5 January 2026

2026: A Year to Reclaim Religion and Rescue Religious Liberty

The headlines in 2025 were filled with stories about government leaders using the rhetoric of religion to support restricting the rights and even erasing the identities of LGBTQ+ people and our families. In state after state, lawmakers invoked religious language to justify bans on gender-affirming care, restrictions on school curricula, and limitations on adoption and foster care. These stories were many, and their common message was clear: we queer people are once again acceptable targets of discrimination, exclusion, and even violence. And religion is being used to support this decidedly unholy work.

And yet, in the midst of intensified attacks on our transgender siblings and increasing attempts to erase queer people and families from U.S. culture, there are signs of hope. Religion does not belong to those who use it to exclude. It belongs rather to all who wrestle with religious ideals and practice in the pursuit of love, justice, and the promotion of human dignity for everyone.

One powerful sign of hope emerged in December 2025, when more than 1000 members of major U.S. religious traditions (including leaders from Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, Sufism, Buddhist movements, and the Unitarian Universalist Association) issued a powerful joint statement affirming the dignity of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people.* At a time when religious language is increasingly weaponized to justify exclusion, this was not merely symbolic. It was a true religious intervention, asserting that faith can be a force for protection rather than punishment, and that LGBTQ+ lives have an inherent sacred worth.

This is the work of the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS): to amplify these voices of religious inclusion and to insist that the story of religion and LGBTQ+ people is far more complex, contested, and hopeful than the headlines suggest.

The public story about religion and queer people has consequences. When religion is seen as inherently hostile to LGBTQ+ people, many queer and trans individuals understandably disengage not only from religious institutions but from spiritual life altogether. At the same time, right-wing movements step eagerly into the vacuum, claiming exclusive ownership of “religious values” and “religious liberty.” The result is a narrowing of religion itself and a distortion of religious freedom.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary misuse of religious liberty. Once a principle understood to protect conscience and pluralism, religious freedom has increasingly been invoked as a justification for discrimination. In this distorted framing, religious liberty means the right to deny services, healthcare, dignity, and safety to LGBTQ+ people while insisting that such denial is a religious duty. Left unchecked, this trend threatens not only LGBTQ+ people but also the very foundation of a pluralistic democracy and the idea that we can hold different beliefs while still extending equal dignity and protection to all citizens.

This is not religious freedom. It is a form of discrimination cloaked in false religious values.

Genuine religious liberty does not require LGBTQ+ people to disappear from society so that others may feel faithful to their beliefs. Nor does it elevate one theological viewpoint into law while silencing others. And it certainly should never require queer and trans people to surrender full citizenship in order to comfort those with religious convictions that deny the rights of some.

Liberating religious liberty from extremist capture is one of the urgent moral tasks of our time. Doing so requires reclaiming religion itself and affirming that religious traditions are living and contested moral ecosystems shaped by scholarship, lived experience, pastoral sensitivity, and moral courage.

This is precisely where CLGS locates our work. Through accessible education, public scholarship, leadership development, and community building, we help to bring LGBTQ+ voices and insights into classrooms, congregations, and the public square. We insist that LGBTQ+ people are not problems that religion must solve, but sources of wisdom that can deepen and transform our religious understanding.

In our current political climate that seeks to roll back protections for LGBTQ+ people, our families, and our communities, we refuse to be cowed by the hateful religious rhetoric that undergirds such discriminatory policies. We will not be silenced.

The question before us is not whether religion will shape the public conversation about LGBTQ+ lives because, of course, it already does. Rather, the question is whether we allow the religious beliefs of some to shape that conversation and toward what ends.

Join CLGS in shaping a more humane and more expansive public religious discourse to support the flourishing of all people, and please join us in remaining faithful to the universal religious values of love, inclusion, and justice for all.

Visit us online to learn more about our work, access our research and resources, or support our mission to transform the conversation about religion and LGBTQ+ lives.

Bernard Schlager, PhD
Executive Director
Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS) at Pacific School of Religion

SOURCES

*Unitarian Universalist Association (15 December 2025): “Americans Across Religious Denominations Support Trans, Nonbinary, and Intersex People.”