In opening this conversation on the subject of sexual identity, it might be helpful to begin with a consideration of some of the terminology that currently frames much of our cultural and Christian discourse and to move from there towards a more careful account of the precise object of our present discussion.
Language in the area of ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual identity’ can be complex and fraught. The precise contextual range of meaning of various of our key terms is unclear, as can be the connotations with which the terminology is invariably freighted. Some terms are perceived to have pejorative or derogatory connotations, whereas others are regarded as affirming and positive. Recent debates in some circles about ‘gay Christians’ have hinged in no small measure upon this question of connotations.
Different vantage points upon relevant behaviours, phenomena, and persons come with their own terminological palettes. The use of specific terms can evoke the vantage points that most routinely employ them, along with their characteristic frameworks of consideration. ‘Gay’, for instance, tends to be the preferred self-description of men who are consistently sexually attracted to other men and celebrate that attraction. ‘Same-sex attracted’ carries quite different connotations and almost invariably betrays a non-affirming religious speaker trying to draw a (overly?) sharp division between persons, their desires, and their behaviours. By contrast, a word like ‘sodomite’ leaves little doubt about the pronounced condemnatory moral posture being adopted. The term ‘homosexual’ has a scientific or medical background, but has enjoyed wide currency, characterizing persons by innate ‘orientations’, which have in many historical contexts been considered as biological, ethical, or psychosexual aberrations or perversions whose etiologies must be discovered. One seldom encounters it as a preferred self-description. Other terminology accents the behavioural aspect, for instance ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM). Almost all vantage points are hotly contested: in the very act of thoughtful speech concerning such matters it can appear that one has always already advanced some distance in the process of adopting partisan positions relative to them.
It should be noted that the terminology mentioned above can imply contrasting ways of relating persons, their desires, behaviours, and identities. Indeed, many of the terms do not offer—nor do they claim to offer—much in the way of a ‘sexual identity’ to those concerning whom they are used. They are labels for specific sexual desires, ‘orientations’, or behaviours and/or the persons who have or practice them. A ‘sexual identity’, however, ought to be distinguished from a person’s sexual behaviour, their desires, or their orientation.
Identity
An identity does not consist in mere objective facts or realities about a person, but in the idiosyncratic integrative whole—perhaps typically chiefly narrative in character, but also involving things such as ‘self-image’ and affiliations—that they form of their existence. There are distinguishing facts and features of us that may nevertheless be no more than minimally constitutive of our identities, facts or features that may be central to the identity of other persons. One of the challenges in discussions of race, for instance, is recognizing the deceptiveness of the objective symmetry of terms such as ‘white’ and ‘black’ when applied to questions of identity: race as such features little in many white people’s personal identities, although it likely would had they grown up in Africa. By contrast, racial and ethnic identities can be profoundly important for many non-white persons in the West.
While it is possible for an observant person to derive some sense of another’s identity by paying close attention to them, their actions and behaviour, their speech, and associations, other people’s identities will often be largely mysterious and hidden to us, an iceberg of which only a small portion is revealed. Indeed, our apprehension of our own identities may be more of the nature of tacit than conscious and articulable knowledge.
Identities are idiosyncratic. While they integrate and are constrained by objective realities about ourselves, they are not simply determined by those realities. I always retain a degree of freedom in the forging of my identity, to take up various postures relative to realities of my existence, or, to shift metaphors, to determine the way I will inhabit them. While, in the process of arriving at my identity, I will adopt narrative, dramatic, conceptual, and perceptual templates afforded me by my society and beliefs, I still express some measure of creative authority in my adoption and deployment of these, which renders my identity my own. As my identity is also projective in character, there will be an interplay between it and my actions, with what I am about. My sense of my identity informs my actions and I need to integrate my actions into my identity.
My identity is not just something that I possess, but is perhaps unavoidably perceived to be who I am. I do not merely engage in Christian practices and hold Christian beliefs: I am a Christian. At those times in my life where my faith has been shaken, it was not solely a set of theological doctrines that were on the line, but my very self and my possession of a meaningful world within which I am embedded and into which I am projected.
As an intimate account of myself, fundamentally to undermine my identity would be to court existential crisis. It is inseparably entwined with my apprehension of my personal world as a realm of meaningful experience and purposeful action. In our worlds—the idiosyncrasy of ‘our’ worlds relating to the idiosyncrasy of our identities—experiences cannot be reduced to bare sensations or perceptions. The brush of a lover’s hand on mine is experienced as charged with meaning that the same physical contact with the hand of a stranger on the subway would not be. The point is not the bare physical sensation of a touch on my hand, but the sensation of having been addressed in my body by a person I love. The perceived meaning and intentionality of the touch is constitutive of my immediate experience of it, not something added to a bare sensation. Our selves and our worlds are immediately perceived and experienced as meaning-laden.
Because of the immediacy of my identity to me, the largely non-reflective manner in which I have formed or arrived at it, and the manner in which it frames and colours all my experiences and perceptions, it can be easily mis-recognized as given and objective, rather than as one of numerous possible construals and constructions of myself and my experience, as, for instance, a story that I am telling myself about myself. The immediacy of our identities and our perception of them as ourselves might help us to understand the ferocity of many contemporary disagreements on matters of sexual ethics and legal and social provision: resistance to the ideological frameworks within which people are articulating their identities can be perceived as invalidation of their very selves. Yet it is necessary to have some appreciation of the contingency and the contestability of my identity, along with the realities to which it must be held accountable, if I am to understand myself aright.
