Tag: queerness

  • Gay Ambivalence: On Gay Men and Queer Theology

    A prompt in a conference call read: What does it mean to identify as a gay man in the era of queer theology? The general answer I have for you is that it means something. There is still something in identifying as a gay man as long as sex between men is difficult to speak of in Christian theology and the church.

    First, a prior question: is this the era of queer theology? The answer might be an obvious yes or girl, please. Two introductions to queer theology have been published recently by Linn Tonstad and Chris Greenough, as have collections like Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects and Theologies and Queer Theologies: Becoming the Queer Body of Christ. In popular books, Mihee Kim-Kort has written Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith. That’s all since 2018, and of course there is earlier work, like Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Queer God (2003), the Blackwell volume edited by Gerard Loughlin (2008), and Patrick Cheng’s introduction called Radical Love (2011).[1]

    As soon as 2002, theologians were already offering genealogies of the emergence of queer theology from gay and lesbian theologies in the 1990s. Elizabeth Stuart does this in her book Gay and Lesbian Theologies, as does Robert Goss in Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus ACTed Up. Stuart traces the emergence of queer theology from Goss’s earlier book, Jesus ACTed Up, published in 1993 and from other theological projects engaging Foucault.[2]

    For Stuart, queer theology emerged from gay and lesbian theology’s failure “to respond to the experiences of those living and dying with HIV/AIDS,” too focused as they were on repeating orthodoxies rather than “dealing with the profoundest theological questions raised” by AIDS.[3] Taking its cues from queer theory, as it ought to in Stuart’s mind, “queer theology is not an identity-based theology, indeed it is an anti-identity based theology. . . . queer theory and, to a large extent, queer theology have emerged from the rubble of gay and lesbian theory/theology. The performance of lesbian and gay identity did not prove to be terribly convincing theoretically or theologically.”[4] Put crudely, gay and lesbian identity was theologically impotent, and AIDS killed it, leaving “queer” to heroically rebuild sexual theologies.

    Goss’s Queering Christ also traces the emergence of queer theology from the failures of gay theology. He parses a complicated history of how the gay theology of the 1970s and 80s “inevitably became problematic in its singular focus on gay male issues, excluding lesbian voices.”[5] Goss argues it was also exclusive of bi, transgender, Black, and brown people. Finally, AIDS drew gays into activist coalitions with lesbians, trans people, and bisexuals, leading to theological cross-pollination and queering.

    Unlike Stuart, Goss doesn’t see queer as simply being anti-identity. He writes, “Queer theologies… will not ever abandon identity and gender as categories of knowledge or liberative practice but will render them open and contestable to various meanings that promote coalition politics.” Like Stuart, Goss’s understanding of how queer theology engages identity is based on his understanding of how queer theory engages identity: “Queer theory aims not to abandon sexual and gender identity as an epistemological category but to render it more flexible, permanently open to revision, and changeable.”[6] Like Stuart, Goss narrates theological development as succession, with new theologies critiquing the life out of old ones. He prophesies, “Bisexual theologies will certainly undermine gay/lesbian and heterosexual theological discourse,” and that “we can expect [transgender theology] to undermine heteronormative and gay/lesbian normative constructions of maleness and femaleness with new interstitional gender spaces.”[7] This language of succession presumes that there is no overlap between bisexual and gay or lesbian, or between transgender and gay or lesbian.

    These readings raise some familiar and relevant questions of a genealogical nature. Is queer anti-identity (as Stuart has it), or does it render identity more flexible (as Goss says)? Does queer theology depend on the simultaneous cannibalization and rejection of gay and lesbian theologies as too backwards, too focused on identity? Or can queer theology occur alongside gay and lesbian theologies, the former reminding the latter of the contingency of identity, while the latter encourages the former to linger with particularity?

    One more point from Stuart that I find illustrative: Stuart compares how gay, lesbian, and queer theologies approach sex. She writes,

    Queer theology though it usually begins with issues of sexuality is not really ‘about’ sexuality in the way that gay and lesbian theology is about sexuality. Queer theology is actually about theology. In gay and lesbian theology sexuality interrogated theology, in queer theology, theology interrogates sexuality. . . . Queer theology denies the ‘truth’ of sexuality and hence declares that it is not stable enough to build a theology upon.[8]

    Here, gays and lesbians are sex-obsessed in a way that queers are not: not only are our desires perhaps more fixed, but we want our desires to make some sort of sense, bear some sort of truth. Our theology remains connected to our sexuality and to our sex. So gay theologians build their houses on sand, while queer theologians find more… stable ground? Stability is queer?

    Queer theology strays from sex in a way that gay and lesbian theologies do not, at least according to Stuart. Because she says that queer theology is “actually about theology,” it sounds like she sees the turn from sex and sexuality to (“actual”) theology as a good turn. For me, it is not. It is, first, an exclusion of sex and sexuality from the purview of theology. Second, this exclusion of sex reinvests in the theological disavowal of sex that is precisely the disavowal that gave rise to queerness in the church via sodomy. It is, third, an example of how histories of the relationship between gay and queer come to associate gayness with fixity and queerness as endless fluidity.

