“Celibate Gay Christians” like Wesley Hill and Nate Collins affirm a traditional understanding of the biblical view of sex and strive for sexual purity in desire and practice. Scripture, Collins writes, forbids sexual expressions outside of a monogamous marriage of a man and a woman.[i] At the same time, gay Christians openly confess to same-sex attraction. They recognize this attraction as a disorder, the product of sin, but they also believe this disorder is so intimately entwined with key features of their character that it’s useful to identify themselves as “gay.”
I commend these writers for their courageous defense of orthodox sexuality. The gay Christian movement has also helpfully challenged Christians to be more honest about the presence and needs of same-sex attracted men and women within the church, and to provide spaces where those who struggle with same-sex desire can be honest about their battle against sinful urges and actions.
Yet, given the logic of identity-talk in the modern age, “gay” and “Christian” are at cross-purposes. In the end, one or the other will yield.
Politics of Identity
In All But Invisible, Nate Collins offers a theological defense of “gay Christian” identity. On conceptual and theological grounds, Collins’s discussion is unconvincing. He is skeptical of the concept of “sexual orientation” insofar as it assumes a post-Freudian sexualization of personhood and thus ignores the variety of non-sexual ways we’re attracted to others. Differences of sexual orientation, moreover, shouldn’t be elevated above the created distinction between male and female. He warns that “terms like homosexual and heterosexual become top-level distinctions that sort humanity into fundamentally different sexual kinds.” In Scripture, “humanity is . . . sexuate (characterized by sexual difference), not sexual.”[ii]
Yet Collins wants to retain one element of the idea of sexual orientation: its “givenness.”[iii] He never adequately explains why he thinks orientation is “given,” or what that means. Recent studies cast doubt on the view that sexual desires are genetically determined. Besides, while same-sex attraction is sometimes a life-long constant, it is not always so. Sexual desires do change.
Collins’s alternative to “sexual orientation” is what he calls “aesthetic orientation,” the “general patterns we discern in the way people experience the beauty of others.”[iv] “Gay” and “straight” people are thus distinguished by different experiences of beauty. A “gay” person more attuned to same-sex beauty than a “straight” person, and is more consistently attracted to same-sex beauty. This, rather than sexual desire per se, is what distinguishes gay and straight orientation. In this sense, Collins insists, “gay” doesn’t name a sin, but a sensibility.
But aesthetic orientation is far too soft to be considered a “given” or a ground of identity. And appreciation of same-sex beauty exists on a spectrum, not as fixed givens. To his credit, Collins argues that David’s friendship with Jonathan was a non-sexual same-sex friendship, based on non-sexual mutual attraction. But this undermines his claim. Despite their attraction, neither David nor Jonathan has a non-straight orientation; neither was “gay.” Many, perhaps most, men and women have experienced non-sexual attraction to someone of their own sex, which often includes an appreciation of the other’s physical beauty. The fact that non-gays have “gay” experiences suggests that orientation is not a rigidly fixed as Collins claims, and that the difference between gay and straight aesthetic orientation is more fluid than he acknowledges. And that means that aesthetic orientation is an unstable basis on which to found an identity.
What Collins means by “gay” isn’t what most people mean by “gay.” Collins doesn’t seem to have much reason to retain the term at all, except as a way to hook into contemporary discourse on sexuality. But that raises considerable dangers. In The Madness of Crowds,[v] Douglas Murray points out that race, gender, and identity are functionally political categories. They don’t refer to a person’s sex, race, or sexual desires, but to a political identity somehow associated with sex or race. Peter Thiel doesn’t count as gay because he endorsed Trump, and Thomas Sowell is dismissed as sub-black because of his conservative views. The “gay Christian” label risks getting sucked into the maelstrom of identity politics.
Identity and Authenticity
The deeper problem of “gay Christian” identity is the smooth shift from “orientation” to “identity,” which is only plausible against the background of the deep shifts in cultural norms of social status, recognition, and identity that have been traced by Charles Taylor.[vi]
According to Taylor, identity is “who” we are, “where we’re coming from.” It forms the “background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense” (34). In traditionally hierarchical societies, identity didn’t arise as a problem because a person’s identity “was largely fixed by his or her social position” (48). A person’s identity “was to a great extent determined by his or her place in society and whatever role or activities attached to this” (47). With the collapse of hierarchical societies in the early modern West, one could no longer rely on social position to confer identity. Instead, identity has to emerge from within. I am to “discover my own original way of being” (47). In a flattened social world, I have to achieve an identity. It’s no longer a given. In what Taylor calls our “age of authenticity,” every individual has his own unique way of being human, and is either true or untrue to himself.
