Hope is a dangerous thing.
—MISS CLAUDETTE, Orange Is the New Black
I’m a little jealous of you.
Yes, you, sitting there reading this book a year or more in the future from this moment when I am sitting here at my laptop, writing to you.
Yeah, I know you have challenges in your life. I know you struggle with relationships and money and all the usual stuff. I don’t mean to say that my problems are bigger than yours, or that you have it easier than me.
It’s just . . . you have this one thing right now that I don’t have that I really, really want.
You have the ability to go onto Netflix and watch what for me, now, is the next season of Orange Is the New Black. I don’t binge watch, but even pacing myself I can only make a new season last for a few weeks. Max. So I finished the most recent season a few months ago, and now I have to wait, wait, wait for my next OITNB fix.
The show is addictive. What hooks me is the way it gives multiple views of each character. Once you begin to develop some familiarity with an inmate, the show gives you that person’s backstory. Who was she before she went to prison? How did she land there? The stories blow huge holes in whatever assumptions you might make about these women as convicts. Sure, some of them had been in one form of trouble or another for a long time. A few made one bad slip that cost them everything. Most of them tripped into the criminal justice system because they needed something: social acceptance, love, expensive surgery, justice for someone they cared about. Hope that you can get what you need and want is indeed a dangerous thing, as Miss Claudette says.1
I am not trying to romanticize these stories, or pull some liberal “oh, poor them” line. I know what it is to need, and so do you. I know what it is to do something questionable in order to meet a fierce need, and to live with regret about it for a long time. I bet you know about that, too. It’s a difficult but inevitable part of being human. Revealing those needs, OITNB puts flesh and bones on characters who might otherwise remain superficial types.
And then there’s all that girl-on-girl action. Part of the reason I love OITNB is that it gets so much right about lesbian relationships.
First off, of course, is that lesbian relationships are hot.
Second, lesbian relationships are hot. (What? It bears repeating!)
Third, lesbian relationships are intense. They are emotionally intense, and they have vast potential to be sexually intense. OITNB portrays all of this exquisitely, and then some.
My favorite show so far was in season 1: the colorfully named Thanksgiving episode that builds up to Alex and Piper reigniting their sexual connection. The match is struck at a party to celebrate a prisoner’s upcoming release. Someone puts on some music, and the women start to dance. The sexual tension between Alex and Piper is already on rolling boil, and it’s not a surprise when their dancing turns into an erotic display. The other women are totally into it and clear the floor to watch and clap.
Pennsatucky, the would-be Christian crusader, is not into it. She runs to Healy, the lesbophobic guard. Feigning offense—and blatantly lying—she draws down the power of the police state as if it were her own. Healy walks in just as Alex is grinding her ass into Piper’s crotch. Healy is scandalized, oblivious to the jealousy that fuels his anger.
Healy accuses Piper of attempting to rape Alex and sends her to solitary confinement. Upon being released from solitary, she makes a beeline for Alex. Does this experience make her cower? Does she express remorse? Does she tell Alex that they have to cool down the electric current running between them? No, she does not. She pulls Alex into the chapel, where they claw off each other’s clothes to make skin contact.
The chapel is where everyone goes to have sex. It’s a delicious inversion of conventional piety: the sanctified space sexualized. In OITNB the chapel is the place where women go to feel alive, to taste freedom. Somewhat ironically, that makes the chapel a place where people want to be. As someone who has been a chaplain in an institutional setting, I can tell you: that’s no small victory for what is all too often a cheesy, wannabe sacred space.
OITNB nails the essence of scandal, taking one conventional assumption about propriety after another and standing them on their heads. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “scandal” as “an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage.”2 When you Google it, here are some of the synonyms that appear: outrageous wrongdoing, misconduct, immoral behavior, unethical behavior, shocking incident, offense, transgression, crime, sin.
This is why people sign up for text alerts and keep their pocketed phones on vibrate, waiting to see what shocking tidbit will appear next. People will go to great lengths to avoid finding themselves in the midst of scandal, and for good reason. Scandal usually exacts a price, sometimes a high price. But when it is someone else paying the price, it’s hard to look away.
