Reclaiming Sacred Space: Queerness, Religious Trauma, and the Right to Return
By Elise Heerde and Sam Sellers, Co-Directors, Religious Trauma and Cults (RTC)
We are writing this article because of what is happening right now in Sydney, where Divine Playhouse, a queer-led arts venue housed in a deconsecrated former church, has been forced to close its doors within a week of opening following protests and a landlord's claim that its trade is "offensive." But we are also writing it because the questions this situation raises are ones we work with every day: What does religious exclusion do to LGBTQIA+ people? Is queer reclamation of religious space and language legitimate? And why do spaces like this matter so much to the communities who build them?
We write as the Co-Directors of Religious Trauma and Cults, an Australian organisation supporting survivors of religious trauma, cults, and high-control groups, and training the practitioners who work with them. We also write as queer practitioners with our own lived experience of high-control Christian environments. We know what it is to be told, in a building that was supposed to represent unconditional love, that who we are is a problem to be solved. This article draws on both: the research evidence and the lived reality.
What religious exclusion does to LGBTQIA+ people
The psychological harm caused by anti-LGBTQIA+ religious environments is not a matter of opinion. It is one of the more consistently documented findings in the research on sexuality, religion, and mental health.
Meyer's minority stress model, the dominant framework for understanding LGBTQIA+ mental health disparities, identifies the internalisation of stigmatising messages as a core mechanism of harm (Meyer, 2003). Religious environments that teach that same-sex attraction is sinful, disordered, or demonic are among the most concentrated delivery systems for those messages, because they attach them to ultimate authority: not just "people disapprove of you" but "the creator of the universe disapproves of you."
The research bears out what this does. Sowe, Brown and Taylor (2014) found that same-sex attracted adults from religious backgrounds reported significantly higher internalised homonegativity and psychological distress than their nonreligious peers, and that this harm extended even to those who had never personally been condemned to their face. The messaging itself is the injury. Gibbs and Goldbach (2015), studying LGBT young adults, found that conflict between religious identity and sexual identity was associated with elevated suicidal ideation and attempts, and that leaving a religion because of that conflict did not simply erase the risk. The wound travels with the person. Dehlin and colleagues (2015), in one of the largest studies of sexual orientation change efforts ever conducted, found these religiously motivated interventions to be overwhelmingly ineffective and frequently harmful.
This is the population we work with. In our practices, we sit with people who learned to monitor their own desires as evidence of corruption, who prayed for years to be changed, who were offered deliverance or "healing" instead of acceptance, and who eventually faced a choice no person should face: belonging or authenticity. Marlene Winell (1993, 2011) named the resulting constellation of symptoms Religious Trauma Syndrome, and while terminology in this field continues to develop, the clinical picture she described, including chronic shame, hypervigilance, identity confusion, and grief, is one we recognise in our rooms every week. Oakley and Kinmond (2013) have documented the same dynamics under the framework of spiritual abuse.
Two things follow from this evidence base, and both matter to the current situation.
First: for many LGBTQIA+ people, churches are not neutral buildings. They are the sites where the harm happened. The architecture of worship, the liturgy, the language of blessing and damnation, these are trauma-associated stimuli in the most literal clinical sense.
Second: what a community does with those associations is a central part of recovery. Which brings us to reclamation.
Reclamation is not mockery. It is a recognised pathway of recovery.
Judith Herman's foundational work on trauma recovery (1992) describes three broad stages: establishing safety, processing and mourning what happened, and reconnection, the stage in which survivors rebuild identity, community, and meaning on their own terms. Herman observed that many survivors ultimately transform their experience into what she called a survivor mission: taking the site, the story, or the symbols of their harm and turning them toward something life-giving.
Queer reclamation of religious space, language, and ritual sits squarely within this framework. When a queer community takes a building from which people like them were excluded, or takes liturgical forms that were used to shame them, and refills those forms with celebration, art, humour, and belonging, that is not desecration. In trauma terms, it is a mastery experience: an active, embodied revision of the relationship between a survivor and the symbols of their harm. Avoidance keeps trauma frozen. Approach, on the survivor's own terms and with the survivor holding the power this time, is how associations change. This is basic to virtually every evidence-based trauma treatment.
The research on post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 2004) similarly finds that survivors who are able to construct new meaning from their experience, rather than simply suppressing it, show improved long-term outcomes. Meaning-making is not decoration. It is mechanism (Park, 2010).
And the humour matters too. The irreverence, the satire, the wink in a name like "Unholy Water Gin": these are not evidence of contempt. Dark humour and subversive play are well-documented adaptive coping strategies among trauma survivors and among communities under stress. For people who were raised in environments where doubt was forbidden and levity about sacred things was punished, the ability to laugh in the very space where laughter was once dangerous is itself a marker of recovery. We see this constantly in our clinical work, watching survivors progress in their recovery with humour.