    Queerness-as-fluidity sometimes involves speaking of sexual desires as malleable, be they naturally so, changing across a lifetime, or through intentional reflection in response to how desire is shaped by histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and transphobia. Queerness-as-fluidity sometimes frames gayness as fixity. It also can involve a methodological fluidity: queer as the site for interrogating how racism, colonialism, etc. are interwoven with configurations of sex and gender, or queer as unmoored from sex and gender altogether. Ubi transgressio, queer ibi est. Where transgression is, there queer is. And often for queer theologians, Deus ibi est. Any kind of transgression is queer is Godly. Take queer sex out and it all gets conveniently flattened into one. In theological registers, where queerness-as-fluidity leaves sex behind, it can easily be confused with Christianity itself. To be a good queer is actually to be a good Christian, and vice versa.  

    I’ll try rephrasing the question again, with more specificity this time: What does it mean to be a man who has sex with men in an era in which the church and its institutions at their worst still exclude gays from their sacraments and leadership and at their best peddle a queer theology that would prefer not to talk about gay sex—what it means, what it reveals, what it doesn’t mean or reveal, what kinds of relationships it forges, what kinds of pastoral care (not correction) it requires?

    A recent example of queerness-as-fluidity leading to the flattening of queerness into Christianity is found in Mihee Kim-Kort’s Outside the Lines. Citing the 2007 volume After Sex: On Writing since Queer Theory, she writes,

    Queerness has undergone numerous challenges and transformations. It began as a way to describe certain expressions of sexuality and gender, and now it includes other markers of identity, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, ability, and more. Yes, it’s rooted in matters of gender and sexuality, but queerness is not meant to be exclusionary. In fact, any kind of exclusion would be counter to queerness, because queerness is about bodies, and we all have bodies.[9]

    First, Kim-Kort is absolutely right in naming the relationship between queerness and race, and some queer scholars of color have made the even stronger claim that queerness has never been separate from race. Second, though, she posits a contrast between gender and sexuality on one hand and inclusion on the other. To insist upon queerness’s association with gender and sexuality is to be exclusionary, which she says, is counter to queerness. On my reading, this risks aligning gayness with exclusion, fixity, and backwardness.

    Now, some contributors to After Sex do argue that queer theory can be illuminating for more topics than sex and sexuality, but these arguments are more about what queer can do as an analytic than about what can be called queer. Other contributors, as the editors point out, resonate with the claim of Sharon Marcus that “If everyone is queer, then no one is.”[10] Heather Love writes, in her contribution to the volume,

    Before we get too excited about the expansive energies of queer, though, we have to ask ourselves whether queer actually becomes more effective as it surveys more territory. In many cases the intentions in generalizing are good. . . . The problem with such a broad vision of queer is… that the intention to be answerable to many different constituencies can end up looking like a desire to have ownership over them.[11]

    Or take the chapter by Richard Rambuss, whose own version of “after queer” and “after sex” includes being a gay man talking about how men are hot. He, too, finds room for an expansion of objects of study: “Gay male sex and what gay men find sexual may be much more, or even quite other, than love of the cock. For some, it might also, or even instead, be love of the ass, the male ass.”[12] Even instead! Anyway, Kim-Kort glosses the variations, more and less subtle, within After Sex, and cites the volume as support for suggesting that queer sex is no longer necessary for queer life.

    Indeed, for Kim-Kort, queerness “can matter to anyone, whether we identify with queerness or not, whether it resonates a little or a lot—because whenever we love ourselves and our neighbors with the boundary-breaking love of God, we enact this queer spirituality in the world.”[13] Queerness and Christianity are both about a kind of transgression that sounds a lot like a basic Christian ethic of love your neighbor as yourself. This definition leads Kim-Kort to give accounts of queer friendship and promiscuity without sex. Promiscuity is really just radical hospitality.

    The problem with queerness-as-fluidity-without-sex is that it makes things easier for the church. Queerness becomes what the church needs it to be, so it doesn’t have to think about gay sex or challenge homophobia and transphobia; rather, the church can just go ahead and consider itself queer—while replicating a phobic silence around queer sex that makes things harder for queers whose queerness is related to their sexual desires and practices.[14]

    I am not claiming that gay men experience the worst oppression in society or in the church. Especially not able-bodied cis white gay men like myself. Nor are we alone in this position of being screwed by queerness-as-fluidity-without-sex. Lesbians experience it, too, and when I speak of gays and lesbians, I am speaking of cis and trans gays and lesbian. And pan- and bisexual people who have queer sex and relationships.

    Another way of revisiting the prompt: What does it mean to insist upon keeping your gay sex life in your theology?

