Interrupting a Gendered, Violent Church

Anna Mercedes, Ashley John Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland, Ashley John Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781506431598
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506458342
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia

This project brings readers into conversation at the intersections of gender studies and Christian theology--particularly diverse feminist and queer theologies. Interrupting a Gendered, Violent Church develops over three parts to an extended essay that points to the real ways churches foster violence around gender. This volume discusses this violent reality while also exploring church as a nexus for resistance to gender-based violence and sketches the contours of a Christian theology mapped apart from patriarchal heteronormativity's hold on late modern Christian life.

The goal of the Dispatches series is to offer a genuinely creative and disruptive theological-ethical ressourcement for church in the present moment. Volumes illuminate and explore, creatively and concisely, the implications and relevance of theology for the global crises of late modernity. Our authors have been invited to introduce succinct and provocative arguments intended to provoke dialogue and exchange of ideas, while setting in relief the implications of theology for political and moral life.

1

Complicit Church

In her book Shameless, Nadia Bolz-Weber candidly and compassionately explores the difficulties of navigating sex amid all of Christianity’s obsessions with it. As a pastor, she wants more thriving for all people and a more widely shared recognition that God’s love is not bound by sexual rules.1

In his book Dear Church, Lenny Duncan lovingly calls out the church’s interwoven white supremacy, sexism, and heterosexism. He helps the church imagine a future that is “gloriously queer” and also makes it clear how painfully far the church has been from celebrating such a future.2

Bolz-Weber, Duncan, and I have all served as pastors and are of similar age; in our lifetimes, there has never been a time when the churches in the United States were not wrapped up in some kind of issue related to sexuality—both the most “conservative” and the most “progressive” groups of churches. A church full of discourse on sex has been the church of our times.

Thus it is no surprise that many people in and out of the churches wonder why Christianity seems so hung up on sex. We notice that Christian organizations seem both fixated on sexual teaching and at the same time entangled in sexual misconduct, abuse, and scandal. We notice that, on the individual level, many Christians will speak of or even define their faithfulness predominately in terms of their sexual ethics or choices. As Mark D. Jordan insightfully notes, “People who know nothing of Christian creeds or scriptures can recite the most notorious Christian sexual prohibitions. . . . In the public imagination, Christianity can figure as nothing more than a code of sexual conduct, a code that likes especially to elaborate prohibitions.”3

These fixations on the institutional and individual levels are far from coincidental, because Christian discourse and polity are so deeply embedded in the modern mechanisms of sexuality. The mechanisms are now so subtle and efficient that we have arrived at a time in the modern West when you can barely do one without the other. One certainly cannot tell the story of modern sexuality without exposing the Christian underpinnings. Whether one can tell the story of Christianity without becoming entangled in the regime of modern sexuality is an open question. This writing is driven by the hope that Christian practice can in fact flow free of the mechanical workings of “sexuality” that have corrupted its energies for so long.

Thus—though you might pick up a book by this title because you want to think more about what Christians teach about particular sexual issues or decisions, or how the church can respond to gender-based violence—this book will not speak directly to those questions. It sits a conceptual step before them. It seeks instead to highlight ways in which every Christian stance on sex and gender is already an iteration of a larger Christian project in forming the gendered and sexualized lives we live and the issues for which we now seek a stance. If we Christians have positions on these issues, they are stances on our own products; they are therefore our own self-critique, though we seldom acknowledge them as such, preferring instead to blame an elusive secular or popular culture. And it is odd and sly, and also dangerous and even immoral, of us Christians to promulgate juridical teachings for individuals concerning a fraught situation we have in the first place underwritten. It is as though we, who as Christian agents helped create the hazardous playing field, now give instructions for how individuals should play on it, and we are ready with shaming and punishing measures for those who don’t play nice and conform. We enforce personal labor for what is actually a public project and in so doing manage to veil the publicness of the construction and make it “private” business. Thus the work of our Christian cultural production is carried out by individuals, bodily carriers who take the blame and bear the brunt and punishing weight, meanwhile shielding the insulated systems that shape the whole domineering project. Often, as individuals, we shield those systems even from our own consciousness and punish ourselves, shaming and abusing our own bodies and those of others.

