Catholic Schools and LGBTQ Students: What Educators Are Actually Doing with Jonathon Sawyer

What happens when LGBTQ students navigate faith, identity, and education inside religious schools?

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright talks with Jonathan Sawyer, a PhD in education policy from the University of Colorado Boulder, about his research on LGBTQ students in Catholic schools. His dissertation explores how educators support these students while working within a traditionally conservative religious framework.

The conversation looks at what these schools actually feel like for students, how experiences vary by region and leadership, and how some teachers lean on principles like dignity and care rather than directly challenging doctrine.

They also dig into bigger questions around school vouchers, public funding, and how religious freedom intersects with non-discrimination laws. Sawyer shares his own background in conservative Christian spaces and connects it to broader issues of faith-based harm and student well-being.

The episode adds context to a topic often reduced to politics, focusing instead on how students and educators navigate faith, identity, and belonging in real time.

Guest Bio

Jonathan Sawyer recently earned his PhD in education policy from the University of Colorado Boulder, where his research focuses on the intersection of religion, law, and LGBTQ student experiences in K-12 schools. His work examines First Amendment issues, school voucher policies, and the impact of religious education on marginalized students. His dissertation explores how Catholic educators support LGBTQ students within a conservative doctrinal framework using an ethics of care approach.

Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091

Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

But Catholic schools have also been very intentional about opening their doors to non-Catholics. So you have many Catholic schools that have non-Catholics within them as well. And one of the things that I found is that LGBTQ students, if they are out within these Catholic schools, often will gravitate to clubs, for example, that have other LGBTQ students. But often the people who run those clubs are people who are either not Catholic or are recovering Catholic and maybe a little bit jaded toward the church. And these educators are saying, look, we do not condone conversion therapy and conversion practices, but we need theologically knowledgeable Catholics who are working with our LGBTQ students if we want to support them and if we want to nourish and grow, help grow their faith, which was an intent of the educators with whom I spoke.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Hey, welcome back to Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. I'm your political host, Will Wright. Your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram, is off training for the Artemis III mission currently, so he won't be joining us today. But instead, we have with us Jonathan Sawyer. He is a person who just earned his PhD in education policy from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and focuses on the intersection of religion and law in K-12 schools. His research covers First Amendment issues, school vouchers, non-discrimination law, and the impact of education policy on LGBTQ students. And he's with us today to talk about his dissertation, Negotiating Faith: Catholic Educators and LGBTQ Plus Personhood, where he explores how Catholic educators support LGBTQ students through an ethics of care approach, offering insight into reducing exclusion in religious education. So welcome to the show, Jonathan. Thank you, Well.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

I've been following your podcast for several years and so appreciate the work you do and the voices you bring on.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Awesome. That's really good to hear. Like we we actually like we have a pretty good, I think, community. It's not big, but like, you know, it's still a community. And even like our YouTube community, I read all the comments. I don't always get a chance to reply to all of them, but like it's it's one of those things where like I'm not afraid to read the YouTube comments. There's like engagement happening there, which is like way different than any other YouTube videos I watch. So yeah, appreciate the comment. But so we're we're here to talk to you about your your dissertation that you wrote, and you're gonna have to forgive my ignorance. I've never had to write a dissertation, nor do I really understand.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Lucky man, lucky man, what a dissertation is.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

So, like before we kind of get into the meat and potatoes, like talk a little bit about like what what the heck is a dissertation, kind of in the context of what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Sure, sure. So I work at the intersection of education policy and religion, thinking about uh legal issues around the First Amendment religion clauses and in particular impacts on LGBTQ students. And my work, broadly speaking, took some time to define. And part of that definition was the dissertation process. So as a PhD student, I knew generally that I was interested in education, law and policy, religious issues, and LGBTQ topics. And over the course of uh five years plus, I spent time narrowing down my interests into this unique document that's over 200 pages and that grapples with specific questions around religion, particularly Christianity and LGBTQ topics.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah, so so your dissertation, one of the things I think is so unique about it is it really kind of like zeroes in on a very specific like type of demographic that most people probably wouldn't necessarily be able to relate to. I'm guessing. So, so like give give us give us like sort of the 30,000-foot view of like what your dissertation is about and like what what were you trying to find out?

