“This Hell” and God’s Love

The song for this year’s Tokyo Rainbow Pride, Rina Sawayama’s “This Hell,” is a defiant response to the traumatizing messages many LGBTQ people hear in their religious communities.

I heard many of these same messages in the evangelical environment I grew up in. At my church, people talked about how queer people were uniquely harmful to society and deserving of damnation. At my Christian school, a group of bullies derisively called me “faggot” like it was my name.

When a 13-year-old me realized I had a crush on another boy, I became convinced I was destined for hell. It didn’t matter if I thought I believed in God or if I thought I loved Him. I was sure Jesus would tell me, “I never knew you. Depart from me.” After all, didn’t Paul say people like me had been “given up?”

I really get this song. I get what it feels like when the community you grow up in talks about people like yourself as though they were talking about the plague. What it feels like to wonder why God even made you if He was just going to damn you for being yourself. (It felt better to try to imagine I was just the product of aimless natural processes, though I couldn’t ever quite get there.) And I get the impulse to squeeze every last drop out of life on earth when it seems like heaven’s gates are barred against you. That’s not where I am now. But boy, do I remember what it’s like!

It took the better part of a decade for the full message of God’s love revealed in the Bible to break through all the lies I had believed. Whatever the world might say, God made me. Whatever the church might say, God made me to be loved. Whatever my heart might say, God made me to be loved and keeps on loving me.

“Yes, Jesus loves me.” That’s why I want to learn to love and honor Him with every part of my being. Why I want to learn to love and care for myself, including those parts of myself I was taught were unlovable. Why I want to learn to love others, including those in religious communities with a sadly diminished view of God’s love. And that’s why I want others to know He loves them.

To my LGBTQ friends

I’m so sorry if Christians hid the truth of God’s love from you. I’m sorry for times when your heart was hurting, but all the church had to say was, “You’re not loved. You’re going to hell because of who you are.” I can understand why your response to that message might be to say, “Well then, screw it.” But the truth is that God loves you. “God hates you” was actually a message straight from hell. It really sucks that you heard it from people who thought and said they were representing God.

The message from heaven is a message of love. The proof of this love is the cross. The cross isn’t proof of God’s wrath, the evidence of an angry Father who needs to be appeased by the death of His Son. The cross is about God loving you at great cost—the greatest cost!—to Himself.¹

It’s true that if God is God, He has an absolute claim on your life. And I think recognizing that claim and trusting the loving heart behind it is a big part of what it means to be a Christian. That’s true for anyone regardless of orientation or gender identity: gay, straight, trans, cis, anywhere in between, or outside these categories. But the church hasn’t always given the time or space to sexual and gender minorities to figure out what this means in their lives. It’s given plenty of time and space to other people. I’m so sorry for this double standard.

I want your heart to hear and know that God made you, and He wouldn’t have made someone He couldn’t love. He’s kept loving you, even when others haven’t loved you. Even when you haven’t loved yourself, others, or God.

God loves You so much!

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Footnotes

1. I wrote about this in a post for the YWAM Tokyo blog a while back.