempt to reckon with the unpalatable views both I and my faith espoused, I remember posting a status on my Facebook page that read:

“God loves homosexuals.”

At the time it felt brave, even radical. A way of asserting that queer people were not beyond the reach of grace. In the back of my mind, I had Colossians 3:11—no Greek or Jew, slave or free, but Christ all and in all—spurring me on in that endeavour. But looking back, I now see what was hidden in the sentence. Because fundamental to the Christian worldview I had inherited was the conviction that you are never enough as you are. Not just imperfect, but fundamentally broken. “Born in sin, shaped in iniquity.” The heart “desperately wicked.” The problem is not simply what you do, it’s who you are.

I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but under that framework, when I wrote that “God loves homosexuals,” what I quietly meant was: God loves homosexuals so much that he will not leave them homosexual. It was a love that was framed as transformation away from who you are. The “good news” is that an all-loving God will re-make you into something more acceptable, more palatable, less you.

This Christian concept of conversion and giving your life to God is akin to engaging in a psychologically abusive relationship. In God, you have a partner who demands total loyalty, threatens punishment, and alternates distance with intense affection. If your best friend said she’d met a wonderful man who was out of her league, and with good intentions he insisted she change everything about herself, including core parts of her personality because she’s fundamentally not good enough, what would we call that relationship? What if she told you that his love for her knew no bounds, but he sometimes went days and weeks without contacting her or answering his phone? What if you could see that this kind of intermittent reinforcement was creating in her an addictive, emotionally destabilising, self-deprecatory, and guilt-inducing obsession? Would you tell her how amazing it is she found someone like him, or would you tell her to run?

Many Christians excuse it away by saying God loves us as we are and transformation is a by-product of closeness, not a condition for acceptance. But when your theology insists that you are inherently sinful at your core and in need of ontological change, the distinction collapses. If the only version of you that is fully welcome in God’s presence is a different version of you, then the relationship begins to look less like love and more like holy gaslighting.

And for LGBTQIA+ people, this is not abstract. It shows up as “ministries” that promise change, pastoral counselling that gently instructs you to spend your life alone, and sermons that frame your love as an attack on God’s created order. The abusive dynamics are not a metaphor, they’re liturgy.

… Adam and Steve

One of the most quietly devastating shifts in my journey came from an unlikely place, an episode of World’s Strictest Parents.

The show followed Tamzin, a teenager from the south coast of England who had dropped out of college, was using drugs, and was barely hanging onto a relationship with her parents. She was sent to live for a time with Scot and Joel, a gay couple on the east coast of the US who had been together nineteen years, adopted three children, and were fostering two more.

Back then, I was deeply invested in the “nuclear family” as not only the ideal but the only legitimate one: mum, dad, children. As an Adventist, I had been taught that God established two institutions in Eden, marriage between a man and a woman, and the Sabbath. I was also taught that both were under attack. One by progressive social ideology, the other by the Catholic Church and Sunday-keeping Christians. We were conditioned to see ourselves as guardians of these divine institutions against a Satanic conspiracy trying to destroy them.

I’ve heard the cheap line that “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” and I’d laughed along because that’s what you do when the joke is part of the liturgy. The punchline wasn’t neutral, it trained me to see any family that didn’t fit the Eden template as inherently suspect. So, when the episode started, I felt that familiar mix of curiosity and discomfort. I didn’t think of it as prejudice at the time. I called it “biblical discernment.”

And yet, as I watched Scot and Joel, what I saw was not deviance or decay. I saw two dads embody love, stability, structure, and care. Tamzin pushed every boundary, lashed out with rage and aggression, and they met her not with condemnation but with patience and presence. They locked step with her through the chaos.