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Sure. So I was working with Catholic educators in the K-12 Catholic schools who self-identify as supportive of their LGBTQ students, and not only identify as supportive of their students, but also I was examining how they look to their faith to support their students. And I almost use the word justify, and I don't mean it that way, but in some sense it is a justification because I was working within a context that is conservative in regards to gender and sexual ethics. And I was really interested in examining the tensions around conservative Christian slash Catholic doctrines on gender and sexuality and support for LGBTQ students. The implications of my study extend beyond what I wrote in the dissertation. They deal with religious freedom, with policy issues around the expansion of vouchers in publicly funded religious schools. They also delve into separation of church and state concerns, which is I know a term that some are even pushing against, as perhaps thinking that it's not even constitutional, the separation of church and state. But those are some of the meta ideas that I'm thinking about in relationship to this very narrow question. And of course, like many academics, my work is personally grounded in some of my own experiences around religion and identity.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Well, why did you choose like Catholics as the study group?

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Yeah. So I was raised in part in the evangelical Christian tradition, uh, particularly the charismatic and Pentecostal tradition. And so my high school years, my adolescence were immersed in the 90s. What would Jesus do? Culture, the Toronto Blessing, the Pensacola revival, the whole bit. But at that time, I was also grappling with my own sense of identity, which at the time I would have felt very tormented about the possibility of even conceiving of myself as quote unquote gay. So I would have used the term same-sex attraction. And I at that time was subjected to what some call conversion therapy and conversion practices, everything from licensed therapists by the state who were trying to delve into all these aspects of my past to try to fix me, to things like what Pentecostals and charismatics might call deliverance prayers, otherwise known as exorcisms, and all of these things I was subjecting myself to because I was seeking freedom and healing, as I conceived of it at the time. Now, to your question around Catholic education, I at first considered working within the evangelical charismatic spaces, but I decided that I really, at least at this time in my life, wasn't interested in exploring conversation around what some might view as demonically inspired attractions, because there are some that view LGBTQ topics in that light. And instead, I wanted to start with thinking about faith as I view it in a more nuanced manner. So I thought, why not go to the heart? Why not go to the center and look at the largest Christian church in the world and think about how they are currently negotiating and navigating through LGBTQ topics? And that was really my reason for choosing Catholic education.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

That's really cool. Did you did you ever speak with Father James Martin in in sort of the your your research? Because I know he's a he's a Catholic, like we've had him on the show, and he runs like almost like an LGBTQ ministry. But I don't know if you've ever spoken with him or not.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

I have not directly spoken with James Martin. I'm familiar with his work and grateful for it. I actually have worked quite a bit with a colleague of his named David Palmieri, who runs an organization called Without Exception Ministries. And David is pretty synced into the Catholic community and working with advocates of LGBTQ people. Um and that was my in to the Catholic community since I myself am not a Catholic, technically.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Got it. Yeah. So so when you talk to these educators, yeah, I mean, number number one, like just help us understand like a Catholic school that has LGBTQ plus students. Because like I think it for for anybody listening that never spent the day in church or was raised in a church, like like you would be standing here, or even if you were raised in a church, you're probably sitting here wondering, like, what the heck? Like, how did that happen? So, like, is are are these students like open? Are they out, or are they sort of like closeted and and that's kind of the dynamic relationship?

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Yeah, I think you're gonna find that within Catholic schools, it is really going to depend upon the region. It's going to depend on whether the Catholic school is associated with a parish or with a religious order, like the Jesuits, for example. Generally, if a school is is run through a religious order, schools are more supportive and accepting of LGBTQ students, whereas parish schools generally tend to be more conservative in their approach to this topic. But the schools that I worked in the educators generally identified themselves as supportive. Now, there are complications around what support means, because some people can use the the word support and then enact conversion practices or conversion therapy. These educators don't condone that, but do identify as supportive. And they spoke about their work with their LGBTQ students in a number of ways. Some of their students, primarily adolescents, because I worked in high schools, identified as gay. And in fact, some of them even converted to the Catholic Church, these gay identifying students, which the educators felt tension around because they said, you're safe here, but you may not be safer in the larger conservative church. You had other students who identified as transgender. There was one story that was relayed about a transgender student who was devoted to the Sacred Heart of Mary and very much from a Catholic family. And this educator pointed to this student as a way to interrupt these dichotomies that are sometimes put in place around LGBTQ identity versus religious identity. But then you also had students who didn't necessarily identify as LGBT or Q, and instead would talk about their own experiences around same-sex attraction. Some of these students would say things like Pride Month is incompatible with the faith. So there was a span of ways that the students with whom they were working were navigating their own tensions of religion, religious doctrine, policies, the church, and their own developing sense of self.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

So where where was the tension for the educators? Was it like their own personal affirmation of the lifestyle? Was it with you know in conflict with what they see on the news when they look at politics and what the administration is doing? Like I'm just curious, like like what's the view from the educators' standpoint?

