9 November 2025

When I reflect on the Trump era, what comes up for me is not so much the policies, but the feeling – that cold, anxious pulse of knowing that people like me are being targeted as unacceptable threats. Christian theology has served as justification for this scapegoating. For queer Christians, this era has been a kind of wilderness. It has forced us to decide what faith would mean when our very own political and ecclesial institutions are the very ones wounding us.

Yet something important has happened in the wilderness: a certain queer spirituality has emerged. Not a polished piety of Sunday service, but a fierce, incarnate spirituality of refuge, presence, and witness – three practices that, together, became a way of surviving and transgressing. Because when we engage these practices, we do more than endure – we transform the world through our refusal to disappear.

Refuge

We often rely on a certain element of safety to ground our spiritual life. When Church and state fail to hold us, we hold one another. We gather in living rooms that double as chapels, in drag shows that become call-and-response rituals, on dance floors that beat like prayer.

Refuge is not retreat – it is re-creation. Around dining tables, queer couples bless one another before dinner; trans friends share their stories like sacred texts; laughter and grief mingle until both feel divine. These sanctuaries are fragile and fierce, but they are ours. We created them.

To create refuge is to overcome a logic of abandonment – a logic the government and the Church want us to internalize so we feel like we are alone. When the world tells us that safety is earned through obedience; we dare to build it through relationship. We take the Church’s language of “shelter” and rewrite it with our bodies, our art, our joy. Refuge is the first miracle of queer spirituality: that in the face of rejection, we still create belonging.

Presence

Presence is what happens when we choose to stay in a world that keeps trying to push us out. For queer Christians, presence means showing up anyway – sitting in pews, marching in protests, teaching, loving, and living with pride.

Presence is about defiance. It says, “we will not vanish simply because you cannot understand us. We remain.” Presence is incarnational – it reclaims the goodness of our bodies and it dares to proclaim that God is present in our embodied expressions.

In this Trump era, queer presence is a crucial calling. We occupy churches that erase us, and we love one another, and ourselves, in ways that make God’s expansive grace visible. In our present queer transgressions, the Spirit finds new breath. To be present is to become a living sacrament of resistance. We to claim, “the divine is not elsewhere; it is here, pulsing in queer flesh, waiting to be recognized.”

Witness

Witness is what happens when safety and embodiment become a testimony. To witness as queer Christians is to tell the truth about surviving and about grace. It is to say, in a world that thrives on silence, “we are still here, and we are holy – join us.” Each story told aloud, each truth spoken in defiance, becomes an invitation for anyone (queer or not) to come see the world as we see it, even if just briefly.

Queer witness is a holy spirituality because it unmasks the sacred where the world denies it. When we bear witness, we don’t just speak our truth – we also expand the very meaning of truth itself. Theology widens and our understanding of the Gospel grows.

Crucially, queer witness brings salvation into the dance floor, the queer art, the protest chant, the chosen family dinner. The streets become the site where God speaks.

Queer refuge, presence, and witness are not really steps in order but rather an interwoven spiritual rhythm that sustains queer life. Each is a transgression: refuge defies abandonment, presence defies erasure, witness defies obedience. Together they crack open our imagination and show that holiness, at its core, is about possibility.

Queer spirituality is not always about temples, or traditional sacraments, or traditional prayers. It is not even about seeking belonging (though that would be nice). It is about a subversive transgression through refuge, presence, and witness. It is about an idea: that we are here and queer because God wants us to be. And, when we force our oppressors to reckon with it, we invite them into a deep conversation about God, grace, the Church, and our world.

This is how we survive – and more than survive, how we transform. When we practice these things, we become the very body of hope the world doesn’t know it needs. We show that queerness is what we need, and that every time we dare to live queerly, the world becomes more spacious, more merciful, more alive.

And the good news is, we don’t have to wait for harmony, justice, and peace to arrive – We can create them, here and now, in the midst of the wilderness.

Ish Ruiz, Director of the CLGS Catholic Roundtable