A Christian can believe that sexual intimacy belongs in the marriage of one man and one woman and still refuse to treat any gay, lesbian or transgender person as worth less to God. Holding both is possible. It becomes very hard when the church runs on culture-war reflexes, which sort everyone into two camps and turn every conversation into a contest. Cammy Hodge, who has stood in a hostile public meeting and sat in church pews carrying the attractions the preacher was condemning, puts the goal in six words: “we can disagree, but still live in love.”
That sentence is easy to say and hard to live. Hodge’s path to it, from a city council fight to her own testimony to the order of the gospel, shows what living it would demand.
The script the church is handed
Before asking how the church should speak, name the script it is given. In her conversation with Hodge, Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, described the common assumption that “there’s only two boxes for people.” She spelled them out: “You’re either conservative bigots or you’re liberal free thinkers pro justice.” The sorting cuts both ways. Each side carries a ready-made story that the other cannot think critically, and the story arrives before anyone opens their mouth.
Hodge described what the label does to a person trying to speak. “You’re branding me in a wrong way, and now I have to fight that,” she said. Once that happens, “we’re no longer talking about the issue.” The energy that could go into the actual question goes into defending your character.
Christians can run the same script. When a church treats every gay or transgender person as an opponent in a political fight, it is doing to them exactly what Hodge objects to when it is done to her.
A meeting that changed her
Hodge lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. She attended a public council meeting about House Bill 2, the state law that, in her account, overrode a Charlotte ordinance on bathroom access for transgender people. She supported the law with a reservation. She wanted one provision amended because it pushed discrimination claims out of state courts, making ordinary people’s complaints harder and costlier to bring. She also floated a compromise: “Why can’t we have both bathrooms? Why can’t there be a choice?”
Her policy views are her own. Christians who share her convictions about sex and gender can reach different conclusions about bathroom law, and the point of her story lies elsewhere. According to Hodge, the first speaker at the meeting could not finish his opening sentence before being interrupted, and security guards eventually warned they would start removing people. She named the worst thing she saw as “the hatred from both sides, quite frankly.” Her conclusion was blunt: “we will never get to a place of healing in society if you can’t listen to somebody else’s opinion without being offended or confrontational.”
She left with her convictions intact and her opponents still human. The thing she decided to fight was the hatred itself, wherever it came from. That meeting, she said, made her resolve to speak more, because “there’s a need for a balanced Christian view.”
When the language of civil rights enters the room
Hodge’s sharpest point reaches into a specific history. She objected to how quickly words like discrimination get attached to anyone holding traditional views, arguing “we’re not using words in the right context.” Then she drew a contrast. Supporters of the law, she said, were not proposing that transgender people be treated the way African Americans were treated: shut out of schools, given inferior ones, living under threat of being beaten or lynched for speaking. “We’re just saying use the bathroom of your sex.”
That contrast carries particular weight in Black churches. Jude 3 honors the Black church as a guardian of historic Christian faith and a witness for justice at the same time. In many congregations, the same pews hold a traditional sexual ethic and a living memory of segregation, and the vocabulary of discrimination is part of that memory. When the word is used, it calls up schools, lunch counters and lynching. Hodge’s argument depends on that: if every disagreement is described in the language of Jim Crow, the language thins out and the history it names gets flattened.
Black Christians do not respond to her comparison with one voice, and nothing in her argument requires them to. Some will hear it as a needed correction about proportion. Others, holding the same convictions about marriage, will think it moves too fast past the real mistreatment transgender people describe. The comparison shows that the two situations differ. It does not show that transgender people face no harm. Jude 3 recognizes that some people feel real, painful distress about their gender, that this distress is not sin, and that the church has too often met it with slogans instead of compassion. Heard well, Hodge’s point is a call for accurate words, and accurate words have to include other people’s pain.
What her own story adds
When Fields asked about her testimony, Hodge said that years earlier she had a brief relationship with another woman, and that even after she was saved she struggled with those attractions. She described a process rather than a switch: over time, “the Lord really showed me who I was and showed me grace in that area.”
That history shapes how she hears preaching. “I believe also that in some ways the church dealt wrongly with this issue,” she said. She described sitting in a service while someone spoke about same-sex attraction in a way that felt demeaning. Inside, she was thinking that this was who she was and that she could not help it. What reached her from the pulpit sounded like a demand to deny herself and a verdict that something was wrong with her.
She draws a reason for the fierce resistance many LGBT people show toward Christian teaching: “it’s an issue that deals with who they are at the core.” People are defending their sense of self, and they hear careless speech as an attack on it.
