'Our Identity is in Christ': Why This Language So Often Hurts Rather Than Heals

Jeremy Marks is a Christian spiritual director and writer who has spent more than four decades in pastoral work with LGBTQ+ Christians. Drawing on his own long journey of faith, he writes about discovering God’s true character through Jesus, and the freedom that emerges when fear gives way to love. He blogs on Substack and on his website https://postcourage.net. Jeremy has recently published If You've Seen Me, You've Seen the Father: Discovering God's True Face in Jesus.

Here he reflects on the important and often misunderstood relationship of our human and Christian identity.

I remember hearing a Sunday sermon many years ago on our identity in Christ that was deeply encouraging. It took as its starting point Paul’s words to the Colossians: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). The preacher spoke of a faith that does not rest on performance, comparison, or anxious self-measurement, but on the astonishing claim that God has chosen to dwell within ordinary human lives. We left that service lighter, freer, and more hopeful—not because we had been told who we must stop being, but because we had been reminded who we are already held by.

So it is disappointing and very damaging when this rich and life-giving language is narrowed and weaponised—reduced to a slogan that questions and undermines the faithful lives of LGBTQ+ Christians. What was once proclaimed as good news—that our lives are secured in Christ—has too often been turned into a not-very-subtle way of policing which parts of human experience may be acknowledged without suspicion.

One of the rather familiar phrases in Christian discourse about sexuality is the assertion that “our identity is in Christ, not in our sexuality.” It sounds deeply orthodox, even reassuring. Yet for many LGBTQ+ Christians, that phrase has not been a source of freedom, but of confusion, shame, and quiet despair.

I want to reflect on how it is that the language of our identity in Christ, which is central to Christian faith, has so often been used in ways that obscure rather than illuminate the Gospel.

At its heart, the phrase assumes a problem that does not actually exist: as though recognising sexuality as a significant part of one’s life somehow competes with belonging to Christ. As though acknowledging embodied desire threatens discipleship. As though naming reality is a form of disloyalty.

But this is to misunderstand both identity and Christ.

Identity in Christ is not a rival identity

In the New Testament, being “in Christ” is never presented as an alternative to being human. It is not a new label that erases all others. Rather, it names the ground of belonging that frees us from fear, condemnation, and exclusion.

Paul does not say that in Christ we cease to be embodied, gendered, relational people. He says that in Christ we are no longer defined by hostility, hierarchy, or shame. Identity in Christ is not about flattening difference, but about securing it—placing human life within the unthreatened love of God.

This matters, because much “Christian” language around sexuality treats identity as a zero-sum game. Either Christ defines you, or your sexuality does. Either you belong fully to God, or you are “leading with” something else. But this is a false dichotomy. No one lives with a single, abstract identity.

All of us live with layered identities: child or parent, spouse or single person; teacher, builder, carer; citizen of a nation, member of a culture; people shaped by history, by love, and by loss. None of these identities compete with Christ. They are simply the contexts in which discipleship is lived.

Sexuality is not unique in this respect. It is one of the ways our capacity for relationship, intimacy, and vulnerability takes shape. Yet it is treated as though it were uniquely dangerous—not because it actually is, but because it unsettles inherited expectations.

This becomes clear in how unevenly the language is applied. Straight Christians are rarely warned that acknowledging attraction, marriage, or family life might threaten their identity in Christ, even though these realities are openly named and celebrated in church life. The concern seems to arise almost exclusively when sexuality does not conform to what is assumed to be normal.

That asymmetry exposes the real issue. This is not a theological principle being applied consistently, but an anxiety being managed selectively.

Sexuality is not an ideology—it is a lived reality

Much confusion stems from treating sexuality as though it were a chosen stance or a modern invention. For LGBTQ+ people, sexuality is not a theory about the self; it is the context in which love, longing, vulnerability, and faithfulness are experienced.

