Queer liveability: Inclusive church-scenes

Karen Cuthbert,Yvette Taylor

doi:10.1177/1363460718772759

Abstract

This article explores queer religious youths’ engagement with the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) – a church founded as a space of worship for LGBT Christians. Interested in sources of well-being in queer people’s lives, we show how MCC provided young religious queer people with a sense of home, family, and a phenomenological experience of ‘fit’ and ‘ease’. We connect to literature on the subjectivization of religion and suggest that MCC is a significant actor in this process, with spatial and liturgical practices that encourage the development of one’s own spiritual journey. However, we also temper these claims by showing how ‘tradition’ was still valued by many participants, evidenced in their continued affiliation with other (often non-inclusive) churches. We argue that this complicates arguments regarding ‘inclusivity’ as these ‘non-inclusive’ churches could also provide spaces of succour and support. Finally, we also consider MCC’s relationship with queerness/LGBT: participants differed in whether or not they saw MCC as part of or apart from the ‘scene’, complicating questions raised about assimilation vs. separatism, with the relative weight of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Christian’.

Highlights

This article explores UK-based queer religious young people’s experiences with Metropolitan Community Churches – a church founded originally as a space of worship for gay Christians in 1960s Los Angeles
This article makes initial inroads in exploring how queer religious youth in the UK engage with the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC)
Amidst more tragic narratives of queer youth, we have tried to show how MCC provides an important source of wellbeing in the lives of many participants

Summary

Introduction

This article explores UK-based queer religious young people’s experiences with Metropolitan Community Churches (hereafter MCC) – a church founded originally as a space of worship for gay Christians in 1960s Los Angeles. Kane (2013: 138) remarks that there has been a relative ‘inattention’ paid to MCC by sociologists of religion, as well as by sociologists of sexuality Kane suggests that this might be due to the neglect of denominations and congregations more broadly within the sociology of religion on the one hand and on the other, the long-standing queer and feminist distrust of Christianity, particular in its organisational and institutional forms (Aune, 2015; Aune and Stevenson, 2017). This article builds upon these initial explorations by focusing on how young people in the UK engaged with the MCC, representing the first research foregrounding both young people and the UK context

Methods

Conclusion