I am a queer priest.
By this, I mean so many things. Most obvious to others, I am a lesbian and I am a priest. Thus “queer” might indicate one of the particularities that I bring to my priesthood, in the same way one might say, “She is a woman priest,” or, “He is a Nigerian priest.”
This is true, but it is not enough. It is not nearly all that I mean.
For one thing, it elevates “priest” as noun above “queer,” which is relegated to adjective. And in truth, “priest” just as clearly modifies “queer” in my soul. You see, I am also very much a priestly queer.
But that still doesn’t capture what I mean.
As a priest, I am primarily concerned with the astonishing ways that God is constantly intruding on our lives, begging us to love and be loved, insinuating Hirself1 in our hearts and minds, cracking us open, tearing us apart, rebuilding us, and keeping us alive throughout this terrifying, rigorous process. In theological circles, we refer to this as “the inbreaking of the Spirit.” This transgressive nature of the sacred may not define the sacred—or it may—but it certainly is core to my experience of and devotion to the sacred. God ruptures our understanding of reality, constantly. God queers our lives and our world. It is fundamental to my priesthood to call attention to this queering, to name it for myself and others, to breathe life into our experience of it in preaching and in liturgy. I am thus a priest of the queer God who creates and calls us, ruptures and reconciles us, sustains and sanctifies us.
My lesbianism, my queerness, is part of who I am. It is built into my DNA as surely as my skin color, eye color, and the genetic kink that makes my hair curl. If I could choose to be gay, I would. I love it in myself, so very much. But the question of choice aside, it is unquestionably part of me and for my entire life has informed my uptake of, well, everything.
My priestliness is part of who I am. Since I became conscious of myself and my desires, I have felt the inescapable draw of the sacred, the magic and mystery and power of something inside me, something bigger than me, something that connected me to other people, to life, to truth. My mother profoundly experienced God’s transgressive power, and whatever made her so open to it, she passed on to me. She was a singer who experienced God most intimately through sacred music, so it was natural for her to enroll me and my sister and brother in the choir at our local Episcopal church as soon as we were big enough to stand and hold a hymnal. One gift of this was that from a very early age I participated in the leadership of our Sunday liturgies. It put me front and center, able to observe closely the mysterious goings-on at the altar. I was dazzled and captivated by the doings of our priest, at precisely the historical moment when our denomination was grappling with women’s call to ordained ministry. I don’t remember thinking consciously, “Hey, I can be a priest, too.” I do remember the clear sense that, just as my mother’s proper place in the church was in the loft, my proper place was at the altar.
These two components of my identity, these two markers, queer and priest, have always intertwined. To say that they have informed each other comes almost too close to suggesting that they are discrete. They are not divisible. And yet, they are distinct parts of who I am; they do mutually inform how I understand each of them; and they do inform how I understand everything else—God, the world, human life, and my own existence.
I am a queer priest. I am a priestly queer.
Both of these identity markers have informed my ethical development. My priesthood, rooted in the discipline of a spiritual path, tends to be explicit in its ethical demands. But the facts of queer life also unquestionably demand a lived ethical response. What may come as a surprise—what surprises me—is that the ethical demands placed on me by my identity as a queer person and by my involvement in the LGBTQ community tend to be far clearer and more rigorous than those placed on me by my ordination to holy orders.
Moreover, I have come to realize that queer ethical demands clearly and often exquisitely manifest widely recognized Christian virtues: spiritual discernment, rigorous self-assessment, honesty, courage, material risk, dedication to community life, and care for the marginalized and oppressed. I can’t count how many times people have asked me how I reconcile my sexuality with my faith. The question always leaves me speechless, because I experience these two parts of my identity to be so deeply resonant with each other, particularly in terms of the kind of life they call me to live. I am convinced that this resonance says something important both about queerness and about Christianity.
For too long, public discourse about LGBTQ people has tended to operate from the premise that queer identity is morally problematic, but that there are specific instances of individual queer people who live upright lives. I argue precisely the opposite: while individual queer people struggle at times with moral failing—as all human beings do—in general I perceive queer identity to have at its core a moral center of high caliber, one that is both inspirational and aspirational. My experience being immersed in the lives and spiritual journeying of queer people tells me plainly not only that the divine is alive and well in us, but that many of us are deeply attuned to it.
