Steven LaChance Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what faith really means. Not the version wrapped in rules or ritual, but the kind that grows quietly inside you. The kind you don’t always have words for, but you feel it. It shows up in how you love. In how you choose kindness. In the way you keep going even when life breaks your heart.

For me, faith started as something small and almost invisible. A whisper in the early morning when everything is still. A moment of peace right before I fall asleep. Just a quiet, sacred pull toward something bigger than me. Something that holds me. It’s not about stained glass or sermons. It’s not about being seen performing belief. It’s the soft yes I say in the dark when no one’s watching. The quiet conversation I have with something I trust, even if I can’t name it all the time.

I used to think I had to earn faith. Or prove it. Or package it in the way people expected. But I’ve learned that faith doesn’t need permission. And it doesn’t need approval. It’s not about fitting into someone else’s idea of holy. It’s about remembering that love, real love, is sacred. And it doesn’t ask for credentials.

So many of us were taught to believe that faith had to come from the outside in. That it had to be handed to us by a church or a leader or a book. But what if it’s the opposite? What if faith is something we build from the inside out? Something shaped by lived experience, by the people we choose to love, by the values we refuse to let go of?

Too often, religion tries to control what faith should look like. Who’s allowed in. Who’s left out. It can get loud with rules and noise and fear. But spirituality is quieter. It’s more honest. It’s deeply personal. It’s the way we reach for connection. The way we sit with pain and still choose love. The way we see the divine in each other’s eyes.

Growing up queer, I learned early that a lot of places that called themselves faith communities weren’t built to hold someone like me. I heard love preached from the pulpit, but I saw people punished for being who they were. I watched belief used as a weapon. I saw people shamed and exiled in the name of God. And it broke something in me. For a while, I thought that meant I had to give it all up. Walk away from faith completely.

But here’s what I know now. Real faith doesn’t exclude. It doesn’t shame. It doesn’t draw lines between who’s worthy and who’s not. It invites everyone in. It holds space for our questions, our scars, our stories. It grows with us. And it gives us the courage to love in ways that transform the world.

Faith, for me, is not about what you wear or where you sit on a Sunday. It’s about how you move through the world. It’s about how you treat the people around you. It’s how you show up for those who are hurting. Every act of compassion is a kind of prayer. Every honest conversation is a sacred moment. Every time we choose grace over judgment, that is holy.

This isn’t about converting anyone. It’s about a deeper kind of belonging. A deeper kind of listening. A deeper kind of love. Whether you find that through silence, through nature, through shared meals or sacred texts or the people who make you feel most like yourself, the point is the same. Love is the root. Humanity is the compass. And faith, real faith, is the daily practice of choosing both.

That’s the faith I’m holding close right now. The one with no gatekeepers. No gold stars. No fear. Just love in action. A soft but steady voice that says, again and again, keep going. You belong. We all do.

But I can’t talk about faith without naming what it is not. What is sweeping across this country right now, this weaponized White Christian Nationalism, is not faith. It is fear disguised as righteousness. It is control clothed in scripture. It is cruelty wrapped in the language of God. It is the system caging immigrants and people of color simply because of where they were born or the language they speak, forgetting that Jesus said to welcome the stranger and love your neighbor as yourself. It is the machine that attacks queer people and relentlessly targets trans people, using religion as a mask for hate. It is the same greed that guts food programs and housing support and medical care for those who need it most while enriching the already rich and calling it moral policy. It is the cold silence that lets pregnant women suffer in emergency rooms while doctors are forced to choose between saving lives and risking prison. That is not faith. That is power built on fear and justified by lies. That is empire, not spirit. And we need to say it out loud.

Because faith, real faith, has always stood with the vulnerable. It has always lifted the fallen and protected the wounded. It has always broken bread with outcasts and healed in places others refuse to enter. If your faith does not liberate, then it is not faith. If your faith harms the most fragile, then it is not holy. If your faith builds walls instead of tables, then it is a hollow idol. And we are allowed to reject it.

We are allowed to walk away from the voices that distort love into a weapon and call it sacred. We are allowed to reclaim the word faith and fill it with mercy and justice and truth. We are allowed to build something new. Something brave. Something beautiful. Something rooted in radical care for one another.

That is the faith I’m choosing. That is the faith I’m returning to. A faith that holds people close instead of pushing them out. A faith that demands we show up for each other, especially when it’s uncomfortable. A faith that refuses to stay silent in the face of injustice. A faith that believes love still wins.