The question of identity
One of the most significant questions facing SSA Christians is not primarily ethical — it is ontological. It is not only "what should I do?" but "who am I?" Contemporary culture offers a clear and confident answer: you are your sexuality. Your attractions are not something you experience; they are something you are. To deny them, or to decline to build your life around them, is therefore a kind of self-betrayal.
The Christian tradition offers a different account — one that is, we believe, truer to the complexity of human experience and more adequate to the dignity of the person. But it requires some careful unpacking, because it can be misunderstood in ways that cause real harm.
Made in the image of God
The foundational Christian claim about human identity is not located in sexuality, personality, ethnicity, vocation, or any other particular feature of a person's experience. It is located in the fact of creation. Every human being, without exception, is made in the image of God — the imago Dei. This is the bedrock of human dignity, and it is prior to everything else.
This means that an SSA Christian's fundamental identity is as a beloved image-bearer of God. Full stop. Everything else — including the experience of same-sex attraction — is a feature of their particular creaturely existence, not the core of who they are. This is not a diminishment of the reality of their attraction. It is a refusal to let any single feature of their experience carry more weight than it can bear.
Redeemed in Christ
For the Christian, this foundational identity as image-bearer is taken up and transformed by a second claim: we are people who have been redeemed in Christ. Paul's language in his letters is striking — we have been "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3), we are "in Christ," we have been adopted as children of God (Romans 8:15-17). This is not merely a legal status. It is a participatory reality that reshapes who we are and how we understand ourselves.
What this means practically is that the Christian's deepest identity is not discovered by looking inward — at attractions, inclinations, desires, or experiences — but by looking outward, to Christ. "I have been crucified with Christ," Paul writes in Galatians 2:20, "and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." The self that is defined by attractions alone is precisely the self that Paul says has been crucified. What remains — and what is being renewed — is something more fundamental.
What this does and does not mean
It is important to be clear about what this theological framework does not mean. It does not mean that same-sex attraction is unreal, trivial, or easily dismissed. The experience is genuine, it shapes a person's life in significant ways, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Pretending otherwise is neither pastorally honest nor theologically accurate.
It does not mean that SSA Christians should deny or suppress the reality of their experience. Honest acknowledgment of one's attractions — including honest grief about what one's commitments entail — is not faithlessness. It is integrity.
What it does mean is that same-sex attraction, however real and significant, does not get the final word on who a person is. It is one part of a life that is, at its centre, oriented toward and defined by its relationship to the living God. That relationship is more fundamental than any desire, any orientation, any particular feature of creaturely experience.
Living from the centre
SSA Christians who have found a degree of peace in their particular situation often describe something like this: a gradual shift from living out of their attractions — experiencing them as the core problem to be solved or the core truth to be accepted — toward living out of their identity in Christ, with their attractions held in that larger frame.
This is not a once-and-for-all achievement. It is a daily, often difficult, ongoing practice of returning to the truth about who you are. But it is, in the testimony of many who have walked this path, a practice that bears genuine fruit — not in the elimination of same-sex attraction, but in a growing freedom from the tyranny of being defined by it.