Religious deprecation of queer people seems predicated on the idea that there is no spark of the divine in us—or that we possess such a spark but live in opposition to it, thus living in a state of perpetual sin. Either perspective ignores the alignment of ethical demands exacted by both Christian faith and queer life. In other words, that queer moral center, that spark, is not only not at odds with core tenets of Judeo-Christian belief, but is resonant with and in fact points to the most important, challenging, and vivifying aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I am not saying that queer people are or must be Christian. I am saying that authentic Christianity is and must be queer.
This is not to say that all Christians should become homosexual, or identify as LGBTQ—sexually queer. Rather, I mean “queer” as something that has at its center an impulse to disrupt any and all efforts to reduce into simplistic dualisms our experience of life, of God. Queer theory is historically rooted in the urgent need to rupture, or disrupt, binary thinking about gender and sexual identity—and very specifically, to dismantle rigid attachment to male and female as definitive poles.2 This work is born of necessity for queer people. We have had to carve out conceptual space for ourselves to inhabit—and not just conceptual, but also social, political, and yes, theological.
Queering did not emerge as a relevant, important discourse in the late twentieth century. Some of the most interesting historical queering has taken place in the church. Christian history is salted with, has been flavored by, rich immersions into gender/sexual queering, from Paul’s encouragement to celibacy, to the clerical dress/dresses—vestments—still worn today. Nor is queering an activity confined to gender and sexual expression, even in the LGBTQ movement. Queering as an impulse and lens has been applied to countless human perceptions and academic disciplines, from architecture to biology to linguistics to theology. It is not a stretch to see how Jesus ruptured simplistic dualisms all the time: life and death, human and divine, sacred and profane. Paul’s insistence that in Christ there is neither male nor female is the essence of queering, set in the midst of a passage that also queers the lines between Jew and Greek, slave and free.
These examples of queering are not marginal to Christian tradition; they are core to our faith. I started this book because I observed two things: first, my queer identity has taught me more about how to be a good Christian than has the church. This is not to say that my church experiences have been devoid of moral example. Throughout my life, I have often been astonished by the level of faith and dedication to Christian community I have witnessed in the lives of people I have known in the church: fellow parishioners, priestly colleagues and mentors, my students in campus ministry. What I am saying is that queer community has created a moral code that I have internalized deeply, one which I have seen lived out more consistently in queer community as community than I have witnessed in the church as community. This living into ethical demands in queer community has thus become a model for me, the basis for virtuous aspiration, more effectively than has Christian life.
For any queer person, this may not come as a surprise. Our status as members of a minority group dictates that ethical queerness be lived out consciously with great regularity. That is, I am constantly having to make ethical decisions—personal, political, relational—that involve my queer identity. Perhaps because of this quotidian quality and the familiarity it breeds, I know and trust my queer ethical sensibility as much and at times even more than I know and trust the all-too-often-rarified world of Christian ethics. During times in my life when I have been most vigorously challenged, my queerness has provided a more reliable moral compass than my Christian faith. When I look back on the biggest mistakes I have made in my life, the clarity of my failing tends to stand out as a failure of my queer identity and obligations—even though, very often, there is a Christian imperative visibly at stake.
The second observation that got me writing is a question: If my queer identity informs my understanding of my Christian faith, might the lessons of queer identity help other Christians better understand their faith, too? I feel this question rear its head whenever I am part of discussions about addressing the spiritual needs of a particular group of people: gay people, survivors of intimate partner violence, people affected by HIV/AIDS, and others. In these discussions, I often perceive a dynamic, an attitude, that I find uncomfortable: that there is some spiritual authority outside the experience of these people, and that this authority, if tapped, will benefit the people as they live into the particularity of their collaborative experience. Conversations about spiritual experience should with far greater regularity move in the opposite direction. For example, a survivor of intimate partner violence, by virtue of his/her/hir experience and survival, has learned something—maybe many things—about God, about his/her/hir own soul. A survivor of trauma has things to teach hir faith community, things about religious tradition, theology, from which the church/theologians will benefit—things that will render a more authentic understanding of religious tradition and community, not just for that person and people who share that person’s particular experience (of violence or trauma, for instance), but also and very importantly for everyone who is a follower of that faith tradition, a member of its global community. I want to encourage people who claim the mantle of Christianity to hone our ability to receive and embrace such perspectives as essential to the vivification of our tradition.
Why should nonqueer Christians care about this?
