If the foundational statement of Pride is “I exist,” then the foundational statement of Pride in queer community is “We exist.” For the community to be whole and authentic, we have to peer into this statement deeply, and literally. We exist as people with complex lives, with intersecting and hybrid identities. Queering as a discipline demands an appreciation for nuance, for complexity. Queerness in community demands that we respect the nuance and complexity of one another’s authentic lives. Fortunately, we as a people have a knack for this. Recognizing the ways that we queer the binary of male and female probably makes it easier for us to comprehend that other kinds of people are also queerly intersectional and hybrid in their identities. Because we are born into families that span every race, religion, nation, and socioeconomic status, our community is inherently diverse. The art of queering therefore both obliges and facilitates our ability to declare that “we exist” in all our complexity.
It is challenging but essential work to become aware of how our various power-infused particularities (things like race, religion, skin color, sex, gender identity, ability, immigration status, access to wealth) interact and consciously or subconsciously reinforce one another. “Intersectionality” describes this complex web of privilege and oppression. “Hybridity” describes the impact of colonization on racial identity, and the impact of hybrid racial identity on power dynamics and cultural expression. Queerness demands that we take these dynamics into account in our ethical lives.
Awareness of and respect for intersectionality and hybridity are among the most important ethical calls of our movement. Not just because we tend to be sensitive to these dynamics, but also and more importantly because they have everything to do with power. People who are seen and recognized have vastly more power than people who are rendered invisible.
Justice for queer people is increasingly a global movement. In this our work aligns with other efforts that will ultimately require global action, such as movements to address environmental degradation, religious persecution, human trafficking, and extreme poverty. Traction on any of these issues will require an understanding of local social and political dynamics along with an ability to communicate and coordinate across lines of language, culture, and tradition. This means that we need to hear, understand, and respect each other. Awareness of intersectionality and hybridity—respect for the truth of our lives—affords opportunities for better dialogue, more effective strategizing, and the cultivation of honest solidarity.
Failure to recognize intersectional and hybrid identities is more than a missed opportunity. Very often willful ignorance of these dynamics is at the root of the problem at hand. It is an old tactic that has long been used with maddening effectiveness by those who persecute queer people. For example, in the wake the Right Reverend Gene Robinson’s consecration as the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, it was common to hear political and religious authority figures across the world intentionally muddying political discourse regarding laws that criminalize queer identity and behavior in their countries. These leaders assailed homosexuality as an intrusion of western decadence, and accused those who protest these laws of colonial hegemony. Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, offered the standard version of this argument when he “reiterated claims that foreign powers were trying to dominate weak countries and warned that Western influences threatened Malaysia’s traditional values.”1 Mahathir was quoted as saying, “Western films idolize sex, violence, murders, and wars. Now they permit homosexual practices and accept religious leaders with openly gay lifestyles.” This bit of propagandist jujitsu was particularly ironic given that Malaysia’s law criminalizing homosexuality is one of the Section 377 laws first introduced under British imperial rule in the nineteenth century—that is, it is the law, and not the protest, that is the result of colonial meddling.
The point here is not to charge anyone with behaving hypocritically—however accurate that charge may be—but to emphasize how hard these laws’ proponents work to render invisible the people who are being most harmed: LGBTQ people living in these countries.
Patrick Cheng gestures toward what is so problematic in this kind of dehumanizing maneuver, and he names it as sin:
Society perpetuates the myth that all people of color are straight (and thus are opposed to LGBT issues), and that all queer people are white (and thus are opposed to issues relating to people of color). This is particularly true when society wants these two groups to be pitted against each other, as has been the case with the marriage equality movement. This, of course, renders queer people of color as nonexistent.2
Cheng is writing about race and sexuality, but he could also be writing about sexuality and national or ethnic identity. Defenders of the Nigerian and Ugandan laws criminalizing same-sex sexual activity, for instance, seem to imply that there is no such thing as an African person—especially an African person of color—who is born queer.3
Queer people take these dynamics very seriously within our communities because they are tactics that have been used so effectively against us. We know well that invisibility robs us of both dignity and the power to combat our own oppression. Recognizing intersectional and hybrid identity is not always something we get right, and we have at times been slow on the uptake. But overall LGBTQ communities do as well or better than any community of which I’ve been a part in recognizing these dynamics and working to perceive and make visible multiple layers of human identity and experience.
