If the number of paintings, children’s books, and cartoon films about the story of Daniel in the lions’ den is anything to go by, then this Old Testament story of the righteous Daniel, saved from a violent death and vindicated, speaks to the imagination and is widely known. This is true for Western contexts where the story has a rich reception history, but also for contemporary African contexts, at least for the Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees participating in our project.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, participants in the life story interviews came up with a range of Bible stories, which they were often able to narrate with quite some detail and to connect to their own life experiences. Both Tigan and Julius named Daniel in the lions’ den as their favourite story in the Bible (Stories 2 and 10). Working with this story in the second part of the project, which focused on contextual and creative Bible study, turned out to be a rich and stimulating process.

The present chapter examines how this ancient biblical story provided a rich interface, or a collective ‘reflective surface’, with the life experiences of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees. Many of the specific narrative elements of the Daniel story resonated with participants’ experiences of vulnerability, struggle, and hope. In particular the story proved to map closely on to one of the most tragic socio-political events in their lifetime: the passing of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in their home country, Uganda, which forced many of them to leave for Kenya. The character with whom they readily identified was Daniel. The lions’ den was variously linked to the situation back home in Uganda, but also to the perilous state of affairs as refugees in Kenya. The character of God in the biblical story inspired participants’ faith that God would come to their rescue, too, as he did to Daniel. What follows in this chapter is an account of the process of inter-reading and dramatising Daniel in the lions’ den vis-à-vis participants’ lives, and of the new sacred and queer story that was engendered as a result. Thematically speaking, this chapter reconstructs the hermeneutics of LGBTQ+ liberation that emerged from this process.