The cognitive dissonance was almost physical. On one side, the script in my head, this is not God’s plan. This is counterfeit. Same-sex parenting confuses children. This is what we’re meant to stand against. On the other, what my eyes were actually taking in was two parents setting boundaries without cruelty, listening without defensiveness, refusing to give up on a young girl who had given up on herself. My theology and my senses were at war with each other, and I could feel my mind scrambling to protect the doctrine. Maybe it’s all scripted. Maybe it’s all performative. Maybe…

Eventually, though, the “maybes” started to sound desperate, like I was arguing with my own conscience in real time. Because nothing about what I was seeing looked like moral collapse. It looked like faithfulness, just not the kind my tradition had categories for.

Eventually, they helped her drop her guard, trust again, and reconnect with her own parents. Tamzin even extended her stay with them a further two weeks, with Scot accompanying her back to the UK to help mediate a conversation between her and her mum. I watched, teary, as they embraced and began rebuilding the relationship. And Scot cried, too.

Sitting in front of the screen, I realised something that has refused to leave me. What I had been taught to see as a counterfeit family bore the marks of love more clearly than any “biblical” model I had been taught to believe in.

That moment didn’t immediately deconstruct my theology, but it did something more dangerous to it, it embarrassed it. It exposed the gap between what I had been conditioned to believe about Godly relationships and what I was actually witnessing. If love, patience, protection, and self-giving care were the fruits we were supposed to look for, then who was I to declare this family illegitimate? If two men I had been conditioned to view as unfit parents could model the kind of parenting I should aspire to, then maybe the problem wasn’t them. Maybe it was my theology. My bigotry. My colonised imagination.

Maybe the problem was me.

The Myth of a Neat Binary

Years later, I came across a story of a young woman who, considering starting a family, had visited a clinic for a check-up. She had never had a period and wanted to make sure everything was okay. The doctor asked about a childhood operation, to which she casually responded that she’d had an appendectomy at fourteen. Reading her medical notes and puzzled, the doctor explained that she didn’t have an appendectomy at all, her appendix was still very much intact.

What surgeons had removed were undescended testes.

It turned out that this young woman had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS), a genetic condition where individuals with XY chromosomes develop along female lines because their cells do not respond to androgen hormones like testosterone. In other words, by chromosomal standards she was “male,” yet every meaningful aspect of her life had been lived, and felt, as female. She had typical external female anatomy. She moved through the world as a girl, then as a woman. She dated, fell in love, planned a future. Her gender identity was not some fragile, artificial construct waiting to be corrected by a lab result, it was the very ground of her lived reality.

Her parents and doctors had always known, but decided she didn’t need to. And perhaps, tragically, they were right about one thing. There was nothing about her sense of self that required “fixing.” The rupture came not from her body but from the moment the medical establishment forced a biological label onto an identity she already knew intimately from within.

Call the Midwife dramatised a similar story. Lois, a young woman preparing for marriage, submits to a pelvic exam. She has no cervix. The doctor, with male students observing as if she were a specimen, informs her she has internal testes and is “genetically male.” His words reduce her entire embodied life to a single chromosome pair, and in a moment, her sense of self is rendered suspect by a system more loyal to theoretical categories than to lived experience.

These are just two examples of the many intersex variations, variations that are not as rare as people assume. Statistically, they occur at rates comparable to natural red hair. Yet, because they make visible the lie we tell ourselves, that sex is simple, binary, neatly partitioned, they are often sanitised, hidden, or dismissed as aberrations to be theologised away.

I don’t share these stories to pathologise anyone’s body or identity. If anything, they expose how deeply unscientific and unpastoral our binary assumptions have always been.

Because here is the unavoidable question.

Do we now label this woman, who lived, thought, loved, and moved through the world as female, deviant because her chromosomes do not conform to our theological categories?

Do we insist that she “should” have identified as male, even though nothing in her embodied experience pointed her in that direction? Does her womanhood suddenly become less valid because a doctor tells her that someone else’s definition of “sex” supersedes her own lived reality?

Once you ask these questions honestly, the neat binary begins to unravel.

Gender identity, how one knows oneself to be a man, woman, both, neither, or something else entirely, cannot be reduced to a single biological factor. It forms at the intersection of multiple influences. Developmental biology, including hormone exposure in utero, neurological differentiation, early childhood socialisation, cultural norms and expectations, relational attachment and self-concept, personal experience, language, and community, and the deep, pre-verbal sense of self that emerges long before theology ever enters the picture.

