If "Pro-Life" Christians Honored the Sanctity of LGBTQ Lives

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Pro-Life Christians adore embryos.

They passionately preach about the sanctity of the life they say they are imprinted with, about their priceless intrinsic worth, about the unforgivable sin of those who would disrespect or disregard them.

They speak effusively about embryos in conversation, publicly revere them, shed crocodile tears over them, accost strangers entering clinics over them, viciously troll people on social media over them, and sermonize on street corners about them.

They even claim to have voted for an otherwise reprehensible monster they'd never otherwise tolerate to lead, solely because of them.

The problem with their breathless, tearful zealotry, is that once these embryos are no longer embryos but queer sentient human beings, these self-identified “life-lovers” don't treat them like they're at all human. Ten or thirteen or twenty-eight years later, when those precious beings become gay classmates, transgender youth group members, or non-binary coworkers, they suddenly aren’t so sacred.

Embryos that grow into LGBTQ lives are no longer worthy of their protection. Instead, they receive their contempt, bear the brunt of their jokes, and absorb the full damnation of their brimstone sermons.

They can't choose their names or get married or use a public bathroom or get benefits for their partners without being violently assailed at every turn by these "lovers of life."

Over two decades as a student pastor, I've sat with and listened to hundreds of LGBTQ young people, and I've had a front row seat to the wasteful violence the Conservative Church has inflicted upon them: the depression, self-harm, and the isolation it breeds.

There are many reasons why the suicide rate of LGBTQ youth is several times higher than cisgender, heterosexual teenagers, but chief among them are professed pro-life Christians who can't seem to find the sanctity in their lives, people of Jesus who respond to their existence with violence, who offer them no spirited protection, no passionate defense, no effusive words about being fearfully and wonderfully made in God's image. These young people daily bear the incredible weight that supposed lovers of life heap upon their shoulders, until they can no longer endure it.

When it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation, I grieve how many Christians still rely on a literal handful of 4000-year old sentences written in another language by authors they often can't verify and know very little about—than millions of flesh and blood gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender men and women standing in front of them telling their stories, sharing their experience of being human, revealing their lives.

It's all such a waste that such vast resources are expended by Christians continually fighting a battle that bears no redemptive fruit, that actually multiplies people's marginalization, that generates unnecessary pain, and a war that Jesus never asked them to wage in the first place.

In the totality of the Gospels, Jesus never once criticizes or condemns anyone for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

However, Jesus did say that he came to bring help to the poor and oppressed; that those who loved him would care for the least, that they would be fierce lovers of vulnerable people—you know, actually nurturing life.

Yet, I don't see a similar passion for such things from Conservative religious people because feeding and helping and welcoming human beings encroaches too much on their comfort; it’s all too invasive, too costly an endeavor. Tangible, sacrificial expressions of empathy are far more taxing than simply dismissing total strangers based on who and how they love.

If supposed pro-life Evangelicals were at all as burdened to stop poverty, hunger, systemic racism, or bigotry as they are about policing LGBTQ people’s bedrooms, bathrooms, and body parts, we'd have very little poverty or hunger or racism or bigotry left here.

Hell, I’d settle for Conservative Christians who simply decided to love their queer neighbors as themselves.

I wish more pro-life Christians could manufacture the slightest bit of reverence for the sanctity of LGBTQ lives; that they could muster a fraction of the compassion they so readily wield for what they claim God makes and breathes life into.

I wish professed followers of Jesus would passionately protect LGBTQ people instead of regularly injuring them. I'd find their declarations as lovers of "life" to be more believable, more commendable, and more truly life-affirming. I'd like to see them as eager to march in Pride parades as they are to protest clinics.

Every day, I grieve the way pro-life Christians are putting LGBTQ people through undue suffering, the callousness of the hearts of so many of those who claim Jesus, and the excuses they make for doing everything but what Jesus actually called them to do: love all life.

It’s a waste.
It’s a tragedy.
It’s a sin.