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yeah. And I assume you you use the term lifestyle intentionally, because on some parts of the the political spectrum, unfortunately, oftentimes someone's personhood gets dehumanized by talking in terms of lifestyle choice or that kind of thing. But these educators in general, some of them actually identified as LGBTQ in some sense. And these educators often are negotiating tensions within themselves, talking about their own development of Catholic faith and LGBTQ identity. One educator spoke about the dualis that he felt for many years. He had to either choose being gay or choose being Catholic. And actually, he spoke to his meditative contemplative practices of Catholic spirituality and closeness to God as bringing him to a point of acceptance. You had many of the educators who said, look, I'm not here to, you know, kick down the church and refute doctrines on LGBTQ topics. I still support traditional conservative and gender ethics, sexual and gender ethics, and yet I'm leaning on other parts of my faith and other principles to support these students. But then you also have some educators who just said, look, I'm a lifelong committed Catholic, and I simply disagree with the doctrines that say that homosexuality is a disorder and can be approved under no circumstances. And in fact, that's a quote from the catechism of the Catholic Church even today. So there was a wide range of ways that these educators were negotiating this question.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

That that that's that's so wild. I mean, like it just seems it sounds like there's there was a lot of nuance kind of in how they were internalizing their own feelings. Because I mean, if you again turn on the news, you you're often you're often left with one of two choices. It's it's either you are a believer or you affirm, you know, like and the the the two seem very incompatible amongst uh a lot of the the religious elites today. But from what you're telling me, it's like now there's there are other ways to look at this and still maintain your your belief structure. Yeah, I I I'd be curious on on and on just learn learn a little bit more, like like give me more of the nuance, just because I think it's important for people to hear it.

unknown 14:58

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Well, there's a couple of things. If we're thinking about the the larger social dilemmas today that we're sitting in around uh religious freedom versus LGBTQ rights, often these are situated within this binary of secular versus religious. And I I don't think that the progressive world is exempt from helping to solidify that binary in people's minds. And often LGBTQ people have been legitimately harmed and have experienced trauma within religious contexts, and so it's understandable that LGBTQ people, as part of working out that process, may for a time, and rightly so, feel very angry with the church and with religion at large. And I think that's part of this tension that I was exploring that I found so fascinating is that educators who are entrusted with caring for youth are people who even in our own lives, we can think back to the educators who made a difference, who came alongside us, encouraged us, cheered us on, accepted us, challenged us, and we can think about the educators in the classrooms that even today we look back and go, that was a very painful experience for me. And so I think if we're thinking about LGBTQ students and people psychologically and from a mental health angle, then in many respects we need to start with though those educators, and we need to think about the context that they are in, the culture that they are creating, the moves that they are making in support, especially within conservative environments. And so primarily my goal for this work was thinking about the students and thinking about their well-being. And at the same time, because LGBTQ people have been politicized to such an extent and weaponized in politics and made scapegoats in politics. I feel like this study interrupts the efficacy of those political efforts. And it says we're people. LGBTQ people are not an ideology. We do have inherent dignity. Our experiences should be respected and our legal rights should be secured. And I think that even individuals who hold a conservative gender and sexual ethics could potentially get behind that if they understood the reality of LGBTQ personhood.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

I I uh really appreciate you saying that because you know, I'm I'm thinking about the students. You know, just I've got two kids, 12 and 10. And, you know, they're very impressionable at this age, and they're still developing and trying to figure out figure out who they want to be in the world, you know, and and number one, like for a high schooler to kind of know who they are already, like kudos, hats off to you, you know. Like I'm still figuring it out in my 40s. Well, yeah, still trying to figure it out, you know, like like and and and I'm just thinking like like you've got sort of two different influencing forces at that age. You've got like teachers, but then you also have like it's a religious teacher, or like you're in a a religious setting. So like there's like there's God, you know, like over overhanging you, and then there's your teacher, you know. Yeah, yeah. And and it it reminds the incarnation of God, right? Yeah, and I'm just like, like, how how does that affect a student's just you know, spiritual well-being, you know, especially when you, you know, you look. I mean, we we talk to a ton of people that deconstruct, right? And a lot of the stories all just kind of sound the same, you know, it it all boils down to I think something of Margaret Bronson said, you know, people are deconstructing all the things that Jesus never said, you know, like they'll they'll stick with Jesus, but like all the other stuff, yeah, you know. And I'm just thinking, like, it in the Catholic school setting you're talking about, like, what's 20 years from now gonna look like, you know, for them? Like, what what what are you seeing just as far as just their their psychological, their spiritual makeup?

