Although I am agnostic, I was raised in Catholicism at St. Paul the Apostle Parish in the beautiful state of Maine. My parents consider themselves “cafeteria Catholics”—embracing Jesus’s charity while rejecting the church’s conservatism. The narrative of our parish, however, was anything but inclusive; one priest, for instance, shared transphobic influencer Michael Knowles’s videos on his personal Facebook page. Within this conflicted environment, authentic queer stories were invisible—and so it took me until my junior year of high school to realize I was queer and until college to come out as nonbinary.
The church’s suppression of my queerness did not end when I came to Georgetown. I felt my identity being erased by Georgetown’s binarily gendered housing system, facilities, and even mission statement—“men and women for others.” My experience was contextualized by the university’s long history of oppressing queer students. “There is an emerging view that gender identity is sort of something you play with. I think that is quite a different view than the Catholic view of identity and of human sexuality,” former vice president of student affairs Todd Olson said in a 2013 interview with the Voice. “The fact is, we are a Catholic and Jesuit university. […] We do not support gender-neutral living arrangements in university housing because of our mission.”
As my undergraduate life commenced, with Olson having only left the university several months prior, I feared that exploring my nonbinary identity and self-expression would not be celebrated or welcomed. And I continued to internalize the narrative that my queerness contradicts Catholicism—that my queerness contradicts Jesus’s message, the central pillar of the Catholic faith.
However, my eyes were opened to an alternate perspective on Jesus’s teachings—and the radical potential of Catholicism—through an unexpected source: music. I initially thought the song “Jesus was a drag queen,” by Melody Walker and Mercy Bell, was satire. In a non-exhaustive list, the artists sing that Jesus was a “drag queen,” “trans kid,” “feminist,” and “radical.” These are far from the typical descriptions that come to mind when I think about Jesus’s life and story.
But these lyrics prompted me to reflect critically on their real basis in scripture, including one lyric in which Jesus was “hanging out with whores and queers.” In the fourth chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus speaks with a Samaritan woman who admits to having had five husbands, and—rejecting the overwhelming stigmatization of her faith, gender, and multiple marriages—Jesus passes no words of judgment. Instead, he welcomes and accepts her as a disciple. This story of Jesus “hanging out with whores,” as Walker and Bell put it, revealed to me the hypocrisy in Olson’s statement asserting my genderqueerness as antithetical to Catholic beliefs. Jesus, in scripture, welcomed all into his community without making judgments of individual identities. In his uncompromising rejection of the salient stigmas of his time, Jesus was a radical figure of compassionate and open-minded acceptance.
Jesus’s radicalism goes beyond universal inclusivity. It is also about social justice, activism, and progress. “Walking In The Snow” is a song by the activist rap duo Run the Jewels (RTJ). Released in 2020 during the George Floyd protests, the rap is a commentary on police brutality and the “enslavement” of all but those at the top of society, and, like “Jesus was a drag queen,” its references to Christianity are supported by scripture.
Calling out the deep flaws embedded in the U.S. justice system, RTJ raps, “Pseudo-Christians, y’all indifferent, kids in prisons ain’t a sin? If even one scrap of what Jesus taught connected, you’d feel different.” Later in the rap, RTJ adds, “Never forgettin’ the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state.” Indeed, Jesus always identified with the oppressed. He was a refugee as a child (Matthew 2:13-18), and he was put to death as a criminal in his adulthood (Luke 23:32-43). He told his followers to feed, clothe, house, and welcome the most marginalized in society, saying, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:31-46). In essence, Jesus’s message is one of social justice, a call to dismantle prejudice and guarantee the human dignity of all.
Over the past year, I have become hopeful that Georgetown’s leadership may come to recognize Jesus’s radical call to action. A university spokesperson recently told Fox News that Georgetown is “committed to creating an inclusive, safe, and welcoming campus for all members of [its] community across all gender and sexual identities.” Partnered with the university’s student-inspired implementation of gender-inclusive housing, this statement of acceptance demonstrates meaningful progress toward actualizing Jesus’s message of universal inclusivity.
Truly radical progress, however, is not defined on an issue-by-issue basis—progress is only radical if it serves all marginalized experiences, individuals, and communities, leaving none behind. To this end, Georgetown has countless crucial action items. Georgetown must conscientiously dedicate itself to a ceasefire in Gaza and the liberation of the Palestinian people, divesting from corporations funding genocide and protecting students from persecution and political suppression. It must end legacy admissions and welcome students from marginalized backgrounds with equality and respect. It must guarantee reproductive healthcare, as well as gender-affirming care, for all students. This list goes on, but its central tenet is the creation of an empowering campus for students from all backgrounds and a community that both preaches and practices peace and compassion for all.
Georgetown is not only Catholic—it is Jesuit, espousing its commitment to cura personalis, to genuinely caring for the whole person. I believe in Georgetown’s potential to actualize Jesus’s message of universal inclusivity and social justice. As numerous student advocacy movements have thrived over the past year at Georgetown, I have found communities of peers that make explicit the connection between our university’s Jesuit values and substantive progress. And, our administrators have demonstrated, at times, a willingness to listen to our calls for change. In scripture, Jesus was far ahead of his time. We, Georgetown, must stand for our values and strive to be ahead of our own time, becoming brave disciples, regardless of faith, of radically compassionate progress.
