Queer Soul and Queer Theology

Ethics and Redemption in Real Life

Laurel C. Schneider, Thelathia Nikki Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000370324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

This book takes up the question of Christian queer theology and ethics through the contested lens of "redemption." Starting from the rootinfinitive "to deem, " the authors argue that queer lives and struggles can illuminate and re-value the richness of embodied experience that is implied in Christian incarnational theology and ethics. Offering a set of virtues gleaned from contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and asexual (LGBTIQA) lives and communities, this book introduces a new framework of ethical reasoning. Battered and wrongly condemned by life-denying theologies of redemption and dessicating ethics of virtue, this book asserts that the resilience, creativity, and epistemology manifesting in queer lives and communities are essential to a more generous and liberative Christian theology.

In this book, queer "virtues" not only reveal and re-value queer soul but expose covert viciousness in thetraditional (i.e., inherently colonial and racist, andthus ungodly) "family values" of dominant Christian ethics and theology. It argues that such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large, including the redemption of God.

This book will be a key resource for scholars of queer theology and ethics as well as queer theory, gender and race studies, religious studies, and theology more generally.

1 Introducing queer redemption

This book came to life in the months before the human world was stopped in its tracks by a virus called COVID-19. We watched from our two perches in Pennsylvania and coastal Massachusetts as the spring came early and wet, ensuring what would become an unusually lush early summer that provided abundantly for animals on the ground and in the air. From indoors, people watched the animals come more and more out of hiding, showing a vitality to the earth that human presence and industry normally forces into the shadows. Even the world’s dwindling bees seemed to make something of a comeback. Local clammers and farmers began reporting unusual abundance among the bivalves, asparagus, and summer squashes. Surely, a few short months of forced retreat by humans could not account for that or for the great blue walls of hydrangeas or the extra height of the sunflowers. But it seemed more than a metaphoric reversal, with humans watching from the shadows as wildflowers grew extravagantly, and moose, deer, otters, wolves, and geese walked, trotted, waggled, and loped down city streets. A closet door, of sorts, opened in the world when the power of a virus briefly dampened the noise and grip of human dominance.

This book matured as the United States erupted in protest over another brutal killing of an unarmed Black man. The video of a policeman’s knee on George Floyd’s neck made the fact of racist police brutality come home to millions of white people who had avoided the truth over centuries of black and brown killings and deepened the grief of black and brown people the world over. We heard Mr. Floyd call for his mama, rasping that he couldn’t breathe, as the officer slowly squeezed the life out of him, and we absorbed the cold reality of state-sanctified murder before our eyes. There was a horrifying irony in the masked protests that exploded in the wake of that video and the murders that continued. We were protesting a death by asphyxiation just as a virus that steals breath was sweeping the world.

Could there be any possibility of a queer redemption in this broken and soul-sick time? We have to think so. The catchphrase “new normal” has become standard since the pandemic arrived. But it refers prematurely to a normal that has not yet arrived, and so masks uncertainty over the deadly loss of efficacy in the old normal/s. In fact, humans face a future stripped of whatever certainty we had. But there is also always the possibility of something unfamiliar emerging, even as we experience a momentary stumble in the familiar hegemony of white heteropatriarchy as it has been wielded in Washington and other centers of power. It is a queer time for sure. Perhaps even a time for queerer thinking that is long used to uncertain futures, nimble course changes, and, of course, animals of all stripes coming out into the open.

Why redemption?

In this book, we take up the question of queertheology and ethics through the contested lenses of “redemption” and “virtue,” theological terms that, in Christian use, have often oriented Christian ideas of each in opposition to the lives, experiences, and communal formations of lesbians, gay men, transwomen and transmen, and other genderqueer people.¹ Non-normative sex or gender self-understandings and their consequent embodiments have historically condemned LGBTIQA people to a theological condition of lack or perversion. According to Christian heteronormative logic, queer folk lack virtue on the one hand and stand in need of divine forgiveness and redemption on the other. Attainment of both is made possible only by renunciation of queer life and acceptance of the divine status of heteropatriarchal social and sexual relations. The fact that heteropatriarchal social and sexual relations are also always configured in a modern global context of racism means that the virtues and redemption demanded of queer people by a dominant Christian theology and ecclesia are also—regardless of the racial profile of the churches that issue it—a demand rooted in and shaped by the deep formations of white supremacy.

However, despite the ways in which the concepts of redemption and virtue have been wielded against those whose gendered and sexual desires do not conform to traditional Christian heteropatriarchal norms, both terms have rich potential for describing the survival and healing wisdom of heteropatriarchy’s exiles, those about whom the gatekeepers of the status quo may stomp and rage, complaining “nevertheless, they persisted.”² Reimagining individual and communal life gleaned from hard-won experiences of persisting nevertheless is, we believe, one of the healing arts so desperately needed in a human world that sets individualism, greed, and social dominance as virtues at the expense of livable life for the 99 percent. What signposts exist that can guide us onto more healing pathways for the human and non-human world?