Sexual Identities
For the purposes of our current discussion, we need to examine the notion of ‘sexual identity’ more closely, to question what we might mean in speaking of it. I began this essay by listing some of the various designations by which we refer to men who have erotic desires for or sexual relations with other men. We can often speak of such designations interchangeably with such men’s ‘sexual identity’, without adequately considering the distinctions between the two. The designations in question all operate within various larger narratives that our culture tells about same-sex desires and sexual relations, but the narratives that we tell about people are often quite foreign to the narratives that they are telling about themselves. That does not necessarily mean that either set of narratives are ‘wrong’ per se, but it should encourage us to consider both more carefully on their own terms and recognize the incompleteness of both.
Over the years several ‘straight pride’ events have been organized in different jurisdictions, mostly as provocative responses to large public Pride events celebrating LGBTQ+ persons. They seldom attract more than a handful of people and, on the rare occasions they do, the majority of those turning up are counter-protesters. Even considering the alienating effect of their politicized intent, the lack of appeal of such events has a lot to do with the fact that few people have a pronounced ‘straight’ or ‘heterosexual’ sexual identity. Likewise, one would be hard-pressed to find people who consider being ‘cisgender’ as integral to their identity.
In place of a ‘sexual identity’, most people have strong sense of being men or women (which is most definitely not the same as regarding themselves as ‘cisgender’) and of being in some sort of a charged relationship with the other sex more generally. Julián Marías has spoken of the ‘sexuate’ condition, the disjunction and polarity between the sexes. We are either male or female and, despite our innumerable commonalities, the other sex is opposite to our own, as our right hand is opposite to our left, forming a pair in their fitting alterity. Coupled with this is our ‘co-implication’, by virtue of which we understand ourselves in relation to the other sex.
The sexuate condition, far from being a division or separation into two halves, which would split off half of humanity from the other half, relates each half to the other, makes life consist in the fact that each fraction of humanity has to “work things out” with the other. (I say fraction because sexuality “breaks” human totality into two parts which require each other, each of which presents its line of fracture or, which is the same thing, its intrinsic insufficiency.)[1]
The sexuate condition is much broader than ‘sexuality’, colouring our existence in our entirety. We always act and think as men or as women. As men and women, we also understand ourselves within the disjunction between the sexes, a charged place of attraction, need, love, and eros. Our identities as men and women are not comfortably self-possessed, but are vulnerable to the other sex and their regard or disregard. Our sense of masculinity or femininity is tied up with desiring and being desired, with loving and being loved, with being regarded or disregarded, and otherwise being projected towards the other sex.
One of the many problems with a culture of casual sex is the way that it callouses people, to protect them from the inherently dangerous promise of true and sustained personal exposure to the other sex. The vows of marriage are a way of reckoning with the transformative power of intimate and loving relations between the sexes, enabling people to lower their defences for genuine and enduring encounter by reducing their fear of betrayal.
The notion of ‘sexuality’ operates within this more generic realm. The man or woman feels keenly their co-implication with the other sex, the way that their identity as men or women cannot easily be extricated from the other sex. The effects of this can easily be seen in the misogynistic ressentiment of certain ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) or in those women who ideologize their hostility to men, both confecting their own woundedness or sense of inadequacy into antagonism towards the other sex. Not to be desired or to be abused by the other sex can throw one’s sense of one’s own manhood or womanhood into crisis.
The neediness characteristic of our co-implication with the other sex can also be seen in the promiscuous sexual behaviour of those whose masculinity or femininity is bound up in desiring or being desired by the other sex as such, yet who have never been able truly to expose themselves to any individual, their very promiscuity perhaps serving as a defence mechanism against such encounter. Sexual technique, emotional detachment, promiscuity, and the imposed fantasies of a pornographic imagination can all be ways of shielding the self from this risky exposure.
Considered this way, the prominence of ‘sexuality’ as such in someone’s identity tends to imply an errant neediness that has not found any specific person to which to commit itself. An awareness of the mysterious reality of one’s sexuality (in the broader sense of one’s capacity for sexual feelings and the implication of one’s identity relative to the objects of one’s desire) is naturally more pronounced and fraught in one’s teenage years. However, to remain at such a stage of development, necessary though it may be to pass through, is to be stunted. Such stuntedness is also encouraged by the diversion of sexuality from its natural orientation to enduring intimate personal relation to a fixation upon impersonal fetish objects and acts and episodic and depersonalized genital relations. Besides this, the aggressive neutralization of the sexuate condition in our broader and integrative social life has encouraged a situation where sexual relations are increasingly overburdened with our psychosexual neediness.
Love
For most men and women, their ‘sexual identities’ or ‘sexuality’ are not separable from, but are rather inextricably embedded in and experienced as, their manhood or womanhood. Our sexualities are male or female sexualities and our experience of our sexuality is an experience of being male or female. And identities do not typically stall at a stage of relating to the other sex more generically and abstractly. Where they do, something has gone awry. Rather, a person’s experience of their manhood or womanhood in the mode of sexuality as such more usually recedes as a person enters into the specificity of being in love with another. Marías writes again,
Pleasure, gratification, attraction, even “love,” affect what man does: being in love affects what he is, in that radical form we have called installation. The fact is that while other installations—sex, age, race, class, language—are of a generic of collective nature, the installation represented by being in love is a strictly individual and personal condition: installed in my being-in-love with a certain woman, I project myself vectorially from that love and live all reality out of it.[2]
Male and female sexuality do not find their fuller realization merely in relation to the other sex in the abstract or in general, nor can they be confined to erotic relations, or partitioned to some supposed ‘sexual self’, distinct from one’s being a man or woman more broadly. Contemporary Western society, as it has denuded the sexuate life of society through the gender neutralization of its spaces and communities, has increasingly restricted people’s realization of themselves as men and women (as opposed to supposedly androgynous persons) to the realm of sexual relations. Rather, although there is a unique encounter between the sexes proper to marital relations, such an encounter is not exclusive to such relations and the single and unmarried can nonetheless discover themselves as sexuate beings.
