To the Online Christian Soldier

Can we be truly honest about something for a second about the online ministries that some people build? Because in our day, it's incredibly easy and lucrative for the meanest people in any church to build an entire presence online belittling and othering queer people. Which is already disheartening enough, but it's even worse when I see people from my church spreading it around. Even though Christians often have little to no respect for Latter-day Saints and don't consider us Christians at all, too many in our community help to platform their messaging and increase their influence. They bully their own, but that doesn't give us license to help them do it—or worse, following their bad example.

So let's be honest for a minute about a couple of things, person to person. Heart to heart.

It is impossible to hate and shame queer people into loving God.

You will never earn the love of Jesus Christ by judging other people for what they do.

You are wholly dependent on his grace, yes? No matter what you do, you will still be an unprofitable servant? So why are you so hellbent on taking that grace from others?

What exactly do you get from condemning queer people for the motes you think you see in their eyes, when the beams are still in your eyes?

Why are you so determined to show how much love you have for God by tormenting queer people, instead of sharing the testimony of what sins you've been saved from?

If you're so convinced that making a spectacle of sin serves God in any way, why are the sins never your own?

It costs you nothing not to invalidate queer people's entire existence by saying they're wrong about who they are. No one is making you do that. So why are you doing it?

Especially since, and I cannot stress this enough, I'm old enough to know that at least some of you are actually queer and so deep in the closet you're finding last year's Christmas presents. You just don't realize it yet. And those of you who have and are doing violence to yourselves and others to convince yourselves that you can change this about yourselves—all of this presupposes that there is something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. You can't pray the gay away. You can't make yourself cisgender, heterosexual, or anything else that you just aren't. Better folks than you have tried. Kinder folks than you have had their Creator tell them that he made no mistake on them in this.

You are not different. Your self-loathing doesn't make you special. And the loathing you hold for others for what you don't like about yourself does not make you holy.

Let me tell you how this story ends, based on experience:

Once you finally figure that out because you've nearly destroyed yourself and your mental health, you're going to end up needing the help of, and asking forgiveness from, the very people you're belittling right now.

So let's skip past all that and get to the part where the God you worship underlines "love thy neighbor as thyself" for you and says to you, in that familiar voice, "What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself."

Now quit elevating the incomprehensible bigotry and indoctrination of Christian influencers from Instagram and go read a book.