There are multiple exiles in the world, living with flair under the radar of white supremacist heteronormative surveillance and discipline, which means that there are multiple options for reimaging virtuous lives according to the native symbols and horizons of multiple traditions. Because we come from Christian backgrounds and our areas of expertise lie specifically in theology and ethics, we pick up the threads of our own tradition, believing that we can contribute a revaluing of some important Christian concepts. We have taken up the concepts of virtue and redemption specifically so that we, who are children of that tradition, may move more gracefully into a future in which our spiritual practices and healing arts affirm a more whole embodied and sexual goodness in human diversity. We believe also that this thinking work is our piece of a wider challenge before all of us who are children of the earth regardless of religion, practice, or place, who seek virtues of good living that are no longer structured on the oppression of others. We work hard to avoid Christian supremacy just as we battle white, heteropatriarchal supremacy, but know that our own tradition of Christian images and terms are ever vulnerable to covert universalization. What we hope is that the wisdom we have gleaned from queer lives in this project may serve to nourish a larger spirit of liberation, creativity, and generosity within Christian circles. We are also glad if this work is of use to others on similar journeys in other traditions, though we do not assume it.

Redemption is a peculiarly Christian term, one developed to describe the ecstasy and fulfillment of a life purified of sin, or more specifically, of a life given over “to Christ.” Linked to a persistent but thoroughly unscientific model of the universe in three tiers—heaven, earth, hell—for Christians who maintain that cosmic model, redemption is a kind of safety suit in an otherwise hostile environment. It is a ticket out of hell. As such, its power is primarily negative, focused more on the sins it eschews and the punishment it avoids than on affirmations of embodied life and living. The same is true of many Christian virtues, to the extent that virtue lies in the avoidance of sin.

In general, this means that redemption has lost its etymological grounding in the verb “to deem” or value, having become more of a norming agent dependent upon pseudo-virtues that ostensibly purify the flesh (with sex functioning as a prime pollutant). Redemption in this sense is an empty and shapeless concept without the skeletal structure that (hetero)norms provide. Norms in turn are habituated practices that become rules for living, the basic building blocks of theological and social judgment such as sin and salvation, good and bad. It is no surprise then that the overall, dominant shape of Christian beliefs about redemption and its supporting cast of virtue, vice, sin, and salvation now reflect the long thrall of imperial Europe: Roman, Constantinian, and Protestant. Parochial ideas of gender, sex, race, human being, and the very constitution of the world filled the sails of Christian European conquistador and settler ships, resulting in a global colonialism that imposed the same logic of lack and perversion on cultures whose relational and aspirational norms were unfamiliar to and therefore most often despised by the colonists.

Redemption, it is clear to us, now stands in need of redemption and that is the primary aim of this book. By seeking a redemption of redemption (and of the God behind it) we do not intend to resuscitate a morbid theological concept for its own sake or to gloss over its role in so much harm. Instead, we think there is more to the practice of redemption than a penal structure of reward and punishment. To re-deem, quite literally, means to rethink, re-imagine, and revalue the worth and existence of something or someone. Having been deemed worthless, queer lives are in a constant process of re-deeming ourselves, but this is not always understood to be divinely inspired or in accordance with “God’s plan” for humanity and the world. We therefore think about redemption less in terms of its negative association of escape from harm and more in terms of re-valuing the racialized sexual, erotic, and fully embodied dimensions of life.

To accomplish a revaluing of redemption we must start with lived experiences out of which new and better norms are emerging. To do so, we introduce “queer virtues” as hard-won principles and experiences that not only re-imagine and re-value queer lives and spirits but reveal covert viciousness in the traditional (colonial, racist) “family values” of dominant Christian ethics and theology. We aim not only to outline a theological redemption for queer communities, but believe such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large.

Virtues

In Western moral philosophy, there are a couple of ways that the term virtue has meaning. In one sense, to have virtue (good character) is to be, or at least have the capacity to be, morally excellent. Such an understanding situates virtue as a kind of tautological and ontological reality: one is excellent if one is good, which depends, of course, on how “good” is defined. In another sense, virtues can be described as essential elements, perhaps even the building blocks, of moral excellence. If moral excellence is the quality of being oriented toward what people understand to be morally good, based on systematized ideas of “right” and “wrong,” as well as the capacity to recognize, value, and ultimately practice such goodness, then virtues are the features of character that underwrite said quality and capacity. This understanding of morality tends to be singularly focused, with attention on the moral subject and the agency that she exhibits through choices, actions, and habits. Comparatively, in some African moral philosophies, morality and ethics emerge from and speak back to a fundamentally social reality wherein duties that contribute to “the whole” supplant rights that only benefit the individual.³ In such frameworks, virtues are based on the relational foundation of the human experience and describe dispositions that support and enhance collective human flourishing.