    I think I’m coming around to an answer. In the era of queer theology, gay men inhabit a tension between relevant and irrelevant objects of discourse and subjects of thought. Also, we are simultaneously sex-obsessed and unsexy (not the hot new thing). Where queer becomes more and more capacious, more and more uncritically Christian and desexed, to be a gay man is to remain with the stigma of gay sex.

    Although I’ve critiqued queerness-as-fluidity quite a bit, there are things to critique about gayness-as-fixity as well—putting all of one’s subjective weight into a sexual identity. In Telling Truths in Church, Mark D. Jordan offers a brief “Negative Theology of Sexual Identities.” Jordan writes, “the negation of the label ‘homosexual’ is truer in theologically important ways than its affirmation. . . . Negating the identity ‘homosexual’ means something [] like remembering what imposing that identity leaves out.”[15] By this, he means that homosexual is not ultimately adequate “for capturing the erotic passion of persons.” It “is too crude, too silly, to capture what God has done underneath it.”[16] Jordan is worried that our identity categories will too heavily overdetermine how we understand our erotic lives and God within them, all the while misrecognizing how the identities we assume have been constructed for us, how they manage us. For him, the erotic “is our deepest experience of grace,” so to limit our language for our erotic lives limits what we can say about God.[17]

    Personally, I’ve not (yet?) felt as if identifying as gay has limited my theology of eros—if anything, it has absolutely blown it open, stripped it of readymade meanings. This rupture is not due to some inherent transgressiveness of a man desiring men but due to the heterosexual Christian context of my upbringing, and indeed, of the church today generally. Jordan admits, “We who live through being gay or lesbian may even need to inhabit fixed identities for a while in church debates before we can set to work dismantling them.”[18] This is identification as a strategy of resistance.

    As I continue to see queerness-as-fluidity-without-sex appear in Christian discourse alongside gayness-as-queerness-without-sex (for another time), identifying as a gay man and identifying with gay sex have felt more pressing and fun. It is worth embodying the shame and sin heaped onto us by the church. It is worth putting a face to theologies intended to deface us. Not so they can see whatever hurt we carry with us, or so that we can try to prove that we too are human, or so that we can die on the hill of “gay is good,” but so that the church (including gay and queer people within it who intentionally distance themselves from the stigma associated with queer sex) can see our freedom, our joy, our Rumpelstiltskin-like spinning of shame into pleasure and isolation into vibrant life, which I believe is made possible in the Spirit. 

    I’ve got two endings for you. One looks back, and one looks forward. 

    i.

    In 1989, what was then called the Gay Men’s Issues in Religion Consultation within the American Academy of Religion hosted a panel called “Constructing Gay Theology.” In the concluding section of his talk, J. Michael Clark, one of the founding co-chairs of the Unit, writes,

    If those of us who are gay men, particularly those of us who deeply identify with the gay ghetto and subculture, are truly going to claim and celebrate our experience as a theological resource, how honest with ourselves are we really willing to be? How much deeper are we willing to delve into our experience and how willing are we to share that experience in the public forum of theological dialogue?

    Specifically: Can we acknowledge God’s presence in our personal rituals of preparation… for sex—from weight-lifting, exercising, and dieting to grooming and dressing? Is the numinous not pungent in the frenzy of disco music, the sweat of dancing, the smell of poppers, the activities of cruising and pairing up for sex? If indeed, “nothing that is of us can be alien to our theology,” then not only must we not be embarrassed by this side of our experience; we must in fact make such an affirmation.[19]

    I’ll have more things to say about Clark in the future, especially his work later on in the 90s. For now, I love the specificity of this passage. I think it’s the only time I’ve read the word “poppers” in a theological text. But it isn’t the recognizable to the point of stereotypical picture of gay male life that draws me to the passage for our purposes today, but rather the framing of those particulars. How honest with ourselves are we willing to be? What are we willing to talk about in a public forum, even the hyper-particularized kind of space that this unit is? Does embarrassment shape our scholarship? What would we write if we felt truly free? And what, if anything, does that tell us about the state of our field and the institutions where it has found lodging?

    ii.

    In June 2021, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin hosted a conference called, “What Happened to Lesbian and Gay Studies?” A strong theme in the presentations was a complication of the narrative that queer theory came along in the early 1990s bringing its anti-identitarian axe to gay and lesbian studies, which had been too narrowly focused on discrete identities.

