This feature is part of an HDS Communications interview series offering students a closer look at selected upcoming courses. Below, HDS student Bo Clay chats with HDS Professor Mark Jordan, who has written extensively in the field of sexual ethics, about his fall 2018 class “Queer Theologies, Queer Religions,” which will “test the boundaries of ‘Christianity’ while exploring the varied forms of queer religion.”
HDS: To really dive into your course, let’s start right at the beginning with what we might call the state of things. You say in the first sentence of your course description that "queer theology has named many projects, some of them contradictory.” Giving some examples, how have some queer theology projects been contradictory? And where does your course stand given these contradictions? Does it celebrate the contradictions or does it provide an alternative in using the term queer theology as “a label for thinking that treats sexual difference as a site for divine revelation or spiritual insight”?
Mark Jordan: One way to think about it is historically, in terms of the different projects we can find over the last century and a half. First, some people meant by queer theology a project of showing that there’s room for queer people within the Christian Bible or Christian ethics. This project wants to find space for queer life within existing Christian frameworks.
For other people, queer theology remained Christian but took up a more critical or prophetic stance. This second project wants to critique the misapplication of Christian principles that resulted in the long persecution of queer people.
Finally, for a third group of people, queer theology meant striking out into new and unknown territory to find religious resources not just in Christianity or Judaism, but across religious traditions—resources for describing and encouraging the religious elements already present in queer life. As you may know, there’s a view—it goes back at least to the nineteenth century—that homosexuality is a third sex infused with special religious capacity or sensibility. This third project wants to empower queer folk to serve as religious teachers, sages, prophets, ritual presiders.
I want to recall each of those projects, but I’m actually using the term “queer theology” in a more limited sense, to describe some books and essays that began to be written in the 1990s. I was a minor figure in this fourth project, but I still believe in its promise.
One question for me is: Why has the project lost energy? Why has it stopped producing interesting, significant, original work? This is the challenge I put to the class. I’m not sure we had the right name, and I’m not sure that we knew how best to proceed, but I am still sure that there are important and unanswered questions about religion and human sexuality. We may have done a bad job with the project, but the questions are still there, waiting to be addressed.
HDS: You mention that the class will “test the boundaries of ‘Christianity’ while exploring the varied forms of queer religion—in spirituality or spiritualism, in magic or neo-paganism, in art-making and erotic asceticism.” Could you dive a bit more into this? Are there specific biblical passages or Christian-centric issues you plan on addressing? And also, is there any overlap between a practice of “queer Christianity” (if there’s a better term, please tell me) and other forms of queer religion? Can one celebrate faith in both Christianity and another queer religion?
MJ: I live that overlap! But let me explain what I mean. Enormous effort has gone into the interpretation of particular passages in the Christian scriptures that have been used to condemn human sex, especially human sexual variation. The results have varied. For example, it’s been clear since the mid-1950s that the story of Sodom is not a condemnation of male-male sexuality. It’s an enigmatic, violent story that no one should want as the basis of a sexual ethics.
With other passages, such as Romans 1, the results are less conclusive. Controversy remains. Some interpreters, like John Boswell, say that the passage is not about homosexuality in the modern sense so much as about power differentials in ancient relationships between older men and younger men. Other interpreters exclaim, “This isn’t Paul at all! It’s a synagogue sermon against idolatry that he copies into his letter to make a point about Gentile depravity!”
My own view is that the Christian scriptures give us little specific guidance in sexual ethics—whether that’s about marriage or same-sex relations or masturbation. I take the silence as significant. If Jesus didn’t speak to these issues, either they’re not central to Christian life (although churches keep making them central) or they are central but he deliberately did not provide a code of ethics for them. How could that be? Maybe he wanted us to be adults, growing in discernment of how to be sexual.
Underneath all of these fights over interpretation, I see a more basic principle, the claim of divine incarnation. Christianity begins from God in flesh. Since human gender and sex are part of flesh, you cannot lock them away with the assertion that Christianity will not talk about such things—other than to say, “Just don’t do it.”