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Yeah. You point to a really interesting dynamic within the Catholic schools that I've studied in that there's a difference between a Catholic school that historically has worked often in tandem with the public school system, has even subjected themselves to certain state regulations, bring in people from the public sp sector, for example, to work with students with disabilities. That teach their students math and science and writing and music and rhetoric and theology, versus maybe a more fundamentalist-oriented school where like we don't care about all that stuff. All we care about is the spirit. And we care about freeing you from LGBTQ demons or from the tendencies that you have. And and for those of you who have not been in those environments, I'm not being hyperbolic, like this is actually a thing within schools. So it's important, I think, one to recognize not only from an individual perspective for the students, but a larger policy perspective, that when we're talking about schools and publicly funding schools, there's a big difference between the types of schools we're talking about. But within Catholic schools, you also have many Catholics from both conservative and liberal backgrounds, but Catholic schools have also been very intentional about opening their doors to non-Catholics. So you have many Catholic schools that have non-Catholics within them as well. And one of the things that I found is that LGBTQ students, if they are out within these Catholic schools, often will gravitate to clubs, for example, that have other LGBTQ students. But often the people who run those clubs are people who are either not Catholic or are recovering Catholic and maybe a little bit jaded toward the church. And these educators are saying look, we do not condone conversion therapy and conversion practices, but we need theologically knowledge. Knowledgeable Catholics who are working with our LGBTQ students if we want to support them and if we want to nourish and and grow, help grow their faith, which was an intent of the educators with whom I spoke.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

How does a student get into one of these schools?

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Yeah, Catholic schools are private. And there has been some efforts to expand religious schools into the public sector, such as charter schools and whatnot. The verdict is still out on whether some of those efforts are successful, but right now they are private. Catholic advocates are among some of the most fierce supporters of voucher programs that bring money from the public sector into private schools. And that opens a host of questions around non-discrimination laws, among other things. But generally, students who are gravitating toward Catholic schools either come from Catholic families who have been in Catholic schools historically forever and believe in the mission of Catholic education, or you have some that are looking to Catholic schools because they view them as quote-unquote safer than public schools. There are some troubling aspects of framing things as safer than the public sector, but that is one reason that families choose Catholic education. Catholic schools are not exempt from being involved in culture wars. And particularly among clergy, I heard stories about educators who were generally supportive of their LGBTQ students, but then would go to a mass and you'd have a priest railing against the dangers of gender ideology. And in fact, one educator said that even his conservative president of the school was rolling his eyes when the priest was railing against gender ideology. So there's all these very interesting dynamics around not only who's admitted, but why they're there, what their level of religiosity is, and what their relationship is with church and church leaders. And I loved, in some sense, because coming from a Protestant background, we're always pointing to the Catholic Church and going, oh, this oppressive organization that stifled thought and burned heretics and did the crusades and all of that, which is true. So I'm not dismissing any of that. And at the same time, I found a refreshing level of uh willingness for educators to simply dissent within the Catholic Church and still be deeply Catholic and committed to their faith.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

That's so wild. And it's it's funny because at the beginning, when I asked you like why Catholic, and then you talked about, well, this is why not Protestant Christian, you know? Yeah, and and at first, like, I mean, mind you, like Josh can't be here today, but he could probably he knows more of these things. But I I did not like I'm just not immersed in that environment. So hearing you talk about like LGBT people in this Catholic environment is like even though some some of it's bad, you know. I'm like, like I couldn't imagine this thing us having the same interview if you were studying kids, you know, LGBT folks at Liberty, you know, or Hillsdale or something like that. It'd probably be a much different experience. So so I'm sure amongst the Catholic schools that you looked at, do they have a like a discrimination? I don't know, I guess you can't have a discrimination policy, but you know, discrimination. Oh, you can't like uh in those schools.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Yeah. Generally they don't, and and here's why uh Catholic schools are wanting to avoid scrutiny, not only from the the overlords who are very scared about LGBTQ topics and the indoctrination of LGBTQ people in the church, which I think is is absurd. That's the that's not a reality of what's happening, in my view. Um, but you do have individuals who buy into that line of thought around LGBTQ topics and indoctrination and the dangers of gender ideology and all of that. And some of the people who hold those positions have money and are donors. But you also have a long tradition in the Catholic Church of concern around social justice and many Catholics in the United States who lean left in their politics. And some of these people have money too. And so if you start to enact policies within schools that draw attention either for or against, you risk money and donorship, and you risk the sustainability of the school. That's not the only reason, but that is one finding that came out of my study is that Catholic schools are concerned about how they survive as institutions. And you have people on both sides of the political spectrum who are invested deeply in Catholic education, and so they're having to navigate through that.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

That's that's wild. Are you finding that the this pull for resources and finances is affecting the theology at all?