    In his introductory talk, Ben Nichols nuances and tweaks this narrative. Following the “core moment of anti-identitarian high theory” of the early 1990s, the late 90s and early 2000s saw explicit discussion of identity as a concept peter out as queer theory turned to the problems of normalization and assimilation. In the 2000s, he notes, queer theorists developed critiques of homonormativity and homonationalism, looking at the gay and queer complicity in nationalist projects. In the 2010s, Nichols claims, queer projects took a “categorical turn,” in which it became possible to think in and through sexual identities while maintaining conceptual validity. Think Halperin’s How to Be Gay, Darius Bost’s Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence, or Natasha Hurley’s Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel, he lists. Or recently, Jeremy Atherton Lin’s memoir, Gay Bar, and Jafari Allen’s There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life. Nichols asks, “What will queer studies be about if it does not have to or cannot ethically be about everything?” Nichols lingers with the distancing of queer from identity, saying, “I wonder how much of the ease with which we fault and displace the identities that might otherwise be seen to ground our work in gender and sexuality studies is a symptom of a basic aversion to those identities. So if we just liked them more, would we be so keen to jettison them?” He asks, “What is it about them exactly that lets us down so badly?”

    In Rachel Corbman’s talk, “Identifying Gay and Lesbian after Queer Studies,” she unearths anti-identitarian impulses in gay lib and feminist movements of the 1970s, when gay was basically a “proto-queer catch-all,” quoting Jeffrey Weeks. Then, through a reading of Queer Nation’s history, she argues that queer activism in the 90s was actually much more identitarian than the familiar narrative allows: “Queer… functioned as a loose synonym for gay and lesbian.” She notes that even Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, often hailed as one of the founding texts in queer theory alongside Gender Trouble, says that structuralist approaches to gender and sex run the risk of being used to homophobic ends. And in their readings and examples, both Butler and Sedgwick’s texts didn’t stray far from gay and lesbian spaces. In summary, Corbman writes, “In overemphasizing queer’s rejection of gay and lesbian, we overdetermine queer, lesbian, and gay in ways that fundamentally distort history.”

    So, I return to the question after the question I started with: is this the era of queer theology? In an obvious sense, yes, but this story may require complication as well, as gay and lesbian theology is still being written. For work largely pertaining to gay men, we could cite Richard Rambuss’s Closet Devotions, published in 1998 and Donald Boisvert’s Out on Holy Ground: Meditations on Gay Men’s Spirituality from 2000 as early signs that there would be more gay work to come. We could note Roger Sneed’s Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation and Cultural Criticism, published in 2010, and Dirk von der Horst’s Jonathan’s Loves, David’s Laments: Gay Theology, Musical Desires, and Historical Difference, from 2017.[20] There are a multitude of fiction writers, essayists, and poets whose work span gay and theological topics. And of course there is the myriad of apologetic gay Christian books like Justin Lee’s Torn, Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting, and God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines, to name a few.

    While I think it’s a fair question of whether or not there is a “gay men and religion” field and even whether there needs to be one, there iswork to do in this domain. I’ll admit I have a stake in this, as many of the projects I am interested in pursuing are about gay men and gay desire. In Christian theology, where I work, heterosexuality has been made core to the symbolic order through the alignment of the God/Church relationship to marriage and the alignment of sex and procreation, meaning that gay sex has historically been considered a threat to nature. There is a purpose in lingering with the specificities of gay sex––what it has been made to mean, what it might yet mean or not, and what meanings it shatters.

    To study gay things and men and sex and desire and religion, we don’t need to conceive of gayness as an unchanging category, either historically or within the lives of those who identify with it – sex, religion, and men aren’t particularly stable categories, either. And we don’t need to see the study of gay men and religion as an entirely separate thing from queer studies in religion and queer theology; neither would it need to “center itself” within queer studies and theology—no one wants that. It doesn’t need to be particularly ambitious or large. It doesn’t need to be the only discourse to which a scholar contributes. But, with relevant critiques of identity in mind, why not study gay men? Why not do theology that is actually about sexuality and theology, from the cultural milieus sexuality engenders?

    If it does look a little backwards to some, let them enjoy the view.

    [This essay is based off a paper I gave for the Gay Men and Religion Unit of the American Academy of religion. The panel was called “Gay Men and Queer Theory: Reflections on the Shape of the Field.” The paper resonates with “Queer/Christian Collapse,” as I was revising that around the same time I wrote this.]

    [1] A lot is obscured by lumping all of these differently queer projects into one category or era.

    [2] Stuart, Gay and Lesbian Theologies, 79–81.

    [3] Stuart, 75.

    [4] Stuart, 89.

    [5] Goss, Queering Christ, 241–42.

    [6] Goss, 237.

    [7] Goss, 236.

    [8] Stuart, Gay and Lesbian Theologies, 102–103.

    [9] Kim-Kort, Outside the Lines, 3–4.

    [10] Marcus, “Queer Theory for Everyone,” 196; Halley and Parker, “Introduction,” 7.

    [11] Love, “Queers ____ This,” 183.

    [12] Rambuss, “After Male Sex,” 201.

    [13] Kim-Kort, Outside the Lines, 6.