Rather, sexuality is properly known in the integrative reality that is being a man or woman, which unites its constituent elements in something more comprehensive. My sexuality is inseparable from and grounded in the sexuate condition of humanity more generally, which we all inhabit. As such, my sexuality derives from what Marías calls ‘the essential structure of human life and from its empirical structure.’[3] It ought not to be abstracted from my being a man, or compartmentalized to the bedroom. It seeks its realization not in the realm of desire for the other sex as such, but within a comprehensive union of life with a woman, attended with the divine blessing of fruitfulness.
It is in such a union that a person’s sexuality typically finds its natural realization, as a man, for instance, knows himself to be a man in relation to this specific woman, rather than just in relation to the other sex as such. Indeed, while this has certainly not been a universal experience, some persons who have struggled with their sexuality have discovered clarity within the specificity of such a union. Rather than pursuing an ‘orientation’ to the other sex as such, in the loving bond to one woman the attractive otherness of the other sex has been gradually discovered through and in her.
Love is dramatic and biographical. It happens to us and is essential to our stories and identities. To be in love is to be who you are in relationship to another person—‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.’ In the experience of the death or frustration of love, you can experience a catastrophic unsettling of your self. Being in love with another—more so than ‘sexuality’—is a matter of identity, as we have been speaking about it. We could not truthfully tell our stories without speaking of the love that made us who we are.
Viewed from the perspective of love, sexuality can be seen as a neediness that must aim at something beyond itself if it is to achieve its realization. Save in situations where it is frustrated or lacks fuller integration to a person’s selfhood or the social order, it does not attain biographical prominence or feature prominently as an ‘identity’ in its own right.
Contemporary Sexual Identity
Identities, sexual or otherwise, are not arrived at within a vacuum. As we have noted, they are idiosyncratic construals of our existence. However, to arrive at our identities, we must assume a posture within and relative to facts of our existence, our beliefs, and our worlds, social and otherwise. Our societies also afford us various categories, social forms, narratives, life scripts, templates, models, etc. to equip us for the task of arriving at our identities. These things are historical, culturally contingent, and socially constructed. While sexual relations between persons of the same sex have been a feature of almost all (but perhaps not quite all) societies, they have been understood in countless different ways. What we regard as ‘homosexuality’ is a culturally contingent phenomenon, which, although it corresponds in various respects to sexual identities and categories in other societies, is peculiar to the modern West.
Homosexuality and same-sex relations are thinkable in the contemporary West in ways that they were not even twenty years ago. In part, this is a result of the mainstream visibility of categories, templates and models of identity that hitherto were only marginally known. For instance, for many for whom prevailing gender scripts and identities have felt stifling, the category of ‘transgender’—and the examples of many transgender persons—has suggested an alternative way of seeing and speaking of themselves to try on for size. ‘Coming out’ has offered a script by which a person’s sexual orientation can be elevated to a public biographical reality and identity in its own right, practiced as a sort of rite of passage. Pride events have given a social form for celebrating it and enjoying a communal affiliation. More recently, same-sex marriage has offered a framework for expressing homosexuality in the form of specific personal love, not merely general sexuality.
In large measure the thinkability of homosexuality and same-sex relations in their current form are a result of the more general dis-integration of sex from procreation and from marriage, encouraged by pharmaceutical innovations such as the Pill and reproductive technologies and techniques such as IVF. It also results from the more general gender neutralization of society’s dominant institutions and life, the reduction of the realm of the household to one of shared consumption and shared private intimacy, the consequent weakening of marriage and family, facilitated through the liberalization of divorce laws, and the atomization of individuals as sexual agents. There has also been a symbiotic relationship between the emancipatory narratives of a weakening liberalism and the elevation of LGBTQ+ persons as the vanguard of the society of the future, freed from the shackles of gender, natural fertility, and tractable to the ascendant corporate order.
All of these things have been greatly accelerated by the technological architecture of online social media within which identities are increasingly forged. On social media we are self-representations in a shared spectacle, constructing our selves in the mirror of the social gaze, where the gravity of concrete physical realities are greatly attenuated. In place of objective realities relative to which we must comport ourselves, the online spectacle privileges our relation to detached fantasies and the desires that project them. The concrete world is then expected to affirm and conform to these.
In a world where being male or female were given realities, ordered towards procreation and the shared production of the realm of the household, the anomalous and illusory character of homosexuality was readily apparent. It was a sterile parody of the fruitful union of man and woman that lay at the heart of society, parasitic, like transgender identities, upon the natural power and gravity of the sexuate reality of male and female and the dignity consequently accorded to their union. Where the objective weightiness of the union of man and woman is readily perceived, sexual desires weigh much less relative to them. Seen relative to that reality, many desires, whatever their cause may be, will be recognized to be misguided or illusory, perhaps even desiring some genuinely good things, but in a manner doomed not to obtain them and even to threaten those good things if persisted in.
However, with the ascendance of spectacle and gender-neutralizing technique, the elevation of gay and trans identities, as sexualities of consumption and artifice, is rendered possible and thinkable. It is imperative that we appreciate that such identities come with the broader cloth of a Western society of spectacle, technique, and consumption as their condition of possibility, and with a transhumanist imperative to remake nature so as better to conform to desires that are, in a sense that will become ever more apparent in the years to come, contrary to nature.
