That’s Not Love

How can someone “love the sinner, hate the sin” when they don’t know how to love?

After years of hearing that I was inherently worthless and deserved to rot in hell from the pulpit, I had self-esteem issues that were worsened by my deteriorating mental health. Where else do people sit to hear such a message and come back to that message? Without the religious gilding, it’s just a toxic relationship with a controlling, short-tempered partner and the ultimate power imbalance: a bisexual girl in the throes of her adolescence and an all-powerful, all-knowing deity that created time itself. The more I looked at the idea that repressing my sexuality was my way of ‘suffering for the Lord’, the more I considered that the church as a whole forgot what it means to love.

The idea that Christians should love the sinner and hate the sin comes from the overarching theme of “tough love” that pervades many churches today. Telling someone that their sexuality is inherently depraved and disordered is “love” by some churches’ standards. For others, “love” is referring to a transgender person by the wrong pronouns and calling for a “Christian” approach that allows a person to live as their designated gender in the name of truth. These same churches can be the ones that often smell like vomit from people coming in after a night of drinking. They operate…