These are heavy claims with which to start a brief book. I will explain these claims more fully as we go; for now, notice that the fixation of churches on “sexuality” is an important “tell” revealing the success of what I will call Christomodern power strategies. That we are fixated on sexuality and busy maintaining it as a category—busy embodying this category and thus incarnating the power it serves—Demonstrates how thoroughly we as Christians have bought into this way of organizing and controlling bodies.

Three Moments

Here is the story of three moments that helped me realized the needfulness of this dispatch on the Christian production of “sexuality” and the ongoing Christian enforcement of its terms.

2006

The large, active congregation in which I was raised in the southeastern United States asked me to come and speak to them on the occasion of their centennial. A PhD student at the time, I ambitiously decided to speak on “One Hundred Years in Theology.” I am sure now that I couldn’t have possibly lived up to that title in an hour, but I did aim to include major movements of the twentieth century in US theology, including the beginnings of gay and lesbian liberation theologies. I remember that during the Q&A, a longtime member, Doris, asked a generous question about supporting LGBTQIA life, and in answering her, I surprised myself by saying that it wasn’t enough to raise questions of queer theology out of concern for gay and lesbian lives—though that concern is vital. I knew the congregation to include supportive people concerned about queer lives and loves, and I remain grateful to have grown up in that church. But it came out in my response that day that it wasn’t enough to just be concerned about an inclusive response to queer individuals in church or society. There was a bigger conceptual problem at stake that affects the church’s life as a whole.

Analyzing heterosexism in the churches and in theology shouldn’t only be about needed concern for the well-being of LGBTQIA persons; it should also be about recognizing the severe brace that such heterosexism has placed on our cognitions and our theological imaginations. What are the churches, or what is theology, consistently missing about God and about love, about human life as a whole, because of the strictures of heterosexism? So I told my childhood church that we need to critique heterosexism not only out of our commitment to social justice—though our world needs that desperately—but also out of our thirst for God, our desire to walk humbly with God, which can perhaps surprisingly appear as determination to scrutinize whether our cultural worldview, or our popular or working philosophy, has limited our vision of and our life with God. I argue that heterosexism, and the whole structure of sexuality on which it rests, has indeed done so. The church is chasing the tail of its own constructions while the world aches for what the churches could instead be offering.

Ten Years Later

Around midnight, as it was becoming clear that Trump would win the White House in 2016, I was huddled in a dim bedroom trying to settle one of my young daughters back down to sleep. As she dozed back off, I was scouring the New York Times on my phone in the dark of her bedroom, looking for articles that helped me understand Trump’s victory. In “A Pennsylvania Town in Decline and Despair Looks to Donald Trump,” Trip Gabriel tells the story of a town that was once strongly aligned with the Democrats but was now firmly for Trump in this election.4 Gabriel introduces the Cranos, a couple that had been pulling for Hillary Clinton in 2008. Now the couple was voting for Trump. What changed their position? Gabriel reports, “For Mr. Crano, a former steelworker who retired after a second career at the Pittsburgh airport, it was abortion and same sex marriage. ‘If you’re a Christian, you can only vote for Trump.’”

In the quiet of a night, reading this article on my phone as I tried to figure out what sort of America I would wake up to the next morning, this statement of Crano’s stunned me. I can understand a sentence beginning with “if you’re a Christian” ending in something like “you can only follow Jesus” or “you must worship Christ.” Things like that. But to be a Christian equals . . . a particular sexual position? How had being Christian become completely aligned with particular views on sexual issues? What had become of my religion?

And what happens when such a stance—standing with particular political leadership because of a “Christian” stance on sexuality—means utterly failing at other aspects of the Christian life, such as hospitality to the vulnerable, as in the Bible’s injunction to care for the “widow, the orphan, the stranger”? Or ignoring the more tacitly accepted political angles of our sexual politics, like misogyny, sexual misconduct, and the abuse of women? When did we, Christians, become agents of sexual patrol and allow ourselves to ignore the wider work of our faith?

