Inside: Christians, have you ever stopped to really consider what the rainbow in the Bible stands for? Because if you did, you might stop dragging it out every single pride month.
We came super close to being homeless once.
I was super pregnant with my third, when we were told late that we needed to leave our current apartment, and we had applied to another and gotten denied based on income (with a rent $100 more a month than we were paying).
We had applied to a luxury apartment building housing lottery and hadn’t heard back. The landlord was checking in weekly, and we had no idea where we would go.
Then the call came. We’d been bumped up to the #2 slot! From 16!
Surely God was involved because we walked outside and saw a double rainbow. That was God promising to look out for us, right?
Right?
Ten years later, I still shake my head at how I interpreted the rainbow that day, given that the Bible story it comes from is so NOT a happy ending kind of story.
And now that I’ve left the church and have become a fierce LGBTQ ally, I implore you, dear Christians: stop trying to “take back the rainbow”.
Or at least, really stop to consider how that comes across.
Might I suggest, maybe before clicking “share” on that rainbow decorated meme that states that in no uncertain terms “marriage is only between a man and a woman because God said so”?
The Biblical Rainbow Isn’t a Fairytale. It’s the Finale to a “Righteous” Massacre.
Every freaking year on June 1st like clockwork, the “rainbow belongs to God” memes start flying.
Sigh.
And after really grasping the significance of the rainbow in the Bible, I keep thinking…is that really the flag you want to fly? Really?
The story of Noah’s Ark. It’s iconic, right?
Did you know that it’s actually a movie with freaking Hermoine Granger (Emma Watson), of all people, and Russell Crowe? How did I miss this 2014 gem when I was still deep in the church?!
We tell this story to preschoolers without a second thought, like it’s a happy little salvation story with animals walking two by two and doves and rainbows. All you need is a little glitter, and it’s a freaking fairytale.
Except it’s not.
It’s the story of God killing a heck of a lot of people – the whole earth minus one extended family, to be exact.
And then, isn’t it so kind of him, he puts a rainbow in the sky to promise he’ll never kill everyone on earth again. Not via a flood anyway.
Ummmmm, yeah.
We decorate nurseries with this stuff. Yikes…on bikes.
When I finally realized that this story I’d heard from childhood wasn’t a happy tale at all, but a tale of mass extinction by a being who decided that the lives of everyone on earth weren’t redeemable, so let’s take care of that and start over…it was jarring, to say the least.
But it’s God, you say. His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. They deserved it, because the BIble tells us so.
Whatever you think about the story of Noah’s ark, I really implore you to reconsider trying to “reclaim the rainbow” from the gays.
To everyone outside of the church, it kinda makes you look like you worship a killing machine who, thank our lucky stars, promised to never flood the entire earth and kill all living things again.
Note: that rainbow only meant he wouldn’t flood the earth again. He never said he wouldn’t wipe out everyone on earth with something else…
So yeah, maybe stop fighting the LGBTQ community for the rainbow. It’s really not a good look.
Happy Pride!
Read Next: The Jesus I Know Doesn’t Want an Extravagant Birthday Party
P.S. You might also want to watch the documentary 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted a Culture, where it talks about how the word “homosexual” was put into the Bible and wasn’t there before.