Reverend Don Abram (he/him) is a queer public theologian and social innovator operating at the intersections of gender, sexuality, faith, and social change. Don founded Pride in the Pews and has partnered with notable social, civic, and religious institutions to promote the holistic well-being of Black LGBTQ+ communities.
Born and raised in Chicago, Don grew up in a “hand-clappin’ and toe-tappin’” Black church called Greater New Mount Eagle Missionary Baptist Church on the South Side. Don’s family attended church every single Sunday, but at first, he hated it. He often tried to find any excuse to not go, such as not finding matching socks or the right tie to wear. However, he made a home in the church eventually. Don participated in the choir, usher board, and junior deacon board and leaned into the safe space that the Black church afforded him. There were also many intergenerational opportunities to become close with elders. They held space and cared for him in many ways, like paying for his bass guitar lessons and sending him baskets and money during college. This sort of community care left a lasting impression on him and is why the work he does today serves people in this tradition.
At age fourteen, Don was called to preach. He preached in his native Chicago but also traveled around the country because people were excited about a young man on fire for God. He loved preaching and felt as if he was in alignment and doing what he was called to do. Around the same time, he started to explore his sexuality in the crooks and crevices of his childhood church. His first queer encounter was with a fellow choir member, and although they never expressed their queerness to each other, they managed to find their way to one another. They knew that this was unfortunately something they needed to do in the shadows because it was frowned upon and shamed. For Don, exploring his sexuality in the shadows of the church that he was serving was inherently violent. Being betwixt and between, both revered and demonized, was a troubling and emotionally unmooring experience. He knew that he could not embody the truth of his calling and his queerness at the same time. If he did, then he would lose what he was taught to care most about, his ministry, and lose his community as well. While still finding himself at age fourteen, he was not willing to pay that cost.
As he matriculated through college, Don continued to explore bridging the gap between his sexuality and his faith. It was not until attending Harvard Divinity School for his graduate degree that Don began to unpack “toxic theologies,” which are theologies rooted in the dehumanization of the ones we see as other, and engage reconstructive theology that spoke to the fullness of who he was. This new theology was formed and shaped by queer theology, Black liberation theology, and a perspective of God and the Divine that centered those on the underside of power. This expansion of his theological imagination really catapulted him into spiritually-rooted work in the world.
After he graduated from Harvard, Don joined the American Voices Project. Known as the largest qualitative study ever conducted on poverty and inequality in the United States, his job was to knock on strangers’ doors and ask about their life story. The premise of the project was that valuable data exists in the stories that people tell us, and those stories shaped Don indelibly. He was forever changed by hearing the stories of the poorest Americans in the country and hearing them talk of hope, resilience, and joy in ways that create and sustain community. He appreciated the philosophy undergirding the project, which was that there is power in telling one’s story, and how it felt deeply connected to the spiritual tradition that he came from. Don recalls members of his congregation testifying before the service started and talking about their lived experience with how the Divine showed up within it. That practice moved him and he knew that he wanted to continue work that centered people and their stories, but from a faith perspective.
After concluding his year-long fellowship with the American Voices Project, Don started a position with Interfaith American (formerly known as Interfaith Youth Core, led by Eboo Patel). For six months, he did work around faith and health, faith and institutions of higher learning, and really thinking about the role of religion in shaping the public square. Not long after that, the George Floyd protests hit in 2020. Don was out in the streets demanding justice and protesting on the South and West Sides of Chicago. However, one question nagged him: where was the black church? He was passing beautiful edifices that had the lights off and parking lots closed. This troubled him because it did not seem to be in alignment with what he understood the Black church to be—a beacon of hope and liberation, a refuge, a strong tower in the midst of adversity. Even as the country was experiencing this radical racial reckoning, it seemed as if the church was absent.