It also matters that this recovery happens in community. LGBTQIA+ people have long built what the anthropologist Kath Weston (1991) called chosen families, and the research consistently finds that community connectedness buffers the mental health impacts of minority stress (Frost and Meyer, 2012). Queer venues are not simply hospitality businesses. They are the infrastructure of that buffering. They are where the reconnection stage of recovery physically happens. When a venue like Divine Playhouse describes its community as a congregation, it is being more clinically accurate than its critics realise: it is describing a gathering place where belonging is restored to people who lost it.
What happens when this recovery is denied
Everything we have described above assumes something that cannot be assumed: that survivors have access to spaces where reclamation is possible. It is worth being explicit about what happens when they do not, because the closure of a venue like Divine Playhouse is not a neutral event for the people we work with.
When there is no safe way to approach the symbols and sites of harm, avoidance takes over. And avoidance, in trauma terms, is not rest. It is a maintaining factor. Contemporary models of post-traumatic stress identify avoidance as one of the central mechanisms by which trauma stays live in a person's system, preventing the associations from ever being updated (Ehlers and Clark, 2000). A survivor who must organise their life around never encountering the language, ritual, or architecture of their harm has not escaped it. They are managing it, indefinitely, alone.
Alone is the operative word. When recovery spaces do not exist, or cannot be reached, survivors do the work of concealment instead, and concealment carries its own well-documented psychological cost: hypervigilance, rumination, and a corrosive split between inner life and outer presentation (Pachankis, 2007). Hatzenbuehler's (2009) work on how stigma "gets under the skin" identifies exactly these processes, isolation, concealment, and internalisation, as the pathways through which prejudice becomes psychological injury. Herman (1992) was unequivocal on this point: recovery happens in relationship, and cannot occur in isolation. Every closed door extends the isolation.
And then there is the shaming, the message, delivered publicly and with institutional endorsement, that a survivor's reclamation is mockery, their humour is hate, and their grief over what religion cost them is illegitimate. In our field this compounds what is known as disenfranchised grief: loss that the surrounding culture refuses to recognise, and therefore refuses to let a person mourn. For survivors watching this unfold, the lesson of the original harm is re-taught in public: your inner life is the offence. Many of the people in our rooms spent years being told that their doubt, their desire, and their laughter were the problem. When the public square repeats it, the shame does not need to be argued back into them. It is simply switched back on.
None of this is speculative. When institutional discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people succeeds, the mental health consequences are measurable at a population level: Hatzenbuehler and colleagues (2010) found that psychiatric disorders increased significantly among lesbian, gay, and bisexual people living in US states that passed constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, while no comparable increase occurred elsewhere. Campaigns that close doors do not just close doors. They change the mental health of everyone standing outside them. That is what is at stake when recovery is denied: not the loss of a night out, but the foreclosure of a pathway, the reinstatement of concealment, and the public rehearsal of the original wound.
The theological case: reclamation from inside the tradition
We are trauma practitioners, not theologians, but the theological argument here has a serious academic lineage, and it deserves to be represented accurately, because the claim being made against venues like Divine Playhouse is that queer use of religious form is inherently an attack on Christianity. The scholarship says otherwise.
Queer theology is an established academic field. Elizabeth Stuart's work on the sacraments argues that Christian sacramental practice is itself performative, identity-making, and resistant to fixed categories, and that queer engagement with ritual belongs inside that tradition rather than outside it. Patrick Cheng's Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (2011) presents queer theology as continuous with historic Christian thought, not a departure from it. Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology (2000) made the case that theology has always been entangled with bodies, desire, and the people it excludes, and that naming this is an act of theological honesty. Decades earlier, the Yale historian John Boswell (1980) documented that Christian attitudes to same-sex love have varied enormously across history, undermining the claim that there is one timeless Christian position from which queer people are self-evidently excluded.
A person does not need to accept every argument in this literature to accept the point that matters here: the question of whether queer people can legitimately claim ritual, sacrament, and sacred space is a live, contested, scholarly question within Christian thought itself. It is not a settled matter on which one protest group speaks for an entire faith group.
"The Christian community" does not hold one view
The breach notice served on Divine Playhouse claims its programming "insulted and mocked the sincerely held religious beliefs of millions of Christian Australians." As practitioners who work with Christians, ex-Christians, and everyone in between, we want to say clearly: there is no single Christian view on queerness, and there is no single Christian view on the reuse of former church buildings.
Whole denominations disagree with the position the protestors claim to represent. The Uniting Church in Australia, one of this country's largest denominations, has authorised its ministers to conduct same-sex marriages since 2018. The Metropolitan Community Church, founded by Rev Troy Perry in 1968, has spent more than half a century demonstrating that queer Christian worship is not a contradiction in terms. Within Catholicism, prominent voices such as Fr James Martin SJ have publicly called the church to build bridges with LGBTQIA+ people, and affirming Catholic theologians, clergy, and religious sisters exist in every generation. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were present on opening night, have performed community care and blessing services for the queer community since 1979.