The word “scandal” comes from the Greek skandalon. In ancient usage, it means “trap,” but it refers to a very specific part of a trap: it is the stick that holds the bait.3 The word also refers to the unfortunate moment in which one takes the bait and falls into the trap and, as the contemporary definition suggests, to the reaction others have when they see you fall. Thus scandal is not just a trap, but an entrapment—the bait, the fall, and the punishment all rolled up into one spectacle hungrily consumed by a public bored with their conventional lives.
There are lots of reasons that scandal keeps people tuned in, but one of the biggest reasons is this: scandal is sexy. That is especially true when the scandal is about sex, which it often is. Temptation, succumbing to temptation, the gaze of others upon you as it plays out. . . . Lots of people—probably the majority of people—have navigated these dynamics at one point or another as they have navigated their sex lives. What queer people have always had to do is navigate them more publicly than others, for reasons we’ve already discussed. The relationships we seek are scandalous, still a moral outrage to many people and a legal transgression in many lands. This makes the ability to navigate scandal a matter of survival for us.
But we do more than survive in these waters. What Piper does as she dances with Alex is what queer people have done since the dawn of time. She sees the scandal brewing and steps right into the heart of it. Boldly. There is something on that turf that she needs, that she wants, and she marches in to claim it.
Queers are able to endure scandal, so many of us, because we have already confronted and survived the threats, the sanctions imposed by those who police scandal and punish its violation. We already know what it is to risk. We are well acquainted with the dangerous, wounding aspects of naga. Many of us perceive the stirring of an identity deep within, an identity that won’t be denied and that cannot be written off by arbiters of social niceties as “scandalous.” We as a people have long been able to find amusement in the notion that we are somehow shocking, scandalous. We laugh, snap, square our shoulders and proclaim with pride, “You need me to be a scandal for your little, impoverished worldview? Well, honey, so be it.”
The facts of queer life demand a lived response of high moral caliber. Some queer friends gave me pushback on this idea. They feared that the words “high moral caliber” could be construed as an appeal to respectability, and they anticipated that many self-identified queers would resist such a call. I would resist such a call. The notion of respectability is itself a trap. It is a trap because our scandalous nature—and our courage in confronting convention—is at the heart of what we bring to larger society that is of such value. This is a paradox of huge ethical import.
Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal is largely a call to resist efforts to become respectable members of society at the expense of our queerly scandalous/scandalously queer natures. He writes:
In scenes where some mad drag queen is likely to find the one thing most embarrassing to everyone and scream it at the top of her lungs, in Radical Faeries gatherings and S/M workshops—in these and other scenes of queer culture it may seem that life has been freed from any attempt at respectability and dignity. Everyone’s a bottom, everyone’s a slut, anyone who denies it is sure to meet justice at the hands of a bitter, shady queen, and if it’s possible to be more exposed and abject then it’s sure to be only a matter of time before someone gets there, probably on stage and with style.4
Warner is describing a gay male scene from the 1990s that is instantly recognizable to many of us who were in or near that world at that time. This scene doesn’t exist today in the same way; nonetheless, the lessons he takes from it still teach us something important about what our lives mean. “In those circles where queerness has been most cultivated,” he writes, “the ground rule is that one doesn’t pretend to be above the indignity of sex. And although this usually isn’t announced as an ethical vision, that’s what it perversely is.”5
The rules of queer culture constitute an ethical vision, Warner claims, because they establish social ties between and among us, social ties that make demands of us in terms of how we think about one another and how we treat one another. To be clear, Warner is not saying that we do not have intrinsic value as human beings. Rather, he is arguing for a self-awareness that is inherently relational. As Warner explains:
I call [this] an ethic not only because it is understood as a better kind of self-relation, but because it is the premise of the special kind of sociability that holds queer culture together. . . . The rule is: Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. And the corollary is that you stand to learn the most from the people you think are beneath you.6
This is core Christian theology.
Queer people seem to get instinctively that transcendence, if it is to be desired, is best gotten by diving into embodiment: sex, design, beauty, service, and scandal, shame. It takes courage to be who we are in the face of rejection, spitting, coercion, threat.
Michael Warner and Piper Chapman both understand there is something of immense value that we seek—and to an extent find—in our performance of scandal. But don’t let our ability to entertain and be entertained fool you. We know full well that scandal is dangerous. By definition, scandal offends conventional sensibilities. It upsets, disturbs. Scandal is unnerving because, according to conventional wisdom, it’s not the way things are supposed to be.