You may have noticed that in terms of my own identity, so far I have talked more about being a priest than about being a Christian. Christianity is the essential lens into my personal faith. The story of God’s transgressive movement into human history is, for me, communicated most clearly in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures of the Judeo-Christian canon.3 I am mesmerized by the God of Genesis, whose voice creates all we know and all we are; the God of the Exodus, murderous and liberating. I join the Hebrew prophets in responding to God’s transfixing call, “Hineni! Here I am.” I am brought to spiritual health—literally, “saved”—by my self-immersion in the dynamic events of Jesus’s teaching, execution, and resurrection. I duke it out with Paul, trying to wrap my mind and heart around what he gets so right and what he gets so wrong in his heroic effort to break open conventional thinking and build a living, global church. Christian liturgy, the living of these stories, the worship of this God—there are few moments when I feel so alive as when I am engaged in that vital space, pulsing with God’s presence. It is up there with really good sex, with fierce anger, with floating effortlessly on the ocean, with being overcome by the surf and pounded mercilessly onto abrasive sand.
There’s no denying that I am a Christian, and I have no wish to deny it. I wish fervently that I could count my Christian identity on the same plane as my priesthood, as my queerness. But it is not a term I employ often when I am presenting myself to others. It would not make it into my “elevator moment” if I had to sell myself in under a minute to an as-yet-unengaged stranger. If you were to ask me why, I bet you would not be surprised by the answer. The word “Christian” itself has become a weapon of violence perpetrated on my queer siblings. And even though I utterly reject the homophobic, transphobic theologies and hermeneutics so readily embraced by too many Christians—reject them as an affront to Christianity itself—I cannot deny that they have tainted, even for me, the very name of our tradition. Of my tradition.
This is a problem. It is a problem for me, obviously, as it makes it difficult to explain myself to others and also complicates my profession of a faith that is vibrant within me. It is a problem for me as I have waded through the subtle and overt homophobia still at work within the Episcopal Church.
The problem is much bigger and far more troubling that the personal and personnel issues at work for one woman. Queer people have for a very long time been under assault, and the violence waged against us is almost always attributed to religious belief. Christianity is not the only world religion that has been twisted to justify hateful attack on queer people; however, the most vocal antigay activists in the United States are quick to identify themselves, nominally, as Christian.4 And their antigay rhetoric, clothed in allegedly “Christian” teaching, has been exported in the guise of Christian evangelism to inform and energize movements to persecute queer people the world over.
It is increasingly clear that this is also a problem for mainline Christianity. The face of the Christian church has become, for many people and especially for many young adults, the face of intolerance. If you have engaged in conversation with many young adults in recent years and asked them about their spiritual leanings, I bet cash money you have heard something like this: “I have a sense that there is some kind of spirit out there, God maybe, and I care about it; but church? No, that’s not for me.”
This discomfort with Christianity is not confined to young adults in America. Even people in the church are affected by it. Come back with me to that elevator we were in a moment ago. It is likely that if you and I were to meet for the first time, very early on in our conversation—perhaps even in my elevator moment of introduction—I would disclose in some way that I am gay. Not all queer people do, but I pretty much wear it on my sleeve. Now, if you are queer, too, you might take that opportunity to tell me so. And we would both get that fabulous little charge that queer people get recognizing and being recognized by each other, that small but significant feeling of the home that we become for each other just by being ourselves together.
This sense of home is a feeling that Christians have known during times when followers of Jesus have been persecuted. The fish symbol was used to identify Christians to each other in the early days of the Roman Empire in much the same way that the lambda became a discreet symbol for queers in the mid-twentieth century. Corrie ten Boom was a Christian in the Dutch underground during World War II whose family was imprisoned for helping Jews escape the Holocaust. Her book The Hiding Place tells the story of her struggle to survive the concentration camp. In the film adaptation, there is a scene in which a fellow prisoner subtly displays a cross to “come out” to her as a Christian. It brings her no small comfort simply to know she is near someone who shares what is for her an essential identity marker, what is for her a kind of home.
Today, that sense of Christianity as home, as identity marker, seems mostly to be embraced by evangelical Christians; and I understand why. I know from my Arkansas childhood that for many people evangelicalism is rooted not in a desire to be part of a conservative political movement, but in a fierce need to feel the love of a God who sustains you as you go about living what may be a very, very hard life. This is especially true for poor people, and especially in rural areas as predominate in the South.
