Growing Up Religious and Queer: Notes on What You Might Be Carrying

Carrying queerness and faith in the same body

You might know the specific feeling. A hymn starts playing somewhere, maybe in a grocery store at Christmas, maybe in a show you're watching, and something inside you catches. Not quite sorrow. Not quite longing. Something older than that, something harder to name, that pulls at the chest before the thinking mind catches up.

Or it's the family group chat. A scripture sent to everyone, with the usual sign-off. A photo from a service you didn't attend. The quiet acknowledgment that this year, again, you're not going home for the holiday. And something old and complicated moves in you.

Or it's a conversation in a queer space, where someone says something dismissive about religion, and you feel the small tightening you've learned to do. Because they don't know. Because the place that harmed you also held you. Because the relationship is more complicated than the conversation has room for.

Many queer folks I sit with, at our Vancouver-based practice offering therapy online across Canada, carry both queerness and a religious history in the same body. Some still have faith. Some have left. Some are in a long, slow process of untangling what was wisdom from what was harm. Most of us have nowhere obvious to take the whole of what we're carrying. This post is for you, wherever you are in that.

What religious community taught us to feel

If you grew up inside a church, mosque, synagogue, temple, meeting house, or any other religious community, you learned to feel things before you had language for what you were learning. Community. Ritual. A specific quality of silence. The way a group of people can sing a line together and something shifts in the room. Your nervous system knew those rhythms before you knew their names. For many of us, they're still the reference point for what belonging feels like.

You also learned, often without anyone having to say it, what was safe to bring and what was not. The parts of you that fit into the community's shape were welcome. The parts that didn't were sometimes corrected. Sometimes condemned. Sometimes quietly left off the list of things you were allowed to be.

For many queer folks, that unwelcome part was queerness itself. Maybe it was said out loud from a pulpit. Maybe it was in the way a beloved adult shifted when the topic came up. Maybe it was in the scripture you memorized, the joke that went around the youth group, the silent understanding that certain lives were fine as long as they stayed invisible.

You absorbed those messages the way you absorbed everything else. Before you had the capacity to sort them out. Before you knew they were a choice someone else made, not a fact about you.

The in-between is where many of us live

When you realized you were queer, whether at eight, or at fifteen, or at thirty-five, that earlier absorption didn't disappear. It often turned inward. For a long time, the voice that said this part of you is wrong may have used the same cadence as the voices you grew up hearing. For some folks, it still does.

What complicates this is that the community that taught those messages also taught other things. How to tend to a sick neighbour. How to sit with grief. How to show up for a potluck, or a funeral, or a baby naming. How to think about meaning, and suffering, and what a person is. Some of what you absorbed was harm. Some of it was wisdom. Both were real. Neither cancels the other out.

Many of the folks I work with live somewhere in the long in-between: no longer in the community they were raised in, not fully at home in secular queer spaces where the expected position on religion is often simpler than what they're actually carrying. That in-between can feel lonely. It can also, over time, become its own kind of ground. You're allowed to live there. You're allowed to stay in the sorting as long as it takes.

What religious shame does to the body

Religious shame has a particular texture. Folks who grew up secular often describe shame as a flush, a sinking feeling, a quick pulse of self-criticism. Folks who grew up religious often describe something older and more structural. A cold spread through the chest. A heaviness in the limbs. A sense of being watched from above, or from within, by an eye that sees more than other people's do. The body learned to listen for it.

This is because religious shame was often not only about a behaviour. It was about your being. The wording was often total: sin, disorder, unclean, fallen, a life against nature. You were taught that your queerness wasn't a thing you did; it was a flaw in what you were. That kind of shame doesn't live in your thoughts. It lives in your cells.

Noticing the bodily shape of this shame is, for many folks, where the loosening begins. Not arguing with it. Not out-thinking it. Just naming, with some specificity, this is the cold-chest feeling. This is the watched-from-above feeling. This is the old story, not the truth about me today. Over time, the naming softens the grip. The body learns that the feeling is a visitor, not a verdict.

Some folks find that old prayers or songs, stripped of the theology they grew up in, still have somatic power. The body remembers how to be soothed in those rhythms. Other folks find that those same rhythms trigger the shame instead. Both are true. Both are information about where the work is.

What softens when you let the both/and be true

When folks stop trying to resolve the contradiction, when they let the both/and be true, a few things tend to shift.

You stop defending yourself to yourself. The part of you that was taught you were wrong and the part of you that knows you are not don't have to keep arguing. They can both be in the room, and you can be the one who holds them.

You get more honest about what you actually want from your spiritual life. For some folks, that means finding a queer-affirming faith community and returning, changed. For some, it means building new rituals that honour the parts of their history that still matter. For some, it means leaving religion behind entirely and letting something else — art, land, movement, politics, rest — carry the meaning the old community used to carry. For some, it means being done, and that is also a complete answer.

You stop needing every queer conversation about religion to go a particular way. You can let a friend's critique land without taking it as a critique of your history. You can let your own ambivalence be part of the conversation without feeling you have to defend the whole institution.

You're allowed to love what you loved. You're allowed to grieve what you lost. Both can be true at once.

Some of the clearest thinking I've read on this specific intersection comes from affirming practitioners in Relationally Queer, a collection that includes a chapter on how religious background shapes queer folks' experience in therapy. It names what many of us have been carrying for a long time, and it helped me find more language for the work.

Small ways to come home to yourself

These aren't homework. They're quiet ways to meet the part of you that's still carrying all of it.

• Notice the bodily texture of religious shame when it visits. Is it in your chest? Your stomach? Your shoulders? Giving it a physical shape, separate from the words it uses, makes it easier to recognize as an old story rather than a current truth.
• Sort what you learned slowly. Over time, you can hold specific teachings up to the light and ask, was this wisdom, or was this harm, or was it both? You don't have to throw everything out. You don't have to keep everything. You get to choose.
• Let yourself miss what you miss. If you miss the singing, miss the singing. If you miss the community meal, miss the community meal. Missing something that also harmed you is not disloyalty. It's honesty.
• Seek out queer folks who share your tradition. Whether you're still in, on the way out, or long gone, finding others who know the specific cadences of what you grew up with can be its own kind of homecoming.
• Give yourself time. This is not a problem to solve. It's a life to live. The sorting can take as long as it takes.

This is part of what gender-affirming therapy online can hold, for queer folks navigating the long work of integrating a religious history with a queer present: room for the grief, room for the anger, room for what you still love, and room for the person you are becoming on the other side of all of it.

Your queerness and your religious history are both part of who you are. You don't have to pick between them, reconcile them tidily, or have a clean position to hold when someone asks. You can carry both. Many of us already are.