This is one of the ways that Christianity is most thoroughly queer. Everything about Christianity is scandalous, from the inherent shock value of God becoming a defenseless baby, to the cosmic joke by which Rome’s most shameful instrument of torture becomes a mechanism for salvation. The centerpiece of Christian worship is Holy Communion, where we share bread and wine that for some Christians represent Jesus’s body and blood and that for Catholics actually become Jesus’s body and blood. If the cannibalistic overtones don’t make the case plainly enough that we are about scandal, try this on for size: the word “Communion” comes from the Greek word koinonia, which means “common.” In Jesus’s time, it also meant “defiled.”
And that’s the point. Scandal isn’t an inconvenient by-product of the Christian tradition. The scandal of Christianity is completely intentional. The entire thrust of the Christian message is supposed to make our jaws drop, our eyes open as wide as they can go as we stammer, “But, but . . . that’s not the way things are supposed to be!”
The Gospels communicate this in an interesting way. Instead of just saying over and over again, “Be shocked. Be very shocked,” the Bible tells us stories in which people trip over this inherent scandalousness. We watch the protagonists of these stories struggle, and we listen to what Jesus says to them about it.
The most dramatic of these stories is an encounter between Peter and Jesus. Peter is a stock character actor in these little vignettes about how people struggle with what Jesus was up to. He specializes in roles that are designed to look clueless, shallow, or just plain dumb. The scene that Jesus and Peter have over the scandal of the cross is, really, just the worst for poor Peter. Jesus has just told the disciples that he is heading for Jerusalem where he is going to suffer and be killed. Peter wigs out. The text says that Peter pulls Jesus aside and begins to “rebuke” him. Can you imagine rebuking Jesus? Peter says, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Does Jesus place his hand compassionately on Peter’s shoulder and help him process this difficult truth? No. Jesus is pissed. He assaults Peter with perhaps the most withering statement in the entire gospel: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”7
Peter is basically saying that he is scandalized by this idea that Jesus is going to suffer and be killed. Jesus responds by calling Peter a “stumbling block” to him. The Greek word is “skandalon.”
In all of Christian scripture, this is the only time when the word “skandalon” is used to refer to an individual person. And here is something else. This little drama unfolds just two verses after the scene in which Jesus renames Peter, and in a famous wordplay, makes Peter the founder of his church on earth: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock [petra] I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven . . .”8
One minute Jesus is identifying Peter as the guy who is going to lead his movement on earth. The next minute Peter goes all establishment and begins reprimanding Jesus for the scandal of his fate. Jesus is astonished. “You are going to be scandalized by me?” Jesus understands how powerfully human society is drawn to safety, to respectability. He sees clearly that the church’s need to be respectable, to be safe, will lead it inexorably to struggle with the scandal he is about to become. That’s why Jesus calls Peter out on this again right after the Last Supper. “You will all become deserters because of me,” he says, using the verb form of “skandalon.”9 Peter stamps his foot in furious protest, “Though all become deserters because of you, I will never desert you.” But the sun has already set, and in just a few hours that cock is gonna crow . . .
This is a cautionary tale extraordinaire for those with religious authority, and mother church specifically: You are not above being scandalized by the very message you proclaim. Beware just how easily you can become a tool of Satan, a scandal to Jesus himself, even as you stand there jangling those keys to heaven.
The epicenter of Christian scandal is that cross. What happens to Jesus is so bad. People who are scandalized respond by shaming. So it wasn’t enough to kill him. The political and religious leadership of occupied Palestine had to humiliate him, snuff out his life like a cigarette butt under your shoe on a filthy street. This is what scandalized people do. This is what scandalous people take on.
So they strung him up, in a hideously gruesome method of execution. Crucifixion wasn’t just a terrible way to die. It was designed by Rome to be a public display of torture, a constant reminder to those people living in occupied lands not to mess with their imperial overlords. As a public display, it shone a bright, blinding spotlight of shame on its victims.
Everything about crucifixion is hard to watch—visually, physically, emotionally, politically, spiritually. You’d think that the early church would have looked away, emphasized something else about Jesus’s death, or done what the contemporary church often does: work overtime to keep Good Friday solidly in the context of Easter, breezing past the crucifixion as an unfortunate necessity in order to get to the resurrection.
