Coming Out, Christian Rejection, and the God Who Never Closed the Door

Coming out has taught me something I didn’t necessarily expect.

The hardest part hasn’t been being gay.

The hardest part has been discovering what happens when the people who have spent their lives talking about love are suddenly confronted with someone they don’t know how to love.

I spent much of my life inside Christianity. I was an ordained pastor. I taught. I preached. I prayed. I believed in the work of the Holy Spirit. I loved God. I loved my wife. And for twenty-seven years, I was married to a woman whom I loved desperately.

Then she died of cancer.

And eventually, after a lifetime of managing, compartmentalizing, questioning, suppressing, praying, and trying to understand my attraction to men, I came out.

That’s when things got interesting.

Not because God abandoned me.

Because some Christians did.

And the more I have walked through this process, the more convinced I have become that we have confused religion with Christianity and righteousness with love.

Those are not the same things.

And sometimes the people most convinced that they are defending God are demonstrating something that looks remarkably unlike Him.

When Your Life Becomes Somebody Else’s Crisis

I made what, in retrospect, was a rather spectacular technological mistake.

I created a new Facebook page.

I had intentionally stepped away from my old page because it contained years of relationships from my former religious and ministry world. I wanted a place connected to the new work I was doing—a podcast and community focused on helping gay men grow in self-acceptance, relationships, emotional health, and love.

I thought I had set everything so my former Facebook world wouldn’t automatically find me.

I was wrong.

Facebook apparently decided everybody needed to know.

Suddenly, people from my old life were discovering the page.

And suddenly, my coming out wasn’t simply my story anymore.

It became everybody else’s emergency.

One Christian friend I had known for more than twenty years called me. He told me he loved me. He also told me he believed God had a woman for me.

And then he repeatedly told me:

“I don’t know what to say.”

Finally, I thought, Well, let me help you.

If after more than twenty years of knowing me you suddenly don’t know what to say to me because you discovered I’m gay, perhaps there isn’t much conversation left to have.

So we ended the call.

Then came my brother-in-law.

This wasn’t some distant acquaintance. We had regarded one another as brothers. He was my late wife’s brother. There was history there. Family. Affection.

Then he saw the page.

And suddenly I wasn’t “brother.”

I was Scott.

And eventually came the word:

Abomination.

They were praying for me.

I suppose that was thoughtful.

I even bought a T-shirt afterward that says Adorable Abomination because sometimes humor is one of the healthier ways to metabolize absurdity.

But beneath the humor was something painful.

Someone who had treated me like a brother could suddenly look at one revelation about me and allow that revelation to redefine the entire relationship.

That is what shame does.

And that is what religious systems built around shame teach people to do.

Projection: I Have to Invalidate You to Validate Me

One of the most important things I’ve learned about shame is that shame rarely stays put.

Shame says:

Something is wrong with me.

It grows out of rejection, abandonment, neglect, abuse, humiliation and trauma. Those experiences can become internalized until they are no longer merely things that happened to us. They become statements about us.

I’m defective.

I’m unacceptable.

Something about me is fundamentally wrong.

Then we have to do something with that shame.

Some people turn it inward.

It becomes self-contempt.

Others turn it outward.

It becomes projection.

The biblical story of Amnon and Tamar is an extreme picture of this dynamic. After Amnon violates Tamar, his response isn’t to face what he has done. He rejects her. The shame that belongs to him becomes contempt directed toward her.

He must invalidate her in order to preserve himself.

And that is the equation:

I invalidate you to validate me.

Once you recognize it, you begin seeing it everywhere.

You certainly see it in religion.

A religious system can become extraordinarily good at creating people who look clean externally while remaining terrified of whatever is unresolved internally.

Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs.

Beautiful outside.

Dead inside.

That is also why image management is so closely connected to shame. It is not enough for me to appear righteous. I also need somebody else to represent unrighteousness.

Somebody needs to be outside the gate.

Somebody needs to be the problem.

And historically, gay people have made wonderfully convenient candidates.

The Church’s Sin Ranking System

Jesus never handed us a four-level chart ranking sinners.

The church somehow managed to create one anyway.

We allow enormous amounts of human messiness through the church doors.

Divorce?

Come in.

Pornography?

Come in.

Adultery?

Come in.

Addiction?

Come in.

Greed?

Come in.

Gossip?

Come in.

Pride?

Please, we might put you on the leadership team.

But somewhere along the way homosexuality got moved into another category entirely.

Gay people became Level Four.

