“The Southern Baptist Convention (an evangelical denomination) and the United Methodist Church (a mainline denomination) continue to be the two largest Protestant denominations in the U.S.; 11% of Protestants identify with the Southern Baptist Convention and 8% identify with the United Methodist Church.”

The above data is from Pew.

Despite the kerfluffle over LGBTQ clergy and marriage last year, it’s fair to say the UMC in the U.S. is strongly pro-LGBTQ. While not all UMC congregations are fully LGBTQ affirming, most are. The ones that aren’t tend to oppose only specific things like married gay clergy. And the clear trend in the denomination is full affirmation.

The UMC is not a rounding error.

Neither is the smaller Episcopal church, which is more strongly affirming hierarchically than the UMC. And of course I could name more.

Certainly Evangelicals with their toxic homophobia and transphobia are in a majority. But liberal, affirming denominations represent significant percentages of church-going Americans. Pretending they don’t exist by lumping all Christians into the same homophobic piece of coal does them a disservice.

You know, it’s much more likely that a Christian who opposes homophobic theology will choose a different church than they will stop going to church altogether or become atheist.

We do ourselves no favors by pretending healthy alternatives don’t exist.