The Evangelical Church and Queer Congregants in the 20th-Century US South

As international acceptance of queer sexualities continues to gain state support and popular visibility, it is necessary for evangelical believers to align their spiritual pasts with their queer futures. In the U.S South, the Christian Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination offered structured spiritual space for Black, Brown, and white worshippers, who came of age in a community of believers who spoke openly against queer sexuality while ignoring, and even welcoming, queer congregants. This paper will explore church rhetoric in conversation with personal stories of queer people who struggled to align their identity with church doctrines. For those whose relationship with Pentecostalism extended beyond Sunday, and into their college educations, religious prescriptions filled their daily on and off-campus lives with gendered and anti-sexual invectives. This left queer evangelical students in a constant state of personal turmoil. The massive growth of Pentecostalism in the Global South throughout the twentieth century did not equip church leadership to evolve in the face of an increasing twenty-first century popular acceptance of queer identities among younger generations. This led to a multigenerational storm in the early decades of the 2000s as young queer evangelicals worked to define a spiritual community on their own terms.