SPEAKER_01 27:38

I didn't find uh a direct correlation between the money question and theology, but that is a question that has come up many times. So it's a very smart question, Will. And in fact, it's one that came up in my dissertation defense around money regulation and its impact on theology. But what I did find is that generally the educators with whom I was speaking, they kind of danced around the doctrines that some of us might look at and say are discriminatory and that are harmful. And they instead leaned into, hey, Jesus came alongside us and accompanied us on our journey and our discernment of who we are in relationship to God and and the world. And all people are created in the image of God, and all people have inherent dignity, leaning on these social uh teachings or the Catholic social tradition. So I found, at least with the educators that I spoke with, generally didn't go there on the doctrine. And that was both interesting but also unsettling a bit. Because I had, in fact, one of the individuals who sat on my dissertation committee who challenged me. And he said, look, this is great that we can lean on all of these altruistic principles that you find in Scripture. But at the end of the day, LGBTQ people and their identity are being attacked and actively trying to be erased. And that isn't just a political thing, that has roots in theology. That has roots in a document that came out even in 2019 from the Vatican in their what was called the Congregation for a Catholic Education, which was titled Male and Female. He can he created them. And it talks about, to the Vatican's credit, it talks about having dialogue around this notion of quote-unquote gender theory, but it's still leaned into this idea that LGBTQ people, particularly transgender people, are an ideology, that they're an abstraction, that they're people who have been victimized by a postmodern secular culture rather than individuals who have developed a sense of who they are that is outside of the mainstream. So to put a bow on your question, Will, that finance regulation question and impact on theology, I think, is a really interesting one. But it's not something that I found in the study. And I also found in some ways a unwillingness for some of the educators that I spoke with, dear people. And I so appreciated speaking with them and their generosity, but but but there wasn't a direct confrontation of the doctrine. And I don't know what to do with that, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Yeah, I wonder if if there were any people that you spoke with that are just wondering, like, why is this even a church issue? Like I know I've I've said this before, and Josh and I have talked about this at length, where you know, if if LGBTQ plus wasn't a political issue, it likely wouldn't be a church issue, you know, but it's a church issue because it is a political issue, you know, and and it's like now you have to kind of wrap your theology around the political issue that makes the conservatives look good, you know. So like this week it's hey, yeah, we want to eradicate all transgender people because that's that's what our political party believes. So now we need to, you know, use a little bit of motivated reasoning to figure out how do I warp the theology around, you know, like like like that part. And and I and I'm curious, like, if if if if you're seeing somewhat of the same thing like in the Catholic Church, like I I don't know how doctrine and theology and stuff work in the Catholic Church. I barely know how know how it works in Christian church, but I know even the Catholic Church. Yeah. So so like are are you seeing sort of like this you know warping of scripture to support to work against it much in the same way you do like in Protestant Christian churches?

SPEAKER_01 32:25

So I'm sitting with so many things in that question, and I appreciate it. It's a complicated one. I'm an education policy scholar who's thought a lot about religion. I've had some theological training, but I wasn't trained as a bona fide religious studies scholar, but I'm gonna put on my religious studies scholar hat for a moment. So those of you out there who are bona fide religious studies scholars, just excuse me for a moment.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

Yeah, but email Josh at Social Politics. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