To pretend that a chromosomal test or a glance at someone’s genitals at birth can capture the full depth of gender identity is not only naïve, it is cruel. It ignores the complexity of human development. It erases people whose lives refuse to fit tidy categories. It claims that biology determines destiny while ignoring all the biological realities that contradict its own reductionism.

And the church, in its determination to defend a binary it mistakes for divine design, has rarely stopped to ask what these lives mean for its theology. Instead, we push the complexity aside, reduce these people to “exceptions,” and file them under “consequences of the Fall.” But human beings are not theological footnotes. Their existence is not a problem for doctrine to solve.

Their lives tell us something true about the world, something Christianity should be listening to.

If a person with XY chromosomes can be fully, deeply, unambiguously a woman, not by any medical or surgical intervention, but by the natural unfolding of her body and identity, then the problem is not her. The problem is the theological and cultural insistence that gender must conform to a binary simplicity that human life itself refuses to obey.

These stories do not challenge Scripture. They challenge our interpretation of Scripture. They challenge the colonial hermeneutic that insists ancient categories must be imposed on modern complexities. They challenge the arrogance that assumes we already know what a “real” man or woman is. And perhaps most importantly, they challenge the belief that our theology should never have to change, only the people harmed by it.

A Colonising Theology

I recently came across this article, “Sexual Identity: A Reflection,” written by Dr Daniel K. Bediako, associate director of the Biblical Research Institute of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

I had hoped it might show some measure of self-reflection, or even offer a token of inclusivity toward the very people it scrutinises. Disappointingly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, it serves instead as a perfect example of how colonised theology dresses itself up as timeless truth.

The article centres European and North American scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir, John Money, and Judith Butler, alongside Western social movements, and treats this narrow intellectual history as if it were the definitive story of how gender theory emerged. In doing so, it completely ignores long-standing non-Western gender systems, hijras in South Asia, fa’afafine in Samoa, Two-Spirit identities in many Indigenous North American nations, muxes in Zapotec communities, sworn virgins in the Balkans, cultures whose ways of understanding gender refuse to fit the tidy male/female binary the article insists is universal. By erasing these histories, the theology is presented as neutral and global when it is, in fact, deeply Western in both origin and imagination.

The article also treats race and ethnicity as fixed biological “hard identities,” despite the extensive scholarship demonstrating how socially constructed and historically contingent these categories are. Its insistence on sex as a clean binary, reducible to external anatomy, brushes aside the existence of intersex people and the complexities of chromosomal, hormonal, and neurological development. Compounding this, it creates an artificial distinction between “hard” identity (fixed and God-given) and “soft” identity (changeable) that functions less as a genuine analytical tool and more as a theological filing system. Qualities the author believes should remain immutable are placed under “hard,” while anything inconvenient to the doctrine is relegated to “soft.” The “basic fact that a human is a body” is doing more polemical work than scientific or philosophical work.

Underlying all this is a hermeneutic that treats Genesis 1–2 as a timeless ontological blueprint for every modern question about sex and gender, as though those texts were written to adjudicate twenty-first century conversations about orientation, intersex embodiment, or gender identity. This reading ignores the ancient Near Eastern world the texts actually address, a world concerned not with identity categories but with kinship structures, fertility, survival, and the maintenance of household and lineage. It also glosses over the Bible’s own messy sexual landscape: polygyny, levirate marriage, concubinage, sexual slavery, patriarchal household codes, practices that sit uneasily alongside the article’s claim that Scripture presents a simple, unified sexual ethic centred on monogamous heterosexuality.

