Today is National Coming Out Day, and it’s no reason to celebrate this year. Gay teens are dying, and it would have been better by far if they could not be out until they were older and a little better to defend themselves or get away from the hostility of their teen peers or hateful parents.

The suicides of several gay youth in the last several weeks, because of relentless bullying they experience, causes me dismay and deep sadness.

It never seems to end. Fifteen years ago Leroy Aarons published his book Prayers for Bobby about a gay teen —harassed by his own fundamentalist mother about his sinfulness until he jumped off a freeway overpass to his death.

A few years ago, in the film The Bible Tells Me So, which traces the stories of five families trying to cope with the coming out of a gay child, one mother must also cope with the fact that her lack of acceptance of her daughter led to her daughter’s suicide.

If you’re really young and you know you are a sexual minority, where can you hide from the evil, the physical abuse, the taunting and bullying? When public schools have become such dangerous places, where can you run to? Is the church a refuge, where a lesbian or gay teen can feel safe? Not yet.

In the Washington Post recently [1] Debra Haffner, the Executive Director of the Religious Institute, reported a startling figure about gay teens:

“All of us have teens and young adults who are gay or lesbian in our congregations, many who are suffering in silence and are at risk. A study done by my colleagues at the Christian Community, found that 14% of teens in religious communities identify as something other than heterosexual. Almost nine in ten of them have not been open about their sexuality with clergy or other adult leaders in their faith communities. Almost half have not disclosed their sexual orientation to their parents. And nonheterosexual teens who regularly attend religious services were twice as likely as heterosexual teens to have seriously considered suicide. Our young people are dying because we are not speaking out for them.”The 14% figure startled me but doesn’t surprise me, since so many young people, who begin to discern they are “different” or “don’t fit in” with their peers—coming up in Christian households and churches—may be drawn to the genuine message of love and acceptance which the Christian faith has always proclaimed. Gay kids may be more likely to “stick around” seeking that love and acceptance when their heterosexual peers grow bored with the message because they don’t have the same self-doubt or self-esteem issues.Or maybe they used to. When I grew up, the Lutheran Church was so repressed that nobody talked about sex at all, period. I didn’t hear negative messages or positive ones, so I didn’t internalize any homophobia from my church. But today, it seems every evangelical pastor (not really, but it seems so) continually rants about homosexuality, and so the message of love and acceptance has qualifications, “fine print” that clearly excludes the teens who are bright enough to figure themselves out at an early age.Seth Walsh, 13, hung himself. Asher Brown shot himself in the head. Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington bridge into the Hudson. Tyler’s suicide cannot be attributed to bullying, even cyber-bullying, which figured into the tragic deaths of four other teens. Tyler was publicly shamed. But from the dark days decades back when homosexuals were considered a security risk because of the likelihood of blackmail—playing on the same dynamic of shame—bullying, intimidation, blackmail and shame have been almost one continuous spectrum from gray to black. For the love God, this must stop.The church of Jesus must stop promoting homophobia, and stop profiting by selling its own self-righteousness by being vehemently anti-gay. I am glad to say that more and more congregations are becoming open-hearted if not open-minded, realizing that while they may still have huge issues with homosexuality, it is not something for which any teenager should be driven to suicide.

However, as the welcoming movement grows in many Protestant denominations, for too many of them it is a very lame and generic welcome that now includes gay and lesbian people as long as there’s no real risk to the congregation. But there is some risk to openly saying that gay teens are welcome —not the least is the sense of “recruiting” the young to “the gay lifestyle.” The only way the church will get past that one is to work harder at educating their own members and the community around them that recruiting is a dangerous and cruel myth.

—Pastor Dan Hooper