    [14] Halperin, Saint Foucault, 65. The concerns I’m raising are not new ones. Writing in 1995 on the initial rise to prominence of queer, David Halperin writes [and I quote at length],

    “What makes “queer” potentially so treacherous as a label is that its lack of definitional content renders it all too readily available for appropriation by those who do not experience the unique political disabilities and forms of social disqualification from which lesbians and gay men routinely suffer in virtue of our sexuality. . . . ‘Queer’ can even support the restigmatization of lesbians and gay men, who can now be regarded (once again) as sad, benighted folks, still locked—unlike postmodern, non-sexually labeled, self-theorized queers—into an old-fashioned, essentialized, rigidly defined, specifically sexual (namely, lesbian or gay) identity. Lesbians and gay men can now look forward to a new round of condescension and dismissal at the hands of the trendy and glamorously unspecified sexual outlaws who call themselves ‘queer’ and who can claim the radical chic attached to a sexually transgressive identity without, of course, having to do anything icky with their bodies in order to earn it.”

    [15] Jordan, Telling Truths in Church, 68.

    [16] Jordan, 69.

    [17] Jordan, 74.

    [18] Jordan, 70.

    [19] Clark, “Prophecy, Subjectivity, and Theodicy in Gay Theology,” 41.

    [20] Michael Ford’s Disclosures: Conversations Gay and Spiritual (2005) and Michael Bernard Kelly’s Christian Mysticism’s Queer Flame: Spirituality in the Lives of Contemporary Gay Men (2021)—both lean heavily on conversations and interviews in their methodology but are certainly relevant to theology. Broader, but certainly representative of a desire for scholarship on gay men and religion, is Ronald E. Long’s Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods: An Exploration into the Religious Significance of Male Homosexuality in World Perspective (2004), complete with a naked blond white model on the cover.

  • The Life of the Speaker: Pastoral Theology

    I wrote the following years ago for a survey course I took on early Christian theology. It was in part responding to a wave of revelations regarding abuse in the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention. I’ve been fascinated by first-person speech and what people think it accomplishes, and this was one effort in working some of that out.

    Narrating a life—as in, say, biography or hagiography—can involve a struggle of interpretive authority with one’s subject, the stakes of which are high, particularly for those marked deviant.

    David Halperin refers to the “perennial threat of discreditation through biographical description” that “becomes painfully acute… when the biographical subject is gay.”[1] After all, “it does not require any very strenuous effort to discredit the views of an ideological adversary when that adversary has already been branded… as a madman or pervert.”[2] Questions of perversion and authority are very much alive now, whenever, for example, the Gays are scapegoated for priestly sexual abuse. In Telling Truths in Church, a book that remains relevant since its publication in 2003, Jordan writes, “sex has seemed to threaten the authority of Christian speaking. Trying to speak truth about a churchly sex scandal—or trying to speak the truth about sex in church—or trying to speak what churches might be after some honesty about what sex is . . . these efforts lead us right to the most awkward tasks of the speech called theology.”[3]

    While fear of delegitimization may cause some to seek firmer boundaries between life and work, a different strategy has emerged in queer theory and theology. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, “there are important senses in which ‘queer’ can signify only when attached to the first person.”[4] Marcella Althaus-Reid has adapted Sedgwick’s claim into her own practice of theology: “Queer Theology is, then, a first person theology: diasporic, self-disclosing, autobiographical and responsible for its own words.”[5] Instead of obscuring the relationship between one’s life and theology to minimize the risk of delegitimization through the revelation of a life understood by many as perverse, Althaus-Reid maintains that the first person is precisely the location from which queer theology is written. “Therefore, to reflect on issues of the theologian’s identity and ways of doing a Queer Theology, we need to begin a reflection intimately linked to a God-talk on living and pleasurable relationships.”[6] The forbidden fruit becomes the very seed and root of theology.

    Queer theology has occasionally interacted with patristic sources, including Augustine,[7] but it has yet, to my knowledge, to tap the work on Christian speech by pastoral theologians like Augustine in On Christian Teaching and Gregory the Great in The Book of Pastoral Rule. Both focus on the role of the Christian pastor and the various other roles with which it overlaps—such as preacher, teacher, shepherd, spiritual director, and cure of souls. For such figures, one’s character, Augustine and Gregory agree, is of the highest consequence. The relevant passage of the fourth book of On Christian Teaching catalogues styles of preaching before pivoting to the life of the preacher, arguing the preacher’s life is of more importance to preaching than the preacher’s style. Gregory’s Book of Pastoral Rule postulates that a spiritual leader “must… be the model for everyone,” “must be devoted entirely to the example of good living,” “must be dead to the passions of the flesh and live a spiritual life,” and “must desire the internal life only.”[8] For both Augustine and Gregory, the authority to speak Christianly stems from the speaker’s personal holiness, and a failure of holiness threatens to delegitimize the speaker’s authority.