Many of the people in our practice still hold faith. Some have found affirming congregations. Some are rebuilding a private spirituality on the other side of a high-control group. Some are done with religion entirely. All of them are part of the real, plural landscape of belief in this country. When a small number of organised campaigners claim to speak for "millions of Christians," they are erasing the millions of Christians who disagree with them, including queer Christians themselves.
Deconsecrated churches have a long, ordinary life after worship
The final claim embedded in the objection to Divine Playhouse is that a former church is an inherently inappropriate site for nightlife and performance. History says otherwise, plainly and internationally.
Deconsecration exists precisely so that church buildings can pass into secular use. Once a church is deconsecrated, as the Kent Street building was in the 1930s, it is, in both canon law and property law, no longer a sacred site. And the secular afterlife of church buildings is one of the most ordinary stories in Western architecture. Amsterdam's Paradiso, one of Europe's most famous music venues, has operated in a former church building since 1968. New York's Limelight, one of the most celebrated nightclubs of the 1980s and 1990s, operated inside a deconsecrated Episcopal church. Dublin's The Church is a bar and restaurant inside the former St Mary's. Across Australia, deconsecrated churches have for decades been converted into homes, restaurants, galleries, theatres, breweries, and bars, as denominations consolidate and sell property they no longer use.
Closer to the current controversy, the Tasmanian Government has funded Dark Mofo for more than a decade, a festival whose programming has repeatedly drawn on religious imagery, including inverted crosses, through successive waves of organised Christian objection, without funding being withdrawn. The precedent is clear: in Australian public life, artistic engagement with religious form, even provocative engagement, is a matter for curators and communities, not a ground for shutting venues down.
What is different about Divine Playhouse is not the reuse of a church. That is unremarkable. What is different is who is doing the reclaiming. And we think it is important to name that pattern honestly, because we recognise it from our clinical work.
When the goalposts move, the objection is to the people
Before opening, Divine Playhouse was asked to respond to concerns raised by members of the Christian community. Its organisers say they did so in good faith, making changes prior to opening, including renaming the venue itself. The venue opened. Protesters gathered on opening night. The following day, the venue was served a breach notice objecting not to any specific content but to its trade in general terms as "offensive”.
In our field there is a name for what it does to people when an institution they have dealt with in good faith turns on them: institutional betrayal (Smith and Freyd, 2014). And there is a pattern we see over and over in the stories of the survivors we support, particularly queer survivors: the demand that is met, followed by a new demand; the assurance of acceptance, followed by rejection on new grounds; the discovery that the problem was never the specific behaviour, because the problem was always you. When objections shift from the correctable to the categorical, the objection is not to what a community does. It is to the community's existence in that space.
We do not offer a legal opinion, because that is not our role. We offer a clinical and community observation: LGBTQIA+ people recognise this pattern because many of them have lived it inside religious institutions, and watching it play out in public, endorsed by protest and political commentary, re-enacts the original harm for many people well beyond one venue's walls. Research on structural stigma consistently finds that public campaigns against LGBTQIA+ communities have measurable mental health effects on those communities as a whole (Hatzenbuehler et al., 2010). The stakes of this dispute are not confined to a lease.
Why spaces like Divine Playhouse matter
Sydney, like most cities, keeps losing its queer venues. Every closure removes a piece of the infrastructure through which LGBTQIA+ people, including the survivors we work with, find chosen family, community connectedness, creative expression, and the felt experience of belonging somewhere without apology. These are not luxuries. In the research literature and in our consulting rooms, they are protective factors.
A venue that takes a building associated with exclusion and fills it with queer art, ceremony, humour, and welcome is doing something that our field would describe, without exaggeration, as therapeutic at a community scale. It says to people who were taught they could not enter: the doors are open, and this time the space is yours. The venue's founder has said publicly that the reclamation was intended for communities who have not always felt included in traditional holy spaces. That is a survivor mission, and it deserves recognition as such.
Reasonable people can hold different aesthetic and religious responses to any piece of programming. That is the ordinary condition of art in a pluralist society. But the claim that queer reclamation of a deconsecrated building is inherently offensive, illegitimate, or an attack on faith is not supported by the theology, the history, the diversity of Christian opinion, or the clinical evidence on what these spaces do for the people who need them.
We stand with the communities who build them.
If this article has moved you to act, you can sign the community petition to keep Divine Playhouse open - one small, concrete way to stand with the people this space was built for.
If this article raises anything for you, support is available. You can find practitioners experienced in religious trauma and cult recovery through the RTC Practitioner Directory. For immediate support, QLife (1800 184 527) and Lifeline (13 11 14) are available.
Elise Heerde and Sam Sellers are the Co-Directors of Religious Trauma and Cults (RTC), an Australian organisation supporting survivors of religious trauma, cults, and high-control groups, and providing professional development for the practitioners who work with them. Both write from professional expertise and lived experience of the intersection of queerness and religious trauma. www.religioustraumaandcults.com
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