Reclaiming Faith: Queer Theology with Brandan Robertson

In a time when LGBTQ Christians still face rejection from many pulpits, author and theologian Brandan Robertson is helping them reclaim their place at the table. In this episode, we talk with Brandan about his new book Queer Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table. He shares his personal journey from fundamentalist roots to becoming an openly gay pastor, and explains why many traditional interpretations of Scripture—especially on sexuality—fail to hold up under scholarly scrutiny.
We unpack the meaning behind the word “queer,” the dangers of biblical literalism, and how Brandan’s experience at Moody Bible Institute helped him realize the fear-based theology he was taught didn't reflect the God of love. He also offers advice for LGBTQ individuals navigating their own faith and identity—and makes the case for a more expansive, inclusive Christianity rooted in honesty, history, and hope.

👤 Guest Bio:
Brandan Robertson is an author, pastor, and activist working at the intersection of faith, sexuality, and justice. He is the pastor of Sunnyside Reformed Church in NYC and founder of the Devout Foundation. Known widely as the "TikTok Pastor," his digital reach spans nearly 300,000 followers. His latest book is Queer Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table.

🔗 Resources & Links:
📘 Queer Christian by Brandan Robertson: QueerChristian.org
🌐 Brandan Robertson’s Website: brandanrobertson.com
📍 Tour Info & Events: QueerChristian.org/tour

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching our YouTube channel, we're so glad you are here. Please make sure you like subscribe and do all that fun stuff so I could finally measure up to my kids expectations. All the YouTubers they watch have like, I don't know, millions of people that follow them. So yeah, yeah, I just I just want my kids to to acknowledge knowledge me once again. So Make sure you do all that I am will write your political host and join as always by your faithful host pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going Josh? I'm just fine, thanks Will. Yeah, and hey, this week we have with us Brandon Robertson. He is a noted author, activist and theologian working at the intersection of spirituality, sexuality and social renewal. He's an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, serving as the pastor of Sunnyside Reformed Church in New York City and founder and executive director of the Devout Foundation. He's widely known as the site formerly possibly known as TikTok pastor. with a vast digital reach of nearly 300,000 followers and 7 million views and we are just Delighted to have him with us to talk about his new book Queer Christian Reclaiming the Bible our faith and our place at the table. So welcome to the show Brandon Thank you so much, it's such an honor to be here with you. Yeah, yeah, we're we're really looking forward to this conversation and we were just opining recently that we have a mutual friend in San Diego. So hi, Nicole. And yeah, I'm just just really, really looking forward to this. And I got to say, we had we had our mutual friend on the show, Nicole, years and years ago, and she helped educate me and our audience about like pronouns and. One of the things I know I asked her was like, like, like, do we do we call like, gay folks queer now because I've always thought that was like a slur, but your your book title is called Queer Christian. So like, when did queer no longer become a slur? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, and it's still a very interesting term. When I go to the UK to do work over there, queer is still very much a taboo term and a lot of people kind of literally gasp in the audience if I use the language. But part of the LGBT movement has been reclaiming terms all over the place that have been used against us as identity. And I like queer because it doesn't just refer to sexuality, it doesn't just refer to gender. I actually defined it in the chat. Chapter one of the book, Bell Hooks defines it, I should say, as being at odds with everything around it. That is what queer means. It means that you are pushing back against conformity, labels, and in my view, I think it's actually a really good reflection of what the Christian faith is supposed to be. And so both theologically and as a sexuality term for me, queer feels very authentic and right. I think that that that's good and it's good for me to hear that because I mean for so long I've associated like queer as being like a uh pejorative or like a negative term, you know, and I think it's pretty awesome like that you kind of reclaimed that like I I was I wrote a I wrote a blog on my sub stack, not too long ago about uh people that you know get blamed for having tds like trump derangement syndrome and You know, the purpose of my blog was basically saying like, you should just own it. Own the term deranged. know, like reclaim that. So you take the power away from those that are trying to use it as a slur or something like that. So I really appreciate that definition. But yeah, let's talk about your book. So Queer Christian, what is it? Why did you write it? Yeah, I mean, this is a book that I honestly didn't want to write because I've written two or three, depending on how you count other books on LGBT and the church, LGBT and the Bible. But my publisher asked me to write this book for kind of the TikTok world. My other books are a little bit more academic theological. And once I got into writing this, it really became a book probably that I'm most proud of out of the ones I've written. And I really resonate now with this finished project because it shows an evolution in my thinking, but also an evolution in the LGBT Christian movement. And there's been a kind of rebirth of that movement over the past 10 years. My friend Matthew Vines wrote a book 10 years ago called God and the Gay Christian that kind of relaunched this conversation in a national way. But so many folks began the journey to reconcile their faith and sexuality by looking at the six Bible passages that seem to condemn same-sex relationships, reconciling with them by either saying they've been misinterpreted, mistranslated, and then just kind of fit back into traditional Christianity. That's where most people begin the