We gathered on Wednesday evenings throughout July and August, sitting around the ubiquitous plastic folding tables that are known to every church. Sunlight slanted in through the wall of glass windows, and the smells of the parish kitchen— old coffee, musty sponges, cleaning product— filled the room. We were there to study Queer Theology, a mix of older and younger people, many of us Queer, all of us bringing our own questions and experiences. Some of us, both young and old, Queer and straight, were content with the way that the church has expressed itself in the world over the past seventeen hundred years, while others were looking to Queer Theology to add to an emerging vision of what the post-Constantinian church might look like.

Our workshop leader, Dr. Judith Grant, led us through a very honest discussion of the three books that she asked us to read: Annemarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction; Linn Marie Tonstad’s Queer Theology; and Patrick Cheng’s Radical Love. Our last session turned to a discussion of the enterprise of Queer Theology in general. It’s a postmodern approach to God and the church, and like many postmodern theories and theologies, it’s very good at presenting a critique. I am a fan of postmodernism in general. I like the critique, the hermeneutic of suspicion, the way that post-structuralist theorists challenge assumed reality and trace the histories of complex ideas. The history of sexuality is an obvious example of this, and is often used to counter fundamentalist readings of the Bible that denigrate same-sex relationships and diverse gender identities. So many of our assumptions about gender and sexuality are culturally determined, but how did they become part of our culture, and who was served by separating human experience into discreet categories and labeling desire? Are our current understandings of gender and sexuality even present in the Bible, which was composed and canonized in cultures that did not think about these topics in the same way that we do?

These are excellent questions to ask, but as we continued in our study, we wondered how far the critique could go, especially as it ventured into the realms of ecclesiology and sacramental practice. The power structures of the church are very prone to fall into domineering and abusive behaviors. A clergy person usually stands at the center of the circle of community, and that one person, with a small handful of advisors, can decide how wide the diameter of the circle can be. A minister might recognize that God’s love is limitless, almost absurdly vast, and try to widen the circle as far as it can go. Then the challenges of community, or the need for control, or a new friendship with a conservative scholar, might change that minister’s mind, and she might draw the circle tighter, willfully excluding those who had been told that they belonged. For Linn Marie Tonstad, this limiting of grace is almost a built-in feature of Christendom. She writes:

Churches that concern themselves with whether queers should be included often worry that including queer people is unfaithful to God. Such churches are concerned with faithful reproduction, which often takes two different forms: 1) faithfulness to established doctrine and 2) a concern for purity that expresses itself by determining who is allowed to approach the eucharistic table and how. The bodily purity of those who approach the table rightly is connected to their right to distribute the body of Christ to others. In this model of the church, the task of the church is to remain the same, not to change—to reproduce itself by training its new authorized representatives (ministers or priests) to defend the purity of the faith and to practice such purity in their own lives.

((Tonstad, Linn Marie. Queer theology: Beyond apologetics. Cascade Books, 2018.))

To break this open, to try to live as a different kind of church, is the task of post-Constantinian Christianity. But what structures might such a church have? Can it continue as an institution of any kind? Can it continue to ordain and give power to an exclusive coterie of leaders? Can it continue to use mid-20th-century business methods? Can it continue to espouse the systematic theology that it spent two millennia developing? Can it continue to study scripture using the 19th-century documentary hypothesis, or the careful parsing of historical, structural, and literary contexts? 

In the face of such questions, some members of our study group found Queer Theology very wanting. Like many post-structuralist theories, it offers a strong critique and a weak, or sometimes seemingly nonexistent, solution. Sometimes it feels like the only real path forward is to break apart the institution of the church altogether.

I didn’t really agree with this point of view, but it has left me casting about, trying to answer the question of how Queer Theology might be practiced within an existing church structure like my own parish. I am an Episcopal priest, trained in certain practices and rules. In our ecclesiology, only a priest or bishop can give a blessing. Only a priest or bishop can preside at the eucharistic table. We wash our hands in a lavabo bowl to show our purity. We either face away from or towards the people in the pews, who we might say are participating fully in the liturgy, but who often act as an audience for the priestly acts. We follow a prayer book and can’t diverge from its strictures. We follow the Revised Common Lectionary and shape our preaching around it. All of this creates a highly structured system that resists attempts to change it.

In the months that have passed since the end of our study, I have mulled over this question, and although I have no concrete answers, I have begun to encounter Queer and liberationist voices who are moving beyond deconstruction towards a new expression of faith. These are mostly biblical scholars, engaged in the project of queering scripture. They are very explicit in their intention to find themselves, and people like them, hidden within the Biblical text, and they write with a refreshing subjectivity. Take, for example, this passage from Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson’s article on Exodus in Queer Bible Commentary: Second Edition:

Biblical patriarchy is, itself, a social construct. Queer names do not appear in these genealogies – nor do many women’s names. The fathers and their sons, the tribes and their property – this is the history with which Exodus begins. Yet while it may seem immutable, it is, in fact, a fiction. Indeed, many of the characters who populate the book of Exodus reveal the imperfect fit between societal patriarchy and social and spiritual actuality. Our names, if we read in a certain way, do appear in Exodus – not in contemporary categories like gay or trans, but in the recurring mis-fit between socially constructed (or constricted) roles and actual, diverse existence. The text itself may not be aware of this subversion, yet through its veils, its queer personages shine.

((Michaelson, Jay. 2022. “Exodus.” In Queer Biblical Commentary: Second Edition, edited by Robert Shore-Goss and Mona West. SCM Press.))