Perhaps most troubling, the article consistently frames LGBTQIA+ experience as an “ideology” rather than as the lived reality of human beings. Queer people become an abstract issue to debate, not neighbours to listen to, not members of our communities whose stories might teach us something about the diversity of the image of God. Their voices are erased so thoroughly that the theology feels not only incomplete, but morally evasive. The tone and framing raise serious ethical concerns. Using language of “abomination,” “vile,” “debased mind,” and “deserving of death” (even if attributed to Scripture) about groups who are already subject to high levels of stigma and violence is pastorally risky. The call to “love and support” LGBTQIA+ people is explicitly conditional on leading them away from their identities, which many will experience as non-acceptance, however gently expressed. There is no engagement with harm outcomes (e.g., mental health, suicidality) among LGBTQIA+ people in conservative religious contexts, or with the possibility that the theology itself may contribute to suffering.

This is not decolonised theology. It is Western, patriarchal, binary theology wearing a vaguely global mask. And if empire once used Christianity as a tool to justify conquest, control, and the suppression of Indigenous cultures, that same imperial impulse persists whenever the church uses theology to police queer bodies, erase intersex lives, and export heteronormativity as “gospel.” To speak of decolonising faith while refusing to interrogate heteropatriarchy is like pulling down the Union Jack but keeping the governor’s mansion, the plantations, and the labour system intact. The flag changes. The empire remains.

The Whole Barrel is Rotten

At various points in these conversations, well-meaning Christians have asked me questions that deserve to be taken seriously. They often begin with something like, “In what sense do you believe LGBTQIA+ people are marginalised? After all, no law-abiding person is prevented from attending a service.” Others wonder whether the real issue is structural rather than doctrinal: “Who actually has authority to teach? Is the whole setup flawed? What if, instead of a top-down shepherd-sheep hierarchy, we imagined a more circular community, shared meals, casual conversation, life lived together, where theology becomes a collaborative exploration rather than a system handed down?”

These are thoughtful questions, and I resonate with the desire behind them: the longing for a gentler, more humane way of being church. But the marginalisation of LGBTQIA+ people is not subtle, and it is certainly not theoretical. It is woven into the very structures that determine what counts as truth, holiness, legitimacy, and belonging.

In most churches, we don’t teach people how to engage Scripture critically, contextually, or creatively. We teach them what they must believe about it. We elevate certain interpretations to the status of divine decree, and then use those interpretations to decide who is “in sin” and who is “in Christ,” who is permitted to marry, who can be entrusted with leadership, who must remain celibate for life, and who can never be fully safe within the community. These outcomes are not incidental, they are the direct consequence of a theology that begins by drawing boundaries and then claims God drew them first.

If Christianity is practised through exclusionary theology, it will always be structurally incapable of affirming LGBTQIA+ people as fully human and fully beloved without conditions or asterisks. And so, when we talk about decolonising faith, we must go beyond the easy questions: beyond diversifying panels, or lamenting historical racism, or swapping out Eurocentric images of Jesus in the lobby. We have to interrogate the deeper architecture of power.

We have to ask who is allowed to name God in the first place, and why. We have to notice whose bodies are presumed holy and whose are treated as suspect or disordered before a word is spoken. We have to recognise that some people’s experiences are welcomed as revelation while others’ are dismissed as rebellion, confusion, or pathology.

If decolonisation does not include dismantling the theological and institutional structures that treat queer people as problems to fix, it is not decolonisation at all. It is rebranding. Empire with a softer aesthetic.

I don’t doubt there are many Christians and congregations who are genuinely inclusive, who affirm queer people in ways that go beyond lip service. I’ve met them. They exist, often at the margins of their own denominations, sometimes in quiet resistance to official policy. But at the structural level, the foundational frameworks of much of Christianity, particularly in its fundamentalist forms, are built on patriarchy and bigotry. That’s not the exception, it’s the rule.

We uphold male headship as God-ordained. We moralise gender expression. We describe non-heterosexual relationships as evidence of Satan’s plot to destroy the family. We frame queerness as symptom and sign of the world’s moral decay. These are not random quirks, they’re pillars. They provide the scaffolding within which “good” Christians are formed.

So, I keep circling back to this question…

Can good people materially reform harmful moral frameworks? Or do the frameworks themselves need to be dismantled and rebuilt?

