The Church Taught Me to Be Holy, Then Hated My Flesh on Mosher Mag

Devotion as damage, shame as scripture, survival as sacred.

They told me God is always watching — and so I learned to sin in silence.

They said the body was a temple, but only if it was clean. Obedient. Still. And mine was a cathedral of noise. My body was not quiet. It begged and bled and burned.

Growing up queer inside the womb of religion is like being asked to kneel while on fire. You learn to hold your breath inside stained glass. You learn to confess things that were never sins. You learn the choreography of self-loathing before you ever learn to love.

The Church taught me how to pray, but not how to live with the hunger. So, I fasted. I punished. I folded myself into pew-shaped silence. I watched girls cry at the altar, mascara streaks like sacrament. We didn’t want salvation. We wanted to be held.

And every time I looked at my own body — too soft, too much, too queer — I saw something unsanctified. Something that didn’t belong in the light.

So, I covered it in modesty and shame. I wore long sleeves in summer. I flinched when boys looked and cried when girls didn’t. I memorised the rules and still couldn’t get clean.

They said flesh is sinful. They forgot that flesh is alive.

Purity is a wound that heals ugly. And when it scars, it tells you it’s your fault for bleeding.

But there’s a different kind of holy.

One they didn’t tell us about.

The kind that lives in queer desire.

In pierced skin and sweaty palms and lipstick on the wrong mouth.

The kind that prays with its hips. That sings when it comes.

That sanctifies shame by refusing to feel it anymore.

I found my own gospel in bathrooms and bedrooms, in clubs where the music was louder than the voice of God in my head. I met angels with chest binders and demons in crop tops.

And they saved me.

Because holiness, real holiness, doesn’t hate your flesh.

It adorns it. It celebrates it. It kisses the bruises, tattoos the scars, loves the mess.

If God made me—If I’m made in that image—Then maybe God is too.

Maybe God is tatted and tired.

Maybe God cried on their bedroom floor at 2am and lit a candle anyway. Maybe God moans when they cum and still calls it divine.

Maybe God doesn’t want your apology.

I’m not here to preach. I’m just here to say: I am holy. And I still fuck.

And I’m done apologising for both. For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com