I know that if I were to come out as Christian, there is a good chance that whomever I was introducing myself to would assume that I meant I was an evangelical Christian. Let’s say I’m introducing myself to you. If you are queer, the assumption that I am an evangelical Christian might put you off. It might even strike fear in your heart. That is exactly the opposite of what I want to have happen when I meet another queer person. That likelihood alone makes it very difficult for me to feel good about identifying myself as a Christian when I first meet someone.
Let’s say you identify as straight, but you regularly attend a progressive church. How likely are you to meet my introduction with an enthusiastic, “Oh, I’m a Christian, too!”? If you are like most of the people I hang out with in progressive churches, you might hold off on that disclosure because you don’t want to run the risk of me assuming that you are an evangelical. Or, if you are assuming that I am an evangelical, maybe you don’t want to bond with me. Evangelical and progressive Christians really are just not the same animal, and you may feel that our views of our faith are so different that there is no real bond to explore. Or worse, you might assume that we will be antagonistic toward each other, which might be anathema to your sense of Christian identity. So, does outing yourself as Christian give you a spark of hope for that little feel-good moment of home? Not likely.
This is a huge problem for those of us on the Christian Left. The question of how we witness to our faith is vexing for mainline Christians, and over the past four decades we have gotten almost no traction in figuring it out. During that span of time, the evangelical Right has become more and more visible, claiming exclusive right to the title of “Christian” with greater and greater audacity.
Who are we? What do we believe? How do we tell other people about it?
A church that cannot answer these questions will not survive. It will certainly never be a force that effects change broadly. It will never be the force that progressive Christianity is meant to be, witnessing to the transgressive, invasive, earth-altering power of divine love that this world so desperately needs.
This is an important issue to me, as a priest and as a Christian who is dog tired of having the lens of her faith distorted, misunderstood, and turned into a weapon. But it is only part of my purpose in writing. In recent years, mainline Christianity has made important strides in shifting the terms of religious conversation about sexuality from the issue of homosexuality to the value inherent in the people whose lives are involved in this conversation. Within those lives—our lives—is a pattern of experience, an ethical trajectory that places extraordinary spiritual demands on the individuals in its path. Queer individuals are called to perceive a truth inside themselves, name it as an identity marker, reckon with it, tell the truth about it even in the face of hostility, find others who perceive a comparable identity marker, and build community for the betterment of all of us. That, to me, is the essence of a spiritual journey. It is more than that. In my faith tradition, we refer to this as a call. It is a vocation.
I want to invite Christians to observe queer virtue and learn from it. We live in a time when people looking for moral example may look everywhere except to the church for it. The church’s moral authority has been badly compromised in recent years by highly visible moral lapses as well as by an obdurate determination by some of our most visible denominations to cling to regressive and oppressive theologies and practices—hostile to women, LGBTQ people, non-Christians, urban dwellers, and the list could go on and on—increasingly rejected by common sense and basic human compassion. In denominations that are more progressive, such as the Episcopal Church, too often the church seems to be following the moral leadership of others, including the secular LGBTQ movement, rather than leading. I know that this is one of the reasons my Christian ethical compass is less robust than my queer ethical compass: the LGBTQ community has been providing bold moral leadership for decades. The church can learn from this, must learn from this example. Within progressive Christianity there are countless people and communities who are living quietly but faithfully the teachings of Jesus, who are witnessing to the ethical mandates of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Given the power and integrity of this witness, the progressive church can and should square its shoulders and provide moral authority to people who hunger for it. One important way to do this is to acknowledge the moral witness of other communities, to celebrate them, honor them, and learn from them.
It is not hard to perceive how this might work and why it matters. Consider, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal to white clergy in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Consider the risk that those white clerics faced as they pondered his appeal. Now consider the quality of Christian witness that King was calling on them to display and proclaim by listening to his words. Decades later, the letter still inspires and challenges people of faith to comprehend the justice that God demands, and to dig into our own souls, try to show the courage that Dr. King was showing, and take even a fraction of the risk that he and so many others were taking in pursuit of justice, of dignity.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” now appears in the Episcopal Hymnal. It is a hymn that has resonance for anyone who has known oppression, and yet its roots as the “Negro National Anthem” are what give it both its meaning and its power. Who can sing this hymn and not remember the story that Maya Angelou tells in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings of the devastating, determined spiritual journey she made on the day of her eighth grade graduation?5 And is there not something of this devastation and determination that informed the decisions of churches across the United States to post signs outside their walls in 2014 and 2015 declaring to the world that “Black Lives Matter”? We are not even close to where we need to be in addressing racism in our faith communities, let alone in our world. But for those of all races within the church who do indeed take black lives seriously, the witness of this movement has powerfully shaped our understanding of what Christian faith is, and what it calls us to be and to do.