Claiming our existence, our identities, and our power are all necessary if we are to claim authority over our own lives. An important next step for queer people is to show greater discernment in choosing those to whom we hand the reins of religious authority. Although it is true that queerphobic religious leaders tend to dominate the news, they do not in fact speak for the entirety of their traditions. It is imperative for progressive Christians to become much more visible and audible in our proclamation of a robust, queer-positive gospel. But it would help immeasurably if those whose well-being is at stake would affirm the authenticity of that message. When LGBTQ people casually assert that Christianity is inherently queerphobic, we give power to the faux pious who argue, wrongly, that Christianity is inherently queerphobic! This renders queer Christians invisible, and our entire community suffers as a result.
Being queer and Christian is not easy. It’s very easy at an interior level, because the two paths are so resonant. But politically, socially, it’s a narrow road. And that’s coming from a white cisgender American woman who enjoys a host of privileges. Imagine what it’s like for a queer Christian in, say, Nigeria, who is struggling to be heard. Davis Mac-Iyalla is a gay man and activist from Nigeria who is also a devout Anglican. In 2009 Mac-Iyalla wrote an open letter to the archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion. He called on the archbishop and all of the primates (leaders of the various national churches in our communion) to reject queerphobic appeals to religion, particularly those used to advance violent legislation:
The anti-homosexuality legislation proposed and enacted in Uganda and many other former British colonies has caused misery for many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, many of whom are forced to flee their countries due to this persecution. Religion is often cited as a justification for state and non-state violence against LGBT people. As a gay refugee from Nigeria who has faced this persecution, I am well aware of the misery LGBT people can go through in Africa. As a practising Anglican Christian, I believe it is crucial that the Anglican Communion unites to prevent the killing of people on the grounds of sexuality.4
Mac-Iyalla is doing in this letter what queer Christians need to be doing more of in general: he is raising his voice and demanding to be heard—at significant cost to himself. Those of us who are queer and Christian have a particular obligation to proclaim a gospel that is attuned to intersectional and hybrid realities. We are doubly called, as queers and as Christians, to insist that the churches and the LGBTQ communities we call home acknowledge us in all our complexity and respect the authenticity of our witness.
Being truthful about yourself in all your complexity is essential to authentic human connection. If you aren’t honest about who you are, it limits your ability to participate honestly in human interactions and hobbles the ability of others to engage you authentically. Finding authentic connection in community thus demands both that you tell the truth about yourself and that you help build spaces where others can do the same.
The draw of authentic human connection is powerful. It is perhaps the most important reason that anyone chooses to join a faith community. Now, maybe you go to church sometimes just to hear exquisite music. Maybe you need stillness. Maybe you have children and you want them to learn the basics of a faith tradition. These are all solid reasons to go to church. But church membership is about more than this.
Christian community should be a place where one gets to work out the most vexing ethical challenge of our lives: the challenge to perceive and negotiate a healthy relationship between Self and Other.
Doing this well is hard work, and it is the rare church that really takes this part of our mission seriously. Some do. I was blessed early in my adult life to join a church where the priest constantly reminded us that “church is not a club; you don’t get to choose the members, nor do I.” This church was a place where many of us were wounded. We didn’t always agree, and our disagreements sometimes became pitched precisely because there were a lot of raw feelings exposed whenever conflicts arose. My priest’s refrain, that we had to work it out with each other because that is what church demands, really stuck with me. And when I finally became a priest, it informed my understanding of what community life was supposed to be about.
I was ordained in 2006 and was called to be the Episcopal chaplain to Northwestern University. I had always wanted to do college chaplaincy, and to have that dream fulfilled was nothing short of a miracle to me.
My family and I arrived in Evanston at the beginning of the 2006–2007 academic year. It was a time of controversy inside the Episcopal Church. Just three years earlier, General Convention, our national legislative body, had approved the consecration of Gene Robinson to be the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, our global family of faith. There was tumult throughout the communion, and sharp dissension within the American church about whether we had gone too far by treading onto territory that was so uncomfortable for so many people in our church.