journey. But the truth is, in my own life and what I've seen from thousands upon thousands of queer Christians, is that that's not where the journey ended. It actually led to a broader deconstruction of their faith. led to a broader rethinking of Christian theology because you realize if the church can be so wrong on a topic like excluding LGBT people, if you can misinterpret the Bible so wrongly to turn it into a weapon against a community, then where else has the church gone wrong? And what else have we been misinterpreting? And what that has led me to is a very progressive, expansive faith. Many people would say I'm outside of the bounds of what is called a Christian because I don't play by the game of orthodoxy anymore. I'm not interested in trying to fit into a mold of what some council or denomination says a Christian is. I want to be my most authentic self and I want to try to conform my life to the way of Jesus as I understand him. And that has led me to a much more expensive way of being in the world. from what I've seen among not just the LGBT Christian community, but this kind of progressive Christian community in general has just expanded what it means to be a Christian and expanded the way we live in our faith. And I wanted this book to be permission and an invitation for folks to move beyond trying to fit into boxes that other people have created to a kind of truly queer version of faith. So I appreciate that. I appreciate hearing from you, Brandon. It really is a pleasure to have you on the show. you know, I always love getting context from people, like understanding what's going on in their world and what has happened, right? Because we're the memories that we have, the things that kind of make us who we are, is how we remember things and how we have gained our own self-identity and understood it. And these are these huge important parts of the journey. And I would love to hear a little bit more of your journey. I'm sure that in writing this book, you mentioned that was like, you're most proud of it. I'm sure there's a lot of yourself you're pouring into this, right? And I would love for you to kind of help our audience understand, like, what is the story that got you to this place where you have this passion for kind of helping bring this theological vision to life. Yeah, yeah, thank you for that question. I totally agree. think all of our theology is contextual. It's based on our experience, despite many people not liking to admit that. And I'll say two things. One, one of the or the recurring themes that has happened throughout my faith journey and my life in general has been butting up against fear. And so when I became a Christian at the age of 12, I didn't grow up religious, but I started going to a fundamentalist Baptist church with my neighbors. Had a conversion experience, felt called to be a pastor in that context, and then started going on the internet and reading everything I could about the Bible, theology, and of course was exposed to versions of Christianity that were outside of my fundamentalist lane. And when I would go back to youth group, there was this one experience in particular where I would go share some of the stuff I was learning online. And I got called into the pastor's office afterwards and he said, you can't bring these heretical ideas to our youth group. This is dangerous. And if you keep doing this, you're not going to be welcomed back. And that was earth shattering for me as a young kid who had given my entire life to this newfound faith and felt like I was being judged for what felt like intellectual honesty, what felt like true curiosity about the faith. And that continues to be my journey when I ended up in Bible college at Moody Bible Institute, which is a very conservative evangelical school. I started a blog and podcast there where we were interviewing people that Moody considered heretical. Most evangelicals today would not. People like NT Wright, even Tim Keller, if you're familiar with those names, like Moody thought they were outside of the scope of orthodoxy. And I got called into the dean's office six times over four years and told in no uncertain terms that if I kept playing with fire, I would be expelled. I'm not, they weren't going to give me a degree because I was not able to uphold their doctrine. And it was really a moment at Moody that I realized in reading first John where it says the powerful verse, God is love and perfect love casts out all fear because fear has to do with judgment. That was an awakening moment for me because I realized whenever fear is present, God is not. And so if my religion was constantly responding in fear, it seemed to me that they weren't grounded in God because God has nothing to fear and we should have nothing to fear and no idea should make us afraid. And that led me on this journey over the next decade to where I am today of just recognizing that as soon as I get rid of the fear that God is going to judge me because I don't believe the right things, I've been free to be truly curious. And over these past 10 years, everyone will probably be be familiar with the fact that there's been this reckoning and evangelicalism of leader after leader that has had this great fall. And what it's revealed to me and to so many others is that so many evangelicals, my people, had lived lives and professed beliefs that they didn't actually believe and that they couldn't actually abide by. And because of that hypocrisy, they've lost everything and hurt lots of people in the process. Now, some of the folks that have fallen have done terrible things and they deserve judgment. But some of them are just people that couldn't figure out their sexuality in the confines that they were preaching. And so where I stand today is everything I write, everything I preach from my pulpit, everything I say on the internet, I try to be completely honest and transparent. I'm not about professing a belief that I'm not sure of anymore. I'm not trying to uphold an ethical standard that I know I can't live up to. I want to be authentic. And I think God honors that. kind of authenticity and I want to invite other people to that freedom that I found and not having to live into that false narrative that I once thought was essential to being Christian. I think that's great. know, and a couple of years ago, we