“It’s traumatizing to be told that you’re rejected by God,” Nichols said. She first took some time away from formal religious spaces, instead investing in her personal prayer life, journaling, making gratitude lists-even skydiving. “And that did test me.”Īfter that final intervention, Nichols decided to leave that church. “They went around in a circle and told me why my marriage was wrong, why I was going to Hell,” Nichols said, growing quieter. Four alders-those with long-term experience and standing in the church-and two long-standing members surrounded her in a room. In September 2022, a year and a half into Nichols’ time with the church, the congregation staged a third, full-on intervention for her. “I thought they were just trying to make a point, but I didn’t think it would stand in the way of my becoming a member or eventually my being able to attend.” “I think I was in denial that they were going to take it as far as they did,” Nichols said. But before she entered the church, a member at the door warned her that she couldn’t become a member if she was gay. The next intervention came when Nichols attended membership class, hoping to become an official member in the church after more than a year of devoted attendance and financial support.

But she did not bring her wife back again. Nichols brushed it off as just one person’s opinion rather than that of the church. Shortly after, she told me, one of the five church alders told her that being married to a woman was a sin and that she had to repent. She’d been there for around a year-involved with Bible study, prayer group, and services-when she brought her wife to a Sunday service. Despite her love of God, she has struggled to find a church that accepts and affirms her as a lesbian.Ībout six months before we spoke, Nichols had been attending a non-denominational church in North Haven. She described to me how being in church continues to give her a peace she cannot find anywhere else. Nichols has been religious since the age of six or seven, when she first attended Lutheran services in Hamden with a childhood friend. “They waited a year and a half to tell me I was going to Hell.”

“Four days a week I was going to church,” Holly Nichols told me in the nave of the United Church on the Green.

Life is strange vol 5 coming home