My ministry at Canterbury Northwestern was not immune to the tide of controversy. There were several conservative students who were struggling with the decision to approve Bishop Robinson’s consecration. There were also several progressive students who thought it was a great thing for the larger church. These students were friends who had already begun the difficult work of talking with each other—respectfully, with love—in order to try to understand one another’s perspectives. That they agreed unanimously to call me, an out lesbian in a covenanted relationship with another woman, was no small leap of faith for the more conservative students in the ministry.
The ripples of dissension notwithstanding, our sense that we belonged together was strong, and we set out to create a spiritual home where we could bring our full selves to bear, and together, try to find God in our communal life. Years later one of the students, Jenn, described what the community felt like to her:
My first two years [at Canterbury] significantly shaped my idea of what a vibrant, thriving church community should be. It was intimate and personally accountable, it was safe and supportive, it was woven into every day and area of our lives, it was open to hard questions and skepticism, it looked trustingly to the Holy Spirit, and relied on prayer, worship, and fellowship to center our communal as well as personal lives. There was a deeply human quality and authenticity to it all; there were occasional tensions or jealousies and all the emotions that inhere in otherwise happy families, but looking back I see our existence at the time as a sustained miracle, a gift of the Holy Spirit.5
Many of the key ingredients for a healthy community were already present in this community when I arrived. What I brought with me was my deep love of scripture, an ability to lead vibrant worship, and importantly, the queer insights that I’ve been discussing in these chapters. Having experienced people bringing their full selves to bear in queer community—sometimes duking it out, but always with a larger sense of identity and purpose—I was able to help these brilliant and largely self-aware college students bring their hearts and minds into constructive conversation. Together, we built a community of extraordinary faith and vibrancy.
And then I lost my mooring. Over the course of my second year at Canterbury I found myself falling in love with one of the graduate students who had made our community her spiritual home. There is no simple answer to the question of whether I regret the connection we forged. Despite the moral and ethical and emotional complexity, it was one of the most significant relationships of my life, and it shaped me profoundly. Still, I would give almost anything to be able to go back and navigate the whole thing differently.
Frightened by a situation that I didn’t know how to handle, I handled it badly. It took me way too long to disclose my feelings to anyone. I didn’t seek help or advice. My relationship with my partner had already begun to fray, and I let it unravel. We broke up; I moved out. I disclosed to my community the end of that relationship and within a few scant weeks the existence of another, one that had been developing under their noses but that I had kept from them. My board, unnerved, went into lockdown and voted to dismiss me almost immediately.
To say that it was a mess is beyond understatement. The fallout left many of us shattered. The lives of people I love deeply, including my children, were painfully upended. It took me years to put my life and my priesthood back together.
The reason I’m writing this is to tell you what happened to the students who were left behind to clean up the mess inside the community. You see, they were really committed to all that work we had done to be honest and authentic with each other. And they stayed committed to it even after I, supposedly the standard bearer, had this massive lapse, failing over a period of months to be honest and authentic with them.
As you can imagine, the community was torn by anger, conflicted loyalties, and raw pain. After I was completely out of the picture, the diocese brought in a mediator to help reconcile the factions that had emerged and were duking it out. I am told that the mediator asked the students to talk to her rather than cross talk with each other. The rules, I am told, felt intrusive to students who wanted to engage each other in dialogue. And then what Jenn had described as a “gift of the Holy Spirit” again took hold:
What happened in the aftermath of the meeting (as immediately as ten minutes later, cleaning up the coffee and snacks we had laid out) was not accidental at all. We intentionally turned ourselves first individually toward the Holy Spirit, and then together toward the problem. That is when the unsuccessful conflict resolution was abandoned and the conflict transformation began. Earlier, many of us acknowledged we had prayed for God to stop the conflict, to heal the wounds and restore equilibrium to our community—in desperation we had just begged Him to stop the pain. We had not come before God, broken, asking Him to guide us individually as He willed, to submit ourselves to the Holy Spirit and not demand easy answers and resolution we were not ready for yet. Real, open communication tore scabs off wounds that had festered, but the flood of talking that happened over the following days was like a salve.