That’s where we put the really bad people.

And the problem isn’t simply theological disagreement. The problem is what happens relationally as a result.

Because once I am categorized as the especially broken person in the room, you no longer have to look at your own brokenness.

I become your distraction.

You don’t want to be exposed, so you expose me.

That is projection.

My supposed unrighteousness becomes the covering for yours.

You sacrifice me at the altar of your own appearance of righteousness.

And that is precisely the kind of religious system Jesus repeatedly confronted.

Religion Needs You to Believe God Is Far Away

Religion thrives on separation.

It needs you to believe God is somewhere over there and that you are somewhere over here.

Then religion can sell you the pathway back.

Pray harder.

Read more.

Try harder.

Repent more.

Attend more.

Give more.

Get yourself back into God’s presence.

I’ve heard Christians say that when you can’t hear God, there must be a “brass heaven” over you.

Really?

I thought the heavens opened.

I thought when Jesus died the veil in the temple was torn.

I thought the symbolism of the torn veil was precisely that the barrier had been removed.

So why are we continually rebuilding a curtain Jesus tore down?

Because religious systems function very effectively when people believe access to God must continually be earned.

If I can keep you conscious primarily of your sin, I can keep you conscious of your perceived separation. And if I can keep you conscious of separation, I can keep you working to eliminate the distance.

But grace says something radically different.

Grace says the work has already been accomplished.

The question isn’t whether God has moved toward you.

The question is whether you can believe that He already has.

Jesus Had His Harshest Words for Religious Gatekeepers

This is one of the strangest things about modern Christianity.

We frequently behave as though Jesus spent His ministry hunting sinners.

He didn’t.

He ate with them.

He touched them.

He defended them.

He talked with them.

He restored them.

The people who repeatedly provoked His anger were religious gatekeepers.

Pharisees.

People who knew Scripture.

People who believed in God.

People who believed they were protecting holiness.

And Jesus could be absolutely ferocious with them.

Why?

Because religion had become an obstacle between people and God.

The gatekeepers were guarding a gate God wanted opened.

That should terrify anyone who claims to speak for Jesus.

Because if my theology causes me to stand between another human being and the love of God, I need to ask whether I’m defending Jesus or repeating the behavior of the people Jesus confronted.

My Marriage Was Not a Fraud

Another part of coming out has been watching people attempt to reinterpret my entire life.

Apparently, if I am gay now, my twenty-seven-year marriage must have been fraudulent.

No.

It wasn’t.

I loved my wife.

Deeply.

She loved me.

Deeply.

Was sexuality complicated?

Of course.

Human sexuality is complicated.

Human beings are complicated.

Love is complicated.

I have been attracted to men throughout my life. Within the religious world I inhabited, I learned to compartmentalize that part of myself. Human beings are remarkably capable of compartmentalization.

But that does not mean the other parts of my life were counterfeit.

I also understand myself as deeply demisexual. Personhood matters enormously to me. Ideas matter. Character matters. Intelligence matters. Spiritual connection matters. Values matter.

I fell in love with who my wife was.

She was not a prop in some elaborate heterosexual performance.

She was the woman I loved.

Our marriage existed.

Our history existed.

Our intimacy existed.

Our children exist.

Her cancer existed.

Her death exists.

And my coming out does not reach backward through time and erase the love that existed between us.

I refuse to allow anyone to invalidate my marriage in order to make my current identity easier for them to categorize.

Human sexuality and relational attachment are more complex than the little boxes religious culture often gives us.

My story doesn’t have to fit your box to be true.

“It’s About Time”

Then came something from one of my daughters.

She had apparently seen my new page. I eventually discovered a message:

“It’s about time.”

The implication was obvious.

We always knew.

And beneath that was something even more painful: the suggestion that because I had now come out, everything that came before could be reinterpreted as fraudulent.

That hurt.

Emotional intelligence does not make you immune to pain.

You can understand why someone behaves the way they behave and still bleed when they cut you.

You can understand projection and still feel projected upon.

You can understand shame and still be wounded when somebody dumps theirs onto you.

And one thing has always been particularly difficult for me:

meanness.

I don’t understand intentional cruelty.

I especially don’t understand cruelty dressed in righteousness.

There is something deeply disturbing about hurting another person while simultaneously believing your cruelty proves your devotion to God.

Forgiveness Has Become My Favorite Sport

I’ve had to become very good at forgiveness.

Not because everything people have done is acceptable.

It isn’t.

Not because forgiveness magically makes the pain disappear.

