“A Queer Gospel: Jesus’s Life through Rainbow Eyes”
by Kali Cawthon-Freels
Nurturing Faith Books, 2026, 240 pages

At A Glance: “Decisively Reconciled” is an honest memoir of one man’s journey to embrace both his Christian faith and his identity as a gay man without sacrificing either.

At A Glance: “A Queer Gospel” reads the life and ministry of Jesus through a queer lens, inviting readers to see themselves in Jesus and Jesus in themselves.

Overview: Sunday School teaches that everyone can see themselves in Jesus. Mainstream Christian culture has rarely lived up to that promise. Anyone outside a cishet, white, male frame has often found the door closed, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people most of all.

Kali Cawthon-Freels reads Jesus’s story differently. She traces moments in the Gospels that mirror queer experience: Jesus coming out, Jesus being outed, Jesus choosing a family the way so many queer people have had to. She writes about Jesus as God’s drag persona, about the Transfiguration as a kind of transition, about queerness as a way into his hardest teachings. She follows him through crucifixion and into a resurrection she frames as the reclaiming of a queer identity’s authority.

“A Queer Gospel” is written for queer Christians who want their faith back on their own terms, and for pastors and church leaders who want a fuller picture of who Jesus was. It asks what the Church has missed by refusing to see Jesus’s own queerness, and what opens up when it finally does.

Also by Kali Cawthon-Freels:

Reclamation: A Queer Pastor’s Guide to Finding Spiritual Growth in the Passages Used to Harm Us

Thoughts from Readers: