Growing up as the daughter of a Baptist minister, Candace Chellew-Hodge had a deep love of God and commitment to the Christian faith. She was also a lesbian, for which she encountered extensive bullying, as school - and in Church. Finding that her attraction to females meant that the God she loved did not, after all, love her, she tried to kill herself. Thankfully, she survived the attempt, and went on first, to found the online Christian magazine, "Whosoever", to study theology, and then to enter ministry. She has also written an LGBT Christian survival guide, "Bulletproof Faith".
At Religion Dispatches, she has a piece up ("God, Rid Me of God"), reflecting from her personal experience on the rash of teen suicides by American queer youth, and especially that of 19-year-old Eric James Borges. These are a result, she argues, of a "dangerous vision of God".
