MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
"Queer & Christian" - that is the title of a new book out this Pride month. It's about more than LGBTQ acceptance within churches. NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose reports the author's goal is transformation.
JASON DEROSE, BYLINE: When deciding what to call his book, author Brandan Robertson knew the word queer would provoke, so he addresses that in this passage at the outset.
BRANDAN ROBERTSON: (Reading) It's a radical declaration of our commitment to living authentically and being who God created us to be instead of who our society, community or religion tells us we need to be.
DEROSE: That authenticity is something the pastor, who serves a small congregation in Queens, New York, and a huge following online, has found an audience for.
ROBERTSON: Since I started doing ministry on TikTok, I really noticed that there was a deep hunger in Gen Z for deep theological and biblical content. But far too often, this is all locked away in the ivory tower of the seminary.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG AND CHUNKY")
WILL I AM: (Singing) All in the way she move. What she do? What she do?
DEROSE: Robertson's TikTok channel is decidedly not ivory tower. In one early video, he dances, dressed as a variety of Christian clergy - all-black for Anglo-Catholic, T-shirt and jeans for evangelical, gray suit with pastoral stole for mainline Protestant and tight button-down with khaki shorts for himself. There are also serious moments.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROBERTSON: You see, Lazarus was locked up in a cold, dark tomb, wrapped in burial cloth, left for dead. That's exactly what so many Christians and so many churches do to LGBT people.
Happy Pride month, everyone. As an LGBT Christian minister, I am so grateful for this month.
My goal is to help queer people be able to come back to the Bible and reclaim it without needing to spend the rest of their lives wrestling with these things.
DEROSE: Robertson's book "Queer & Christian: Reclaiming The Bible, Our Faith, And Our Place At The Table" is part memoir, part Bible study and part applied ethics. He writes about his teens and 20s as an evangelical struggling with his sexuality. Like other gay Christians have done, he takes on the Bible's clobber passages, the verses used to condemn LGBTQ people. But then he does something new, what he calls queer readings of familiar Bible stories, like Joseph and his coat of many colors.
ROBERTSON: Joseph is relentlessly bullied by his brothers. They even tried to kill him in the text. But because of Joseph's father's love and support and Joseph's own perseverance in his identity, he ends up becoming one of the great leaders of Israel.
DEROSE: Robertson even views Jesus through queer eyes.
ROBERTSON: A single Jewish man in his 30s that abandoned the pursuit of a family and traveled in the cities preaching good news, that's a very strange, rare thing to take place in the first century, and it definitely subverts the patriarchal norms and expectations of that culture.
DEROSE: This way of reading used to make Robertson uncomfortable.
ROBERTSON: To be honest, 10 years ago, if you would have brought to me queer readings of scripture, I would have rolled my eyes and said, that's just modern people trying to read things into an ancient text that's not there.
DEROSE: But after his time in seminary and now in a Ph.D. program, it's an approach to the Bible he now embraces.
ROBERTSON: It's important for each community to be able to see themselves reflected in the face of Christ. And so if there are openings in the text, even if they're small openings, for queer people to say, oh, Jesus can relate to my queer experience, that's profoundly healing, profoundly liberating.
DEROSE: In the final section of "Queer & Christian," Robertson turns to advice, including sexual ethics.
ROBERTSON: It's really a summary of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Any sexual experience or relational experience we go into should be rooted in love of our neighbor and love of ourself.
DEROSE: While his book's audience is other LGBTQ Christians, he sees his mission as much larger.
ROBERTSON: I think queer people are especially tasked with helping the heterosexual and cisgender church learn one of the central things that Jesus taught, which is that by dying to our false self and rising to our true self, that is a path to liberation and salvation, according to Jesus.
DEROSE: A path of authenticity, says Brandan Robertson, toward a community where all are welcomed and embraced.
Jason DeRose, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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