When deciding what to call his new book Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table, Brandan Robertson knew the word queer would provoke. So, he addresses the issue at the outset.
"It's a radical declaration," he writes, "of our commitment to living authentically and being who God created us to be instead of who our society, community, or religion tells us we need to be."
That authenticity is something the pastor – who serves a small congregation in Queens, New York and a huge following online – has found an audience for over the last several years.
"Since I started doing ministry on Tik-Tok, I really noticed that there was a deep hunger in Gen Z for deep theological and biblical content," he says. "But far too often this is all locked away in the ivory tower of the seminary."
Robertson's TikTok channel is decidedly not ivory tower. In one early video, he dances, dressed as a variety of Christian clergy – all black for Anglo-Catholic priest, tee shirt and jeans for evangelical preacher, gray suit with pastoral stole for Mainline Protestant minister, and button-down shirt with khaki shorts for himself.
More recent videos take on more serious issues, offering mini-sermons for online seekers looking.
"You see, Lazarus was locked up in a cold, dark tomb wrapped in burial cloth, left for dead," he says in one video. "That's exactly what so many Christians and so many churches do to LGBT people."
Some of the videos are timely: "Have a Happy Pride Month everyone!" Robertson exclaims in another TikTok offering. "As an LGBT Christian minister I'm so grateful for this month."
And other videos lay out, in snackable portions, Robertson's overall project: "My goal is to help queer people be able to come back to the Bible and reclaim it without needing to spend the rest of their lives wrestling with these things," he says to the camera.
Queer readings transform old stories
Robertson's book Queer & Christian, published by St. Martin's, is part memoir, part Bible study and part applied ethics.
He writes about his teens and 20s as an evangelical, struggling with his sexuality. During this period, he tried to "pray the gay away" through a series of counseling sessions while in college. That didn't work. And eventually he came to not just accept being gay but embrace it joyfully.
Like other gay Christians have done elsewhere, Robertson takes on the Bible verses often used to condemn LGBTQ people. He offers what he calls "rapid responses" to use when someone brings them up.
But then, Robertson takes a different tack. He does what he calls "queer readings" of familiar bible stories, like Joseph and his coat of many colors.
"Joseph is relentlessly bullied by his brothers," he says. "They even try to kill him in the text. But because of Joseph's father's love and support and Joseph's own perseverance in his identity, he ends up becoming one of the great leaders of Israel."
He also does "queer readings" of the book of Ruth and the story of David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel. He says LGBTQ people can discover themselves in these stories, which portray same-sex relationships, romantic or otherwise.
Robertson even views Jesus through queer eyes: "A single Jewish man in his thirties that abandoned the pursuit of a family and traveled in the cities preaching good news? That's a very strange, rare thing to take place in the first century," he said. "And it subverts the patriarchal norms and expectations of that culture."
This way of reading once made Robertson uncomfortable. "Ten years ago, if you would have brought to me queer readings of Scripture," he explains, "I would have rolled my eyes and said, that's just modern people trying to read things into an ancient text that's not there."
But after his time in seminary and now in a Ph.D. program, it's an approach to the Bible he now champions.
"It's important for each community to be able to see themselves reflected in the face of Christ," he says. "And so if there are openings in the text, even if they're small openings for queer people to say, 'Oh, Jesus can relate to my queer experience,' that's profoundly healing, profoundly liberating."
It's not a liberation from the Bible or from Christianity, he says, but a liberation to read the Bible in ways that are life-affirming and life-transforming.
Acceptance grows, opposition continues
An approach to reading the Bible that creates life-affirming churches for LGBTQ+ Christians could be having a broad affect in the U.S.
Data released earlier this year by Pew Research shows that 57% of Christians now say "homosexuality should be accepted by society." That's up from 44% in 2007. Mainline Protestants and Catholics show the strongest support.
Even when it comes to same-sex marriage, progressive viewpoints have made significant inroads among Christians. According to Pew, 55% of people who identify as Christian now support same-sex marriage – up from 44% a decade ago. The biggest increases in acceptance are among Mainline Protestants, Catholics, and those who attend Historically Black churches.
There's even been an increase for LGBTQ+ rights among evangelicals, who've been the backbone of opposition for decades.
Between 2007 and 2024, the number who agree that "homosexuality" should be accepted has gone from 26% to 36%. Similarly, 36% of evangelicals now say they support same-sex marriage.
But those numbers also mean there's still significant opposition from evangelicals to the kind of worldview Robertson is espousing.
In early June, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant group in the U.S., called for the overturning of same-sex marriage. It came as part of a larger resolution on family life that passed overwhelmingly.
"We're going to be there and holding to that position regardless of what public surveys may indicate," said Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. "It's not something that is up to us to decide."
Honesty is key to a queer Christian approach
In the final section of Queer & Christian, Robertson turns to applied ethics in the form of advice. He writes that after years of praying to be healed from being gay, he now realizes that there's nothing about being gay that needs God's healing. He celebrates it.
While some in the more progressive Christian movements counsel LGBTQ people to remain chaste until they've entered a monogamous same-sex marriage, Robertson has a less rule-based approach.
He relies on an ethos described in the New Testament, in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians: all things are allowable, but not all things are beneficial.
"It's really a summary of do unto others as you would have them do unto you," Robertson says. "Any sexual experience or relational experience we go into should be rooted in a love of our neighbor and love of ourself."
Those experiences might, if mindful of self and others, he says, include sex outside of marriage or non-monogamous relationships.
While the primary audience for Queer & Christian is LGBTQ people, Robertson sees his mission as much larger: cultivating an understanding of Christian community in which all people are welcomed and embraced.
"I think queer people are especially tasked with helping the heterosexual and cisgender church learn one of the central things that Jesus taught," he said. "Dying to our false self and rising to our true self is a path to liberation and salvation according to Jesus."
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