Because at the time of that election, my gender theory students were reading Mark D. Jordan’s The Ethics of Sex and thus scrutinizing with Jordan how our Christian rhetoric on sex raises as many or more ethical problems as our sex lives themselves, I heard in Crano’s remark proof that a commitment to a particular sexual ethic can indeed involve a major ethical breech in Christian life. Our religion has conspired in creating a rhetoric on which we now fixate and with which we distract ourselves to great peril from the lives Christians could be living in service to God’s world. In defending particular positions within our logics of sex, we are defending not the God of the Scriptures but, plainly, our logics of sex. No Christian statement on sexuality can be adequate if it does not recognize Christianity’s role in shaping what we know as “sexuality.” Such shaping is our largest sexual “sin”—the major issue behind all other Christian sexual “issues.”

Third Moment

A group of college faculty from multiple disciplines was discussing white racism in conjunction with a campus grant on improving learning outcomes for students of color in the United States. The discussion turned to what the institutions could do to declare their commitments to countering racism. I teach at Catholic and Benedictine schools, and noting our mission, colleagues wondered whether our Catholic, Benedictine values on hospitality and dignity of all persons already gave us our way of expressing an institutional commitment to counter racism. Other local state-funded schools have more explicit antiracism programs. For us, some wondered, does a reassertion of our Benedictine values “cover it”?

As one of the theologians in the room, I felt an urgent need to speak an emphatic “no.” Lest anyone assume that being Christian already puts in you in a stance against social oppression, I felt compelled to emphasize that Christianity is at the root of many social oppressions in the first place. To point, one cannot invoke Christianity to counter racism without recognizing that Christianity is largely responsible for creating the concept of “race,” or said differently, that race is a Christian theological by-product. Far from being a mode of liberation from racism, Christianity is built into the beams of modern racist structures. I directed my colleagues to the work of Carter in his Race: A Theological Account. And I became involved in directing our next inclusion grant.

It was later, working on that next grant project and having been asked by colleagues to address how to reconcile our Catholic identity with support for trans students, that I started to argue that the same can be said for Christian responses to sexism and heterosexism. To the extent that the modern logics of sexuality are Christian theological productions, Christians cannot adequately engage their corruptions without isolating Christianity’s ongoing production of the “sexuality” with which we can do modern “sexism” and “heterosexism.” To put it harshly, we can’t declare ourselves inclusive, even with wide-open arms, when there is structural blood on our hands.

Connecting Fields and Conversations

In the fields of gender and sexuality studies, it is not a contentious claim but rather a familiar one that what we now know as “sexuality” in the West is a modern and recent thing.5 There is general agreement that “sexuality” developed conceptually very recently, has a great deal of power clustered around it, and was a discourse of power to begin with. Inarguably, we have had human bodies and contact between human bodies, some of it erogenous and some of it reproductive, for all of human history; that is different from the modern category of sexuality. That is all much less specific than what we now file in the conceptual category of “sexuality,” even if we now think of sexuality as a wide category rooted in the core of each human.

I write on this topic influenced by teaching in theology and being a pastor. The histories of how modern sexuality came to be understood have begun to seem obvious to me after years of simultaneously teaching gender studies courses alongside my theology courses. But I have become increasingly aware of a gulf between what was seemingly obvious to me and what the givens about sexuality are for many of my theological colleagues. Certainly, in pastoral work with churchgoers, I still encounter a sense that gender and sex just are—as givens, not social products—or at best I encounter the idea that sex and gender are societal or secular topics to which responsible churches will respond. But it’s more surprising to me to encounter this sense in the academic and clerical theological guilds. Yet I still do, where colleagues who teach, preach, or write on sex do so from a place of big heart and willingness to work on important topics but where the conversation still proceeds as though sex and gender are cultural products out there for us to engage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Complicit Church
• 2. Circulating Christomodern Power
• 3. Assemble Otherwise
• Afterword
• Selected Bibliography