But I think it's it's in some ways impossible to look at the history of the Christian church at large, the Catholic, Protestant, any number of groups, and dismiss how central the relationship with political power has been all the way from the beginning. In some ways, the early Christian movement was pushing against the oppression of the Roman Empire. In many respects, Jesus was defying the authorities of his day, politically and otherwise, and promoting this radical idea about not only loving people within your community, but loving people outside of your community. Bart Ehrman, a scholar of religion, his book coming out where he, even as an agnostic who was once identifying as a Christian, says, look, that ethic changed the world. And it changed the way that we think about government and about policy and about enacting the welfare state for the benefit of people. And you also had early Christians who did experience persecution by the Roman government. It wasn't to the extent that sometimes we hear about, sometimes we think that every single Christian in the Roman Empire was being placed on a cross upside down, and that's not quite how it was. Most Christians in the Roman Empire went from cradle to grave undisturbed by the state. But you did have periods of persecution by the government. And then you had the allegiance of the church with the state, and you saw once that alliance began to form, the reversal of power in that those who had be been the ones who were persecuting now became the persecutors, particularly of the pagan communities. And I would even argue to get back to your question, because I'm talking and going now, what did Will actually just ask? But to get back to it, I would argue, even again, using the religious scholars, religious studies scholar, not theological orthodox hat. I would say is the religious studies lens, that even the doctrine of the Trinity and the ways that we began to conceive of the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were not without political influence. And the development of that doctrine came in part through political pressure. All of that to be said, I think that Christianity at its heart has always been responding to political pressure. And I think it's responding to political pressure even now, which is why perhaps there's such a backlash in retrenchment, especially on gender and sexuality.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Yeah, I mean, it it seems like I appreciate you at least prefacing the religious studies or the theology part, because like it would be easy just to kind of say, well, they thought this then and now they think this now, you know, and then that's a distinct theology change. And yeah, so I I I I appreciate that. I'm I'm curious about like faith-based harm. So like in your dissertation, you talked a little bit about that, and and so I'd love for you just to kind of unpack that. And if if it makes sense, like to tie it into like your own personal experience. Because I know that you you talked a little bit about you know your own personal experience growing up, but you know, compare and contrast that to what you saw in your study.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

The heart of the tension, Will, is again, I'm I'm leaning into these left-right binaries, and forgive me to the guests you had on recently who are like, these are all fiction, these left-right binaries. So I hear you, I listened to your episodes, the good, the good men in Utah, the brothers. So I hear you. But but what I what I'll say is on the quote unquote left, there is discourse around faith-based harm, around religiously motivated discrimination, around religious bigotry and homophobia and transphobia and all of that, right? I'm not dismissing that that those words are effective and that that that that actually that's happening in many respects. But I think we, and here I'm throwing down my cards and showing you my own positionality, but I think those of us who lean on the progressive side of the equation would really benefit from understanding this idea of worldview. And it's a term that that gets employed a lot in conservative spaces, but fundamentally on this topic, there's a difference of worldview. And so, for what I might view as faith-based harm, another person views as faithful adherence to doctrine, and in fact, in the best interest of the students with whom they're working, not only their temporal interest, but their eternal interest. And so without dismissing the need to push against where doctrine has been wielded in ways that have dehumanized, that have asserted coercion and whatnot over students. I'm not dismissing that. And we need to grapple with that. And I've grappled with that hard in some of the stuff I've written, especially when it comes to demonology and exorcisms and like physical abuse that LGBTQ people have experienced to try to fix them. That is unacceptable. We shouldn't accept that. In my view. Christians shouldn't accept that, in my view. And at the same time, we do need to recognize that traditional gender and sexual ethics developed for a reason. People recognized that sexuality engenders passion, and that passion sometimes leads to harm. And so people were thinking about ways to regulate gender and sexuality. And I'm not saying that that regulation has worked out well. I'm not dismissing that patriarchy hasn't harmed, that people haven't been experienced abuse through misogyny. But I'm saying we need to more deeply grapple with the why behind conservative gender and sexual ethics. Why were they developed? Why did they retain and have retained such a strong hold in the minds of religious people and non-religious people? And I think if we can understand that and dialogue around that, we can envision new possibilities that work for the betterment of LGBTQ students and people at large.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

This is probably gonna be a bad question to ask you, but I'm gonna ask you anyways.

SPEAKER_01 40:20

Like why if you ask a bad question, you're gonna give a bad answer. I'm gonna give a bad answer.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

So we're prefacing that what the answer you give is gonna be bad. I'll put a note on whatever show notes. But like what why is that? Why, why, why do conservative Republicans on a whole have a very like negative view, you know, or maybe a different view, counterview from from like Democrats, progressives, or whatever. Like, like and you don't have to ground your answer in science, you know, just just quick thought. I'm I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_01 40:51

I listened to a a podcast, I think it was Dr. Nathaniel Blake, that you had a while back, and he was talking about the sexual revolution. And that episode made me mad. And I actually uh emailed you about Yeah, yeah, yeah. I emailed you about it. And Dr. Blake, hey, you know, give me give me a call. We can we can talk. But I went back and listened to it again, and I found that it was really insightful because Dr. Blake was discussing the way that desire, passion, ideas of liberation around sexuality have developed into people having less sex and you know, more, as I heard the argument, more discontent and depression and anxiety in society. And I I guess in in one sense, I can agree with leaning into this libertinism around sexuality is probably not helpful for individuals and society at large. But I would also respond that we're talking about people, persons who for generations have had have not had language to name a fundamental part of who they are. And so the sexual revolution and the gay rights movement and transgender activism, as imperfectly as it has been enacted, has provided an opportunity for people who were not seen to now be seen. And that, in my view, uh, there are correlations to mental well-being, to the way that we interact and and love our partners and our children, and how we interact with the greater society. So, yes, I think we can agree that there are some dangers if we lean totally into we're gonna identify simply based upon desire and attraction, while at the same time recognizing that in some sense, in my view, these movements were necessary in order to create language, to create rights, and uh to safeguard uh students and adults for that matter.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