Under these new social arrangements, identity is established “dialogically,” in social relationships. This is, Taylor says, unavoidable. No matter what our social setting, “we become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.” We don’t discover or invent these languages, but receive them from significant others. In the initial genesis of our identity and throughout our lives, we define and refine our sense of ourselves “in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us.” I may leave my parents’ home, but my life is a continuous dialogue between how they regard me and how I have come to regard myself. There can be flashpoints, such as when the newly independent college student comes home for break to discover his parents still regard him as a child (32-33).
At times, modern identity attempts to justify itself monologically, from purely inward resources or unique individual features. What makes me me is, say, the fact that that I’m “the only person with exactly 3732 hairs on my head” or the fact that I have a unique mix of sexual or musical tastes. These monologic efforts fail, Taylor says, because feelings can’t determine what is significant: “Things take on importance against a background of intelligibility.” The number of my hairs might be an important feature of my existence if it counts as a sacred number in my culture, or if hair-numbering establishes a social hierarchy. Absent social recognition, an identity forged by counting hairs is trivial. Unavoidably, “some things are worthwhile and others less so, and still others not at all, quite anterior to choice” (38).[vii]
Even the dialogic modern conceptions diverge from earlier ideas of identity, insofar as recognition emerges as a key element, and a key problem, in identity-formation. A medieval lord was recognized a priori, simply by virtue of birth to a particular social position. Most of us don’t have the luxury of a priori recognition, and so must battle for recognition. Once recognition becomes a mode of identity formation, its refusal is regarded a violation of democratic norms, violence against the person who goes unrecognized. The politics of recognition demands that every identity be equally valued. But there is, Taylor says, no basis for this claim. The fact that someone chooses his identity doesn’t give it value, nor does the fact that he happens to discover an identity as a member of some racial, sexual, or cultural minority (51). Neither my choice nor my uniqueness as such impose any duty of recognition on others.
Gay Christians are hardly the only Christians who assume modern conceptions of identity, but they stand out because of their stress on identity. Outside the modern frame, would anyone think “aesthetic orientation” constitutes an identity? Or that a person’s aesthetic orientation is a ground for recognition? These ideas are plausible only within the frame of the age of authenticity, and its associated concepts and practices of recognition and identity.
What’s the alternative? Do we need to restore the social hierarchies of traditional society to stabilize personal identities? No. Instead, Christians should work out identity within a theological and ecclesial frame.
Triune Identity
As Klaus Hemmerle argues, the Trinity implies that creatures image the self-giving love that is the heart of Triune life. Things aren’t what they are in splendid isolation but in relationship. Persons aren’t who they are in rigid self-identity, but in process, in giving themselves out to others. From a Trinitarian viewpoint, the verb rather than the noun is the primary substantive.[viii] You can’t understand a thing by isolating it from its interactions with other things, because an isolated thing isn’t the thing. Trinitarian thought doesn’t try to “go back behind the process in order to reconstruct it from an isolated point of origin” (36-7), because no process-free thing exists.
Hemmerle illustrates by considering the German word Leben, which means both “life” and “to live.” Even as a noun, the “thing” named is “a process, a happening” that “has its identity in this going-on itself.” Life is life only if it reproduces and continues; “to live is to live on.” As a living thing goes out of itself, it also receives what is outside into itself (air, food, sights, smells, etc.). You can’t circumscribe the static reality of a living thing by peeling back the process of living and the relationships the thing has. If you peel away the process and the relationship, you don’t find “pure life” but the opposite: A corpse. Without relationships, there is no life. Once relationships end, so does the living creature (37).[ix]
On these assumptions, there is no space for the modern conceit that identity can formed from purely inner resources, because there are no purely inner resources. Going-out, communication, assimilation of the other, reproduction all already belong to the inner dimension of life. Interiority isn’t eliminated; desires and “orientations” are given their due, but they cannot be isolated from the relational context. The inner life inescapably has an external dimension in which it lives with others. In short, “living lives for and from the life of another” (38). Identity as the age of authenticity understands it is incompatible with a Trinitarian ontology and anthropology.