To recognise that one is gay, lesbian or trans is not to “privilege identity”; it is not “special pleading”; it is to tell the truth about how one is made. It does not answer every ethical question, but it is the beginning of honesty. And honesty, in the Christian tradition, is not a threat to holiness—it is its foundation.

When Christians are told that acknowledging same-sex attraction is “making it their identity,” what is often being required is not humility but silence. A refusal to name reality. A willingness to carry one’s life as a problem God tolerates rather than as a gift God receives.

Over time, this does incalculable damage. It pushes faith away from trust and toward vigilance. It replaces prayer with self-monitoring. And it turns Jesus—whose words are spoken out to liberate—into an instrument of fear.

Why this language becomes spiritually dangerous

What makes the phrase “my identity is in Christ, not my sexuality” so damaging is not that it is false in itself, but that it subtly shifts how faithfulness is measured. A claim originally meant to liberate is quietly turned into a test of orthodoxy. Belonging to Christ becomes something that must be demonstrated by what one refuses to name about oneself.

Over time, the effect is corrosive. LGBTQ+ Christians learn that honesty is dangerous, that speaking plainly about their lives invites suspicion, and that spiritual safety lies in minimising themselves. The phrase does not invite deeper trust in Christ; it trains people in self-surveillance. Faith becomes vigilance, and prayer becomes anxiety about getting oneself sufficiently out of the way.

Worse still, the language resists challenge. To question its effects is made to sound like a challenge to Christ himself. Pain suffered along the way is reframed as resistance. Hurt sustained becomes evidence of misplaced allegiance. In this way, what began as Gospel language quietly functions as a form of spiritual gaslighting: the wound is denied, and the wounded are told the problem lies in their response.

This is why the issue cannot be reduced to semantics. Language that consistently produces fear, shame, and inner division cannot be squared with the Jesus who says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

The real issue is fear, not identity

What sits beneath these arguments is rarely theology alone. It is fear.

Fear that if we accept embodied reality, moral clarity will collapse. Fear that if Scripture does not speak plainly on every modern question, it cannot be trusted at all. Fear that love might lead us somewhere unfamiliar.

Fear prefers abstraction. It prefers slogans that sound faithful but avoids the risk of listening. It prefers ideas about identity over encounters with people.

But Jesus consistently works the other way. He does not begin with categories. He begins with persons. He does not ask people to resolve their identity before they follow him. He invites them as they are—and trust grows through relationship, not pre-emptive self-denial.

Christ does not compete with our humanity—he reveals it

Perhaps the most damaging assumption behind the “identity in Christ” (when used as little else but a slogan) is that Christ and humanity are in competition. That to be fully human is to be less Christian; that to be fully Christian is to shrink oneself.

Yet the Christian claim is exactly the opposite. In Christ, we see humanity without distortion—life lived without fear, coercion, or self-division. Christ does not replace human identity; he redeems it. He does not erase desire; he orders it toward truth and love. He does not ask people to disappear; he calls them to become real.

When faith is used to deny embodied truth, it ceases to be faithful. When discipleship produces secrecy rather than honesty, fear rather than freedom, and the self-imposition of a rigid, crushing self-discipline, something essential has been lost.

I have spent nearly forty years accompanying LGBTQ+ Christians in pastoral work. I have seen what happens when people are freed from the belief that their very existence is a theological problem. Faith does not evaporate. It deepens. Scripture becomes something to dwell in, not defend against. Prayer becomes possible again.

That fruit matters.

A different way of speaking

If we truly believe that our identity is in Christ, then we should expect that identity to make us more truthful, not less; more humane, not more abstract; more capable of love, not less embodied.

Identity in Christ is not something we assert against one another. It is something we discover as fear loosens its grip and shame gives way to trust.

The question is not whether acknowledging sexuality threatens faith. The question is whether denying reality has already done so.

And perhaps the deeper question still:

                            If Christ is not threatened by our humanity, why are we?