A significant and positive feature of virtues is their usefulness in pointing us toward lives of flourishing, happiness, and joy. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum regards virtues as helpful for cultivating practices and affective postures that foster lives without limit and that usher others toward the same kind of freedom and possibility.⁴ Another important feature of virtues is their ability to support and encourage individual and collective efforts towards those realities and possibilities by pointing to the traditions from which they emerge and through which they gain wisdom. Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in discussions of the goodness embedded in lives with narrative coherence, suggests that virtues provide a singleness of purpose and an awareness of location within tradition, thus allowing people to become moral agents as they develop and practice virtues with others in the tradition.⁵ Virtue theorist Iris Murdoch writes that human lives exist in a context in which there is a concept of the Good that grounds our humanity and that can unify our experiences.⁶ For her, attention and proper orientation to the Good breeds morally excellent practices and experiences of freedom, while virtues act as roadmaps, pointing us toward the Good.⁷

As we attempt to discern virtues in our admittedly idiosyncratic handle on lived queer experiences we understand that we are thinking within the grain of Western virtue theory. But we are also attending to the social and communal elements of morality and virtues in our own lives that have been forged against that grain in order to survive the demonic significations placed upon us. We understand, in other words, that for those who have been exiled from the realms of virtue by virtue of their bodies, lives, and loves, the very morality that cast them out comes into question. For example, as Katie Geneva Cannon points out in her groundbreaking work Black Womanist Ethics, Black American women have had to “live out a moral wisdom in their real-lived context that does not appeal to the fixed rules or absolute principles of the white-oriented, male-structured society.”⁸ Much as we aim to do here, Cannon proposes a set of virtues crafted and perfected in African American experience. Those virtues, invisible dignity, quiet grace, and unshouted courage speak directly out of and to that experience, revealing a mode of moral reasoning that can instruct us all.⁹

In order to highlight some of the practices, traditions, and orientations found in queer spaces and lives toward a better understanding of what virtues may exist therein, we need a variety of tools with which to work. We therefore aim to merge virtue discourse with queer theoretical perspectives and analysis. Of course, as a pair of theologically motivated, queer-oriented moral thinkers, we admittedly approach the subject of virtues with caution. At times, when we have mentioned the use of virtues or virtue ethics to our queer theorist friends or religious studies colleagues who employ queer theory, we have been met with eye rolls or, worse, side-eyes. Such expressions of disdain are meant to remind us that the space between virtue theory and queer theory is like a valley worn wide by the waters of social constructionism and the idea of “nurture” that chisel the rocks of essentialism and “nature.”

Inasmuch as virtues and virtue ethics are traditionally steeped in notions of a stable and properly ordered self that bears the capacity to ultimately be good, they epitomize the very thing that queer theories try to deconstruct and dismantle.

Because they seem to be stable and essential qualities and point to a static eudemonistic future, queer theorists have not necessarily been fans of ‘the virtues,’ as espoused by Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum. The very alterity and diverse subjectivity from which queerness emerges and to which queerness points shuns notions of selfhood that essentialize and orient our character to an externally determined telos.¹⁰

Aristotelian moral thinking (on which much of Western moral philosophy is built), and its resulting discourse, is in one way or another deeply invested in understanding and evaluating hexis (disposition).¹¹ This notion of disposition is inextricably linked in modern thought to essential qualities of character which become essential judgments of persons. This tendency can make it difficult for queer thinkers doing the work of queertheology precisely because of our efforts to articulate the fluidity and multiplicity of queer dispositions, as well as our goal of affirming profound embodied capacities for change. In writing Queer Soul and Queer Theology, we therefore think about virtues less in terms of their associations with character and more in terms of praxis (motivated action) and poiesis (creative transformation).

Beyond troubling the notion of essentialism in discussions of morality, putting queer discourse in conversation with virtue ethics and exploring the possibility of queer virtues does the powerful and transformative work of questioning the placement of queer life in a context formerly rendered “beyond moral redemption.”¹² For us,

acknowledging virtues within marginalized existences is not only an ethical task, but it is also one that debunks the myth that only certain subjectivities have a repository for—or exemplify—features of ‘goodness’ toward which we might direct ethical action.¹³

In this book, we get to assume that queer folk have and exhibit moral excellence, and we have the opportunity to acknowledge and learn from the grit of surviving and grace of thriving that bespeak queer existence. Even more, we have the chance to lift up virtues that highlight queer complexity and that shape and redeem queer lives. This work also provides counterpoint to explanations of and narratives about Christian virtues that are often told through stories of heteronormativity or with the motivation of maintaining cis-het contexts and social relations.

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