A Failure of Christian Formation
There is a difference between a house and a home. A house is an architectural edifice, often one of several constructed according to the same plan. A home is a house that has been rendered a personal habitation, a unique realm of life, communion, and indwelling. In discussing matters of contemporary sexuality and gender, Christians have all too often been narrowly concerned to defend the edifice of Christian doctrine (indeed, many have contented themselves merely with the protection of the façade of the edifice, allowing much of the actual building to fall into decay). However, they have provided people with scant imaginative and practical resources by which to make it their own home, which is an acute challenge when that edifice must be built on the soil of contemporary West society. Yet this is the task that we must undertake.
In recent years, speaking in terms of a wider cultural preoccupation with identity, many evangelicals have spoken of the need for us to ‘find our identity in Christ.’ What form such a self-discovery in Christ might take, or how Christ might make practically possible the formation of an integrated self, is far from clear. While sounding—and being—good in principle, how such an idea is to be made flesh is seldom well elaborated. The resources for identity formation offered can often be principally ideological. Exemplars, templates for action, narratives, and communal practices can often be weak, leaving people largely forming identities with what is offered to them by their surrounding culture, somewhat chastened by their Christian beliefs.
This is problematic for anyone, yet it is especially so for people who are struggling with integrating their sexuality into their identity and relating it to their being a Christian. As our sexuality relates to our experience of ourselves as men and women and our need to love and be loved, while it might be theologically correct to speak of it in terms of doctrines such as concupiscence, this gives people little in the way of resources to undertake the creative and imaginative task of navigating this intimate dimension of their subjective and relational experience. In practice, too many, facing the struggle of integrating their sexuality into their Christian faith, find themselves walking a self-destructive and generally unsustainable path of repression or denial, for instance. They never are furnished with a path of sublimation (I imagine that this is a more general problem of contemporary Christian formation, far from exclusive to those whose sexuality is less conventional).
That many Christians in such a situation should adopt self-designations such as ‘gay’ is regrettable, albeit not surprising. What they are dealing with is too far-reaching and intimate a reality, and too entangled with their desire for genuine goods, to be neatly internally compartmentalized. Likely no better language has been offered them.
Some Potential Theopolitan Contributions
Although it is perhaps currently underdeveloped as an explicit element of our theological programme, it has long seemed clear to me that one of the greatest potential contributions of a Theopolitan vision is in the rediscovery and foregrounding of the formative power of Christian faith. This, I believe, has a very great deal to offer to Christians who have so often narrowly focused on Scripture and doctrine as chiefly informative, especially to those seeking to develop a mature Christian identity in which such things as their sexuality can be more fully integrated and sublimated.
A typological reading of Scripture, for instance, is not merely a matter of literary play, but is a means by which the word of God is found to be something that we can inhabit. Preaching Scripture should not be a matter of abstract doctrinal gleanings from the field of the text, applied to individual lives in a secondary move, but a discovery of the ways in which we are implicated in the text, of the ways that it generously furnishes us with a dwelling place within itself, of the concrete ways that we are granted a name and an identity as the sons and daughters of God. Biblical narrative has all too often been treated as the stone from which the jewels of de-narrativized doctrine must be extracted. However, God gives us a Story and its many component stories because these are essential to the way that we have identities as human beings. Deep inhabitation of such a Story should also inspire and resource the godly improvisation by which we can faithfully integrate the many features of our lives and world. It should also equip us with the insight to perceive the modern world accurately and to speak truthfully concerning it.
Besides being an invitation to inhabit a rich story, the Scriptures seek to take up residence in us. From the external law, we move to the internalized insight of wisdom and to the Psalms’ conscription of heart, emotion, memory, and desire, transposing the law into the language of delight and will. Beyond this, Scripture takes flesh in the ingested and embodied words of the prophets and, climactically, in the incarnation of the Word himself. Christian pedagogy must aspire to such a formative end by the Spirit by whom we participate in and are joined to Christ.
Finally, a Theopolitan vision emphasizes the importance and centrality of the sacraments in the Christian life. For an informative vision of discipleship, the sacraments are often regarded as secondary and non-ideal accommodations to the deficiencies of our flesh, designed to communicate ideas by picturing them. However, this has starved the Church of the grace of God addressed to our bodies, precisely the site where we must struggle with the shame, guilt, and the insufficiency that so often attends our fleshly sexualities. In baptism, my physical body was marked out for resurrection! As I have written elsewhere:
[I]n baptism God declares his love for us and summons us to faithfulness to him precisely in our embodiment. Whatever our bodies look like, whatever frailty, disease, or disability they may experience, whatever we have done with and to them in the past, however others may have violated them, whatever bodily shame we might bear: in baptism God declares that he values, delights in, and is committed to our bodies, that he loves us in our embodiment.
The pursuit of an identity that fails to integrate our bodies is an endeavour doomed to failure. Yet God has made ample provision for this.
While gesturing at some of the resources that we may draw upon in our constructive and pastoral task, I have here offered little in the way of more specific approaches to equipping people for the task of navigating their sexualities. Various of the narratives, the exemplars, the templates, the designations and terminology, the categories, the scripts, the templates, the practices, etc. by which the integration of sexualities into Christian selves might be achieved largely remain to be identified. However, I hope that by outlining the task and describing various of its contours, some of my successors in this conversation might start to undertake this most necessary of endeavours.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Julián Marías, Metaphysical Anthropology: The Empirical Structure of Human Life [translated by Frances M. López-Morillas] (London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 137-138.
[2] Metaphysical Anthropology, 195.
[3] Metaphysical Anthropology, 187.