It doesn’t.

I forgive because unforgiveness was eating me alive while doing absolutely nothing to the people I was angry with.

So I learned to let go.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Forgiveness became my favorite sport.

But forgiveness does not mean pretending something wasn’t wrong.

And forgiveness doesn’t require me to call religious abuse love.

I can forgive someone and still identify the system that taught them how to wound me.

I can forgive my brother-in-law and still reject the theology that tells him calling me an abomination is an expression of love.

I can forgive my daughter while refusing to accept someone else’s projection as the definition of my life.

Forgiveness releases people.

It doesn’t require me to surrender truth.

Your Projection Is Not My Reality

This may be one of the most important things I’ve learned:

Your projection is not my reality.

Your words cannot define me unless I give them permission.

Your labels cannot become my identity unless I wear them.

When I don’t know who I am, I have very little ability to distinguish between what somebody says about me and what is actually true about me.

But when I know who I am, I can separate the two.

I can sit with the pain.

I can acknowledge that it hurts.

I can grieve.

And then I can detach from the lie and attach myself again to truth.

For me, that truth is rooted in the conviction that I bear the image of God.

The Spirit of God lives in me.

There is something deeper than trauma.

Deeper than rejection.

Deeper than abandonment.

Deeper than shame.

Those things have happened to me, but they are not me.

My wounds are part of my story.

They are not my identity.

And neither is somebody else’s religious judgment.

When Telling the Truth Stops Being Loving

There was another situation that pushed all of this even further.

My mother is eighty-four.

I had not planned to come out to her.

Not because I am ashamed.

Because I love her.

She has already lost my father. She has watched me lose my wife. She worries about me. She wonders whether I will find companionship again.

I simply did not see a reason to place another burden on an elderly woman I love.

Sometimes religious people respond to that by saying, “But you should always tell the truth.”

Should you?

Suppose you were hiding Jewish people from the Nazis and soldiers came to your door asking whether anyone was inside.

Would righteousness require you to hand them over because lying is wrong?

Of course not.

Why?

Because there are moral principles that govern how other moral principles are applied.

And the highest one is love.

Sometimes love tells.

Sometimes love remains silent.

Not everything that is true needs to be said.

Sometimes we preserve people by what we choose not to tell them.

My choice was to preserve my mother.

Then I discovered that someone else might be trying to tell her for me.

And that affected me differently.

You can throw darts at me.

I’ve had practice.

But when you are willing to hurt somebody I love simply because hurting them will allow you to hurt me, we have crossed into something else entirely.

And please don’t baptize that behavior by calling it Christian.

What Is the Actual Test of Christianity?

This brings me to the question I can’t escape.

How do we know what Christianity looks like?

Is it church attendance?

Correct theology?

Biblical knowledge?

Political alignment?

Sexual behavior?

Religious vocabulary?

The Pharisees could have passed many of those tests.

Jesus gave us something much more difficult.

Fruit.

You’ll know the tree by its fruit.

And what is repeatedly at the center of Christian fruit?

Love.

Love.

Love.

Paul says that if I possess extraordinary spiritual gifts but do not have love, I am nothing.

Jesus takes the law and summarizes it in love of God and love of neighbor.

And then comes the terrifying qualification:

Love your neighbor as yourself.

That means my capacity to love another person is intimately connected to my capacity to receive and experience love myself.

If all I possess internally is self-contempt, eventually I will distribute contempt.

If all I know is shame, I will eventually distribute shame.

You cannot give away something you do not possess.

“We love because He first loved us.”

Love originates in God.

If I bear God’s image, I was created for love.

So if Christianity consistently produces contempt, exclusion, shame and cruelty, at some point we have to ask whether what we are witnessing is Christianity at all—or merely religion wearing Christian clothing.

You Don’t Have to Understand Me to Love Me

This is where I want to be extremely clear.

You don’t have to understand me.

Really.

You don’t have to understand how someone could love a woman for twenty-seven years and later come out as gay.

You don’t have to understand my sexuality.

You don’t have to understand demisexuality.

You don’t have to understand the years of compartmentalization.

You don’t have to understand why I came out when I did.

You don’t even have to agree with me about everything.

Ask questions.

Talk to me.

I’m an open book.

But understanding is not the prerequisite for love.

Love is the prerequisite for love.

You may look at my life and think, Scott, I don’t understand this at all.

Fine.

Pull up a chair.

Let’s talk.

But don’t call me an abomination and call that love.