Queer people who were cast out from Christian churches formed their own religious communities or fled to more welcoming religious groups. The resulting variety of practices—this garden of surprising blossoms—has been ecumenical and inter-religious and anti-religious all at once. What I call “queer religion” is this long series of experiments with the divine after most religious institutions have shut their doors.
HDS: I’d like to highlight a few titles from the current course syllabus: Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly; Angels in America (Tony Kushner); Elizi’s Mirrors by Omise’ke Natasha Tinsley; and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sex, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. badly (your words) by Hurley. Of all the texts you could have chosen, what led you to these? What about them makes them crucial to the class’s mission? Also, did you schedule them with a particular design in mind?
MJ: Just like a book (including scholarly books), a course has got to have a plot. Not in the sense that I’m trying to drive people to particular conclusions, but in the sense that I want to keep them moving through the course’s books to the richer articulation of their own thoughts—to the discovery of their own voices.
So, I broke the course into two parts. The first part is about where queer theology has been or where it came from: Mary Daly, Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Robert Goss. I conclude the first group with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—in part to show that the line between constructive theology and creative literature is vanishingly thin, in part to emphasize that all of these texts engage Christian material alongside other religious or secular symbols.
The second stage of the course focuses on more recent work in yet other genres—with the hope that pushing at the boundaries of academic genres and disciplines might yield better questions and better ways of writing about them. Here we read an anthology on gay spirituality by Mark Thompson, Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology, Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts, and a very recent book—Ezili’s Mirrors by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley. I take seriously the old etymology according to which “theology” is speech or words about the divine. Theological problems are always in part writing problems. They’re about finding the language, bending the language, breaking the language so you can register the divine.
HDS: The assignments for the class are pretty straightforward (a final essay/written project preceded by an outline), but the first assignment seems very unconventional: a 1,500 word “form- or genre-exercise” in which students reflect on the “formal features” of a work (such as terminology/vocabulary, style, “voice,” and structure) as they relate to conceiving or deepening one’s perception of queer theology.
I know you specifically mention that “more detailed advice about the assignment will be given as it approaches,” but what do you hope students gain from this assignment? What do you hope they discover in the process of writing it? For example, a “form or genre exercise” tells me that students can choose several different directions for the assignment—what do you imagine are the perks of this format for students?
MJ: Whenever I teach Christian theology, I ask people to attend to the form of what they’re reading or writing. How could it be otherwise in the religion of an incarnate God? More generally, I don’t think that you can ever shake content free of form in order to transport it to another form without worrying about how you are changing it—translating it, in the root sense. It’s a mistake to presume that our academic genres, like the academic essay, are transparent to content.
In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, there were so many efforts to find or make alternate language for queer life. All sorts of people wrote poetry, plays, utopian science fiction, because they were convinced that you couldn’t live sex otherwise until you could invent or anticipate the new forms of language that would foster it.
My hope is that the assignment will help students appreciate and inhabit the acts of composition behind the texts we read. If you think of learning different theologies as learning alternate languages, you can see that learning theology through memorization of fixed positions is completely counter-productive. What you have to do is embody a theological language as best you can, to keep practicing it, until you can begin using it in your own way, stretching the language by speaking it anew. In order to understand Marcella Althaus-Reid, you’ve got to learn how to speak Marcella!
After two millennia, Christian language has been largely trivialized, hollowed out—not to say, soaked in innocent blood. One way to help restore its gravity or weight is to re-embody it in different situations—and, we pray, less violently.
HDS: This might be a sentimental question, but, by the end of the semester, what do you hope that your students gain from the class other a deeper appreciation for queer theologies and religions? In what ways do you hope that your class will influence their academic pursuits and their lives overall?
MJ: I never understand what people mean when they distinguish theology from practical theology. I always want to ask what the alternative is—impractical theology? Unlivable theology? Theology is not theology unless it shapes lives. So, I hope, first, that students come out of the course convinced again (or for the first time) that theology matters. Then I hope that, whatever their sexual orientation or disorientation, they will emerge from the course with a renewed sense that sex cannot be separated from religion—and, for the sake of both sex and religion, ought not to be.
—by Bo Clay, HDS correspondent