had an opportunity to talk with Megan Rohr. They were at the time a bishop for I forgot what denomination, but I remember mentioning something to the extent of, know, there's parallels I see from biblical interpretations to substantiate some of the greatest offenses in this country, be honest, know, slavery, segregation, you know, thinking that people of color are, you know, descendants of, some aspect of whatever that's bad, devil, evil, I mean, like, in the Negro Bible, and, I mean, it's just, the Bible's been used in some really terrible ways in this country. But when you talk to people about... LGBTQ and Christianity, they will refer to these Bible verses, which you alluded to earlier. So, I'd love for you just to kind of help unpack some of those Bible verses and why you think, you know, folks are either misinterpreting them, placing the wrong emphasis on what it's trying to teach us or what have you. So, just walk us through those. Yeah, I mean one thing that I've become convinced of is that the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press was one of the best things for humanity and one of the worst things for humanity. And I say that because, right, it gave everyone a copy of the Bible, which on one hand is great. It helped democratize the faith, get it out of these hierarchies, wonderful. But people seem, and I didn't realize this until I started doing academic study. I'm currently doing a PhD in biblical studies and like I've gotten the privilege to be in environments where I got into study the Bible from an academic lens. And I've realized that it takes a lot of work to understand a 4,000 year old text written in languages we don't speak, cultures we don't know anything about. And the problem with evangelical churches that I grew up in, they said, just read the Bible. It's self-evident, the Holy Spirit will give you the meaning, and whatever the Holy Spirit leads you to the interpretation, it's correct. That's good. That's just not true. And the scholarship on sexuality in the Bible in particular has been pretty clear and lockstep for 50 years. In academic institutions, everyone knows that the six Bible verses that are often weaponized against LGBT people are likely referring to exploitative sexual relationships between men in the ancient world. And the reason that we say that is because, for instance, in the book of Leviticus chapter 18 verse 22, it says, man shall not lie with a man as with a woman, for this is an abomination. If you just read that in your English Bible with no understanding of the context, of course that sounds like a broad condemnation of gay sex. But I stop you there just for one second? would dumb it down even more because I'm not, mean, amongst us three, I'm probably the least biblically literate person here, even though I profess Jesus. But, you know, if I were to read that coming into it cold, I would think I've already sinned because I'm former infantry and I've cuddled with other men just to stay warm. Like, I'm not even joking. So, I have laid. with other men as it's saying. So I'm sorry, go ahead. love that. And I mean, that's the other problem with the conservative lens of literalism. I mean, if you just are told that you need to take the Bible literally, then you could come up with an interpretation like that, even though that's not what the Hebrew says at all. At the beginning of Leviticus 18, it specifically says the following commands are about things that the ancient Egyptians and Canaanites used to do that you Israelites should not do. So then the question you have to ask is when and where in ancient Egypt or Canaan did men lie with men as with women. In the Hebrew there is literally have sex with men as they do with women. Ancient Egypt and Canaan were not broadly supportive of same sex sex. The only times that it was broadly permissible in those cultures were for men of higher statuses to sexually abuse men of lower statuses for pleasure, but also as a way to say, we dominate you, we are above you. The ancient world. tended to believe that if you were a man who allowed yourself to be penetrated, you gave up your masculinity. And this is literally, there's thousands of pages of books in first century Greek that talk about this complex understanding of how gender and power work. And so as soon as you have that lens, which again, academics have known for 50 years, you begin to have a good reason to question, well, the relationships I'm in as a gay person are not about power and exploitation or abuse. So is this an applicable command at all? And virtually that applies to all other six verses. Paul in particular is writing in Roman contexts and Rome was very well known for having these relationships and power dynamics between men of higher statuses and lower statuses, men and younger boys, temple and like pagan rituals that were being done that are well documented, that included kind of gay sex. None of that is what LGBT people are engaging in today. I condemn what Leviticus is condemning, exploitation and abuse. I condemn what Paul is condemning, ritualized sexual acts to worship pagan deities. But if you're just reading it in English from a modern lens, you're never going to get that information. And I think that's the biggest problem, not just with homosexuality. This is the issue with slavery. This is also the issue with women. This is also the issue on a plethora of other issues that people just read the Bible literally from their modern context. without understanding what was happening in the ancient world and come up with very bad and destructive conclusions. Yeah, like I can totally understand. Like come into this text and you're like, this thing is so old. You know, it's not just like it's old. It's it's old and it's in a completely different culture. And as you said, a completely different language. And It's thousands of years old. And it's like the only way we have access to what happened back then is trying to understand, right, the writings that are there, the whatever evidence was left in the ground. You know, we have to like dig it up like, you know, these rocks, these, you know, all of these. all of these buildings that we found, they don't speak for themselves. People have to take it and interpret it. And I would love for like, I like to hear how people think. I like to hear not just