Jenn writes that in the conversation that followed, students realized that “opposing” perspectives were more similar than they had previously allowed, that there were wounds on both sides that had not previously been seen by the others, and that the commitment to keeping the community running—by everyone—was stronger than they had realized but demanded more help from people who had slipped to the margins when the storm hit. The pivotal shift came when students stopped focusing on their feelings for/about me, and started taking responsibility for their relationships to the community and to each other. She continues:
One of the most difficult parts of the process of reconciliation was acknowledging and confessing the ways we had been unhelpful, petty, unfair and spiteful. This practice of reflection and humility led to enormous spiritual growth in certain members of the community, myself included. Open communication revealed fairly similar views of what transpired, that people, despite siding with a “group” when polarization occurred, were really ambivalent. The next step in repentance is to resolve not to continue sinning; the transformation continued in the realization that organizational dynamics had to change in order for the community to achieve our common future visioning of rebuilding, welcoming an interim priest, and recruiting new members in the coming academic year. The community encouraged students who felt left out of the leadership to begin new ministries, take over existing ones, and apply for Board membership. This was an important step toward resolving longstanding resentments over access and power in the organization and uneven distribution of workload.
I am not proud of my behavior; but I am fiercely proud of those young adults. What Jenn is describing here is Christian community at its level best.
This is what we are called to as a church. This level of honesty and work—this is what you are called to be and do as someone on the Christian path. I hope that you never have to deal with a mess like the one I made for these students, but you and I both know that every community has its messes. And honestly, it is in putting on your waders, pulling out the mops, and working together in the muck that some of the most important work of our lives gets done.
This is the work of touching and being touched. This is how any one of us puts ourselves in the path of naga, God’s exquisite touch that wounds and heals, that destroys and saves. As Jenn describes so well, this work involves a complex dynamic in which the individual comes to terms with herself, which makes it possible for the entire community to move forward. A person may invest in such a process out of self-interest, out of concern for her own spiritual health. In truth, though, it is very common for the motivation to go the other way: preserving the group can be a powerful incentive for an individual to engage this work, for reasons that have everything to do with the mysterious power of our relational God. Ultimately, if you do the work, it doesn’t matter whether you come to it out of concern for yourself or the community or, hopefully, both. Shoring up one with integrity will shore up the other.
Queer people know that living out our identities calls us to find others who share those identities, and to create spaces where we can be ourselves together with some measure of safety, inviting others into those spaces and using them as a base of operations to reach out to others who need us. Because we need one another so much, there is a level of accountability to each other that many of us seem to grasp and shoulder intuitively.
For Christians, accountability to one another is an explicit demand of our tradition. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” said Jesus, “if you have love for one another.”6 As we have discussed several times, “love” in the Christian sense has everything to do with communities that people enter deliberately, and build up with perseverance.
Thus commitment to Christian community is not merely a sign of our faith; it is a crucial component of both the path we are on and the message that we preach. The Gospel of a theologically substantive God is proclaimed both by individuals and by the community as a whole, and doing so takes courage. You have to be rooted in a community that is rigorous in demonstrating love and accountability to one another. Both the love and the accountability themselves model the theological substance of the Gospel: thus the theology of our tradition and the ethics we live reinforce each other and depend upon each other.7
This is the fundamental problem with the inclination to live out your faith life in solitude, without the discipline of a tradition or community—what some people describe as “spiritual but not religious.” Living the ethical life demanded by God is so greatly facilitated by relationships with others that it is honestly hard to see how one can truly manage it alone. And no matter how ethical your life, there is still something important that is missing if you aren’t living it out in intentional community that you have deliberately entered and claimed, and to which you have committed yourself.
At the same time, individual churches don’t necessarily cultivate the kind of authenticity and accountability to the Other that Jenn and the students in her community demanded of themselves. Many churches cultivate responsibility—for outreach ministries, for liturgy, for church governance—and that is important. But responsibility for specific duties is not the same thing as the kind of accountability to one another that fosters spiritual growth.
