‘It was necessary to become activists’: LGBTQ-affirming Iowa religious groups find church in quiet rooms, loud rallies

Sunday services of the Ames Friends Meeting are held at their meetinghouse on S Maple Avenue, marked by a sign in the front yard declaring “All are welcome.”

I visited on a sunny spring morning. Beams of sunlight seemed to make the houseplants against the walls glow. Occasional birdsong seeped through a barely open window. Someone had arranged sturdy but simple wooden chairs, the kind often found in public meeting spaces, in a broad oval on the stain-resistant utilitarian carpet. Many of the chairs remained empty. The dozen congregants present were sitting in peaceful silence.

The simplicity of the space and service was far removed from the religious services that I was accustomed to. I grew up Catholic, though I’ve since left the church. Our spaces were ostentatious. Our services were complex rituals. But I’d come here looking for something that was never on offer at my family’s church: queer acceptance. 

The Ames Friends Meeting is a branch of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. They self-describe as conservative, which members explained means they maintain traditional Quaker worship practices. It does not mean they adhere to conservative political values. 

As part of a traditional Quaker service, we began Sunday morning with 45 minutes of silence. During this worship time, Quakers seek spiritual openness and remain alert to any clarity or truth that might come to them. 

Members might feel prompted by the spirit to break the silence and vocalize a thought. However, speaking does not invite conversation. After a member speaks, the room falls back into silence. 

I did not speak during the 45 minutes, though a few people did. About halfway through the silence, one member, Deb Fink, raised her voice. She spoke about injustice and our current political climate. She mused on agency and our roles as individuals or communities. Eventually, she asked the room, “What does it take to live out our belief in equality radically and counterculturally?” 

It was a question I had visited the Ames Friends Meeting to answer.

For many LGBTQ+ Iowans, Christian religious spaces have been places of hurt and rejection. In Iowa, Christian rejection of LGBTQ+ identities hit a new low when Gov. Kim Reynolds signed SF 418. The bill removed “gender identity” from the Iowa Civil Rights Act and leaves transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming Iowans vulnerable to discrimination. 

I visited the Quaker congregation in Ames on a quest to find Christian spaces that offered solutions and healing. Christian rejection of queer identities often makes life harder for already marginalized groups. However, even in conservative Iowa it is possible to find Christian communities that recognize the damage the faith can do when weaponized against the most vulnerable, that seek to repair injustices, and that stand in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ struggle for justice.

At Faith United Church of Christ (Faith UCC) in Iowa City, Rev. Ryan Downing proudly showed me through their building. In the sanctuary, a simple pulpit stood front and center. A pulpit scarf displayed a quilted dove carrying an olive branch over a field of rainbow stripes, symbolizing the promises of God. On one wall, someone had taped construction paper with Matthew 24:50 handwritten in cursive.

“Truly, I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” it read.

On our way to his office, Rev. Downing stopped to point out the church’s Open and Affirming Covenant. Printed on simple printer paper with a rainbow background, it’s a promise to affirm LGBTQ+ identities and not discriminate against groups based on sexuality, gender, age, nationality or economic condition. The Covenant is dated May 31, 1992.

Despite the publicly displayed dedication to equity and inclusion, Rev. Downing recognizes the need for further work. “What we passed in 1992 was the opening of a door through which we will just keep going over and over again,” he said. “Because Open and Affirming is something that you live into.” 

Good allyship must move beyond words in some way, and LGBTQ+ affirming churches have to figure out how that works for them. For many, like the Ames Friends Meeting and the Unitarian Universalist Society of Iowa City (UUSIC), one answer is participation in Pride events. 

Some, such as St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Ames and UUSIC, find it necessary to invest in LGBTQ+ inclusion education programs. These programs support the growth and continued education of their congregants and help ensure that LGBTQ+ members are seen and their needs recognized. 

Other churches offer their physical building as a meeting place for queer organizations and events. Faith UCC of Iowa City proudly hosts rehearsals for The Quire of Eastern Iowa, a chorus for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender singers.

However, living out faith practices with equality in mind also requires direct political action. Pastors of Lutheran, Unitarian Universalist and Faith United Church of Christ churches joined with members of their congregations in the recent historic protests against SF 418. Rev. Paris White of Faith United Church of Christ in Muscatine held a vigil in rural Muscatine for the loss of civil rights for transgender people. 

At Faith UCC of Iowa City, Rev. Downing introduced me to the church’s administrative assistant, Ulrike Carlson. Carlson is a self-described atheist. Rev. Downing referred to her fondly as a “friend of the church.” 

Carlson isn’t an official member of the church or even a believer, but it is not strict adherence to religious dogma that drives Rev. Downing’s ministry. Rather, like many of the churches I visited, Faith UCC foregrounds community and inclusion above all else.