what they think, but how they think and how they work through these problems, right? Because you have like this certain interpretation of marriage that somehow we have received. like that I received growing up, you know? And then where did all that come from? And how did they define marriage in the ancient world? And then it goes into all these different details about like, you know, what do we do with this? There are all these different customs for marriage. And I'm just, I'm kind of going to rabbit hole, but what I'm getting at is that there's like this, you try to understand like, the world differently and expand your view and you have to take in new data. And where was the point? Can you talk to us about a point when you kind of shifted your views on one of these passages like that maybe you were interpreting it in a way that you that like was you felt harmful or you felt was you didn't sit right with you and then there was a shift. What was that process like? How did you how did you do that? Yeah, that's a great question. mean, I think the truth is, and conservatives never believe me when I say this, but this was not a case of me coming out as gay and then going back and trying to reinterpret the Bible to justify my lifestyle. This was a young man committed to conservative Christianity who was wrestling with his sexuality, who did conversion therapy, who was planning to get married to a woman. And what actually happened was it wasn't an issue on one of these topics that changed my mind. was understanding how I had been taught to understand what the Bible was. That is what shifted everything. Evangelicals are taught that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, meaning every word from Genesis to Revelation is objectively true, without error, and come from the mouth of God itself. But when I'm at Moody Bible Institute, we still engaged with real biblical scholarship there. These Bible classes I had to take for four years where some of it was a real scholarship, some of it was more theological kind of indoctrination, but the scholarship is just clear. There are things in the Bible that are incorrect. There are things that we know objectively did not happen. There are things, the evangelical lens tends to be also that everything in the Bible is literal, but. Any study Bible will tell you there are different genres of texts in the Bible. There are myths in the Bible. There are poems in the Bible. There are laws in the Bible. And so as soon as I started putting all of this together and recognizing, wow, the Bible's a complex library of books that cannot be interpreted in one flat way. And clearly it cannot be at least the way I was taught it directly from God because there are problems with the text. There are people who disagree with one another in the text. There are places where the apostle Paul, one of the first things I noticed, there's little writings from Paul where he says in the middle of the scripture, this is my opinion, this is not from God. And yet an evangelical would still have to affirm that as the inerrant word of God, even though Paul tells us in the text, this is not him speaking for God. Like little things like that just began to unravel what the Bible was for me. And I found a lot of liberation in how I see the Bible now of shifting to see the Bible is a human book reflecting my lineage of faith, the community of faith that I'm a part of. It's our book of our ancestors who wrestled with understanding God, morality, their place in the world. I believe God inspired it, meaning that they were literally inspired by God in the same way that I think all Christians are inspired by our relationship with God. That does not mean that it's free from their human opinions, human error, human judgment. And as soon as you take that, which I think is a very realistic lens of how to understand the Bible, immediately all of the problems that I had as a conservative went away because I no longer had to justify Paul saying, slaves submit to your masters. I can now say Paul was wrong. He was reflecting a first century Jewish identity. That was common for his day. I disagree with that. And what I discovered also is that Christians for thousands of years and Jews for thousands of years have engaged with the Bible in that way. They wrestle with it. It's not given just carte blanche authority. It's a conversation partner rather than the end all be all. And once you're able to have that frame of engaging with scripture, the entirety of faith now becomes exploration and curiosity rather than dogma and certainty. And for me that's been such a much more life-giving way to be a Christian and to engage with the Bible. You know, when we spoke to Megan, I remember asking them to talk about their coming out. And I'll never forget what they said because I never heard it framed in this way. essentially what Megan said was it wasn't like a day. You know, I called my best friend and I called this and whatever and like, I'm out, you know, like, and, and, and Megan's trans by the way, for, for those that didn't watch the episode. and I, I'd love to, to, to get your, I don't know, your, your, your coming out story, your, process that, that they went through. Um, and then, um, after you, you, um, tell us, I'd love for you just to kind of give, give some advice to. you know, queer Christians that are listening to this that want to come out and tell their pastors or what have you. Yeah, well, mean, my story, coming out story, was very unique and it did all happen on one day. In that, I've wrestled, so to speak, with my sexuality since I was a teenager, of course, and I hit puberty, but I was in a conservative Christian environment and so there was no room to engage in homosexuality, so I dated women and that was the path I was gonna be on. But it was in college that I really started wrestling with the fact that the sexuality didn't seem to be going away despite doing conversion therapy, despite being faithful and going to a conservative college and trying to be a pastor. And what ended up happening was I got my first book deal while I was in college to write a memoir about becoming a more progressive evangelical. And I wrote that book and graduated school and Right before the book was supposed to be published, I had started working for an organization in DC called