Don’t invalidate my marriage and call that truth.

Don’t reject me and call that righteousness.

Don’t attempt to wound my mother and call that Christianity.

You are free not to understand me.

You are not free to redefine cruelty as love simply because you can attach a Bible verse to it.

Messy People Can Still Be Christians

I also don’t want to create another impossible standard.

Christians are messy.

I’m messy.

You’re messy.

We all blow it.

My son once said something about me that I actually think captures this beautifully. He essentially told me:

“Dad, your first response can be messy, but your second response is usually really good.”

I’ll take that.

Because Christianity is not the absence of messy humanity.

It is what we do with our mess.

If I hurt you and love is alive in me, eventually something in me says:

That wasn’t right.

I hurt you.

I need to make this right.

Love brings us back.

That is very different from using righteousness to justify our cruelty.

The question isn’t whether you ever fail to love.

The question is whether love keeps calling you back when you do.

Is love persistent?

Is love becoming increasingly consistent?

When you fail, do you repair?

Do you apologize?

Do you humble yourself?

Do you move toward the person you’ve wounded?

That, to me, looks much more like Jesus.

My Anger Isn’t at People

I want to make one final distinction because it matters enormously to me.

I am angry.

There are moments when I am profoundly angry.

But my anger is not ultimately directed toward my daughter.

It isn’t ultimately directed toward my brother-in-law.

It isn’t directed toward Christians who don’t understand me.

My anger is directed toward a religious system that teaches people to abandon love in order to defend the system.

That’s what infuriates me.

I can forgive people.

People are wounded.

People project.

People get afraid.

People repeat what they’ve been taught.

People don’t know who they are.

But when a religious system takes those wounded people and gives divine permission to their fear, shame and rejection, something terrible happens.

Religion gives cruelty a halo.

Now exclusion becomes holiness.

Rejection becomes righteousness.

Shame becomes conviction.

And abandoning somebody becomes “standing for truth.”

That is the system I reject.

Because I don’t believe Jesus rejected me.

Jesus Never Closed the Gate

Look at Jesus.

Who did He eat with?

Who did He touch?

Who did He move toward?

Tax collectors.

Sinners.

People religious society considered unclean.

People with reputations.

People respectable religious folks avoided.

And who did He repeatedly confront?

The gatekeepers.

The religious system.

The people who believed they possessed God and could determine who was allowed access to Him.

That’s why I refuse to believe religion’s closed gate represents Jesus.

Religion barred the gate to people like me.

Jesus didn’t.

And if you call yourself a follower of Jesus, then perhaps the question isn’t whether you can successfully defend the gate.

Perhaps the question is whether you’re willing to follow Jesus outside of it.

Love the people your religious system tells you to fear.

Love the people you don’t understand.

Love the people whose stories disrupt your categories.

Love the people who make your theology uncomfortable.

Trip over your own feet trying to love people.

Because if we’re going to get something wrong, I’d rather get it wrong trying to love somebody than get it wrong trying to exclude them.

“For God so loved the world...”

Which part of the world did He forget?

When in Doubt, Choose Love

Coming out has cost me relationships.

It has exposed things.

It has hurt.

But it has also clarified something extraordinary for me.

I don’t want religion.

I want love.

I want the Jesus who moved toward people.

I want the God who tears veils instead of hanging new ones.

I want the Spirit who heals shame instead of weaponizing it.

I want a spirituality that makes me more loving, not more judgmental.

And I want gay men—especially gay men who have spent years believing something is fundamentally wrong with them—to discover that their interior world does not have to remain a prison.

There are places in us that need healing.

There are places that need growth.

There are lies we have believed because of rejection, abandonment, trauma and shame.

That isn’t condemnation.

It’s an invitation.

An invitation to receive love.

An invitation to love ourselves rightly.

An invitation to become more capable of loving other people.

An invitation to build relationships from wholeness rather than shame.

An invitation to discover that life can actually be good.

Joyful.

Friendly.

Beautiful.

I want to be able to say:

I love myself as a gay man.

And I want other gay men to be able to say it too.

Not arrogantly.

Not defensively.

Not as a weapon against anybody else.

But peacefully.

Wholeheartedly.

Without shame.

Because ultimately this journey isn’t about winning an argument with religion.

It’s about becoming love.

And when everything gets confusing—when theology gets complicated, families fracture, religious people argue, shame starts shouting and everybody seems convinced they speak for God—I keep coming back to something remarkably simple:

When in doubt, choose love.

Every time.

Choose love.