They'll Know We are Christians By our Love | Elisabeth Doty '25
The year did not go as I had planned when I applied for the Perkins Fellows in April of last year, but I feel no less strongly that I have learned a great deal from my peers and mentors about what it means to be Christian in the modern world.
Here are a few of these lessons:
1) Covenants are important. To be honest, I did not live up to my expectations for this year or the covenant set out for me. While I continued to perform service for other organizations through my service fraternity and struggled to build momentum after returning from my semester off, I worked with Bread and Roses far less than I would have liked. At the same time, I have learned that when I fall short of the expectations of myself or others, the best thing I can do is to make a new covenant. With God’s abundant grace, I have the chance to try again.
2) Christian is not a bad word. Uncommon in my secular school community and unpopular among my friends who conflated Christian with conservative, I felt uncomfortable publicly embracing my faith. Even growing up in a progressive church community, I felt the need to say, “I am Christian, but I’m not...,” to signal to those around me that I did not believe in the fire and brimstone God of Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) fame. Learning from my fellow Perkins Fellows, joining them at worship nights, and attending the Christian Community Development Association conference in Cincinnati, I feel more confident and comfortable in a public profession of faith knowing that there is a community that readily puts Jesus and justice in the same sentence.
3) There is space for me in Christian community. When I came out at the beginning of the fall, I was terrified of losing an outlet for two of the most important things to me: faith and the pursuit of justice. A lifetime of observing a WBC-fire and brimstone Christianity from afar takes its toll and can easily make a queer person question their place in it all. However, just as I have been embracing my Christianity publicly, I have been positively surprised at how Christians receive my transness. Yes, my evangelical aunt has a hard time ‘understanding it’ and CCDA seemed uncomfortable at best with my queer presence, but I have successfully created space for myself in those places and been embraced by so many others at Theological Horizons and beyond. I have the unique and wonderful opportunity to create space for myself that other trans Christians who share my former doubts will be able to occupy after me.
These lessons on covenant and identity as a trans Christian propel me on my pursuit of faith and calling. On so many days and in so many ways over the last year, I have felt the love of God and His people. As my favorite hymn says, “they shall know that we are Christians by our love.”
May all know that I am a Christian by how I love.