Everything you described sounds like the uh the social theory of ideology, which is one of the concepts that Verlin and Hiram Lewis wrote in that book, The Myth of Left and Right. And in in short, it goes something like this, and I'm probably gonna butcher it, so apologies. But but it's you know, you excuse me, you you join a group, and then kind of part of the social structure is you have to believe, you know, these things that are part of the moral pillars or foundations of that belief structure, you know. So like with Democrats, it's like, hey, yeah, you know, we're we're affirming LGBTQ plus whatever, you know. Republicans, yeah, not so much. So if you find yourself in one of these groups, you know, through however socialization, you know, groups, churches, whatnot, then you will eventually adopt these, adopt these groups. And if you happen to be in one of these groups that, you know, where you might yourself be in the closet, like that's that's where where kind of the the tensions start. But once you're in a group that accepts you, it's like there's this other book by um gosh, if I'd have memory, called the Scout Mindset. But Jonathan Haidt also talks about in it in his book, The Righteous Mind, about accepting beliefs. So like if you want to accept a belief, right, you ask, like, can't can I believe it? And the threshold to the burden of proof is much lower if you ask, can I believe it? If you don't want to accept something, you ask, must I believe it? And the burden of proof is much higher, right? So, so it's like if I'm in a if I'm, you know, a gay man and it in the Democrat Party, like it's accepted. Like, can I can I exist here? Yeah, of course I can, you know, like in and I don't need a whole lot of people to say yes to me, you know. But if I'm in a conservative group, you know, it's like like must I be straight, you know, or or whatever the question is, it's much harder. So so that yeah, that that was probably a long-winded, I just mansplained it to you, I think. Dang it.

SPEAKER_01 45:47

No, no, I I appreciate it. And what I'm hearing is that perhaps in both groups, again, if we're thinking left and right, religiously, politically, and otherwise, there's been um a lack of recognizing the experiences of people that go against the ideology of the group, and recognizing how even being in an environment where there's one dominant ideology that we don't connect with can become a source of suffering. And I I feel like, at least speaking from my own experiences, having been immersed in conservative Christian spaces for the you know, the first 35 years of my life, that I deeply loved my conservative Christian community at times. I loved it so deeply that I went and spoke with a pastor over the course of five years who said, Do you have any attraction to women? I said, Yeah, you know, a little bit. Well, good, we're gonna go with that. We're gonna find you find you that trophy wife, and you're gonna be good. Then we're really gonna accept you. He didn't say that, but that's what I internalized. I loved this man, I loved this church, and I loved this community, and I loved it so deeply that I was willing to subject myself to actually what turned into extreme harm. Where when I left that group, I fell into one of the deepest, darkest periods of depression in my life. Because the people I loved so much didn't actually love me. They loved the idea of who they wanted me to be.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

Gosh, yeah, that's that's I'm sorry you had to go through that. And yeah, there there's your your story is is one of many voices that we have heard, like just the people having having church heard. And yeah, that's terrible. My last question to you. If you were sitting in front of a bunch of lawmakers, educators, church leaders, what have you, reporters even, I did hear that somebody from the Atlantic watches us, so hi.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

Give me a call.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

Yeah, if uh if if you had the opportunity to to explain, you know, the ramifications of your dissertation and your work and kind of what you want people to do with it, what what would you say?