    The position from which Althaus-Reid suggests queer theologies begin is the very position in which a preacher’s authority to speak would be called into question under Augustine and Gregory; Althaus-Reid’s “lived and pleasurable relationships” would easily qualify as the relationships that concern either Augustine in his defense of the polygamy of the patriarchs—which is procreative and, he argues, without lust—elsewhere in On Christian Teaching[9] and Gregory in his allegorical reading of God’s prohibitions against those with physical ailments being leaders in Leviticus 21:17–21 (the bleary eyed person is carnal; one with a persistent rash is “dominated by the depravity of the flesh”) or in his admonition that sex in marriage should not be merely pleasurable.[10] In juxtaposing Augustine and Gregory with Althaus-Reid, I’m not trying to queer the former by reinterpreting or destabilizing their sexual ethics, or to straighten the latter by dressing her sexually deviant positions in hetero/orthodox drag.[11] 

    My goals are comparatively modest: to demonstrate resonance between patristic and queer theologies in their recognition that one’s life and embodiment legitimizes one’s speech and, within the framework of Augustine and Gregory’s pastoral theologies, to argue that sin is for everyone and authority belongs to the Lord, that is, regardless of how eloquently one preaches and teaches Christian morality, reflection on one’s own sin of any kind ought to safeguard the Christian from believing that their holiness and authority are complete and rightfully their own.[12]

    In The Book of Pastoral Rule, first shared by Gregory in 590 CE, Gregory posits that it is because pastors are to be examples to others that their actions bear such an important role in legitimizing their vocation. The spiritual leader must be “the model for everyone,” which implies that the life of the pastor itself is a pedagogical instrument for teaching Christian living and doctrine.[13]

    Humans are prone to sin already, as is evidence in their need for a model of right living in the first place, but sin can also be taught. Gregory writes, “No one does more harm in the Church than he who has the title or rank of holiness and acts perversely.” Citing Matthew 18:6, he says that it is better for one who “gives off the appearance of sanctity but destroys another by his words or example” to be bound to death by “his earthly acts, demonstrated by worldly habits… than for his sacred office to be a source for the imitation of vice in another.”[14]

    Due to this danger, the one seeking a position of spiritual leadership must be cleansed prior to attaining such a position. Gregory writes, “no one who has not been cleansed should dare to approach the sacred ministries,” and “because it is very difficult for anyone to know if he has been cleansed, it is best for him to decline the office of preaching.”[15] Even once one is cleansed and in a position of leadership, Gregory maintains that the pastor must still be vigilant, lest their own “personal afflictions… get in the way of zealous corrections” that their flock will require.[16]

    A life lived rightly is not only a prerequisite for Christian speech; it also makes such speech effective. Gregory writes, “the flock (which follows the voice and behavior of its shepherd) may advance all the better by his example than by his words alone…. For his voice more easily penetrates his listeners’ hearts when his way of life commends what he says.”[17] At the end of the Rule, Gregory pushes the importance of one’s actions ever further, saying, “every preacher should be ‘heard’ more by his deeds than by his words.”[18] For Gregory, the life and speech of a spiritual leader are not intended to be separate concerns; they are of the same calling and are dynamically related to each other, one’s life authorizing and amplifying one’s speech.

    Similar concerns are found in On Christian Teaching, albeit in fewer words. Augustine writes, “there are plenty of people who look for a justification of their own evil lives from those in authority who teach them,” which makes it all the more necessary for leaders to “practise[] what they preach[].”[19]Augustine provides qualifications for preaching, the first being that “the person required for the task under consideration is someone who can argue or speak wisely, if not eloquently”—and wisdom requires familiarity with scripture.[20] And a preacher must understand what the audience needs to hear and how they need to hear it and then deliver such teaching intelligibly and eloquently.[21] 

    Augustine then shifts his emphasis to the life of the preacher, saying, “More important than any amount of grandeur of style to those of us who seek to be listened to with obedience is the life of the speaker. A wise and eloquent speaker who lives a wicked life certainly educates many who are eager to learn, although he is useless to his own soul.”[22] Recognizing that eloquence of speech and even wisdom are not available to all who speak, the pastor’s life is not only a model but also a kind of surrogate eloquence. If a speaker lacks wisdom and eloquence, Augustine writes, “he should seek to live in such a way that he not only gains a reward for himself but also gives an example to others, so that his way of life becomes, in a sense, an abundant source of eloquence.”[23] Like Gregory, Augustine sees one’s actions not simply as the ground of Christian speech but as a form of Christian speech itself.