Because individuals are always already entangled with others, recognition is an aspect of a Trinitarian notion of identity. But recognition isn’t fundamentally an outcome of struggle but a gift. We are not who we are simply because of our choices, desires, or unique features or abilities. We don’t become who we are by triumphing in a battle for recognition. Christians are who we are by grace, by the gift of God’s recognition, sealed in baptism. “Consider yourselves to be dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus,” Paul tells the baptized Romans (Romans 6:11). We’re to conform our self-conception to God’s prior identification. Our identity is mediated through the recognition of the community of the baptized, who are commanded to receive all those whom God has received (Galatians 2:11-21). Collins insists gay identity is given, but, as I’ve indicated, it’s not clear how this is true or why “gay orientation” in Collins’s sense is more foundational to identity than, say, an orientation toward manual rather than intellectual labor. In any case, as Collins would surely agree, gay identity cannot have anything like the same valence for Christians as baptismal identity.
Conclusion
Collins doesn’t provide sufficient reasons to retain the descriptor “gay,” and the term risks being swept up, involuntarily, along the trajectories of identity politics and the culture of authenticity. I fear they won’t be able to retain both orthodoxy and gay identity, but that the cultural currents will carry them outside the bounds of orthodoxy.
[i] Collins, All But Invisible: Exploring Identity Questions at the Intersection of Faith, Gender, and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017) 20.
[ii] Collins, All But Invisible, 146; note Alastair Roberts’s use of the same term in his Conversation Starter.
[iii] Collins, All But Invisible, 147.
[iv] Collins, All But Invisible, 150.
[v] Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019).
[vi] Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.
[vii] On Taylor’s argument, cultural revolution might be defined as a drastic alteration in the horizon of significance.
[viii] Hemmerle, Theses Towards A Trinitarian Ontology (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020). Page numbers are indicated parenthetically in the text.
[ix] This means there’s an eschatological dimension to life and human activities. “Life is identical with itself, insofar as it goes on, insofar as it grows; life remains life in so far as it becomes more life.” So too language “remains language in so far as it goes on speaking, in so far as it always says more, always expresses more” (41).
“Celibate Gay Christians” like Wesley Hill and Nate Collins affirm a traditional understanding of the biblical view of sex and strive for sexual purity in desire and practice. Scripture, Collins writes, forbids sexual expressions outside of a monogamous marriage of a man and a woman.[i] At the same time, gay Christians openly confess to same-sex attraction. They recognize this attraction as a disorder, the product of sin, but they also believe this disorder is so intimately entwined with key features of their character that it’s useful to identify themselves as “gay.”
I commend these writers for their courageous defense of orthodox sexuality. The gay Christian movement has also helpfully challenged Christians to be more honest about the presence and needs of same-sex attracted men and women within the church, and to provide spaces where those who struggle with same-sex desire can be honest about their battle against sinful urges and actions.
Yet, given the logic of identity-talk in the modern age, “gay” and “Christian” are at cross-purposes. In the end, one or the other will yield.
Politics of Identity
In All But Invisible, Nate Collins offers a theological defense of “gay Christian” identity. On conceptual and theological grounds, Collins’s discussion is unconvincing. He is skeptical of the concept of “sexual orientation” insofar as it assumes a post-Freudian sexualization of personhood and thus ignores the variety of non-sexual ways we’re attracted to others. Differences of sexual orientation, moreover, shouldn’t be elevated above the created distinction between male and female. He warns that “terms like homosexual and heterosexual become top-level distinctions that sort humanity into fundamentally different sexual kinds.” In Scripture, “humanity is . . . sexuate (characterized by sexual difference), not sexual.”[ii]
Yet Collins wants to retain one element of the idea of sexual orientation: its “givenness.”[iii] He never adequately explains why he thinks orientation is “given,” or what that means. Recent studies cast doubt on the view that sexual desires are genetically determined. Besides, while same-sex attraction is sometimes a life-long constant, it is not always so. Sexual desires do change.
Collins’s alternative to “sexual orientation” is what he calls “aesthetic orientation,” the “general patterns we discern in the way people experience the beauty of others.”[iv] “Gay” and “straight” people are thus distinguished by different experiences of beauty. A “gay” person more attuned to same-sex beauty than a “straight” person, and is more consistently attracted to same-sex beauty. This, rather than sexual desire per se, is what distinguishes gay and straight orientation. In this sense, Collins insists, “gay” doesn’t name a sin, but a sensibility.