In opening this conversation on the subject of sexual identity, it might be helpful to begin with a consideration of some of the terminology that currently frames much of our cultural and Christian discourse and to move from there towards a more careful account of the precise object of our present discussion.
Language in the area of ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual identity’ can be complex and fraught. The precise contextual range of meaning of various of our key terms is unclear, as can be the connotations with which the terminology is invariably freighted. Some terms are perceived to have pejorative or derogatory connotations, whereas others are regarded as affirming and positive. Recent debates in some circles about ‘gay Christians’ have hinged in no small measure upon this question of connotations.
Different vantage points upon relevant behaviours, phenomena, and persons come with their own terminological palettes. The use of specific terms can evoke the vantage points that most routinely employ them, along with their characteristic frameworks of consideration. ‘Gay’, for instance, tends to be the preferred self-description of men who are consistently sexually attracted to other men and celebrate that attraction. ‘Same-sex attracted’ carries quite different connotations and almost invariably betrays a non-affirming religious speaker trying to draw a (overly?) sharp division between persons, their desires, and their behaviours. By contrast, a word like ‘sodomite’ leaves little doubt about the pronounced condemnatory moral posture being adopted. The term ‘homosexual’ has a scientific or medical background, but has enjoyed wide currency, characterizing persons by innate ‘orientations’, which have in many historical contexts been considered as biological, ethical, or psychosexual aberrations or perversions whose etiologies must be discovered. One seldom encounters it as a preferred self-description. Other terminology accents the behavioural aspect, for instance ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM). Almost all vantage points are hotly contested: in the very act of thoughtful speech concerning such matters it can appear that one has always already advanced some distance in the process of adopting partisan positions relative to them.
It should be noted that the terminology mentioned above can imply contrasting ways of relating persons, their desires, behaviours, and identities. Indeed, many of the terms do not offer—nor do they claim to offer—much in the way of a ‘sexual identity’ to those concerning whom they are used. They are labels for specific sexual desires, ‘orientations’, or behaviours and/or the persons who have or practice them. A ‘sexual identity’, however, ought to be distinguished from a person’s sexual behaviour, their desires, or their orientation.
Identity
An identity does not consist in mere objective facts or realities about a person, but in the idiosyncratic integrative whole—perhaps typically chiefly narrative in character, but also involving things such as ‘self-image’ and affiliations—that they form of their existence. There are distinguishing facts and features of us that may nevertheless be no more than minimally constitutive of our identities, facts or features that may be central to the identity of other persons. One of the challenges in discussions of race, for instance, is recognizing the deceptiveness of the objective symmetry of terms such as ‘white’ and ‘black’ when applied to questions of identity: race as such features little in many white people’s personal identities, although it likely would had they grown up in Africa. By contrast, racial and ethnic identities can be profoundly important for many non-white persons in the West.
While it is possible for an observant person to derive some sense of another’s identity by paying close attention to them, their actions and behaviour, their speech, and associations, other people’s identities will often be largely mysterious and hidden to us, an iceberg of which only a small portion is revealed. Indeed, our apprehension of our own identities may be more of the nature of tacit than conscious and articulable knowledge.
Identities are idiosyncratic. While they integrate and are constrained by objective realities about ourselves, they are not simply determined by those realities. I always retain a degree of freedom in the forging of my identity, to take up various postures relative to realities of my existence, or, to shift metaphors, to determine the way I will inhabit them. While, in the process of arriving at my identity, I will adopt narrative, dramatic, conceptual, and perceptual templates afforded me by my society and beliefs, I still express some measure of creative authority in my adoption and deployment of these, which renders my identity my own. As my identity is also projective in character, there will be an interplay between it and my actions, with what I am about. My sense of my identity informs my actions and I need to integrate my actions into my identity.
My identity is not just something that I possess, but is perhaps unavoidably perceived to be who I am. I do not merely engage in Christian practices and hold Christian beliefs: I am a Christian. At those times in my life where my faith has been shaken, it was not solely a set of theological doctrines that were on the line, but my very self and my possession of a meaningful world within which I am embedded and into which I am projected.
As an intimate account of myself, fundamentally to undermine my identity would be to court existential crisis. It is inseparably entwined with my apprehension of my personal world as a realm of meaningful experience and purposeful action. In our worlds—the idiosyncrasy of ‘our’ worlds relating to the idiosyncrasy of our identities—experiences cannot be reduced to bare sensations or perceptions. The brush of a lover’s hand on mine is experienced as charged with meaning that the same physical contact with the hand of a stranger on the subway would not be. The point is not the bare physical sensation of a touch on my hand, but the sensation of having been addressed in my body by a person I love. The perceived meaning and intentionality of the touch is constitutive of my immediate experience of it, not something added to a bare sensation. Our selves and our worlds are immediately perceived and experienced as meaning-laden.
Because of the immediacy of my identity to me, the largely non-reflective manner in which I have formed or arrived at it, and the manner in which it frames and colours all my experiences and perceptions, it can be easily mis-recognized as given and objective, rather than as one of numerous possible construals and constructions of myself and my experience, as, for instance, a story that I am telling myself about myself. The immediacy of our identities and our perception of them as ourselves might help us to understand the ferocity of many contemporary disagreements on matters of sexual ethics and legal and social provision: resistance to the ideological frameworks within which people are articulating their identities can be perceived as invalidation of their very selves. Yet it is necessary to have some appreciation of the contingency and the contestability of my identity, along with the realities to which it must be held accountable, if I am to understand myself aright.