Put another way, can good apples restore a diseased barrel? Or will they simply rot too?

A Theology of Decolonised Faith

If decolonising Christianity means anything, it must mean more than sprinkling the works of African theologians into sermons to appear balanced, or acknowledging racism as a regrettable footnote in our history. Decolonising faith requires a far deeper reckoning. It means repenting of the ways Christian theology has been used to criminalise, pathologise, and demonise queer bodies and queer love. It means listening to queer Christians, and ex-Christians, not as pastoral “cases” to be managed, but as theological voices in their own right. It means recognising that Western heteronormative ideas about sex, love, kinship, and gender are not universal but culturally contingent, and that humans across the world and throughout history have organised these aspects of life in ways the Bible itself never contemplated. And, crucially, it means interrogating doctrines that require people to hate themselves in order to be loved by God.

Any pursuit of decolonising faith that does not include queer liberation is not decolonisation at all. If your “liberated” theology still requires LGBTQIA+ people to deny their own belovedness, their own capacity for love, or their own families, then your faith has merely traded the coloniser’s flag for a sun-bleached version of the same empire. The structure remains the same, only the colours have faded.

Scripture itself may offer a better model than the one we have inherited. One of the earliest non-Jewish converts in the Christian story, the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8, stands as a quiet but radical testimony to God’s expansive welcome. Eunuchs in the ancient world did not conform to typical gender categories, they occupied a liminal space that unsettled the rigid binaries of their societies. Yet Philip is instructed not only to approach this gender-nonconforming seeker but to sit with him, teach him, baptise him, and recognise him fully as part of the unfolding body of Christ. The Eunuch is not asked to conform to a different gender role, to repent of his embodiment, or to hide the complexity of who he is. Scripture presents him as whole, worthy, curious, and beloved. If the early church could embrace this figure, someone who would confound our modern theological categories, then perhaps our rigid certainties were never divine commandments but inherited anxieties about bodies, purity, and control.

To Christians, especially those who care about justice, if you are stirred by the language of decolonisation, if you grieve the church’s legacy of racism, misogyny, and violence, then you cannot stop there. You cannot speak passionately about empire while ignoring the frightened queer teenager in your pew who has spent years praying for God to either change them or kill them. You cannot call yourself committed to liberation while defending doctrines that make people’s lives unliveable. You do not need to have every answer or dismantle centuries of theology in a single lifetime. But you do need to be honest, honest about the harm your tradition has caused, honest about the limits of your own understanding, and honest about the fact that “love the sinner, hate the sin” has wounded far more queer people than it has saved.

If your God cannot affirm queer people as fully human, fully beloved, without demanding that they become someone else, then I would boldly suggest that it is not queer people who need to change first.

And to LGBTQIA+ people, you are not an anomaly God forgot to factor into the blueprint. You are not a theological puzzle to be solved or a spiritual obstacle other people must overcome. Your life, your body, your way of moving through the world are not errors awaiting correction. If the church has told you that you are welcome only as a project, know that you deserve spaces where you are welcome as a person. If the God handed to you behaves like an abusive partner, requiring you to shrink, contort, or amputate parts of yourself just to be tolerated, know that you are allowed to walk away from that God. Any God worthy of the name will not be threatened by your refusal to accept harm disguised as holiness.

Christianity loves to talk about conversion. But perhaps what it needs most right now is not more converted sinners, but a converted church, a church that finally confesses, “We have not loved you as ourselves.” A church that learns to say, without conditions or caveats, “Your life, your love, your body, your queerness are good, not in spite of God, but as an expression of the image of God.”

Until then, talk of decolonising faith will ring hollow. Because any theology that still requires queer people to disappear themselves in order to belong is not liberation. It is simply empire, dressed for church.

For too long, Christians have treated being gay or gender non-conforming as the unpardonable sin. But perhaps the real unpardonable sin is the persistent bigotry we have baptised as righteousness. Because what is the image of God, if not the full range and expression of human life and love?