Content warning: This article discusses evangelical beliefs.
I was baptized three times in my youth: once in seventh grade, once in eighth grade, and once in my senior year of high school. As I’ve written previously, I “redid” my baptism out of fear.
In eighth grade, I was afraid I had “done my baptism wrong” because I “didn’t understand it properly” the first time. In my senior year of high school, I got baptized again because I believed wholeheartedly that the previous time, I “didn’t understand” what it meant to follow Jesus.
But this time I did. My confidence that I had it right that time indicated that I had no idea what I was doing.
During my adolescence within evangelicalism, I knew God loved me, but I was strangely afraid of disappointing God. It was a paradoxical tension.
My prayer life and Bible study helped me through some traumatic times, and I took great comfort in those practices. The consistent routine gave me the strength to handle those trials and assured me that I was deeply loved.
At the same time, I was usually one of the last ones to take communion because I spent so long praying for God to forgive me for any sins I may have unknowingly committed. In many evangelical spaces, it’s a common belief that if you take communion without asking for God to forgive your sins, then you are bearing false witness–sinning as you consumed the pure sacrifice of Christ with your own tainted heart.
I didn’t want to “do it wrong” or experience spiritual karma for taking communion with an unclean heart, so I prayed fervently for forgiveness even though I wasn’t sure if I had done anything wrong.
These are the mental gymnastics of evangelicalism: God loves me. I love God. I’ll disappoint God if I do something wrong. I can’t disappoint God. God might send me to Hell to suffer forever if I do enough things wrong. But God loves me unconditionally and works everything together for my good.
Right?
As some of my students say, “The math ain’t mathing.” Something doesn’t add up.
But I was too young to question it. I simply went to the baptismal waters repeatedly in the hopes they would make me clean enough to be accepted by a God who, supposedly, already accepted me.
Fast forward to my deconstruction era. I was in seminary in my mid-twenties, facing the reality that I’m queer.
At this point in my theological journey, I had no qualms about being gay. Based on the prayer and study I’d done, I didn’t (and don’t) believe that is a sin. Frankly, I was more worried about being able to find a ministry job as a queer person.
Looming larger were deeper questions about the validity of the evangelical theology I had held as truth for so long. I had numerous questions, many of them regarding baptism.
If praying to God for salvation makes you a Christian, then what’s baptism for? If being baptized doesn’t make you a Christian, then what’s the point?
Why practice baptism at all? Does my baptism actually mean anything? At that point in my faith journey, I didn’t believe baptism mattered much.
I didn’t have all those theological questions figured out when I graduated. But after the woman who would later become my wife and I started falling in love, there was one thing I knew for certain: I didn’t want to hide who I was or who I loved from the world. And so, out of the closet I came.
Queer theologians such as Robert E. Shore-Goss liken the practice of coming out to rites within the church. I imagine it’s because there’s a litany to it–a call and response, if you will.
We announce who we are to the world, stripped down and bare in our vulnerability, like a baptismal candidate in a plain white robe. We await the community’s response, wondering if they’ll cheer as we exit the closet or if they’ll call for the preacher to push us back in.
Or, perhaps they’ll demand that the preacher push us under the water just a little longer before letting us come out. After all, baptism is the “coming out” of the Christian faith.
It is a public declaration of something already true within you. Much like how I knew I was gay well before I came out, I followed Jesus long before I got baptized.
Just as coming out didn’t make me queer, the baptism(s) didn’t make me a Christian. Those realities were already true before I announced them to the world.
But coming out and getting baptized allowed me to speak my truth plainly. It is empowering to tell the world who you are, but it’s about more than the proclamation. It’s about the community.
When I came out, I connected and reconnected with people who have loved me and my wife with such a warm intensity I’m not sure how I survived without them before. They have my back; I have theirs.
Just like when we get baptized, part of the litany addresses the congregation, reminding them that they are there to support and encourage whoever is getting baptized that day. Shore-Goss likens both baptism and coming out as an “initiation rite,” by which we publicly declare that we are part of the fold and the fold welcomes us in.
Queer theologian Matthew Fox claims both acts, baptism and coming out, are relational because they tie us to community. These public acts remind us we are not alone. That’s why, now more than ever, as we enter a season where minoritized people are going to be even more targeted by hate, we need to be loud about who we are.
So allow me to say plainly:
I’m queer. I love my wife.
I have a beard that grows naturally. I present masculinely.
My pronouns are she/her, but I’m open to that changing. The kaleidoscope of humanity is full of theys and thems, ims and ers, zes and zirs, and I’m proud to be part of God’s imaginative design.
I’m also a Christian.
I believe the love and ministry of Jesus Christ were some of the most radically beautiful things to happen in the whole of human history. I believe–I know–the love of Christ can transform this world for the better. I followed God’s call on my life to vocational ministry because I believe in that love so deeply.
I still follow that call.
Here I stand–outside the closet, water dripping from my clothes. I am a Baptist, after all. They dunked me all the way down from head to toe.
To circle back to the anxiety-ridden self of my seminary days, I would tell that student baptism does matter, just not in the way you were taught. It matters because it’s a queer thing that unites you both to a God who loves you and a community who supports you.
That makes it valuable. It’s so valuable, in fact, that it’s not something you can mess up.
So breathe, beloved. Just make sure to wait for your nose to breach the surface.
A bivocational pastor, writer and spiritual director based in Williamsburg, Virginia, she currently works as a Spiritual Director at Reclamation Theology. Cawthon-Freels is the author of Reclamation: A Queer Pastor’s Guide to Finding Spiritual Growth in the Passages Used to Harm Us (Nurturing Faith Books), and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