The practical implication for anyone who teaches is direct. A pastor preaching on sexuality should assume that someone in the room carries these attractions and may never have chosen them. That changes the sentences. Attraction can be described as a struggle a faithful person may live with for years. The ethic can be stated without implying that the listener is uniquely broken. And the preacher can say out loud, in the same sermon, that the person’s worth before God is not in question.
Reading “fearfully and wonderfully made”
Fields raised an argument she had heard from two people who described themselves as queer and Christian: we are fearfully and wonderfully made, so nothing about us needs to change. The phrase comes from Psalm 139:14: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.”
Psalm 139 is a prayer of praise in which the psalmist marvels that God knew and formed him before birth. Hodge affirmed it fully. She pictured God shaping a person from clay with patient care and said, “God took the time to make you the way he wanted to make you.”
She and Fields read the psalm alongside Scripture’s wider account of human nature. Fields pointed to Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” The Bible that celebrates God’s careful making also describes a nature bent by sin. In Hodge’s words, “sin comes in and starts to distort that.” Being made by God and needing restoration are both true at once.
Fields kept this from becoming a way to single out one group. Everyone, she said, carries inclinations they wrestle with, whether toward lying or stealing or something else. Paul states the same level ground in Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 1, which Fields cited, belongs to an argument that runs through chapters 2 and 3 and leaves no kind of sinner standing above another.
Hodge then added the line that keeps the argument from turning cruel. “But our value is in God,” she said. People devalue one another, whether the label is LGBT or a criminal record, but that loss happens “maybe to man, but not to God.” No one’s worth is on the table in this debate.
The strongest objections
Fields took up another argument from the same video: since only a few verses address same-sex relationships, readers should set them aside and follow the Bible’s larger themes. Those who make this case argue that the few prohibitions address practices unlike committed modern partnerships, and that Scripture’s themes of love and justice should govern. Fields called the reasoning flawed. Many wrongs get little explicit attention in Scripture, she observed, yet no one concludes they are acceptable. In her view, how often a subject appears does not measure how much it matters, and the passages should be read within the Bible’s story of creation, sin and redemption rather than set against it.
The same goes for the claim that David and Jonathan were lovers, which affirming readers base on the intensity of their bond. Fields reads it differently. She notes that David’s marriage to Michal was given as a reward for victory, so his deeper love for Jonathan needs no romantic explanation. Her reading also recovers something the church tends to neglect: committed friendship is a real and honored form of love in Scripture.
The hardest objection is about the church’s conduct. Many LGBT people have heard churches claim to love them while treating them with contempt, and to them “disagree in love” can sound like a slogan that lets Christians keep their convictions and skip the cost. Hodge concedes the failure. She also names a harm from the wider culture. In her campus ministry work, she sees young people trying to understand themselves, and “society automatically labels you as gay” the moment any same-sex attraction appears, before they have time to sort out what they are experiencing.
The phrase proves nothing by itself. Christians who hold the historic ethic show whether it is true by listening without attacking, admitting the church’s failures and refusing to let anyone feel worthless. Hodge’s credibility comes from doing that work.
Love that comes first
Asked what she wanted to leave with listeners, Hodge went to the order of the gospel. She said she believes God loves everybody, naming transgender people, gay people, people in prison and liars in one breath. Then: “God is not asking you to fix you.”
In her telling, God asks people to receive his love and to receive Jesus, and transformation follows through his Spirit. Romans 5:8 sets the same order: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God’s love arrives before anyone cleans themselves up.
That order guards against two errors. It keeps the church from making repair a condition of welcome. It also keeps the church from promising what it cannot. Hodge’s story includes years of struggle, and change in the Christian life is the Spirit’s work on his timeline. The gospel promises that no one is beyond God’s love and no one faces the struggle alone.
Quick answers
Is Hodge’s support for House Bill 2 a Jude 3 position? No. It is her civic view. Christians who share her convictions about sex and gender can disagree about how the law should handle bathrooms and discrimination claims.
Can someone hold the historic sexual ethic and still say the church got this wrong? Yes. Hodge does exactly that, saying the church has dealt wrongly with the issue in ways that left people feeling something was wrong with who they are.
Did Hodge’s attractions simply go away? She does not say so. She describes struggling after she was saved and God showing her grace over time. Her story offers no promise that anyone’s attractions will change.
Does God’s love depend on a person changing first? In Hodge’s reading of the gospel, no. God asks people to receive his love and his Son, and change follows from that.
The real dividing line in this conversation runs between people who let the culture war decide how they treat others and people who let the gospel decide. Hodge walked out of a room filled with hatred from every direction convinced that conviction and refusal to hate belong in the same person. A church that wants to be heard on sexuality will have to show that the one who tells the truth is also the one who treats the listener as someone God made with care.