This essay builds on ideas introduced in my earlier post, Navigating Identity, Family, and Belonging: A Secular Perspective on Reconciliation with Evangelical Loved Ones. In that piece, I explored the emotional and communicative strategies LGBTQ+ people often use to stay connected to family members whose faith frameworks marginalize them. It was broad, reflective, and intentionally restrained. The ending to that article is still pending.
This piece is not the continuation of that rhetoric, but it goes further. It is philosophical but more personal. It turns inward, toward my own extended family, who lead a global Evangelical ministry that excels at connection across cultures but struggles with connection at home.
The paradox I am trying to understand is familiar to many: how can people who preach unconditional love place conditions on their own kin? What happens when you are both part of the story and excluded from what it promises?
This is not a story of bitterness. It is a story of clarity. Of curiosity. Of continuing to look closely, even when the answers are uncomfortable.
Why do I bother and keep trying? Before going any further, it is worth asking why I continue to reach out at all. Why stay in conversation with relatives who frame love through doctrine, especially when those conversations often end in silence or sorrow?
The answer is not simple. Part of it is a desire for recognition. Not agreement, but acknowledgment. I want the people who participated in my life from my birth, who contributed to shaping my experience, and shared history with me to see my life as whole, not broken. To see a person, not a problem to solve.
I also write to reclaim the narrative. To name what was once unnamed. To document the subtle erasures and open exclusions that theological language can disguise. And to witness, not only for myself, but for others living inside similar contradictions.
There is also a need to understand. How can people who are skilled communicators, effective leaders, and builders of global connection fail so profoundly at empathy when difference lives inside the family? What does that say about the structure they serve?
And finally, I keep writing because the story is not finished. I am still here. Still family. Still reaching, waiting at the center of the bridge.
After one particularly strained exchange, I reached out to my aunt and uncle. I tried to respond honestly to what had been said. I acknowledged our differences. I named that I understood the faith behind their words. I also stated clearly that I did not experience myself as broken, deceived, or in need of rescue.
I did not ask them to change. I asked to be seen. There was no response.
Over time, a pattern became hard to ignore. Love was promised, but always deferred. Silence functioned as a way to maintain boundaries without confrontation. Care was preserved rhetorically, even though it was withheld relationally.
It felt less like open conflict and more like quiet withdrawal. No argument. No resolution. Just distance, dressed as restraint.
That is what was on my mind all these years I kept questioning. Why?
But this is not just my story. There are two directions to this story. One is a personal level documenting the cognitive dissonance and contradiction of seeking relationship inside a family shaped by totalizing belief that governs nearly every aspect of their daily life, behavior and identity. The other looks outward. It examines how Evangelical ministries use empathy, storytelling, and media fluency to project love, while drawing theological lines that erase real people.
This is not just a letter to my extended family. It is a way of looking at a system from the inside. Not as an outsider, but as a relative standing just outside the frame.
Nor am I trying to dismantle their ministry. Not at all. But I am trying to hold it up against the values it claims to embody: connection, compassion, truth, and love.
The Narrative Shift
I no longer write in search of belonging. That longing has softened into something steadier: a commitment to truth. I write to tell what is true for me, even if it unsettles those who raised the platform I once stood on. I write not to win arguments or force reconciliation, but to remain honest.
I now see the part two of the story shifting from petition to perspective where silence gives way to witness, standing at the threshold with clarity.
to be continued…
Mikhail Oparin 
One Reply to “”