As a queer son of the Black church, Don knew that even if the Black church was present, they would likely not be saying the names of his queer and trans siblings who have died at the hands of state sanctioned violence. Therefore, the question then became: how do we make sure in the next crisis, the next issue, the next point of divergence, that the church is ready to show up for queer and trans people? How do we help them get through their bias, apathy, and lethargy so that when that crisis happens, they are ready to be activated and show up? Don spoke with a former colleague from Harvard and explained that he was upset with was happening in the world, incredibly disappointed by the absence of his faith community, and how he imagined a world in which spiritually-rooted folk interested in liberation and justice would show up on behalf of queer and trans people. Deeply compelled by Don’s vision, his colleague offered him $40,000 from his family foundation to make it happen and fix those problems. After sending his colleague a paragraph pitch and receiving the funding, Pride in the Pews emerged and did so out of a broken heart, righteous rage, and believing one can actually do something about this problem and change the church’s response to it.
Pride in the Pews’ first move was a storytelling project called Can I Get a Witness that collected sixty-six Black LGBTQ+ Christians’ stories and approached them as sacred texts. Much like the American Voices Project, this project believed that these stories can teach us not only about God, but also about relating to one another. Thus, Don spent a year talking to Black trans and queer Christians about their experience in the Black church. Pride in the Pews was also able to hire qualitative researchers to deep dive into those stories and create the Can I Get a Witness curriculum. This helped churches move along a continuum of advocacy, underscoring that the goal is not simply to make affirming churches but to make affirming churches that engage in advocacy in the public square. Once that curriculum was complete, Don traveled the country himself to share it, but it was draining and unsustainable work. He was meeting many of likeminded people, but those people did not know each other to form a network. Therefore, he created a fellowship program focused on equipping Black churches to advance LGBTQ+ inclusion and coupled that programming with financial and curriculum support to carry out projects in a local congregation.
Later on, folks started to see connections between religious trauma and health, especially with suicide, depression, and HIV, but did not know what to do with the information. Don was asked to come lecture and sit on panels about the topic, but rather than center his story, he considered how to provide organizational support as a resource to health providers and practitioners who were seeing these trends. The sixty-six stories that formed their previous curriculum were now in the hands of public health professionals and they concluded that intersections between health and religious trauma were clear! For example, where someone was on their reconciliation journey determined their health and wellbeing. Knowing this, they developed a public health and religion curriculum and now are training public health departments, public healthcare practitioners, LGBTQ+ health providers and nonprofits that engage in health and wellness programming. This new curriculum teaches health professionals to adopt a radar screening for religion as it relates to the ways that they care for queer and trans people.
Pride in the Pews initially sought to help churches become more affirming so that they could engage in advocacy, but then they quickly realized that “what is said in the church does not stay in the church.” In other words, church activity informs the ways in which other institutions are in relationship with queer and trans people. The church is a hub of economic and healthcare resources for many and the same people in the pews on Sunday morning are leading the local non-profits, hospitals, providing local testing, and showing up in the local schools. Therefore, if the church is embodying problematic toxic theologies, the harmful effects will make their way into other anchor institutions. Thus, his work is not just with faith communities, it is with anchor black serving institutions as well.
Throughout his life, Don has connected the dots on how faith connects with all facets of life and community. Coming from a Baptist background, Don honors the tradition in which the Civil Rights Movement emerged as well as seminal figures like Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, Ruby Sales, and Andre Leon Talley. They changed the world, not just the church. Don believes it is a gift to be at the intersection of Black, queer, and Christian because something about it bursts movement makers, revolutionaries, and folk who are able to lift up our shared humanity in the most decisive times. His work makes it clear that this intersection must be tended and cared for because there is more to come from it and those who come out of it have so much more to offer too.
Through this vital work, Don and his Pride in the Pews team are daring to imagine a world where the next revolutionaries—the next Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, Ruby Sales—do not have to contend with structural, institutional, and theological forces that seek to obscure their humanity. They want to create that world so that their impact on the current and next generation of revolutionaries will far exceed that which came before them. Not because they are better or more worthy, but because they simply did not have to endure the question of their worthiness, reckon with systems that sought to dehumanize them, and because the capacities that would have been extended to staff off those resources could be used to dream, create, develop, and build.
(This biographical statement was written by Elizabeth Herrick from an interview with Don Abram on August 8, 2024 and was reviewed by Don Abram.)
Biography Date: September 2024
“Rev. Don Abram | Profile”, LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, accessed October 14, 2024, https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/profiles/don-abram.