Religion is a living, dynamic sociocultural entity through which people make sense of themselves and the worlds they inhabit. Religiosity is a lived experience subject always to interpretation, one's own, as well as the outside observer. An interpretivist lens onto the lives and experiences of queer Christians highlights the significance of situated cultural contexts in understanding collective social change as well as individual sense-making. An interpretive framework also reveals the complexities of supposedly dominant or hegemonic institutions, such as religion, as sources of both inclusion and exclusion, of meaningful self-understanding and simultaneous oppression. Interpretive analyses explore the sources of the scripts or narrative frameworks that queer Christians draw from in constructing an oppositional self, the variation among the self-stories that emerge from grappling with these tensions, and the subsequent transformation in dominant narratives and social relations. In this chapter, I explore the vastly expanding repertoire of narratives through which LGBTQ Christians make sense of themselves and their lives. I also reflect here on how one queer sociologist, me, has been troubled into an immensely expanded awareness through engaging with queer Christians who are (re)naming their place in scriptures, families, congregations, and politics.

This story begins in the mid-1990s when I happened into the nascent “open and affirming” movement taking shape in several mainline Protestant congregations. My curiosity had been piqued by gay and lesbian Catholics and Mormons marching in Pride parades in major urban cities. At the time, onlookers didn't really know what to make of these folk marching with pride for both their queerness and their religiosity. Some viewers even booed. Who were these people, I wondered? Politically, this was a moment of extreme antipathy between Christians and queers: Christian charismatics such as Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell had ascended to national prominence in their demonization of homosexuality and their claims that AIDS was God's revenge for lives lived in perversion. Meanwhile, queer activists were publicly outing closeted religious leaders, loudly denouncing organized religion as synonymous with oppression and repression, and labeling religious practices as deluded. Who were these self-described queer Christians trying to straddle this divide, seemingly stigmatized on both sides?