Evangelicals for Marriage Equality. And I had been hired as the spokesperson. Presumably they thought a straight evangelical advocating for marriage equality among evangelicals. So you could see I had already shifted politically at this point, but I'm still theologically pretty conservative, still not sure what I was gonna do with my sexuality. But because of that advocacy, the publisher decided, they reached out to me and said, we can't publish this book because your public advocacy is outside of what we believe. And Time Magazine reached out and said, we want to write a story about you losing your book deal because of your advocacy. And the reporter did their work and talked to people in my life and found out that I was wrestling with my sexuality. And so the reporter basically said to me, I want to share your full story. I want to be fully honest. but I also want to give you time to figure out how you want to identify, if you want to come out, whatever. We had that meeting, we did the full interview. Literally the next morning I woke up, I was at a board game day with some friends and my phone started blowing up. Time Magazine article had gone live and the headline was, Young Evangelical Leader Loses Book Deal After Coming Out. And literally... Dang. phone, called my mom, said, you're going to get on Facebook and see this. I'm gay. That's how my family, everyone found out. Crazy 12 hour day. Of course, got tons of hatred from the evangelical world online and from people in my life. But the blessing of it was progressive Christians emerged and I didn't really know that they existed as, as many as I found that day. And I really immediately felt like I had a new community. and lost my community in a day. Yeah, I should say, progressive Christianity, we are many, we are legion. Yeah, it's stunning to me how many people don't know that we exist. But that's our fault. We need to do better marketing. So that was a unique coming out experience. And on one hand, I'm grateful for it because it ripped the bandaid off. I didn't have to have a conversation with anybody because everybody knew. But to those who are coming out and I've had the privilege over the past 10 years of sitting with people from the 17 year old kid who's wrestling with their sexuality to the 80 year old man who's been married to a woman has grandkids and is now trying to figure out what to do because they want to be honest about who they've always been. And the things that I've learned and that I say to all folks on the coming out journey, one, it's there's an impulse to want to do it, make up for lost time, make it quick. Don't do that. Take your time. There is no rush. And you want to make sure that you come out on your own terms and that most importantly, you have a community that will support you. So many Christians who are queer do not have a community at all that will support them and in fact, will lose family, will lose church, will lose colleges or universities that they might be at if they come out. And so the first thing people need to do is to connect to supportive communities, whether that's a progressive Christian community or an LGBT group. an LGBT community center, there are things in cities all across this country, but form some relationships there, explore your identity in that context, in that safe space before publicly coming out. And then once you know that you have a support, I would also say, using Jesus's words, count the cost, know what's going, what likely will happen. And I would say, predict the worst case scenario. So do you, if you come out and you lose family, Do you have a place to go? Will you be taken care of? If you lose the church community, do you have another community that you can be a part of? Because that spiritual community is very important, I believe. But it's just to kind of do that planning so that when you come out, you can do it without the fear. There's going to be grief. There's going to be joy. All of that will be a part of it. But you'll have people there with you and you'll have the resources and the support you need to actually move into this next chapter of your life. And the last thing I'll say is that it's always worth it. once you go through it. And again, I've seen 80 year old men come out of the closet and the liberation and healing that they experience is incredible to witness. And the young people that get to come out now, what a joyful thing to get to know that there are middle schoolers that are happily out as they are. And wherever you're out on that journey, it's worth it. It's good. But make sure you have the support. Make sure you're not rushing yourself. And yeah, come on out. You know, thank you so much for just, you know, being honest and candid with us. I know you put a lot of this in the book, but, you know, I just want to thank you for at least just, you know, explaining that to us. And also like, I don't know, I don't know if I want to apologize or riot for just the fact that we have an environment where people have to do like like have to just live like in secret and in themselves um and not be who they are i mean like i i don't know what that experience is like but i'm i'm i'm just like i don't know i mean it'd be like if i were like a this is a terrible example so hopefully like don't at me please but like it you know it'd be like if if if i were if i really really like chick-fil-a i don't i think their food's gross but if I really like Chick-fil-A but I didn't want anybody to know so like, know, when nobody's looking, I'm over here, you know, like eating their waffle fries, you know, or whatever. So like, it's just really sad and yeah, I just got all kinds of respect for you. So that's all I wanted to say. Thank you, and I do appreciate that. And it's true, like, the psychological harm of bottling yourself up is tremendous. And lots of queer people spend a lifetime working through 20 years of being in the closet, let alone the folks that wait 60, 70 years in the closet. But the good news is, and I would say this is the spirit of God on the move, that even with the Trump world that we're in now and all that we are facing, I agree, Bishop Gene Robinson, who's the first openly gay bishop, stood in Washington National Cathedral, I think two years ago, and declared, we've won. Speaking of the LGBT movement. And I agree, I