Sexual Identities
For the purposes of our current discussion, we need to examine the notion of ‘sexual identity’ more closely, to question what we might mean in speaking of it. I began this essay by listing some of the various designations by which we refer to men who have erotic desires for or sexual relations with other men. We can often speak of such designations interchangeably with such men’s ‘sexual identity’, without adequately considering the distinctions between the two. The designations in question all operate within various larger narratives that our culture tells about same-sex desires and sexual relations, but the narratives that we tell about people are often quite foreign to the narratives that they are telling about themselves. That does not necessarily mean that either set of narratives are ‘wrong’ per se, but it should encourage us to consider both more carefully on their own terms and recognize the incompleteness of both.
Over the years several ‘straight pride’ events have been organized in different jurisdictions, mostly as provocative responses to large public Pride events celebrating LGBTQ+ persons. They seldom attract more than a handful of people and, on the rare occasions they do, the majority of those turning up are counter-protesters. Even considering the alienating effect of their politicized intent, the lack of appeal of such events has a lot to do with the fact that few people have a pronounced ‘straight’ or ‘heterosexual’ sexual identity. Likewise, one would be hard-pressed to find people who consider being ‘cisgender’ as integral to their identity.
In place of a ‘sexual identity’, most people have strong sense of being men or women (which is most definitely not the same as regarding themselves as ‘cisgender’) and of being in some sort of a charged relationship with the other sex more generally. Julián Marías has spoken of the ‘sexuate’ condition, the disjunction and polarity between the sexes. We are either male or female and, despite our innumerable commonalities, the other sex is opposite to our own, as our right hand is opposite to our left, forming a pair in their fitting alterity. Coupled with this is our ‘co-implication’, by virtue of which we understand ourselves in relation to the other sex.
The sexuate condition, far from being a division or separation into two halves, which would split off half of humanity from the other half, relates each half to the other, makes life consist in the fact that each fraction of humanity has to “work things out” with the other. (I say fraction because sexuality “breaks” human totality into two parts which require each other, each of which presents its line of fracture or, which is the same thing, its intrinsic insufficiency.)[1]
The sexuate condition is much broader than ‘sexuality’, colouring our existence in our entirety. We always act and think as men or as women. As men and women, we also understand ourselves within the disjunction between the sexes, a charged place of attraction, need, love, and eros. Our identities as men and women are not comfortably self-possessed, but are vulnerable to the other sex and their regard or disregard. Our sense of masculinity or femininity is tied up with desiring and being desired, with loving and being loved, with being regarded or disregarded, and otherwise being projected towards the other sex.
One of the many problems with a culture of casual sex is the way that it callouses people, to protect them from the inherently dangerous promise of true and sustained personal exposure to the other sex. The vows of marriage are a way of reckoning with the transformative power of intimate and loving relations between the sexes, enabling people to lower their defences for genuine and enduring encounter by reducing their fear of betrayal.
The notion of ‘sexuality’ operates within this more generic realm. The man or woman feels keenly their co-implication with the other sex, the way that their identity as men or women cannot easily be extricated from the other sex. The effects of this can easily be seen in the misogynistic ressentiment of certain ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) or in those women who ideologize their hostility to men, both confecting their own woundedness or sense of inadequacy into antagonism towards the other sex. Not to be desired or to be abused by the other sex can throw one’s sense of one’s own manhood or womanhood into crisis.
The neediness characteristic of our co-implication with the other sex can also be seen in the promiscuous sexual behaviour of those whose masculinity or femininity is bound up in desiring or being desired by the other sex as such, yet who have never been able truly to expose themselves to any individual, their very promiscuity perhaps serving as a defence mechanism against such encounter. Sexual technique, emotional detachment, promiscuity, and the imposed fantasies of a pornographic imagination can all be ways of shielding the self from this risky exposure.
Considered this way, the prominence of ‘sexuality’ as such in someone’s identity tends to imply an errant neediness that has not found any specific person to which to commit itself. An awareness of the mysterious reality of one’s sexuality (in the broader sense of one’s capacity for sexual feelings and the implication of one’s identity relative to the objects of one’s desire) is naturally more pronounced and fraught in one’s teenage years. However, to remain at such a stage of development, necessary though it may be to pass through, is to be stunted. Such stuntedness is also encouraged by the diversion of sexuality from its natural orientation to enduring intimate personal relation to a fixation upon impersonal fetish objects and acts and episodic and depersonalized genital relations. Besides this, the aggressive neutralization of the sexuate condition in our broader and integrative social life has encouraged a situation where sexual relations are increasingly overburdened with our psychosexual neediness.
Love
For most men and women, their ‘sexual identities’ or ‘sexuality’ are not separable from, but are rather inextricably embedded in and experienced as, their manhood or womanhood. Our sexualities are male or female sexualities and our experience of our sexuality is an experience of being male or female. And identities do not typically stall at a stage of relating to the other sex more generically and abstractly. Where they do, something has gone awry. Rather, a person’s experience of their manhood or womanhood in the mode of sexuality as such more usually recedes as a person enters into the specificity of being in love with another. Marías writes again,
Pleasure, gratification, attraction, even “love,” affect what man does: being in love affects what he is, in that radical form we have called installation. The fact is that while other installations—sex, age, race, class, language—are of a generic of collective nature, the installation represented by being in love is a strictly individual and personal condition: installed in my being-in-love with a certain woman, I project myself vectorially from that love and live all reality out of it.[2]
Male and female sexuality do not find their fuller realization merely in relation to the other sex in the abstract or in general, nor can they be confined to erotic relations, or partitioned to some supposed ‘sexual self’, distinct from one’s being a man or woman more broadly. Contemporary Western society, as it has denuded the sexuate life of society through the gender neutralization of its spaces and communities, has increasingly restricted people’s realization of themselves as men and women (as opposed to supposedly androgynous persons) to the realm of sexual relations. Rather, although there is a unique encounter between the sexes proper to marital relations, such an encounter is not exclusive to such relations and the single and unmarried can nonetheless discover themselves as sexuate beings.