Carlson, who has two LGBTQ+ identifying children, was active at the protests against SF 418. Her family are also plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal against SF 496, a “don’t say gay” and book banning bill passed in the 2022-23 Iowa legislative session. 

Carlson said of her recent experiences, “It was necessary to become activists.” 

On the subject of rallies and protests, Rev. Downing said, “It’s another way of doing church. It’s another way of being in community with people and sharing, in that moment, your rage or your joy.”

Ulrike added, “It’s a signal, not just of hope but of support [that says], ‘we are standing with you.’”

The Unitarian Universalist Society’s driveway in Coralville is flanked by solar panels. A Black Lives Matter flag and a Progressive Pride flag fly on either side of their entry sign. The outside is beautifully landscaped. When I arrived, volunteers were gardening in raised flower beds set in a rock garden. Eight tall metal art pieces are installed around the garden, each bearing one of the eight Unitarian Universalist principles. The first piece to catch my eye read “Worth and Dignity of All People” above a simplistic, silhouetted figure that seemed to leap for joy. 

Rev. Diana Smith greeted me inside a foyer and introduced me to Bridget Laflin, a ministerial intern at UUSIC. Just beyond the entry, a sanctuary and a fellowship hall were positioned on either side of a room. Under a vaulted ceiling, their interior glass walls sparkled in the sunlight of windows that spanned the height of the building. Light spilled abundantly into the worship space. 

Unitarian Universalism was formed from Christian roots, but today the church has no formal creed. Belief in God or some god or no god is left up to individuals. Unitarian Universalists are united by shared beliefs in justice and a dedication to centering love.

“It is my call, it is all of our call, to make this world a place where everyone can survive and thrive,” Rev. Smith said as we sat in her office. It was a small, cozy room decorated with fabrics and warm colors. “We keep going and we keep going, because this,” she referred to the church’s mission for equality, “is too important not to, and that’s part of what having love at the center means.”

Rev. Smith was not the first pastor to talk to me about centering love. But, as many LGBTQ+ folks know, many Christian denominations that attack queer identities also claim to be doing so out of compassion. As the saying goes, “There’s no hate like Christian love.”

“How do we parse the difference between that kind of love, and the kind of love you two are talking about?” I asked.

Rev. Smith was slow and contemplative with her response. “When we talk about love, I think we need to notice where that love is calling us. Is it calling us to a place of more inclusion? More equity? Is it calling us to a place where—” 

Rev. Smith paused and sighed. Many of us know what love is intuitively, but when asked to define it or address why sometimes people can do so much harm in its name, things get tricky. 

“If you look at our [Unitarian Universalist] values, love is in the middle, and love, for us, is calling us to those values,” Rev. Laflin offered. “To justice, to equity, to transformation, to generosity. Love is at the center and that’s where we come from, but it has to lead to those values for it to be what we would consider love.”

Rev. Smith picked up where her colleague left off. “There’s a feeling of love, but there’s that question of where is love pointing us. What is the action here?”

Unitarian Universalism, like the Quakers, like Faith United Church of Christ, like the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (the umbrella St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church falls under), isn’t new to LGBTQ+ inclusion. These denominations have been affirming in some form since, at the latest, the ’90s. For some, histories of queer inclusion stretch back to the mid-1900s. Less regulated forms of inclusion are likely even older. 

Many of these acts of inclusion were radical for their time. In the ’70s, the Gay People’s Union and the Lesbian Alliance hosted dances at the Unitarian Universalist Society’s building. When Iowa recognized the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, UUSIC helped organize the Love Bus, a series of chartered bus trips that brought gay and lesbian couples north from Missouri to marry legally in Iowa between 2009 and 2015. Faith UCC of Iowa City participated in performing the destination weddings. 

Members of the Ames Friends Meeting told me that the Live Oak Friends Meeting in Houston, Texas performed a gay marriage in 1994, and Rev. Meredith Garmon of the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines said Unitarian Universalists have been performing same-sex union ceremonies since the ’50s — long before any U.S. state legally recognized such unions.

In some ways, congregations like these have been answering the question Deb Fink posed in the Ames Friends Meeting for decades. How do congregations live out a belief in equality radically and counterculturally? First, they allow people to be themselves. And then, they do everything they can for people in their community. They do it out of love. They do it even when it’s hard or scary or hopeless.

“It’s about really doing the work and not being afraid,” said Rev. Smith. “Because love calls us to really big stuff.”  

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Achilles Fergus Seastrom is a transgender writer and artist living in Ames. Find his nature and culture podcast Not All That Human on Spotify. This article was originally published in Little Village’s June 2025 issue.