But aesthetic orientation is far too soft to be considered a “given” or a ground of identity. And appreciation of same-sex beauty exists on a spectrum, not as fixed givens. To his credit, Collins argues that David’s friendship with Jonathan was a non-sexual same-sex friendship, based on non-sexual mutual attraction. But this undermines his claim. Despite their attraction, neither David nor Jonathan has a non-straight orientation; neither was “gay.” Many, perhaps most, men and women have experienced non-sexual attraction to someone of their own sex, which often includes an appreciation of the other’s physical beauty. The fact that non-gays have “gay” experiences suggests that orientation is not a rigidly fixed as Collins claims, and that the difference between gay and straight aesthetic orientation is more fluid than he acknowledges. And that means that aesthetic orientation is an unstable basis on which to found an identity.
What Collins means by “gay” isn’t what most people mean by “gay.” Collins doesn’t seem to have much reason to retain the term at all, except as a way to hook into contemporary discourse on sexuality. But that raises considerable dangers. In The Madness of Crowds,[v] Douglas Murray points out that race, gender, and identity are functionally political categories. They don’t refer to a person’s sex, race, or sexual desires, but to a political identity somehow associated with sex or race. Peter Thiel doesn’t count as gay because he endorsed Trump, and Thomas Sowell is dismissed as sub-black because of his conservative views. The “gay Christian” label risks getting sucked into the maelstrom of identity politics.
Identity and Authenticity
The deeper problem of “gay Christian” identity is the smooth shift from “orientation” to “identity,” which is only plausible against the background of the deep shifts in cultural norms of social status, recognition, and identity that have been traced by Charles Taylor.[vi]
According to Taylor, identity is “who” we are, “where we’re coming from.” It forms the “background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense” (34). In traditionally hierarchical societies, identity didn’t arise as a problem because a person’s identity “was largely fixed by his or her social position” (48). A person’s identity “was to a great extent determined by his or her place in society and whatever role or activities attached to this” (47). With the collapse of hierarchical societies in the early modern West, one could no longer rely on social position to confer identity. Instead, identity has to emerge from within. I am to “discover my own original way of being” (47). In a flattened social world, I have to achieve an identity. It’s no longer a given. In what Taylor calls our “age of authenticity,” every individual has his own unique way of being human, and is either true or untrue to himself.
Under these new social arrangements, identity is established “dialogically,” in social relationships. This is, Taylor says, unavoidable. No matter what our social setting, “we become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.” We don’t discover or invent these languages, but receive them from significant others. In the initial genesis of our identity and throughout our lives, we define and refine our sense of ourselves “in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us.” I may leave my parents’ home, but my life is a continuous dialogue between how they regard me and how I have come to regard myself. There can be flashpoints, such as when the newly independent college student comes home for break to discover his parents still regard him as a child (32-33).
At times, modern identity attempts to justify itself monologically, from purely inward resources or unique individual features. What makes me me is, say, the fact that that I’m “the only person with exactly 3732 hairs on my head” or the fact that I have a unique mix of sexual or musical tastes. These monologic efforts fail, Taylor says, because feelings can’t determine what is significant: “Things take on importance against a background of intelligibility.” The number of my hairs might be an important feature of my existence if it counts as a sacred number in my culture, or if hair-numbering establishes a social hierarchy. Absent social recognition, an identity forged by counting hairs is trivial. Unavoidably, “some things are worthwhile and others less so, and still others not at all, quite anterior to choice” (38).[vii]
Even the dialogic modern conceptions diverge from earlier ideas of identity, insofar as recognition emerges as a key element, and a key problem, in identity-formation. A medieval lord was recognized a priori, simply by virtue of birth to a particular social position. Most of us don’t have the luxury of a priori recognition, and so must battle for recognition. Once recognition becomes a mode of identity formation, its refusal is regarded a violation of democratic norms, violence against the person who goes unrecognized. The politics of recognition demands that every identity be equally valued. But there is, Taylor says, no basis for this claim. The fact that someone chooses his identity doesn’t give it value, nor does the fact that he happens to discover an identity as a member of some racial, sexual, or cultural minority (51). Neither my choice nor my uniqueness as such impose any duty of recognition on others.