There are churches that do this well. If you are looking for a church, I encourage you to look for one that breeds healthy interpersonal dynamics. Look for a place where members know themselves (themSelves), and treat each Other with respect. Look for a community that corporately knows ItSelf and engages in a healthy way with Others. I hope that’s already on your short list of things that you might be seeking—but know that you are right to expect it in a Christian community. If you are already in a community, I encourage you to dedicate yourself to a discipline of healthy Self/Other dynamics. If you are a leader, demand it of yourself and among the others leading ministries for which you have responsibility.
Here are some of the ways that a Christian community can and should incarnate healthy Self/Other dynamics.
Power in a Christian community should be shared, and shared broadly. There are always some decisions that are properly made by a small or elected group, and in rare instances there are decisions that are appropriately made in confidential settings. But to the maximum extent possible, decisions should be made prayerfully (I mean that literally—people joining in prayer together), through conversation and group deliberation that works to include rather than exclude church members.
I am not naïve about power dynamics or ignorant of political processes. Intermingled with my years in professional ministry, I have enjoyed a robust career as a professional political strategist. I am good at it, precisely because I understand how people use power to pursue their self-interest—and because I know how to do that myself. I know the fine art of moving behind the scenes, convincing people to see my group’s side of a dispute, brokering deals, and building up a critical mass of votes to move my group’s issue/contract/funding proposal down the field. I also know the more laborious art of grassroots education, coalition building, and intragroup dialogue. I tell you: the church should always be more about the latter than the former.
Although I am a skilled political operative, I’m lousy at church politics. Over the years I have often pondered why church politics is so different, so difficult for me. I think the answer is fairly simple: in the professional political world, people are up front about the facts that 1) we are engaged in politics, and 2) we each have a vested interest in the outcome. All too often in the church, people play politics but pretend that we are doing something else—usually something having to do with an alleged greater good, or God’s will, or something like that.
Church politics would be a whole lot less ugly if people were more honest about the fact that we have self-interest and if we had open dialogue about what those interests are and why they matter so much to us. There is no crime in having a vested interest in the outcome of a decision. The crime, so to speak, comes when you fail to acknowledge that interest—to yourself or to others—or worse, hotly deny it. Such denial prevents the community from talking openly about the dynamics that are probably operating most powerfully beneath the surface of decisions both momentous and mundane.
Open and honest conversation is crucial to any healthy relational process, but it is particularly important to a community of faith. Being honest about one’s interests, one’s fears, one’s authentic perspective is crucial to negotiating the relationship between Self and Other with the health that faith life demands.
One of the biggest mistakes I made at Canterbury was that I shut everyone in the community out of my process—even though every person in the community was going to be affected by the decisions I was struggling to make. I did this out of fear, and out of deep mistrust that anyone else would help us all move forward to a place of health.8 If I could change just one thing that I did during that time, this is what I would change. Keeping power to myself caused me to lose the ethical perspective I had always relied on, both as a lesbian and as a Christian. That ethic demands rigorous engagement with others as modus operandi, keeping the health of the community and of one’s other personal relationships in view. Adhering to my queer/Christian ethic would also have helped me attend to my own well-being. Keeping power to myself prevented people from helping me, at a time when I was drowning and needed a lifeline.
The fear that I was feeling is, I think, not uncharacteristic of what causes many people of good heart to shut others out. Sometimes people in churches usurp decision making not because they are evil power mongers, but because they think they know the right way to go forward and they are afraid that a broader conversation will lead to the wrong decision. But let’s be honest: there are also plenty of people who do hoard power, just to do it, for a myriad of reasons. Failing to be honest about our self-interest in church creates fields that are ripe for the abuse of power, toxic to healthy relational dynamics, and disastrous for a community’s ability to perceive God in its midst.
Christian community can’t thrive like that. Fear, secrecy, and power hoarding too effectively undermine the core principles of trust and reliance on one another that are at the heart of our faith. We know ourselves to be reliant on God; deliberately relying on others is one of the ways that we practice our reliance on God and, prayerfully, can come to trust more and more deeply both in God and in one another.
And here it matters to acknowledge that when the institutional church itself gets it wrong, the price is very high. I know that I bear a lot of responsibility for what went wrong at Canterbury, but I also know that I would not have been as afraid as I was had I not over the years been badly injured by church dynamics that failed to treat queer lives and relationships with care and respect. If the church is going to demand accountability and honesty from its clergy—and the church is correct to do so—then the church itself needs both to model such accountability and to cultivate environments that respect and value the human beings who inhabit them, in all our diversity.