SPEAKER_01 48:46

Well, one, I'd say I wasn't expecting just now to give what has turned into a a kind of an emotional thing that I'm sitting with in in this interview. But I would I would start with the humanity, the personhood, the recognition that love is not contained within the boundaries of doctrine, and that just because someone identifies as transgender that somehow they are incapable of love or loving, uh would start there. And and I I hope Ted Cruz or you know one of those people on the right will will actually listen one of these days. I don't know, I haven't heard much from Ted Cruz lately. So maybe Ted Cruz is the one. Have you tried Cancun? Yeah. So that's one. Like y'all get a grip. Okay. And I'm saying y'all, because I lived in Texas for a while, and that's probably why Ted Cruz came up. And the story I told you about the Christian church and the five years, that all happened in Texas, actually. And so that's that. On the left, I would also say that there is a real, I would say, danger in relegating all ideas that are conservative around gender and sexuality as homophobia or transphobia. And I think that that that we on the the left, those of us on the left, need to understand that there are gradations, if you will, of harm, and that uh conservative gender and sexual ethics have developed for a reason. I'm not totally sure the reason myself. That's work that other scholars, I'm sure, have done and can do. But I think we can oversimplify things when we assume that all conservative Christians are homophobes or transphobes. I actually don't think that helps the cause of moving us forward. So I've mentioned the person, the individual, the student is important. I've mentioned the dangers of politicizing people on both the left and the right. But I'd also say from a much more meta-scale, and now I'll throw out another name of a guest that I loved that you had on, which was a scholar named Stephen D. Smith. I read his book, The Technology Constitution. And the Providential Republic. Right. And I I disagreed with some of his conclusions. I felt like Professor Emeritus Smith leaned a bit more into this idea that like religious freedom is really under attack and we need to safeguard it at all costs. And so the way that we've conceived of this in our current court is good and the direction is good. I don't actually agree with you, Professor Emeritus Smith, on that point. But I do think your work was so deeply thought-provoking around the difference between like Christian nationalism and this idea of a Christian state, versus what I think is that Smith makes a great argument for, which is that the founders were leaning into this notion of a providential republic and what providentialism means. And so what does providentialism mean not only for Christians and believers, but what does that mean for LGBTQ people as well, if we're gonna lean into that providence argument? And we should also think about the fact, again, to mention Bart Ehrman in his book on the triumph of Christianity, that the notion of separation of church and state actually was articulated in the first couple of hundred years of Christianity by apologists who were concerned about the state imposition of their pagan ideas upon Christians. And then that got lost as imperialism took form and Constantine came on the scene, and the sons of Constantine and whatnot. But then the Enlightenment came around and we started thinking about the separation of church and state idea again. And oftentimes we're like, yeah, that's just a secular idea that came out of the Enlightenment. But actually, there are fundamentally religious origins to that idea. And I will acknowledge that we have oversimplified things on the left when we talk about that. We need to think about that issue a bit more in a bit more nuanced manner. But I do think that LGBTQ people and topics are central to this question of religious freedom and separation of church and state, because ultimately we're talking about these notions of religious freedom and separation of church and state, not just as some abstract ideas, but actually because these ideas lead to liberty for people who are being governed. And if politics is wielded and laws are wielded to discriminate, to ostracize, harm to even in the most extreme forms perpetuate genocide in the name of religion, that's a problem, and it's something we should all be concerned about, irrespective of whether you're LGBTQ or Christian or Christian LGBTQ or any combination thereof.

SPEAKER_00 54:47

That's awesome. Are you going to turn this into a book?

SPEAKER_01 54:52

I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I've been in conversation with a few publishers. Uh so if you have any folks out there who listen and want to talk with me, you can reach out. Pretty easy to find. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:04

I I don't know anything about dissertation or writing a book, but I've spoken to a lot of people that have written dissertations and turned them into books. Yes. So I that must be the thing that people are doing. Thank you so much for coming on, John. And this has been this has been such a great conversation. Um, how can people get a hold of you if you want them to get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_01 55:23

Yeah, so I'll be sure to update it by the time this episode comes out, unless it's coming out tomorrow. But I've got I've got okay, I've got a website, John Sawyer J-O-N-S-A-W-Y-E-R.org. Um, you can get a hold of me that way. I'm currently at the University of Colorado Boulders. If you Google my name, Jonathan, that's J-O-N-A-T-H-O-N. And my last name is Sawyer C U Boulder. You can find my email address pretty easily. Happy to hear from you. I I've done some op-eds on these topics. I've got one coming out with Education Week actually tomorrow, around the court case on conversion therapy. So you can find some of my public-facing scholarship there. But ultimately, I'd actually love to hear from people. So if you made it through this entire episode, God bless you. I'm sorry for some of the things I said, but I'd love to hear from you.

SPEAKER_00 56:13

So that's awesome. Well, thank you again for stopping by. It's always a pleasure. And hopefully we can have you back again. Chance to meet Josh.

SPEAKER_01 56:22

Say hi to Josh for me. Yeah, sorry to miss him.

SPEAKER_00 56:24

I'm I will when he gets back from his NASA training. Um I will definitely do that. And uh thanks for for our audience for uh coming by again. Really appreciate you all. Make sure to like, subscribe, do all that stuff that Josh Grimley does, um, or that Josh Grimley reminds you to do. Um, and as always, keep your conversation uh right or left, but uh we'll see you next time. Bye.