I appreciate your message, and it’s an important one. My co-editor at Prism & Pen, an online LGBTQ journal, is a devout Christian. So are several of our writers who focus on social justice and racial equality. So I’m well aware Christians don’t have to be right wing, don’t have to be homophobes, don’t have to be racist.

Unfortunately, the reality in the United States right now is that most Christians, meaning members of the nation’s largest Christian denominations, are right-wing, homophobic racists.

This leaves the small minority of Christians who are different in a tough spot with a tough challenge. Often, I see them not rising to that challenge very well.

Frequently, Christians who are not right wing will simply be silent and say they need to stay out of politics. Giving most Christians do exactly the opposite and advocate for right-wing politics, pushing for hateful laws that hurt vulnerable people, silence is hard to swallow for many of us targeted by Christian hate.

And then there’s the group of liberal Christians who speak up only to deny the Christian identity of Christians who are right-wing homophobic racists.

I wrote a fairly popular article back in December about a 12-year-old boy in Tennessee who killed himself after Christian students at his school taunted him for being gay and told him he was going to hell. I explored in the article how prevalent homophobia and Christian condemnation of LGBTQ people are in local media the boy and his peers at school were exposed to every day. I pointed out that in an environment like that, bullying causing mental health crises up to and including suicide are inevitable. What happened to this boy is going to happen again. Self identified queer kids in Tennessee are being bullied by Christian peers right now, right this minute.

I got lots of positive reaction to the article, and little negative reaction. I mean, even right-wing homophobic Christians can’t come in with guns blazing when a 12 year old is dead. What I didn’t appreciate were the tons of comments I received on social media from liberal Christians assuring me that the Christians in Tennessee responsible for that toxic environment aren’t really Christians.

That’s such an unhelpful thing to say. Tennessee is the fourth most Christian state in the United States, based not just on self identification but on church attendance. The toxic air that child breathed, that eventually led to the crisis that caused him to end his life, was Christian air. This is critical to acknowledge. It’s critical we not deny it.

The boy’s classmates taunted him on explicitly Christian grounds, emulating the adults in their lives who do exactly the same thing all the time.

This is a Christian problem. It’s a problem Christians need to fight and fix.

That will not happen by denying that Christians are often racist, homophobic, right-wing bigots. More often than not. Acknowledging that fact has to be the first step to doing something to fix it.