think we've won. I think there's work to do, and I don't want to be too presumptuous, but the tide is turning, has turned, and fewer and fewer people are going to need to have coming out experiences because it is now acceptable, widely. Not in all places, but I believe it will be. So we're in a good era for sure. I really appreciate you sharing your story and sharing your heart. I've been trying to get like... figure out like I'll just give you just a little bit of context I started to listen to this series on YouTube and I'm not just I'm not gonna drop the name quite yet because I think I'm gonna reach out to him see if they'll come one so I'll just but it was about it was essentially somebody who's an agnostic and was a Catholic then became an atheist then became an agnostic and it was It was a video about the hundred arguments for God and he's like responding to them all. And I would say like, the way I've been describing it to my wife is like, I find like just what he's saying compelling. I'm not necessarily convinced, but I'm compelled. And what am I compelled? I'm compelled to hear, I'm compelled to know more. I'm compelled to understand it. That's how I feel like when I hear you, when I hear you talking and when I hear you explaining your heart. And I grew up in a very probably similar situation, similar viewpoints, the differences that I, well, there's probably many differences. I don't want to say some broad thing that's like, know, that our experience was the same. That's not what I'm trying to say. But I didn't have the same identity that you did. And I didn't have to hide myself necessarily in the way that you did. I'm sorry that that happened. I truly am. There were things about myself I think I hid and probably still do, right? If I'm really honest. And so it's like just trying to figure out more and more I'm trying to understand and look at people that I disagree with and try to understand how they think, what's going on. what does life look like from their angle? And I just really appreciate hearing that from you, you know, because I'm supposed to be the conservative one on the show and I do feel like I'm conservative. Like I have very conservative views. I probably have views about the Bible, about marriage, about sin, about maybe any number of things that we would profoundly disagree on. And yet I want to hear more because I want to understand. Like if I can't even hear what someone else is saying and respect them and see them as made in the image of God and be able to let them challenge my assumptions, then why even have these assumptions? I don't know. I would just love for you to respond to any of that. I'm trying to be as honest as I can be, but also be as respectful as I can be because I just want to honor you and and honor your journey and the things that you've had to go through. But also be honest about the tension inside and the conflict. So yeah, go ahead. I have a question. Maybe we can back, I might just pass it on to Will, but I'd love for you to respond to anything you want in that. Yeah, no, I love that and I appreciate you saying that because one of the blessings of my life is that the church, after the Fundamentalist Church, I ended up in an evangelical church that I still consider to be my church home, even though I disagree with most of their theology, called Bridgeway Community Church. And my pastor, a man named Dr. David Anderson, instilled in me as a young high schooler, building bridges across divides is what it means to be a Christian. ministers of reconciliation is what it means to be a Christian. And he would bring Catholic priests to our evangelical mega church of 6,000 people and talk to them, which was mind blowing to a lot of people or lots of different people on that platform. And so at my heart is a desire to build bridges. And it's one of the hardest things in this era of human history, both politically and religiously. And I play into it too. I mean, TikTok makes it very easy for me to get on and say, all right-wing evangelicals are narrow-minded bigots, and it gets lots of views, and it's incentivized, and we all love it. That kind of debate changes no one's heart and mind. Exactly as you framed it, I've learned the only way to change people's hearts and minds are by sharing stories and doing life with one another. Because theologically, and I'm just going to project this onto you, it might not be true. But let's just say, if you're a conservative evangelical, I am not a Christian. If we were to list out our theology, you would say, you're not a Christian. But if we spend a day together or have a conversation with each other, and I see the Spirit of God in you and you see the Spirit of God in me, it makes it a lot harder for us to say, well, just because we disagree on theology, both of us have to walk away and say, well, maybe he's not a narrow-minded evangelical bigot. Maybe Brandon's not a left-wing heretic infiltrating the church. Maybe there's something more here. And I think that's the case for all of us, right? Like we're all more nuanced, but it's about the story and the context that matters, not the point-by-point debates. And yeah, I really appreciate you. bringing that up. Yeah, and I appreciate you identifying, you know, us progressives, Democrats as not being considered Christian. I wrote another blog. isn't, I'm not going to spend this whole time plugging in my sub stack, although you should read it. I feel like I'm a pretty good writer. But anyways, Christians have always been good at gatekeeping. Like, you can come in, but you can't come in. You can come in once you do the thing we tell you to do, you know, but, you know, I don't care if you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, you have a relationship with him, you pray every day, like, that doesn't matter. Like, what matters is that you're white, you know, you are Republican, and you're straight. And if you meet those three qualifiers, you can come to our church, participate, lead worship, do all that kind of stuff. folks in the LGBTQ community are not immune to the rabid attacks of not being Christian just because they're also Democrats. I mean, not all LGBTQ people are Democrats, but I do want to ask you... a question about like affirming churches. Josh and I had this conversation not too long ago where I was, you