This post by Cassandra Clare is one of the best — most honest, personal, and insightful — things I’ve read about queerness and religion in a long time. Addressing a (young, perhaps) correspondent who asks the above question, Ms. Clare talks a bit about the negative reactions people who write to her have to the fact that her works include LGBT characters, and how they rationalize that inclusion to themselves with her apparent religiousness. Then she says…

There is more, but these strange, involved explanations for why I do what I do come, I believe, from people not able to understand that to me, there is no conflict between my morals and values and including gay and lesbian relationships (not just characters — a gay character who has no on-page relationship is a character whose romantic life is a shadow life: not normative, but hidden) in my fiction. Including gay and lesbian characters and relationships is part of my values. I would feel I was abandoning my morals if I didn’t do it even though it may mean damaging my sales.

To return to addressing the original letter: I think it sounds like you are finding yourself in a place where you are beginning to question aspects of what you have been taught. That is a good thing, and does not make you a bad Christian or person of faith. There are many Christians who have examined their faith and found that it does not in fact conflict with believing that being gay is not a sin, and that gay rights are a value. Befriend those folks, and find out where they are coming from.

There’s more. It’s all good.