In lifting up the moral witness of queer life, I wish for two outcomes: First, that progressive Christians will rise up to demand a full stop on the frontal assault being waged on queer people in the name of religion. Not just because such assault is blasphemous to any understanding of the Christian impulse, but also and importantly because to deny the inherent worth of queer people is simply a lie. Second, that progressive Christianity will look to queerness as a lens for vivifying our expressions of faith, both personal and corporate, theological and liturgical. To the extent that progressive Christians see the potential value of such exploration, I want to encourage it.
During Holy Week in 2008, I attended a remarkable presentation on the Triduum—the three days that stretch from Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday. The presentation was given by the Right Reverend Jeffrey D. Lee, bishop of Chicago, a man whose primary impulse is to breathe life into our understanding and experience of worship. He spoke about the ancient traditions at work in the liturgies of those three days, the meaning they held for the ancient church, and the remnants we bring into our services today. Toward the end of his presentation, he asked us to gaze upon an icon of Christ stepping back through the door of the tomb, back into the world of the living. The bishop talked about Jesus, in that moment, rupturing everything that human beings understand about life and death. I was mesmerized, moved to tears by the power of his witness.
Later that day, I returned to my office at the Episcopal campus ministry at Northwestern University. I saw several students, and told them about the bishop’s presentation, about his use of the word “rupture” to describe what Jesus had done. Now, you have to understand, for anyone who has spent any time studying queer theory, the word “rupture” is iconic, a code word that evocatively captures the essence of the movement. The word was not lost on my students. “Really? ‘Ruptured’? He said ‘ruptured’?” When I assured them that this was the word he had used, it appeared that the bishop, and Jesus, had risen in their esteem.
This story goes a long way toward illustrating how I think an appreciation for queerness can benefit progressive Christianity. Not only is queerness true to what Christianity is about, it also takes people by surprise. It is alive, and exciting. It communicates the power of the Christian gospel in ways that thoughtful, intrepid seekers can hear.
Having expressed that sentiment, it is important to be very clear about what this book is not. This is not an attempt to tell queer people that they “should be” anything other than the extraordinary souls they already are. This is not an attempt to define the spiritual life of any queer person without hir consent, in any way, or even to impose the notion of spirituality on queer people who have rejected that notion for themselves. Queer atheists have nothing to fear from me. I intend only the deepest respect for my LGBTQ sisters and brothers and genderqueer siblings, and for the choices and definitions they apply to their interior lives.
A powerful motivation for me in writing is the fervent desire to spread balm on the vast wounds of my people, to tend to the immense damage done to queer people and queer souls in the name of religion. My perspective is a spiritual one, and I see my queer tribe through a spiritual lens. What I see are experiences, truths, journeys, and ethics that, for me, have deep spiritual meaning. This book is certainly an attempt to point to that meaning as I see it, and as I believe anyone who embraces a spiritual worldview—and explicitly, a Christian worldview—should see it as well.
Thus there is a persistent subtext here, which is a love song to my people. If in hearing that love song a queer person is moved to view himself with deeper love, to perceive herself as a person of greater value, that is all to the good. Also, importantly, if such ones find themselves feeling God’s extraordinary touch, or naga, or hear God’s encouraging voice whispering into their ear—“You go, girl”; “You go, boy”; “You go, you fabulous genderqueer child”—well, awesome.
This project explores several aspects of queer experience that inform queer identity. In part 1, I will discuss the nuances of queer virtue, paying specific attention to resonance with vital teachings in Christian tradition. I hope to lend theological heft to a populist call for a moratorium on religious-based violence against queer people, recognizing such violence to be not just offensive but blasphemous. In part 2, I will discuss how specific aspects of the lived experience of queer people might help invigorate contemporary Christian practice. Taken together, it is my hope that this work will provide trajectories for Christian inquiry that could bring new energy and urgency to the progressive church and its proclamation of the gospel. If the prospect of such inquiry stirs up a little burst of excitement, of joy in the hearts of my nonqueer Christian siblings, again I say, awesome.