Church community should be a place where we work hard to see and respect each other as we really are. We talked earlier about intersectionality and hybridity, people’s experiences of possessing multiple identities, some of which communicate privilege and some of which leave one vulnerable to oppression. The truth is, we are all complicated beings. Most of us experience layers of privilege and pain—some of which are visible to others and many of which are not. Church should not ever be a place where people get the message that they can’t disclose their true selves, nor a place where disclosing one’s true self puts one in peril.
It is our job to listen for, respect, and seek to comprehend people’s identities and experiences in all their multiplicity. In Christian community, difference is not a problem to be overcome; it is a strength that is crucial to our call. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul likens the community to a human body:
Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. . . . But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as [Ze] chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”9
Paul’s message is explicit: we don’t need one another simply to increase our numbers; we need others within the community to be different from ourselves. This is one of the most important and explicit ways that Paul characterizes a healthy relationship between Self and Other, insisting that all Christians appreciate just how vital the difference inherent in the Other is to our lives and to the cosmic project of which we are now a part.
It is our privilege to find ways to grow from that diversity—to embrace that these different identities and different levels of privilege inform not just the other person’s experience of sacred truth, but yours as well. Work to take these different identities/experiences into account in your community. Let these dynamics inform your interior conversations. If you belong to a church, understand the power that you already have simply by being a member—the one who already exists in the place that a visitor has to enter for the first time. Be aware of tendencies to keep power to a few, to shut others out of decision making, to assume that you can evaluate anyone else’s identities or beliefs based on whom they appear to be. Use what you learn and apply those lessons to your church’s work in the world. Whose voices are being heard? Whose voices aren’t? How many layers of identity are being recognized, valued, and drawn upon for discernment?
Queering lines of power in this way could help churches navigate some of our most vexing problems. In recent years many Protestant denominations have paid keen attention to the de facto racial segregation that is all too common in our churches. In the United States, much of this segregation is historically rooted in denominational or congregational schisms that were explicitly about race and power.10 Some of it is rooted in cultural divides that raise complex logistical issues within liturgy, such as attempting to worship in multiple languages. Today, many predominantly white denominations have created offices specifically designed to support ministries by and/or for various ethnic groups, including offices for Hispanic, African American, and Asian ministries. The Presbyterian Church has a national office for “Intercultural Ministries,” which sounds intriguingly like an effort to rupture walls that separate people along racial lines and allow new and innovative liturgical exploration to thrive.
Several denominations have launched efforts to recruit a more racially diverse pool of candidates for ordination. Ordaining people of color and giving them pulpits—especially people of color who possess a strong sense of how their racial identity informs their faith—has in some places proven a successful path for addressing de facto segregation. Queer clergy of color often possess extraordinary gifts for seeing how to queer lines of race, cultural heritage, and language in order to create worship experiences and communities that are pulsing with life. The potential benefit to Christianity in raising up such gifted ministers is significant, but it will be reaped only if churches give these clerics the opportunity to work and have their backs when they bring themselves authentically to the altar.
Whether the issue is empowerment of people who have been historically marginalized, or simply the challenge for any one of us to bring our most closely guarded selves to bear, authenticity in church requires courage. It is hard work to talk openly when you are afraid of losing something you value or need. It can be hard to trust, hard to be honest, hard to put yourself at risk of attack. You know all of this. But the fact that it is hard does not excuse churches from doing the work. In fact, church should be the place where we take most seriously the need to do this and to do it well. The challenge inherent in the relationship between Self and Other exists in every sphere of our lives. Church should be the place where we get to work it out. Church should be the place where our priesthood shows forth, where we make ourselves vulnerable—as individuals and as communities—to invite both individuals and other kinds of communities to enter the sacred.
The call to authenticity is an end in itself in Christian community, but it also leads us to the water’s edge of Christian mission. Grappling honestly with the real lives of real people puts each of us keenly in touch with an interior imperative to pay close attention to the needs of those on the margins. This is the ethical call that plunges us deep into scandal.