    Augustine provides a further extension of the relationship between life and speech: one who speaks truth eloquently but lives an evil life has no proper claim to the truth they preach. Because “the good things they say seem to be the product of their own brains, but are at odds with their behavior,” they “speak something that is not their own.” Violation of the right ordering of life and speech confuses the speaker’s relationship to their words to the point at which their words belong to someone else. “But,” Augustine writes, “it is not they themselves that speak the good things they say…. when they say good things it is not they themselves who say them.”[24] Such a statement could be construed as God using a broken vessel or speaking through Balaam’s ass, but Augustine’s emphasis here is not on the gracious inclusion of sinners into the work of God but on the way one’s sin negates one’s agency as the sinner, to borrow a phrase from City of God, “veers toward nothingness.”[25]

    Truth can only be ventriloquized through evil lives. Someone who lives well, however, can preach the true words of one who is “eloquent but evil” and speak them as their own: “when this happens, one person transfers from himself what is not his own, and one receives from the other what is his own.”[26] This sounds similar to the “perennial threat” Halperin describes “of discreditation through biographical description,” but it makes a different claim, i.e., that an evil person does not have genuine credibility in the first place. This is not merely an issue of public perception but of truth, albeit truth that migrates from one body to another. However, outing someone as gay or queer can be experienced by the one outed as social delegitimization while others understand it as a revelation of evil from an outside vantage point. The disjuncture between these two interpretations is where queer theology labors.[27]

    Holiness in Gregory and Augustine functions similarly to queerness in Sedgwick: one’s actions perform one’s identity and beliefs and authorize a particular variety of speech. While Althaus-Reid’s emphasis on first-person theology is not shared in Augustine’s writing on preaching in On Christian Teaching per se, he does say that each preacher has “their own particular style, and it would be inappropriate for them to have used any other style or for others to have used theirs.”[28] And he does offer up as an example of wisdom and eloquence a passage from 2 Corinthians 11 in which Paul, “obliged to blow his own trumpet, and at the same time present[] this as foolishness,” identifies and disidentifies with the Hebrews, Israelites, seed of Abraham, and servants of Christ, saying of each, “I am too.”[29] In these texts, Gregory and Augustine speak sparingly of their own experience except to illustrate an occasional point.[30] The first person does appear in a confessional register, however, in the short final paragraphs that end both books.

    The final part of Gregory’s Pastoral Rule is titled “That the Preacher, After He Has Done Everything That Is Required, Should Return to Himself So That He Does Not Take Pride in His Life or Preaching.” Borrowing an observation from Kate Brackney, a teaching fellow for the early Christian theology course I took at Yale Divinity,[31] this final passage is performative: having said his piece about the qualifications and obligations of a spiritual leader, Gregory steps away from his project, writing,

    Behold, good man, being compelled by the necessity of your request, I have tried to show what the qualities of a spiritual director ought to be. Alas, I am like a poor painter who tries to paint the ideal man. [Again], I am trying to point others to the shore of perfection, as I am tossed back and forth by the waves of sin. But in the shipwreck of this life, I beg you to sustain me with the plank of your prayer, so that your merit-filled hands might lift me up, since my own weight causes me to sink.[32]

    The “good man” being addressed is John, the newly appointed archbishop of Ravenna. Gregory had been pope for five years and ordained for eleven when he sent the text to his fledgling friend.[33] The text’s subsequent proliferation into the hands of a larger readership broadens this ultimate deference to the holiness of his reader and request for prayer. Gregory’s humility is stretched to cover you and me in the elasticity of first-person speech. Critically, he acknowledges that the pastor he has attempted to describe is an ideal and that his own sin prevents him from attaining it. Augustine does something similar. He concludes,

    I thank God that in these four books I have been able to discuss, with such ability as I have, not the sort of person that I am—for I have many failings—but the sort of person that those who apply themselves to sound teaching [Titus 1:9], in other words Christian teaching, on behalf of others as well as themselves, ought to be.[34]

    Like Gregory, Augustine creates space between himself and the type of spiritual leader he has described. While these statements function as a formal attribute of this type of pastoral theology, that does not preclude their authors’ earnestness.

    Neither of the bishops are confessing to having lived lives of utter evil, but they do confess their sinfulness, and Augustine does so immediately following his description of how one’s sinfulness throws into question one’s claim on the truth one teaches and preaches. This confession also opens up questions regarding whether or not truth relayed through first person speech—theology beginning in the “I”—can belong to someone else if the speaker is a sinner. Is Augustine’s sin grievous enough to qualify him as one who speaks the truth of another? While there is a marked difference between having “many failings” and living an “evil life,” that he has had many failings is the only positive claim Augustine makes regarding himself in this final section. It is a crack that opens the possibility that even a bishop who speaks with the authority of decades of experience and prayer does not hold a death grip on any truth he teaches; truth is ultimately of God, which is not to delegitimize the inflection, the style, with which it is spoken and lived out in the strangeness of human particularity.

    It is often in the throwaway, the formally perfunctory, the negligible nooks and crannies, the personal by-the-ways where a text gestures toward its own undoing. Confession of sin prevents the authors of our texts from confusing themselves with the idealized portraits they offer. In their closing salutations, Augustine and Gregory confess their sinfulness in a way that acknowledges the holiness of their audience in contrast to the sinfulness of the author (Gregory) and suggests that the wisdom they impart does not originate in or belong to themselves (Augustine). Even as these public confessions attempt to undercut the elevation of their authors, they also complete the pedagogical portraits they paint of pastoral ministry—a good priest confesses that they aren’t good—so whether or not holiness can be taught without drawing attention to one’s own perceived holiness remains a question.