Rather, sexuality is properly known in the integrative reality that is being a man or woman, which unites its constituent elements in something more comprehensive. My sexuality is inseparable from and grounded in the sexuate condition of humanity more generally, which we all inhabit. As such, my sexuality derives from what Marías calls ‘the essential structure of human life and from its empirical structure.’[3] It ought not to be abstracted from my being a man, or compartmentalized to the bedroom. It seeks its realization not in the realm of desire for the other sex as such, but within a comprehensive union of life with a woman, attended with the divine blessing of fruitfulness.
It is in such a union that a person’s sexuality typically finds its natural realization, as a man, for instance, knows himself to be a man in relation to this specific woman, rather than just in relation to the other sex as such. Indeed, while this has certainly not been a universal experience, some persons who have struggled with their sexuality have discovered clarity within the specificity of such a union. Rather than pursuing an ‘orientation’ to the other sex as such, in the loving bond to one woman the attractive otherness of the other sex has been gradually discovered through and in her.
Love is dramatic and biographical. It happens to us and is essential to our stories and identities. To be in love is to be who you are in relationship to another person—‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.’ In the experience of the death or frustration of love, you can experience a catastrophic unsettling of your self. Being in love with another—more so than ‘sexuality’—is a matter of identity, as we have been speaking about it. We could not truthfully tell our stories without speaking of the love that made us who we are.
Viewed from the perspective of love, sexuality can be seen as a neediness that must aim at something beyond itself if it is to achieve its realization. Save in situations where it is frustrated or lacks fuller integration to a person’s selfhood or the social order, it does not attain biographical prominence or feature prominently as an ‘identity’ in its own right.
Contemporary Sexual Identity
Identities, sexual or otherwise, are not arrived at within a vacuum. As we have noted, they are idiosyncratic construals of our existence. However, to arrive at our identities, we must assume a posture within and relative to facts of our existence, our beliefs, and our worlds, social and otherwise. Our societies also afford us various categories, social forms, narratives, life scripts, templates, models, etc. to equip us for the task of arriving at our identities. These things are historical, culturally contingent, and socially constructed. While sexual relations between persons of the same sex have been a feature of almost all (but perhaps not quite all) societies, they have been understood in countless different ways. What we regard as ‘homosexuality’ is a culturally contingent phenomenon, which, although it corresponds in various respects to sexual identities and categories in other societies, is peculiar to the modern West.
Homosexuality and same-sex relations are thinkable in the contemporary West in ways that they were not even twenty years ago. In part, this is a result of the mainstream visibility of categories, templates and models of identity that hitherto were only marginally known. For instance, for many for whom prevailing gender scripts and identities have felt stifling, the category of ‘transgender’—and the examples of many transgender persons—has suggested an alternative way of seeing and speaking of themselves to try on for size. ‘Coming out’ has offered a script by which a person’s sexual orientation can be elevated to a public biographical reality and identity in its own right, practiced as a sort of rite of passage. Pride events have given a social form for celebrating it and enjoying a communal affiliation. More recently, same-sex marriage has offered a framework for expressing homosexuality in the form of specific personal love, not merely general sexuality.
In large measure the thinkability of homosexuality and same-sex relations in their current form are a result of the more general dis-integration of sex from procreation and from marriage, encouraged by pharmaceutical innovations such as the Pill and reproductive technologies and techniques such as IVF. It also results from the more general gender neutralization of society’s dominant institutions and life, the reduction of the realm of the household to one of shared consumption and shared private intimacy, the consequent weakening of marriage and family, facilitated through the liberalization of divorce laws, and the atomization of individuals as sexual agents. There has also been a symbiotic relationship between the emancipatory narratives of a weakening liberalism and the elevation of LGBTQ+ persons as the vanguard of the society of the future, freed from the shackles of gender, natural fertility, and tractable to the ascendant corporate order.
All of these things have been greatly accelerated by the technological architecture of online social media within which identities are increasingly forged. On social media we are self-representations in a shared spectacle, constructing our selves in the mirror of the social gaze, where the gravity of concrete physical realities are greatly attenuated. In place of objective realities relative to which we must comport ourselves, the online spectacle privileges our relation to detached fantasies and the desires that project them. The concrete world is then expected to affirm and conform to these.
In a world where being male or female were given realities, ordered towards procreation and the shared production of the realm of the household, the anomalous and illusory character of homosexuality was readily apparent. It was a sterile parody of the fruitful union of man and woman that lay at the heart of society, parasitic, like transgender identities, upon the natural power and gravity of the sexuate reality of male and female and the dignity consequently accorded to their union. Where the objective weightiness of the union of man and woman is readily perceived, sexual desires weigh much less relative to them. Seen relative to that reality, many desires, whatever their cause may be, will be recognized to be misguided or illusory, perhaps even desiring some genuinely good things, but in a manner doomed not to obtain them and even to threaten those good things if persisted in.
However, with the ascendance of spectacle and gender-neutralizing technique, the elevation of gay and trans identities, as sexualities of consumption and artifice, is rendered possible and thinkable. It is imperative that we appreciate that such identities come with the broader cloth of a Western society of spectacle, technique, and consumption as their condition of possibility, and with a transhumanist imperative to remake nature so as better to conform to desires that are, in a sense that will become ever more apparent in the years to come, contrary to nature.
