Living for Change as a Queer Military Chaplain with a Queer Faith

I find myself repeatedly navigating coming out in various ways while trying to time strategic disclosure and maintain my trusted position as special staff to the commander. I often have to remind myself that this struggle is one that reorients me on the path of Love and liberation for all. May we all be free.

Queerness is me. Not just my sexual identity, but my understanding of religiosity and my neurotype.

I am a Unitarian Universalist (UU) Army chaplain. My uniform has a cross on it to symbolize my place in the chaplain corps because my tradition is historically Protestant, but we aren’t all Christian — I’m definitely not. I joke that Unitarian Universalists come from two Protestant traditions that merged and kept protesting (that is, in the reformation of religious and spiritual understanding). This assigned symbol means I need to come out as not Christian all the time.

Chaplains in the U.S. military are sorted and issued one of five officially recognized symbols of faith: the cross (Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism), the tablets (Judaism), the crescent (Islam), the aum (Hinduism), and the dharma wheel (Buddhism). The cross is not a symbol I have ever connected with.

Despite the efforts of my mom’s family of origin and a few different friends along the way, I’ve been UU since around age 10 and out as bisexual/queer since around age 15. Even when I was spending more time in progressive Christian circles, the cross never appealed to me as a symbol. I grew up with a pluralistic lens colored by my mom’s religious trauma as she strived to raise her kids outside of the authoritarian tradition she experienced. My mom only braved going to UU churches after she deconstructed the idea that queer folks weren’t welcome. After years of allyship, she eventually came out herself.

The congregation of my pre-teen through emerging adult years was a mystical humanist one. It observed some Christian traditions and some Buddhist ones, and it had an active Pagan group. It was always, in my memory, a ‘Welcoming Congregation’ (UU speak meaning queer folks could be out and serve in all positions within the denomination).

Most UU religious education (R.E.) focuses on social justice and understanding one’s own identity and beliefs, rather than memorizing a creed. Such self-reflection is used to cultivate an understanding of our own morals and spirituality from a young age. The Unitarian Universalist tradition holds us in community and accountable to one another.

That UUs are assigned the cross in the U.S. military is an example of Christian normalcy and hegemony, both within our denomination and wider society. The policy upholds an undesirable status quo for many who might want to seek the path to chaplaincy.

This status quo lacks care for the moral pain of misrepresentation or the underrepresentation of diversity within the Chaplain Corps. In the U.S., every new UU military chaplain is told by our own people to make peace with wearing the cross because the benefits outweigh the costs. This rings false to me and is about as tiresome as the requirement that chaplain trainees at the Army Institute of Religious Leadership (USA-IRL) sing the less-than-pluralistic “Soldiers of God” every morning. What’s more, there are alternatives we could explore; the Canadian military added the chalice for UU chaplains in the time since I joined the U.S. military.

Because UU chaplains wear the cross, we might be expected to support a Sunday chapel service with theology that excludes those we would include. I experienced this first-hand; the cross has granted me admittance to hearing ignorant and harmful comments by a handful of chaplains and one contracted director of religious education.

After living and leaning more into who I am — a pluralistic, mystical, queer, humanist, and theist — I was blessed to witness good work by other chaplains with influence to challenge the status quo. I am grateful for their prophetic voice and use of power for justice. I am open about who I am and what I believe, set boundaries, and find the good folks doing the good work who don’t require me to play small or fit in a box not designed for me.

My call to military chaplaincy is about bringing a compassionate and liberatory presence to service members. The cross insignia I am compelled to wear isn’t a true representation of who I am, and it can take time to build a reputation that goes beyond it. There are many assumptions about what soldiers should or shouldn’t do in the presence of a cross-wearing chaplain. Most of these assumptions are about propriety of tone or topic rather than what I really care about: are we living into the liberation of all beings with Love interwoven through all we do?

I am committed to challenging the status quo because conforming to propriety based on how things have always been done is not liberation. Holding back the word “fuck” while not flinching at a sanist or ableist slur is not Love. It takes conversations and time for soldiers to learn how to truly understand me, this apparent rarity that is a female progressive queer chaplain. It’s understandable that seeing the cross can silence conversation or elicit apologies for benign acts, given the stories America and the Army continue to tell about chaplains and morality.

I have always been a deeply spiritual person, drawn to mysticism and direct experiences of the Divine. I am strongly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, and Humanism. Quite the queering of religiosity, I wouldn’t work in a siloed tradition, but I do work in a loving one.

This conceptualization of God can be difficult to explain to those who feel most at home in the types of Christianity that get disproportionate airtime in America. The White Christian Nationalist and the dominionist movements (efforts to spread a specific understanding of Christianity and force this belief system into politics, society, and schooling) claim to have the real way to reach God. These dominionist movements seek to control anyone not within their traditions by twisting the First Amendment to mean “publicly being different from my understanding of Christianity wrongs me.”

When I use the words “Divine” and “God,” I do not understand this as an entity with human form or gender, though sometimes the sense of being held by Love feels most correct when understood through the context of a caring embrace. This understanding of God contrasts with the Christian Nationalist understanding of God as a male God who holds America in higher regard than other countries — a God who prioritizes the existence of countries is very strange to me.

I am not alone in my contrasting conceptualization of God, just as I am not alone in queerness, so representing this less common view publicly makes space for others to claim belonging and liberates us all from narrow-mindedness.

This is not in the spirit of the First Amendment. There is more than one type of Christian and Christians are not the only religious or spiritual groups. A more expansive and diversely inclusive world is possible and getting there is challenging but more loving. This challenging transformation means embracing the queerness of all existence and our holy-human struggle with accountability.

Love is a central value within UU theology and I understand it to be a force as well as a verb, a kind of description of God that aligns well with process theology.

The most influential and transformational theological teachers in my life have been of various intersecting identities among womanist1, mujerista2, queer3, liberation4, disabled5, and indecent theologies6. These teachers dare us to live into a deeper freedom and connection with Love through mutual solidarity, joy, and by affirming the spark of the Divine (or interdependent non-dual nature or imago Dei) within each and all of us. It is in this theological swirl of traditions that I approach my life and my work.

I queerly reject the premise that chaplains, or religious people in general, are Christian by default. I also queerly reject that we should be understood through a comparison to Christianity.

Instead, let us ask for symbols that adequately capture the vast ways we identify and seek to support all people in community as they strive to be their best self. Tell me what matters to you and how you have experienced joy, peace, sorrow, and hope; that is where I find my calling.

Footnotes:

1 Womanist theology is a Black woman led school of theology and ethics which challenges the idea that we are meant to suffer with the radical joy and centers the lived experiences and spiritual lives of Black American women.

2 Mujerista theology centers the liberation and lives of Latina women.

3 Queer theology is theology done by queer community. Queerness challenges the status quo.

4 Liberation theology centers the oppressed, specifically addressing poverty; it was popularized in Latin America in the 60s-70s by Roman Catholic theologians.

5 Disability theology challenges ableism and sanism by claiming space for disability in sacred places.

6 Indecent theology mixes feminist, liberation, and queer theology. The term was first used by Marcella Althaus-Reid, an Argentine theologian who worked in Scotland until her death in 2009. Althaus-Reid used “vulgar” language and insisted God was within even the most “profane” circumstances.

Feature photo credit: U.S. Army Sgt Sarah Sangster