For Michaelson, Moses himself is a queer personage. “Moses, who is both Israelite and Egyptian, and neither one, who lives as an outsider inside, not only ‘passing’ as Egyptian but, we are told, brought within its royal house. Moshe… never quite fits in, not only as a child, but even in his adult leadership role. He stutters, he has a temper, he seems like an introvert more comfortable as a shepherd (as he lives nearly one-third of his life) than as a leader of a nation.” Any societal misfit might find spiritual resonance with Moses. I find Michaelson’s queering of Moses not only convincing, but more honest in its engagement with his character than readings that see him as a paragon of virtue or an undisputed leader of humanity. One can even say that Moses himself was engaged in what we might now call “queering,” in that he challenged the cultural norms of his time, was engaged in an active process of imagining new ways of being in the world, and exposed the hard-hearted biases of Pharaoh and his cronies.

The poet Joy Ladin takes a similar approach to Jonah. “The Book of Jonah,” she writes, “tells a story every transgender person knows: the story of someone desperate to avoid living as the person (in Jonah’s case, as the prophet) they know themselves to be.” All of Jonah’s resistance and running away might seem odd to a comfortable reader, who can’t imagine why Jonah won’t just get on with the task that God has set for him. But to Ladin it makes perfect sense:

Jonah’s self-destructive response reflects a psychological pattern that is all too familiar among transgender people: flee from yourself for as long as you can, and when you can no longer endure the internal and external storms, kill yourself for the sake of others, so you can avoid ever having to live as who you are… Jonah’s flight from himself leads him simultaneously closer to death and closer to God. That spiritual paradox is at the heart of his story, and it was at the heart of the story of my life when I was living as a man I knew I wasn’t.

((Ladin, Joy. 2019. The Soul of the Stranger : Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press.))

Moses and Jonah are well-known Biblical characters, and Michaelson and Ladin are unearthing their queerness, finding the ways in which their experiences rhyme with their own gay and trans encounters with the world. The Womanist theologian Wilda Gaffney and the feminist scholar Ellen Frankel take on a different task, investigating and giving voices to the truly marginal characters, and even to those whose existence is only hinted at by the task. In a wonderful essay on Zipporah, Gaffney traces the white supremacist scholarship that continued to read all Biblical figures as Aryan well into the 21st century. “Liberating biblical characters and their ancient counterparts from the clutches of white supremacist scholarship is womanist work,” Gaffney writes, “enabling hearers and readers of the biblical text to see the ancient world in its context, see diversity in the biblical and contemporary worlds as normative and God-designed, and to see themselves as the image of God represented in their Scriptures.” Gaffney presents a midrashic reading of Zipporah that emphasizes her multitudinous roles as motherless daughter, shepherdess, sister, clergy daughter, clergy spouse, ritualist (she knows the ritual that keeps the angel from killing Moses as he enters Egypt), ambassador to the enslaved Israelites, abandoned spouse, divorced mother, and ancestress.

A womanist midrashic reading of Zipporah reveals that she is a Black woman, a daughter of Keturah, an outsider to Israel transcending the binary of Israel and Ishmael. She is a motherless daughter, a sister, a shepherd, and a survivor all before she is a wife. She is a mother, a God-wrestler, and a divorcée. Then Zipporah became a single mother. Zipporah is a biblical matriarch whose matriarchy has been all but erased. Zipporah can be read as a clergy spouse and a church mother; she could be the patron saint of Black church women married to preacher.

((Gaffney, Wilda . 2015. “A Womanist Midrash on Zipporah.” In I Found God in Me A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader., edited by Mitzi J. Smith. Wipf & Stock Publishers.))

Ellen Frankel, in The Five Books of Miriam, presents her commentary as a dialog between multiple characters, including the Bubbes, or grandmothers, the matriarchs Rachel and Rebecca, the Prophet Miriam, Esther the queen, and Lilith the rebel. No single voice gets the last word. She imagines religious discourse as a dialog that takes place outside of time, and lets the people we meet in scripture comment on their own experiences and the scriptural narrative as a whole. She presents a feminist Talmud that values multiple readings instead of a single, authorized reading. While her lens isn’t explicitly queer, it is liberative, and follows the pattern of upsetting patriarchal readings of the text and imagining the wisdom and yearnings of disregarded, or even absent, biblical figures.

I want to end this brief essay by returning to Joy Ladin, who writes in her book The Soul of the Stranger, that

the things that cut me off from other people—my lack of a body that felt like mine, my inability to fit into gender categories, my sense of being utterly, unspeakably different—made me feel closer to God. God knew who and what I was. God had created me, fitting my mismatched body and soul together. God was always there, day and night, as I tried to live and sometimes tried to die. We were an odd couple, me struggling with a body that didn’t feel like mine, God existing beyond all that is, was, and will be. But when it came to relating to human beings, God and I had something in common: neither of us could be seen or understood by those we dwelt among and loved.

This is where liberative readings of scripture come into contact with the contemplative tradition, which has always resisted the church’s claim to have a monopoly on theological thought. Writing in the late 5th to early 6th century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite also insisted on the unknowability of God, and his insight carried down through the ages, articulated again in works such as The Cloud of Unknowing and The Dark Night of the Soul. These works, and many others, form the basis of apothatic spirituality, prayer, and thought that is rooted in silence and an absence of images. And this, I think, is one of the major paths forward for post-Constantinian Christianity. An embrace of humility, a recognition that our claims to knowledge are necessarily limited, an acceptance that encounters with the divine will often lie outside of the mediation of the church. One could say that the Christian mystics were the first deconstructionists. They often had to carefully negotiate their position within the institution of the church, as their project did little to support that institution and often destabilized it. The contemplative tradition often “queered” what it means to be a Christian. Angela Foligno screamed aloud at the eucharist. Christina the Astonishing rolled herself up like a hedgehog and slept in trees. Francis took off all of his clothes in the town square and insisted on living a life of radical poverty. They lived in ways that pointed beyond existing structures and understandings to the intimate yet unknowable love of God.