‘‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know’’: Finding a Rainbow God in Contemporary Adolescent Literature

This article explores four adolescent novels published between 1999 and 2010 specifically for the intersections of Christian faith and lesbian and gay sexual identities. Using cultural, queer, and ideological theories, the piece makes distinctions between progressive and traditional depictions of both Christianity and LGBTQ teen protagonists in Nancy Garden’s The Year They Burned the Books (1999), Laura Torres’s November Ever After (1999), Alex Sanchez’s The God Box (2007), and Mark Hardy’s Nothing Pink (2008).