But there is a reason that the cross itself became the chief symbol of our faith. The early church couldn’t stop looking at it, wondering about it, trying to make sense of it.
Paul, for one, focused intensely on the cross. He wrote about the cross even when he didn’t need to, forcing it into people’s faces. Why? Like any good Roman citizen of his day, Paul appreciated that death by crucifixion was designed to shame, to humiliate. And like any good Jew, Paul knew that the idea of God being shamed in this way was so horrifying as to be almost incomprehensible. All of which adds up to this: Pointing to that cross wasn’t an accident, or an odd literary choice. He was telling his audiences, the people in his churches, that it was impossible to ignore the cross—and very specifically the scandal of the cross—and fully understand what Jesus was up to.
Paul unpacks this idea most clearly in a succinct paragraph from his first letter to the church in Corinth:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block [skandalon] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.10
In this passage Paul is dialoguing with two worlds of thought: Greek philosophy and Jewish theology. The gentiles of his day would have discussed the nature of reality in well-reasoned discourse as was characteristic of Greek philosophy. At the core of Jewish faith was the strong belief in the one powerful God, YHWH, whose salvific feats of creation and exodus testified to this God’s existence and supremacy. Jews of his day would have looked for signs—acts of divine power—to authenticate anyone claiming to represent YHWH.
Both of these perspectives were part of the public airwaves in Corinth, where Paul had founded a small but solid community. The people in this church couldn’t help but try to see their newfound faith through these two lenses, Greek and Jewish, but neither lens explained—nor, really, made any sense of—this radical message that Paul was trying to get them to understand. Because neither worldview could comprehend the essence of scandal that the cross simultaneously represented and ruptured.
In this passage, Paul uses the word dunamis, root of the English word “dynamic.” Dunamis is the power of God that Jesus channels in order to heal people. By setting dunamis in opposition to skandalon, Paul is saying that something happens in this formula of identity, risk, touch, and confrontation of scandal—something that is so strong, so powerful, it blows the lid off of every puny conventional fear harbored in the human heart.
That’s because this formula stands on its head everything that people conventionally think about what power is and how it operates. For Paul, this is a cosmic shattering of something that operates as a stranglehold on humanity: the idea that death is the most powerful thing we know. The scandal of the cross means that death and its affiliates—terror, torture, physical and spiritual agony—lose their potency as the ultimate stumbling block, the ultimate bait and trap, the ultimate outrage.
Paul sees clearly that this shattering opens up a horizon of ethical possibility, an ethical vision that in some ways parallels what Michael Warner sees in queer experience: the ability to learn the most from those you think are beneath you.
The Christian message explicitly demands that folks with power—political power, religious power, economic power, any kind of power—pay close attention to the realities on the ground of people who don’t have nearly as much power as they do: people who are hungry, poor, marginalized, sick; prisoners, refugees, widows, orphans. If you’ve spent any time at all reading the Bible, you know this list. It matters to take seriously that inside every one of those categories are real people, human beings who think and feel, who need to eat, who have sex, who hurt and love and laugh and struggle and just want someone to understand what they are going through—just like you. Most of us have found ourselves inside one or more of these categories. Whatever of those experiences you’ve had, you know: it doesn’t help when someone assumes that your experience is an aberration, that what you are going through is simply “not the way things are supposed to be.” It doesn’t help because sometimes—not always, but all too often—when people equate “how things are supposed to be” with “good, right, just,” they also equate “not the way things are supposed to be” with “bad, wrong, criminal.”
That’s often how people come to believe that struggling, or being different, is shameful.
Shame is a complex emotion that has to do with a sense that you are bad or that you’ve done something bad. It can be situational, and it can at times be valid: sometimes people are right to be ashamed of what they have done. You can also feel shame as a kind of deep embarrassment. Sexual shame is sometimes about this—a sense of awkwardness piled on top of intense vulnerability that you may not want exposed to the world, especially when you are trying to get basic needs met.
The threat of shaming gives scandal its power as an effective arbiter of human behavior. Shame is designed to keep us in line. But shame is not merely a tool. Wrestling with questions about our inherent worth is an unavoidable part of who we are. Warner argues that we need to hang on to shame for health, authenticity, and power. He would say that we ignore or deny our shame at our expense and at the expense of others.