A Failure of Christian Formation
There is a difference between a house and a home. A house is an architectural edifice, often one of several constructed according to the same plan. A home is a house that has been rendered a personal habitation, a unique realm of life, communion, and indwelling. In discussing matters of contemporary sexuality and gender, Christians have all too often been narrowly concerned to defend the edifice of Christian doctrine (indeed, many have contented themselves merely with the protection of the façade of the edifice, allowing much of the actual building to fall into decay). However, they have provided people with scant imaginative and practical resources by which to make it their own home, which is an acute challenge when that edifice must be built on the soil of contemporary West society. Yet this is the task that we must undertake.
In recent years, speaking in terms of a wider cultural preoccupation with identity, many evangelicals have spoken of the need for us to ‘find our identity in Christ.’ What form such a self-discovery in Christ might take, or how Christ might make practically possible the formation of an integrated self, is far from clear. While sounding—and being—good in principle, how such an idea is to be made flesh is seldom well elaborated. The resources for identity formation offered can often be principally ideological. Exemplars, templates for action, narratives, and communal practices can often be weak, leaving people largely forming identities with what is offered to them by their surrounding culture, somewhat chastened by their Christian beliefs.
This is problematic for anyone, yet it is especially so for people who are struggling with integrating their sexuality into their identity and relating it to their being a Christian. As our sexuality relates to our experience of ourselves as men and women and our need to love and be loved, while it might be theologically correct to speak of it in terms of doctrines such as concupiscence, this gives people little in the way of resources to undertake the creative and imaginative task of navigating this intimate dimension of their subjective and relational experience. In practice, too many, facing the struggle of integrating their sexuality into their Christian faith, find themselves walking a self-destructive and generally unsustainable path of repression or denial, for instance. They never are furnished with a path of sublimation (I imagine that this is a more general problem of contemporary Christian formation, far from exclusive to those whose sexuality is less conventional).
That many Christians in such a situation should adopt self-designations such as ‘gay’ is regrettable, albeit not surprising. What they are dealing with is too far-reaching and intimate a reality, and too entangled with their desire for genuine goods, to be neatly internally compartmentalized. Likely no better language has been offered them.
Some Potential Theopolitan Contributions
Although it is perhaps currently underdeveloped as an explicit element of our theological programme, it has long seemed clear to me that one of the greatest potential contributions of a Theopolitan vision is in the rediscovery and foregrounding of the formative power of Christian faith. This, I believe, has a very great deal to offer to Christians who have so often narrowly focused on Scripture and doctrine as chiefly informative, especially to those seeking to develop a mature Christian identity in which such things as their sexuality can be more fully integrated and sublimated.
A typological reading of Scripture, for instance, is not merely a matter of literary play, but is a means by which the word of God is found to be something that we can inhabit. Preaching Scripture should not be a matter of abstract doctrinal gleanings from the field of the text, applied to individual lives in a secondary move, but a discovery of the ways in which we are implicated in the text, of the ways that it generously furnishes us with a dwelling place within itself, of the concrete ways that we are granted a name and an identity as the sons and daughters of God. Biblical narrative has all too often been treated as the stone from which the jewels of de-narrativized doctrine must be extracted. However, God gives us a Story and its many component stories because these are essential to the way that we have identities as human beings. Deep inhabitation of such a Story should also inspire and resource the godly improvisation by which we can faithfully integrate the many features of our lives and world. It should also equip us with the insight to perceive the modern world accurately and to speak truthfully concerning it.
Besides being an invitation to inhabit a rich story, the Scriptures seek to take up residence in us. From the external law, we move to the internalized insight of wisdom and to the Psalms’ conscription of heart, emotion, memory, and desire, transposing the law into the language of delight and will. Beyond this, Scripture takes flesh in the ingested and embodied words of the prophets and, climactically, in the incarnation of the Word himself. Christian pedagogy must aspire to such a formative end by the Spirit by whom we participate in and are joined to Christ.
Finally, a Theopolitan vision emphasizes the importance and centrality of the sacraments in the Christian life. For an informative vision of discipleship, the sacraments are often regarded as secondary and non-ideal accommodations to the deficiencies of our flesh, designed to communicate ideas by picturing them. However, this has starved the Church of the grace of God addressed to our bodies, precisely the site where we must struggle with the shame, guilt, and the insufficiency that so often attends our fleshly sexualities. In baptism, my physical body was marked out for resurrection! As I have written elsewhere:
[I]n baptism God declares his love for us and summons us to faithfulness to him precisely in our embodiment. Whatever our bodies look like, whatever frailty, disease, or disability they may experience, whatever we have done with and to them in the past, however others may have violated them, whatever bodily shame we might bear: in baptism God declares that he values, delights in, and is committed to our bodies, that he loves us in our embodiment.
The pursuit of an identity that fails to integrate our bodies is an endeavour doomed to failure. Yet God has made ample provision for this.
While gesturing at some of the resources that we may draw upon in our constructive and pastoral task, I have here offered little in the way of more specific approaches to equipping people for the task of navigating their sexualities. Various of the narratives, the exemplars, the templates, the designations and terminology, the categories, the scripts, the templates, the practices, etc. by which the integration of sexualities into Christian selves might be achieved largely remain to be identified. However, I hope that by outlining the task and describing various of its contours, some of my successors in this conversation might start to undertake this most necessary of endeavours.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Julián Marías, Metaphysical Anthropology: The Empirical Structure of Human Life [translated by Frances M. López-Morillas] (London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 137-138.
[2] Metaphysical Anthropology, 195.
[3] Metaphysical Anthropology, 187.
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