Ebook: A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church

Revealing the underappreciated progressive contributions of a liberal LGBT church

Perhaps an unlikely subject for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust, and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it to engage in radical solidarity with asylum-seekers, pointing to the work of affect in radical, coalition politics.

House of Prayer for All People maps the affective dimensions of the politics of citizenship at this church. For nearly three years, David K. Seitz regularly attended services at MCCT. He paid special attention to how community and citizenship are formed in a primarily queer Christian organization, focusing on four contemporary struggles: debates on race and gender in religious leadership, activism around police–minority relations, outreach to LGBT Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Engaging in debates in cultural geography, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, A House of Prayer for All People stages innovative, reparative encounters with citizenship and religion.

Building on queer theory’s rich history of “subjectless” critique, Seitz calls for an “improper” queer citizenship—one that refuses liberal identity politics or national territory as the ethical horizon for sympathy, solidarity, rights, redistribution, or intimacy. Improper queer citizenship, he suggests, depends not only on “good politics” but also on people’s capacity for empathy, integration, and repair.


A House of Prayer for All People complicates the common narrative about the seemingly natural and insurmountable divide between LGBT people and religion. Through an examination of the Metropolitan Community Church in Toronto and its Pastor, The Rev, Brent Hawkes, Seitz elegantly engages with questions of sexual orientation, race, gender, religion as they are intertwined with social justice activism and the nature of citizenship. Drawing his narrative across local, national and transnational sites, Seitz build a nuanced and complex conceptual framing in order to ‘repair’ religion and religious spaces for queer people. In doing so he strives to open a space for more capacious (yet precarious) possibilities beyond contemporary identity politics.
— Catherine J. Nash, Brock University