know, just just opining about my views about affirming churches and like allyship because it's my opinion. It doesn't mean it's the right one, but like I've never really considered myself an ally. You know, I don't hashtag ally, you know, wear shirts, whatever like. Like, I just treat everybody with respect, you know? Like, I feel like I shouldn't have to necessarily, you know, point out one particular group that I'm an ally. I mean, I'm married to a white woman too, so it's like, am I a white ally? You know? Like, I don't really understand that. And then the same thing with, like, affirming churches. Like, in my view, like, all Christians should be affirming. Like, but not just of, like, LGBTQ, like... the deforesee, know, the whomever. So I'd love to just get your thoughts on affirming churches. Is that a good thing, bad thing, you know, and if it is good, like what's the purpose? Yeah, no, it's a great question. It's one I wrestled with a lot because there's there's a growing portion of the LGBT Christian community who would say something like, I just want to be a part of a church. I don't need to be reminded that it's a gay affirming church every Sunday. I agree. If you came to my church, you would not know unless you knew I was gay that we were a gay affirming church, unless you picked up on the subtleties of our theology. So I see that point. I also think there is a benefit to churches naming with whether it's a rainbow flag on their sign, whether it's a Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard, because there's this movement, especially in conservative Christianity, use the language of we welcome all, all people are welcome, gay people are welcome here. Almost every evangelical church would say gay people are welcome here. That language doesn't really mean much anymore. And an LGBT person won't know if they're going into a church that says you're welcome here until they're already a member or in Bible study when they finally hear, believe you're a sinner. You can't get married here. You can't actually be in membership because you're living in sin. And that's a really harmful process for anybody to have to experience once you've built community in a church. So I do think that there's a place for publicly identifying we are an affirming community. And what's become interesting is like that language, though it is specific to LGBT, it actually just means we're a progressive community to most people. It means that we are a community committed to racial justice. People read into that now, and I think rightfully so, that if you see a rainbow flag on the church, they're gonna be aligned with progressive values and progressive politics. And that's good for people to know. So I'm somewhere in between strategically of like, if you came to our church, we do have a sign up front that says LGBT people of all races, people of different abilities are welcome here because nobody in our neighborhood would know that we're that kind of church unless we said it. But in the structure of our churches, we are not waving rainbow flags every week. I am not mentioning my sexuality every week because I am a Christian. And this is, I hate kind of this language a little bit because It's a critique I get from conservatives all the time of, are you putting a modifier in front of Christian at all? Well, I am a queer Christian, and you are a black Christian, and you are a white Christian. Like, those things matter. But it's not the whole of my identity. And so I don't need a church to make it the whole of our faith, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I they all make total sense. Yeah, that definitely, I appreciate your words there. So my last question is, I would love for you to talk to me about what are your thoughts on Jesus? And what I mean is like, kind of like, did he exist? What did he say? know, did, just give me your theology of Jesus. Do you think he resurrected from the dead? Like truly, like all of that, like. What's your theology of like, yeah, and then this church getting sent out and everything. Like I just would love to hear your thoughts at a pure curiosity to understand what you think about Jesus, the person of Jesus. if Brandon comes out and says he doesn't believe in Jesus, I think that he's going to have declining numbers in his congregation, or at least he should probably. Yeah, I mean what I will say, so I'm to give a caveat first to make, build some tension. I do identify as a Christian agnostic and a lot of people have pushed back against that, but I think it's actually what all Christians should be. And what I mean by Christian agnostic is I have faith. I do not know. And I don't think any Christian knows that God exists. I don't think any Christian knows that the resurrection happened. Do I have faith that God exists? Yes. Do I have faith that there was a literal resurrection? Yes. There are things we can know. The historical Jesus certainly existed. We know that for a fact. Almost no scholar in the world at any credible institution questions that. I believe Jesus is God incarnate. I believe Jesus died on the cross for the sins of humanity, rose again from the dead, defeating sin, death, hell and the grave and I also believe that through the work of Jesus, all of humanity will be saved in the end. And so if you actually, if I wrote out my Christology, I actually don't think it'd be very different from you or any other Orthodox Christian. The only difference is that I do want to make the caveat, and this is where my kind of universalist progressive lens comes in, that it's a matter of faith. As a conservative, I used to say, I know Jesus is God. I know Jesus rose from the dead. And the problem with that that the rest of the world hears a Christian say that and that's not compelling at all. It just reads as dishonesty because there's no way to know those things. The reason humans have faith and keep asking these questions thousands of years after thousands of years is because we don't know. We have faith. We can have experiences. I'm pretty convinced Jesus is God. I cannot empirically prove to you that Jesus is God. And so that's the only caveat I make and again it also gives me some room. be curious so that when a scholar says maybe Jesus didn't exist, I'm not afraid of somebody saying that. I'm interested. Show me what your