‘Glitter Ashes’ Offered At Progressive Church To ‘Show Remorse … To Our LGBTQ Siblings’

An Atlanta-based progressive church is offering what it calls “glitter ashes” for Ash Wednesday this year, a ritual it says is meant to show remorse for “Christian cruelty to our LGBTQ siblings” and affirm LGBT identity, marking yet another instance of activist politics supplanting historic Christian belief in Protestant traditions.

According to The Church at Ponce and Highland’s website, congregants attending its Ash Wednesday service will be offered a choice between traditional ashes and ashes mixed with purple glitter. The latter, the church explains, are intended to symbolize regret for the Church’s historic moral teaching and to encourage LGBT individuals.

“Glitter ashes show remorse at straight Christian cruelty to our LGBTQ siblings,” the church states. “For LGBT people, they are a reminder that we have but one life, and we should shine — not hide.”

For Ash Wednesday, one progressive church is offering “glitter ashes,” which is ash mixed with purple glitter, and which “straight Christians” can don as a sign of “remorse…to our LGBTQ siblings.” pic.twitter.com/1qX7kgmB57

— Protestia (@Protestia) February 11, 2026

In Christian tradition, however, ashes serve a very different purpose. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, a penitential season ordered toward Good Friday and Easter. The ashes, applied in the shape of a cross, function as a memento mori, a reminder of human mortality, sin, and the need for repentance: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The Church at Ponce and Highland openly rejects that framework. “Christianity has gotten off track,” the website declares. “It’s time to get back to the life and teachings of Jesus.” The church describes itself as “diverse, pro-LGBTQ, member-led, inclusive,” and explicitly states that it requires no shared statement of faith. Instead, the church says it unites around “common practices,” which include encouraging doubt over defined doctrine, rejecting eternal punishment, and downplaying the salvific significance of Christ’s death.

“We emphasize Jesus’s love and how it can free us to love more (rather than only avoiding punishment),” the site reads. “Jesus’s life and teachings instead of focusing only on his death.”

The church further claims that historic Christianity was corrupted by “empires,” blaming traditional belief for colonialism, slavery, violence, and oppression. Traditional Christianity, it argues, emphasized “uniformity, power, violence, and eternal punishment,” while the church presents itself as part of an “alternate tradition” rooted in liberation, solidarity with the marginalized, and identity-based affirmation. While the church loosely associates itself with the Baptist denomination, it is ostensibly independent since it eschews any affiliation with the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, the dominant governing body of the denomination. The church was a member of the Convention until 2010— it left over the SBC’s policy of denying female ordination.

Within that framework, it makes sense then that Ash Wednesday is no longer oriented toward repentance before God but toward moral apology directed to the world. The church makes that shift explicit in its description of the service. “We will have both traditional and glitter ashes available,” the site states. “Glitter ashes show remorse at Christian cruelty to our LGBTQ siblings as well as our love and affirmation for LGBTQ people.”

Conspicuously absent from the church’s description is any reference to sin, divine judgment, or the resurrection toward which Lent is traditionally ordered. Rather than calling believers to repentance, the ritual is reframed as a symbolic acknowledgment of harm and a declaration of ideological alignment.

The result is a service that retains Christian imagery while redefining its meaning. Ashes, long a sign of penitence and mortality, are repurposed as a political statement. The language of repentance is redirected away from God and toward contemporary social causes.

By offering glitter ashes alongside traditional ones, The Church at Ponce and Highland presents two competing visions of what Ash Wednesday is meant to signify. One points toward repentance and redemption. The other toward affirmation and apology. Only one has grounding in the traditional observance the ritual was designed to mark, and in the Christian theology it was meant to serve.