As a student of theology and a queer Christian, the work of understanding and envisioning desire as part of the spiritual life, particularly erotic desire, is something I’m passionate about. Not only because it very directly affects my life (though it does), but also because I think it’s a question that the church in power has done very little helpful reflection on, and it’s a significant facet of human life. Even for my aroace siblings in Christ, the way we talk about desire and God shapes the realities queer Christians experience in the Church and in the world.
In thinking about these things in my classes, I have found that many theologians of color have wisdom to offer on desire that is far more illuminating than anything I read in white purity culture. The traditional, patriarchal, abstinence-only shame-of-the-body approach to eros is not life giving for anybody. Cis straight white men can pretend that it gives life to them as they benefit in a certain way. However, as someone who myself is all those things except straight, I have seen the underside and I can say that this model hurts them too, much in the way that whiteness as a system hurts white people by cutting us off from our humanity (though in ways not as deadly as how it affects people of color).
M Shawn Copeland, a black Catholic nun and womanist theologian, describes eros and the erotic as something deeper and more complex than simply the desire for genital sex, though it does include that. In summary, Copeland describes the erotic life of Jesus as one that reaches out to others, sees itself as interwoven with others and effects the possibility of life and flourishing. Reading Copeland, one perhaps feels a resonance with Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”.
This is just one example of the insight that theologians of color can bring to bear on the questions of queer theology, and also of theology of sexuality and desire in general. And yet, as a white queer Christian, I continue to see ways in which their insights occasionally clash with queer theology as I’ve come to understand it. This is not a critique of theologians of color or white queer theologians, but something that I feel must be contended with in order to do both communities justice. Desire and my understanding of it often feels like a rushing river. Unlike traditional evangelical accounts of desire, I do not see this fast moving current as a threat, a river to be dammed and siphoned. On the contrary, I think the complexity, intensity and vibrancy of human desire speaks to the power and dynamism of God’s own life which God pours out on us. But I do wish to avoid the rocks, and to do justice to the words and flesh of the people who accompany me on the river, their desires, their being, their inherent dignity in the εικον θεου. The following rumination is an attempt to lay my cards on the table, understand both what wisdom and what challenges are offered by theologies of race and theologies of queerness (offered by white theologians). Perhaps in so doing, we can begin to offer one map or chart through the rapids and enjoy the ride.
My struggle to do justice to both theology of race and theology of queerness seems to be largely due to the realities of eros in a racialized world that both theologies wrestle with.*
I’ve seen a number of theologies of race that rightly talk about the problem of gaze in the service of whiteness, objectification, and patterns of relationality that are embedded in colonial/patriarchal/imperialist/white supremacist hierarchies. Occasionally, I have also seen theology by white authors productively used to pursue this good purpose. Recently, I read an excerpt on Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans as part of a class on theology/race/culture. Barth comes down fairly harshly on eros as it currently exists, but in the context of racism and supremacy, his critiques make a good deal of sense.
Likewise, many theologians of color I’ve read provide powerful insights into the nature of love, relationship and belonging, of the possibility of seeking spaces of freedom, flourishing and affection in resistance to the oppression of supremacist and capitalist desire.** Indeed, I would argue black theology as I’ve experienced so far has taught me more about what it means to love others well than has academic queer theory.
At the same time, some queer theology, while broadly aligning with the values of egalitarian relationship, love and belonging expressed by the aforementioned theologies, is often in the business of critiquing society’s relationship to eros in general, and asking if we might not have missed crucial realities of being, loving and belonging in an attempt to found a sexual ethic (particularly for the church).*** Monogamy and, to a lesser extent premarital chastity are not necessarily bad things if undertaken willingly with an understanding of the dynamics involved. But queer theology is right to name that they are not inherently exempt from the systems of oppression that plague all human affections. Some theology of race acknowledges this, but it is also in my experience at times uncomfortable with the possibility of other solutions. It’s worth noting that polyamory and promiscuities are not exempt from oppressive dynamics either. But to me it seems that some traditional theology around race sees the positive principles of love and belonging as only capable of coalescing around monogamous, chaste, often though not always heteronormative lines.
In my conversations with other queer Christian activists, we sometimes acknowledge that the work of queer theology is really advancing two different but related conversations in the Church. The first conversation is around the questions, “Can same-sex relationships be measured by the same measures of virtue as straight relationships?” and “Can trans lives be measured by the same measures of virtue as cis lives?”***** This is the conversation of integration and dignity, and it is the one that is generally the most comfortable to cishet people, or at least the most accessible.
The second conversation is centered around the more dangerous question, “Do queer lives and relationships require us to reimagine what it means to be faithful in our relational lives?” Admittedly, speaking as a theology student, I have perhaps written the question differently than some secular queer theorists might. But I think in either case, there is a desire to see how queer experience might challenge or reshape the possibilities of human life, not just conform to what is currently expected or normative.
People in both conversations sometimes wish to pretend the other doesn’t exist. Activists working for integration want to advance the narrative that “we’re just like you straight people” and in so doing at times erase the ways queer experience differs radically, and the promise and potential of that difference. Activists working for deconstruction sometimes reject marriage or other practices entirely as morally bankrupt, and in so doing erase any acknowledgment that people who find certain relational practices compelling for personal reasons might be able to “queer” them in unexpected, life-giving ways.
I personally feel that we need to be having both conversations at once or we will never achieve the hope we seek. And my struggle with theology of race and the ways it often treats eros is that it feels uncomfortable having the second conversation. At the same time, some of its insights provide answers to the first conversation that far surpass much of what white queer theology can contribute to the first conversation, and the moral fabric many theologians of color can describe through their lived experience provides a possibility for queer virtue that operates more like the destabilizing, recreating power of the second conversation.
And so, ultimately, I feel caught between the critique of desire, its call to rise above the easy answers of kyriarchal sexual practice, and the critique of chastity, its call to see in mysterious and scandalous exercise of desire the possibility of deeper life, love and communion with the Other. I expect I will be navigating these currents for the rest of my life, but it is my hope to be faithful to the truth of both, and it seems important to be able to talk about it.
*Queer friends of color, feel free if you feel so led to add any context I may miss in my analysis as a white queer man
**It’s important to note that theology of race is not only something that theologians of color can do, lest I exempt the patterns of whiteness from the conversation around race as if race is something that “other people” have and wrestle with but I do not. That said, my readings of theologians of color have proved fruitful for understanding not only their experience in the system of race, but also for ways that we all might begin to, as my professor puts it, “throw a wrench in the gears” of race and racism.
***Some queer theorists and theologians, not without cause, suggest that even trying to form an ethic was our first mistake. I personally think it’s pretty difficult to not form some kind of ethos or ethic or approach by which to try and embody positive relationality to others, but their critiques are important in at least two ways: They bring to our attention the limits of our best intentions, and they highlight the ways in which our attempts to create ways of living faithfully and mutually with one another have been tainted by racism, colonialism, capitalism, sexism, etc.
*****I recognize that the conversation around trans identity and experience adds layers of meaningful complication to the entire conversation of queer theology. It’s beyond my scope and experience to be able to explain these, but I want to note here that I’m not intending to ignore them by not delving into them fully. They are important and should be considered.
