THE CHURCH THAT baptized me and was my spiritual home does not provide marriage counseling to LGBTQ couples. I doubt it even allows openly LGBTQ people to join its congregation. This treatment isn’t unusual: For years, many LGBTQ people have been denied true belonging and dignity in church bodies worldwide. Their romantic partnerships have been damned by clergy and discredited by loved ones. While heterosexual couples have been given pastors’ blessings and guidance, many LGBTQ couples have been abandoned to the harshness of life’s challenges.
David and Constantino Khalaf know this struggle well and don’t want queer Christians interested in finding a partner to have to figure out the complexities of faith, marriage, and commitment on their own. That’s why they have bravely written the book Modern Kinship: A Queer Guide to Christian Marriage.
I say “bravely” because, in this beautifully public way, they reveal a lot about their private and imperfect lives. From painful memories of reparative therapy and ostracization by relatives to the story of how they found each other after failed relationships and struggled to make it to the altar, the Khalafs share much of their individual and shared histories. Their mistakes and lessons, often conveyed with humor, provide LGBTQ Christians support and validation that churches have denied for years.
The Khalafs could have limited the contents of Modern Kinship to just their experiences, but they understand how perspectives of cis men dominate the culture, obscuring the narratives and concerns of others. By including interviews with Christians who are trans, lesbian, and other queer identities—and proclaiming that the church must, in addition to embracing queer marriage, “approach singleness as an equally valid life choice”—the Khalafs recognize the humanity and importance of other lives and expand Modern Kinship’s impact and truth.
“A good marriage,” they write, “is outwardly focused; it carries a mission and seeks to make the world a more loving, peaceful place.”
Rarely have I seen so much goodness and potential attributed to queer Christian marriages; in Modern Kinship, these sentiments are as abundant as hand fans in a Southern Baptist church. LGBTQ Christians can open the book and see reflected back the imago dei that’s within them and the people they care for.
“Queer bodies are worth saving,” the Khalafs write, “... be they cis or trans; male, female, neither, or both; curvy, skinny, or muscular; black, brown, white, or any other shade of skin. Sexual ethics matter because we are all worthy of respect, honor, and celebration.”
As I read those words for the first time, the ice around my faith—the frost of forlornness I had felt ever since my queerness met my religion—quickly began to melt. Amen, David and Constantino. Amen.
Da’Shawn Mosley (dashawn-mosley.com) is a former Sojourners associate editor and lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
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