evidence is. Let's think about what that means. But at the end of the day, I had an experience with Jesus Christ that changed my life at the age of 12 and I'm never going to deny that. I experience Christ in my life every day. I preach her as in Christ. So yeah. Yeah, so my last question is, you you said at the top, some of those Bible verses, Leviticus and whatever, I don't know all of them, you know, your kind of, I don't know, hermeneutics is that these verses are taken out of context, like so many other Bible verses. And if that's the case, like, how do you change that? I mean, like, Like, Josh and I have had lots of conversations about him in seminary and like, I never been to seminary, so I don't know the first thing about it. But I'm like, you know, I told Josh, like, do they teach about like, you know, the doctrine of discovery in seminary? You know, do they teach about, you know, like if we're sending missionaries over to Africa, like you would think, you know, like you would teach that, right? But like, how do you convince people that? the way they've been reading the Bible is all wrong. Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing that's really encouraging that I don't think most people recognize is the conservative view of the Bible is the new view. This doctrine has only been around since the Enlightenment at the earliest. The idea words like inerrancy did not exist in the language of Christians for 1500 years. Homosexuality, many people will know because it was viral from a documentary. did not appear in the Bible until 1946. All of this is new, which means even though people now assume it's how Christians have always read and understood these texts, it's not, and it can change. And for instance, the new revised standard version of the Bible, which is the version most progressives use and most academic institutions use, came out with an updated edition this year that removed the word homosexual or any reference to... modern homosexuality and instead translate Paul's writings. It says men who engage in illicit sex, which I think is way closer to the meaning of the verse than same sex or homosexual. So the changes are happening. The problem is cultural and it's going to be generational people, for better and for worse, are unfamiliar with the Bible generation after generation. So I do think the conservative Christian belief will continue to decline in cultural relevance and I think this is a good opportunity for progressives and just for people who are interested in the Bible to engage in education, which I think we're really blessed that we live in a world where people are sitting on YouTube and listening to four-hour Bible lectures by Jordan Peterson every week or coming on TikTok and engaging in biblical scholarship. There's a democratization of this knowledge and so I think the general public has more of an opportunity to learn the complexity of Bible and Bible translation and I think given some time we can move past what has only been a 50 to 100 year phenomena of the Bible's inherent, every word is true and gay people are condemned in it clearly because it's a new doctrine. Yeah, yeah, you know, and it's tough because people aren't naturally inclined to research things that will work against their own biases. I told this to Josh earlier, if there was a study that said interracial couples are... doing more harm to the environment than, you know, same ethnicity couples. that probably wouldn't be a study I would read because that would affect me. Like, it'd me feel all icky, you know? Like, and I don't really want to feel icky. So, you know, I think the same thing probably exists with, like, biblical scriptures. It's like, I don't really want to dig deep there because, like, what if I'm wrong? You know? I mean, mean, to the same degree, like, I mean, I don't do a lot of, like, biblical research anyways, but, like, I've never once biblically researched homosexuality in the Bible. And if I'm being honest, it's because I don't really want to know if I've been wrong this whole time. So I just go with the grace of God and I'm just like, hey, Jesus loves everybody, so I'm to love everybody. I'm not going to care if they're married to whoever. The conversation we had devolved into me talking about, I don't even care if somebody was married to an animal because How is that affecting me? Like, hey, they're happy. I like this person and I'm with them happy. So marry whoever you want, you know? Okay, to be clear, that is not where the slippery slope is leading people. We're not endorsing bestiality. True, true. So anyways, yeah, where can people find your book? You know, get a get a hold of you. Go to your church, you know, finding on. mean, I should I should preface this. We are recording this before your book release, but this episode will be released on your on your actual book release day. So. whatever has happened in the country in that time period, like, yeah, we'll have no bearing on this. So, yeah, how can people reach out to you? if we're still here in May, are, thank God, thank God for that. And yeah, you can get the book at QueerChristian.org or wherever books are sold. And if this is coming out in May, I'm about to embark on a three month, 45 city tour all over North America and the United Kingdom. So you can go to QueerChristian.org. And if you want to come out and go a little bit deeper into these conversations, I would love to see you at one of these events. Are you coming to Virginia at all? Really? Where at in Virginia? I'm gonna be all over. think I have a Richmond event. I have one in Williamsburg. I have one in Arlington. We live in Richmond, so we may have to go to that Richmond event. Yeah, Boom. Yeah, love the way you think. Really, really cool. Well, thank you so much, Brandon. This has been a really, really fantastic conversation. I love talking with you. I'd to have you back, actually. So, for those out there watching, make sure you pick up a copy of Queer Christian Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith and Our Place at the Table. This is Brandon Robertson and Yeah, wish you all the all the success with with the book Brandon. Thanks for coming on Yeah, and to our listeners and watchers as always make sure you keep your conversations not right or left But up and we'll see you next time. Take care. Bye