He makes a valid point. Neither shame nor scandal are vacuous concepts. Shame, if it doesn’t paralyze you, can breed a kind of humility. It is an ethical posture that makes it possible to “learn the most from the people you think are beneath you.”
But as a priest I have also worked with many people for whom queer shame is a debilitating condition cruelly inflicted by sanctimonious devotees of various religions. Claiming to speak on behalf of God, these people of alleged faith work hard to convince beautiful queer souls that they are bad. Internalized, these messages of shame wreak spiritual havoc, not just upending lives, but all too often ending them.
This kind of shame is not ethically helpful. It makes it all the more difficult to see the stuff for which one really should be accountable.
The question that both queer ethics and authentic Christianity press is: What behavior is truly scandalous, truly shameful? There is a message here to the church: if you want scandal to be an effective arbiter of social behaviors, be very careful how you define it, what traps you set, and what bait you use.
If the concept of scandal has value, queer people are not the ones who are devaluing it. We have rejected its power because it has been used so often and so violently as a weapon against us. But there are traps that people fall into because they—the people—are wrong. Sometimes people take the bait and reveal that their true nature is corrupt. Queer people know a lot about this, too. We see it happen when someone who has been persecuting LGBTQ people is revealed to be a closeted queer, cheating on his wife (it’s almost always a him, a powerful him). We watch the scandal engulf such a person, and we know that he is getting what he deserves. Not because he is gay, but because he is a hypocrite. And not just a hypocrite, but a malevolent one, so busy projecting his internalized self-hatred onto others that he cannot even see the people he is damaging.
The Christian concept of “salvation history” is the story of how God creates us, declares us to be good (that is, not ashamed), watches us periodically wander off, and calls us back. The episodes of “wandering” sometimes look like this: people engulfed in pain or fear come to believe that they are bad, shameful; and through this false belief, they bring those destructive qualities to life. Today, people very often do this by projecting their own sense of shame onto others, especially sexual shame. This is not to say that evil does not exist as its own power, but rather that it is possible to collude with evil simply by denying our inherent value—denying it in ourselves, or denying it in others. Honestly, what is “evil” other than a denial of everything God stands for? When it comes to us, what God clearly stands for, puts God’s heart and incarnate body on the line for, is the idea that we are of infinite value to the God who made us in Hir image.
A person of faith has to perceive this truth in order to stop participating in the abuse of power, either as perpetrator or as victim. It’s how any marginalized, abused community or individual throws off oppression, by declaring, “The scandal is not what you say it is. Yes, I was crucified. Yes, I am queer. Those things do not make me bereft of value as you say I am. I am who I am, empowered by God, and I will live with integrity.”
This is the essence of LGBTQ pride. Queer theologian Patrick Cheng describes “healthy pride” as “the affirmation of one’s intrinsic value and self-worth.”11 Pride is thus the antidote to debilitating shame. Pride makes it possible for a queer person to feel the healing power of dunamis, upending the death-dealing aspects of skandalon.
This is not always easy, and the LGBTQ community has not always gotten this right. To claim queer identity is to sail into the headwind of scandal—knowingly, deliberately. It is very hard to do so and to maintain a posture of integrity. As a community, we have struggled deeply with the competing impulses to hide our most scandalous qualities/members and to lift them up for the world to acknowledge. Those of us who take queer virtue seriously are forced to reflect on our past and come to terms with our complicity in the shaming of our own—butch/femme, drag queens, those who are trans* or intersex or bisexual. The strength of the LGBTQ movement, at our best, is precisely that we stand together, that we look directly into the scandal imposed by others and declare it null and void. We know that our truth is stronger than the scandal, and we know that experiencing that truth together gives us power to do extraordinary things.
When we do get it right, it is stunning. It captures the essence of what Christianity is trying to get us to do/be/understand. This inversion of human shame and scandal was at the very heart of what Jesus was doing on earth. By looking scandal in the eye, Queers and Christians rob scandal of its power to keep us down, and use scandal as an avenue to build us up—as individuals, but through community.
Christians and Queers share this common understanding: our ethical foundation lies in the communities into which we are received by grace, which we build consciously for ourselves and for others. It is our communities that give our risk meaning, that hold our touch, that shore us up in the face of scandal, that empower us to be the people we are called to be.