Queering church, churching queers

Cross Currents, Spring, 1999 by Robin Hawley Gorsline

The debates about Christianity and sexuality rage everywhere today. Among many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people - those I'm calling queer - inside the church, the conventional wisdom is that the loudest voices are those which claim to speak with complete doctrinal and biblical authority in condemnation of sexual variety, and especially against the morality of homosexuality. On those occasions when the story of an individual queer within the church becomes public it is usually over the matter of same-sex unions or ordination, and the focus is often on the struggle between, on the one side, the "orthodox" claiming to uphold the Bible and the tradition, against, on the other, straight liberals (also claiming to be within the tradition) and their gay allies, each struggling to prove the other wrong.

Queers outside the church often cite these media portrayals of the church as proof that it is the most homophobic institution in our society, and as support for their view that the sooner queers get out of church, and the sooner it loses its remaining power to shape sexual morality, the better. These critics often exhibit impatience with queer Christians, sometimes going so far as to assert that remaining in the church is a sign of deep-seated internalized homophobia. Sometimes this connection between religious belief and internalized homophobia is accurate.

There is more to the story than these media-based views would suggest, however. Indeed, there are distinctively queer voices within the church, and two recent books go far in showing the creativity now energizing queers within Christianity. In the process, they also offer views of Christianity which differ in important - dare we say fundamental - respects from those who oppose a queer presence in the church, as well as those who argue for Christian tolerance of queers. Neither work is without significant limitations, but each offers important resources for queer Christians and those among their allies who are willing to entertain the possibility of a Christianity not only tolerant of the sexually different but also a Christianity changed, indeed made better and more whole, by the contributions of queers.

Kathy Rudy, an assistant professor in women's studies at Duke University, offers the more daring book. Her Sex and the Church: Gender, Homosexuality, and the Transformation of Christian Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999, 240pp., $22.00 [cloth]) offers several arresting arguments which can help the reader think carefully about several kinds of religious orthodoxy, both the Christian right-wing variety and its liberal, tolerance-based relation. The first argument, namely that for the Christian Right gender is the first organizing principle of theology, is not exactly radical, having been articulated by many feminist theologians, but it grounds the entire book. From here, Rudy describes the contemporary right's reliance on the traditional family, its resulting fervent opposition to alternative visions of family, and the deleterious effects of both. She also shows how liberal Christians, and other promoters of tolerance, fail to combat this insidiously genderized theological vision and, indeed, reiterate it themselves.

Rudy is consciously sex-positive, a position sure to earn her the enmity of the Right (and probably others). She argues that "sex is ethical when it opens God's world to others." In her view, the way to evaluate sexual acts is not whether they are based on same-sex or other-sex attraction and activity (she is very critical of genitally based sexual ethics) but rather whether they are based on hospitality and what she calls "unitivity" - i.e., how much they help us "welcome the stranger into our church and into our life with God."

Thus, unlike most Christian observers, including many queer and feminist theologians, she refuses to interpret non-monogamous queer sex practices - activities which, especially among men in pre-AIDS days, took place in bathhouses, public rest rooms, and parks, and today find expression in sex clubs and house sex parties - as merely desperate attempts at sexual gratification in a hostile world. Instead, she contends that these activities are often, although not always, essential elements in community building and that at least some queer practices of "communal sex" may be pleasing to God.

Even more daringly, she makes an explicit connection between these communitarian activities and the traditional Christian emphasis on building up the Body of Christ, contending that the church could learn much from a group of people who, because they are so often without family support, base their social and emotional existence on membership in community. In this regard, her critique of the heterosexist model of family as a privatizing, anti-communitarian institution is particularly acute.

Despite her pro-sex attitudes, however, Rudy will not please many queer Christians with her argument that identities such as "gay" or "lesbian" or "queer" - even "male" or "female" - should be cast aside. "Our primary identification is and ought to be Christian; any identification that takes precedence over our baptism is to be avoided." She bases this contention on an insight most clearly articulated by queer theorists, namely their critique of the categories "gay" and "straight" - and even "bisexual" - as natural and fixed. By siding with queer theory in this regard, she stakes out a position at odds with that argued by other queer Christians and their friends within mainline Protestantism and liberal Catholicism - namely that these categories are ordained by God. Accepting the fluidity of sexual categories and identities advanced within queer theory, Rudy argues that Christians are first and foremost called to be people of God - to eschew, following Jesus and Paul, the labels and histories which divide us - and take on, through baptism, new life in Christ, to become "new people, with a new and radically different ontology."