The Iglesia historically it has been a conservative institution on many issues, one of them being homosexuality. However, with the new times, among its members have emerged those who want to raise a revolution.
That is the goal of Bingo Allison, who was ordained as the first openly non-binary priest by the Church of England, a non-Catholic Anglican church. Since he was little, he believed that God’s way would allow him to express himself without fear of being discriminated against. Now 36 years old, he assures that the religious guidance has been vital.
A term that transformed him
His childhood was marked by a very conservative family. Because of that environment, he often heard that gay people “were a sinful thing,” he told the local newspaper ‘Liverpool Echo’.
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“My views used to be very traditional and certainly very conservative. Some might call them intolerant and there was a lot of ignorance and a lot of ‘otherness’. I didn’t take the time to learn from other people’s experiences. I was definitely in a lot of denial and some of that denial manifested itself in the denial of the identities of others.” assured.
From spiritual retreats, his perception was transformed. Remember how on a journey of religious self-discovery, one person referred to gay marriage as not a problem. That “different way of thinking” was growing within her being.
While training as a vicar -auxiliary to the bishop-, he came across the term ‘queer’which can be used to “express that sexuality and gender can be complicated, change over time, and not quite fit into one identity or another,” as a nonprofit organization Planned Parenthooh explains.
The word provoked more times of reflection; he thought of retiring from training as a vicar, even though he was in the middle of his seven-year term.
“It was much more difficult than I thought coming out of the closet and then staying in the closet. There were definitely many times before where I questioned my identity, but growing up in a more conservative form of Christianity meant it was way beyond my imagination,” she commented.
an epiphany
The definitive guide came when I was writing an essay on how God created the Earth. According to the story he gave to the aforementioned medium, one of the passages from Genesis in the Bible caught his attention.
“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them,” he read in Genesis 1:27.
His interpretation was that he was speaking “from masculinity to femininity” and not about men and women. That reflection qualified it as an epiphany.
“I was sitting there in the middle of the night when I realized that I might need to change my life. It was a deeper spiritual experience, I correctly felt that God was leading me to this new truth about myself. One of the things that has remained in my ministry ever since is that transition and coming out can and should be a spiritual experience, as well as an emotional, social, and sometimes a physical one,” he said.
Thanks to that demo. now it is defined as ‘genderqueer’ or non-binary person, that is, one who does not identify as a man or a woman. On that outing, he has had to face his own family: he is the father of three children.
“They are young. We talked about trans and queer people before I changed. I am not an alien to them. It was difficult to talk about it in my life. When you are married, they think you are gay, but things are more complex, ”he said for a podcast on the British channel ‘BBC’.
Although some people in the Church of England found his transition scandalous, they endorsed the decision and, after completing his studies, he was ordained as a priest.
Since then, fight for the inclusion of people from the LGTBI community and neurodiverse subjects. Develop assemblies and work in schools with children so that gender issues are not alien to them.
“The history of biblical interpretation is littered with the opinions of wealthy, white, straight, cisgender, non-disabled, neurotypical men, assuming that everyone who reads them thought like them. The prejudices this creates exclude anyone who does not fit in from fully engaging with the Bible,” he concluded.