    Such a reading does not inherently challenge the structures of power and authority that allow for abuse and can in fact be leveraged as an apologetic for those structures and the logics of deferral that maintain them, in which, to borrow language from Linn Tonstad, “deferral (yielding, obedience, fidelity) is the only way to receive a full share in the authority of God.”[35] Left unexplored in this essay is the relationship between sin and the institutional forms of power wielded by priests and pastors that are bound up with their authority to preach the truth of the Gospel. Is there a point at which the abuse perpetrated by priests and pastors, covered up by the church, negates the authority of the church, period? Answers will range widely across Christian traditions, while some who have left the church precisely for these reasons can point to the moment at which church authority stopped making sense. And it is unlikely that queer and hetero/orthodox theologies will agree on how to respond to abuse of authority, be it committed by Catholic priests or Baptist ministers or evangelical megachurch pastors, because church authority has provided the abusive norms by which some Christians are queered and denied authority. Whatever practical and theological work in ecclesiology remains to be done in response, spiritual leaders and those who lay claim to truth must be cautioned to remember, as Althaus-Reid has written, “that holiness is always the holiness of the Other,” or risk confusing themselves with God.”[36]

    A bouquet of questions arises here specifically for the queer priest and the queer theologian, who are at risk of delegitimization and, for the former, defrocking. If queer theology’s relation to the first person means that one must speak one’s loves and experiences come what may, that is dangerous, and not only because it risks construing our selves as fundamentally knowable and disclosable. Queer people should not be forced to bear the burden of compulsory personal truth-telling, as theologians have often asked of us.

    Yet I see the desire of ordained friends to live out their priesthood in forms fitting to their particularity, the particularity of their own iterations of sex and gender nonnormativity, their queerness, and I feel it myself with regards to whatever work I can do in the capacity of a theologian. How can this be possible without making queerness legible for the sake of ecclesial regulation?

    There must be a difference between freedom and surveillance. The church must have the capacity to recognize the empowerment of the Spirit, which will mean recognizing the necessity of that which cannot be assimilated. Not to capture it and force what it deems to be holy upon it, as misperception of holiness and unholiness can become and historically have become rationale for varieties of abuses, but to pray and provide for its increase. Queerness isn’t holiness, and its excess is not the same as the excess that is grace; but some queers do move gracefully. 

    [1] Halperin, 135, 136.

    [2] Halperin, 133.

    [3] Jordan, Telling Truths in Church, 9.

    [4] Sedgwick, Tendencies, 9. Emphasis original.

    [5] Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 8.

    [6] Althaus-Reid, 8.        

    [7] See, for example, Rees, Romance of Innocent Sexuality; Burrus, Jordan, and MacKendrick, Seducing Augustine; Pettinger, “Double Love: Rediscovering the Queerness of Sin and Grace.”

    [8] Gregory, The Book of Pastoral Rule, 43.

    [9] Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 78–82. Augustine makes similar arguments regarding polygamy and custom in Augustine, Confessions, 43–48, and Augustine, The City of God: XI–XXII, 162–64.

    [10] Gregory, The Book of Pastoral Rule, 46–47, 171.

    [11] For salient queer theological critiques that highlight the exclusivist underbelly of arguments for LGBTQ inclusion, see Tonstad, “The Limits of Inclusion”; Brintnall, “Who Weeps for the Sodomite?”

    [12] Due to spatial and temporal restraints and the context for which this is being written, I will focus in this paper on the early Christian writers. A further project could treat more fully the queer sources I engage and their relationship with early Christian writers.

    [13] Gregory, The Book of Pastoral Rule, 43.

    [14] Gregory, 32.                                                                                                            

    [15] Gregory, The Book of Pastoral Rule, 39.

    [16] Gregory, 51.

    [17] Gregory, 51.

    [18] Gregory, 207.

    [19] Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 143.

    [20] Augustine, 104.

    [21] Augustine, 115–16.

    [22] Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 142.

    [23] Augustine, 144.

    [24] Augustine, 145.

    [25] Augustine, The City of God: XI–XXII, 119.

    [26] Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 145.

    [27] In the context of the construction of sodomy and dialogue between priest and penitent in the confessional Mark Jordan writes, “Here we see the disparity between the faithful self-description of the penitent and the unfaithful description of the confessor.” Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 165.

    [28] Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 106.

    [29] Augustine, 108.

    [30] See, for example, Augustine’s story in which he demonstrates the power of the grand style to change lives by relating how a sermon of his ended a yearly period of civil strife in Caesarea. Augustine, 139.

    [31] Brackney, “Pastoral Ministry and Church Leadership in Early and Medieval Christianity.”

    [32] Gregory, The Book of Pastoral Rule, 212.

    [33] Demacopoulos, “Introduction,” 9–10, 13; in Gregory.

    [34] Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 146.

    [35] Tonstad, God and Difference, 260.

    [36] Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 154.