Gay Christians are hardly the only Christians who assume modern conceptions of identity, but they stand out because of their stress on identity. Outside the modern frame, would anyone think “aesthetic orientation” constitutes an identity? Or that a person’s aesthetic orientation is a ground for recognition? These ideas are plausible only within the frame of the age of authenticity, and its associated concepts and practices of recognition and identity.
What’s the alternative? Do we need to restore the social hierarchies of traditional society to stabilize personal identities? No. Instead, Christians should work out identity within a theological and ecclesial frame.
Triune Identity
As Klaus Hemmerle argues, the Trinity implies that creatures image the self-giving love that is the heart of Triune life. Things aren’t what they are in splendid isolation but in relationship. Persons aren’t who they are in rigid self-identity, but in process, in giving themselves out to others. From a Trinitarian viewpoint, the verb rather than the noun is the primary substantive.[viii] You can’t understand a thing by isolating it from its interactions with other things, because an isolated thing isn’t the thing. Trinitarian thought doesn’t try to “go back behind the process in order to reconstruct it from an isolated point of origin” (36-7), because no process-free thing exists.
Hemmerle illustrates by considering the German word Leben, which means both “life” and “to live.” Even as a noun, the “thing” named is “a process, a happening” that “has its identity in this going-on itself.” Life is life only if it reproduces and continues; “to live is to live on.” As a living thing goes out of itself, it also receives what is outside into itself (air, food, sights, smells, etc.). You can’t circumscribe the static reality of a living thing by peeling back the process of living and the relationships the thing has. If you peel away the process and the relationship, you don’t find “pure life” but the opposite: A corpse. Without relationships, there is no life. Once relationships end, so does the living creature (37).[ix]
On these assumptions, there is no space for the modern conceit that identity can formed from purely inner resources, because there are no purely inner resources. Going-out, communication, assimilation of the other, reproduction all already belong to the inner dimension of life. Interiority isn’t eliminated; desires and “orientations” are given their due, but they cannot be isolated from the relational context. The inner life inescapably has an external dimension in which it lives with others. In short, “living lives for and from the life of another” (38). Identity as the age of authenticity understands it is incompatible with a Trinitarian ontology and anthropology.
Because individuals are always already entangled with others, recognition is an aspect of a Trinitarian notion of identity. But recognition isn’t fundamentally an outcome of struggle but a gift. We are not who we are simply because of our choices, desires, or unique features or abilities. We don’t become who we are by triumphing in a battle for recognition. Christians are who we are by grace, by the gift of God’s recognition, sealed in baptism. “Consider yourselves to be dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus,” Paul tells the baptized Romans (Romans 6:11). We’re to conform our self-conception to God’s prior identification. Our identity is mediated through the recognition of the community of the baptized, who are commanded to receive all those whom God has received (Galatians 2:11-21). Collins insists gay identity is given, but, as I’ve indicated, it’s not clear how this is true or why “gay orientation” in Collins’s sense is more foundational to identity than, say, an orientation toward manual rather than intellectual labor. In any case, as Collins would surely agree, gay identity cannot have anything like the same valence for Christians as baptismal identity.
Conclusion
Collins doesn’t provide sufficient reasons to retain the descriptor “gay,” and the term risks being swept up, involuntarily, along the trajectories of identity politics and the culture of authenticity. I fear they won’t be able to retain both orthodoxy and gay identity, but that the cultural currents will carry them outside the bounds of orthodoxy.
[i] Collins, All But Invisible: Exploring Identity Questions at the Intersection of Faith, Gender, and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017) 20.
[ii] Collins, All But Invisible, 146; note Alastair Roberts’s use of the same term in his Conversation Starter.
[iii] Collins, All But Invisible, 147.
[iv] Collins, All But Invisible, 150.
[v] Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019).
[vi] Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.
[vii] On Taylor’s argument, cultural revolution might be defined as a drastic alteration in the horizon of significance.
[viii] Hemmerle, Theses Towards A Trinitarian Ontology (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020). Page numbers are indicated parenthetically in the text.
[ix] This means there’s an eschatological dimension to life and human activities. “Life is identical with itself, insofar as it goes on, insofar as it grows; life remains life in so far as it becomes more life.” So too language “remains language in so far as it goes on speaking, in so far as it always says more, always expresses more” (41).
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