I am an Australian. I went to the American Academy of Religion mega-fest last year to meet up with some friends, to present a paper at a ‘science and religion’ panel, and to marvel at the sheer scale of how Americans do things. It was quite a ride. Looking at the hundreds of panels on offer, I discovered that over half of them had a prominent ‘queer theology’ presence, including the science and religion panel in which I participated. The young monk who organized my panel—a very likeable, deeply pious, and a highly intelligent young man— was doing his doctorate on a queer theology of physics.
I have looked into the matter, and I do not find queer theology to be compatible with Christian theology. But there are reasons it has taken our theological landscape by storm. Let us briefly look at those reasons first and then ask, ‘is queer theology Christian?’
Queer theology is integral with mainstream trends in Western philosophy over the past quarter millennium.
The Enlightenment aimed to liberate reason and science from religious authority, from metaphysical speculation, and from revelation and faith. The high philosophical point of this ambition was theorized in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason towards the end of the eighteenth century. After reason and science were thus ‘Enlightened’, the early modern marriage of science and religion became increasingly cold. By the late nineteenth century there was a separation and the young and attractive Science left the old and cranky Religion, with Science taking the house and children. At much the same time, Charles Darwin gave the secularizing academy an alternative narrative to Genesis for an understanding of human origins. Darwin was by no means to blame for the separation of science from religion, but his work conveniently appeared at exactly the right time for Enlightened rationalists and empiricists to decisively wash their hands of religion. From the 1870s to the 1970s, a scientistic atheism was powerfully reforming academic life. Public truth became wedded to a functionally materialist and methodologically atheist set of knowledge categories. As a result religion became privatized, subjectivised, and (for scientistic realists) was now seen as a crutch for those who were too psychologically immature to face the cold but heroic realities of life and death without God. By around 1970 a post-Christian reform movement was sweeping aside the central high meaning framework of the West’s long Christian heritage as quickly and thoroughly as it could.
In the 1970s two new trends appeared that will give us what we now call the US culture war. On the one hand, conservative Christians realized that the broader cultural formation context for their children was being radically re-framed, so they got political, and what we now call the Religious Right was born. On the other hand, the radical progressive reformation movement—which would become the Queer movement in the 1980s—was being theorized by French postmodernists such as the brilliant gay intellectual Michel Foucault.
The sexual liberation movement was integral with the birth of postmodernism. This movement radically challenged Christian categories of sexual morality. For example, Foucault lectured in Tunisia in the 1960s and according to Guy Sorman, a journalist and friend of Foucault, Foucault exploited his rich white status to engage in paid sex with Tunisian children. It is a matter of public record that in the 1970s Foucault championed the abolition of the age of consent in France. Recall, doing whatever sexual activity comes naturally (i.e., naturalistically, where there are no divine moral truths, but there is only animal hedonic eroticism) was all the rage among the progressive youth of the 1960s and 1970s. Stonewall only (and only strategically) excluded paedophilia from its pro-gay, pro-queer (now ‘Rainbow’) reform agenda in the 1990s.
Queer gender theory—where both gender and sex are treated as culturally situated yet individually determined identity constructions—gets into the air with Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble. Queer postmodern constructivism denies that there is any real and objective difference between natural biological males and natural biological females. That is, a transwoman (a biological male who now identifies as a woman and may have undergone hormonal and surgical modifications to how “she” looks) is considered by queer theory to be just as female as a biological woman. Queer justice insists that there can be no meaningful discrimination between transwomen and naturally female women. This rejection of what philosophers call scientific realism has its origin in the Enlightenment. For the way Kant was able to separate faith from reason and religion from science, was to separate the (knowable) apparent world from actual (now unknowable) reality. The Enlightenment—as thinkers like Peter Kreeft point out—gives rise to scientific and moral anti-realism. Now ‘sex’ is just a word, and as a word it is a human construct and a tool of power. But the central thing I want you to notice here is that for our post-Christian university educated elites, the queer reform movement makes perfect sense and seems entirely moral. But is it compatible with Christian theology? Can there be a queer theology that is genuinely Christian?
Let me give you a ‘no’ answer to the above two questions.
Biblically, male and female bodies are sacred carriers of the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and the sexed body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:16–20). Christ Himself explains that God made us male and female for the purpose of (obviously heterosexual) marriage. Christian Marriage is understood as a sacred union and a sacramental reality where physical sexual love is integral with a spiritual bond made by God (Matthew 19:4–6). Thus, the Church has traditionally affirmed that heterosexual monogamous marriage is a holy sacrament, no sexual union outside of marriage is licit, the sexual innocence and safety of women and children must be vigorously protected, and the sexual mutilation of the body is a sacrilegious crime for those who commit it and a sacramental sin when chosen.
Of course, exercises in Enlightenment apostasy—methodologically atheist biblical scholarship and Liberal Protestant ‘theology’—have been finding fabulous ways of making the Bible mean whatever you want it to say and throwing out traditional church doctrines and practices as fast as possible. So the popularity of queer theology is no surprise. But let us conclude with a brief philosophical theology argument as to why queer theology cannot be true, and is not Christian.
Plato and Aristotle founded the Western academic tradition by drawing a sharp distinction between sophistry and philosophy. Sophists exploit that fact that—as William Desmond might put it—human meanings are porous to natural and transcendent truth and are never able to fully capture any truth no matter how mundane nor how transcendent. This partial participation of our words in reality gives the cunning and slippery sophist room for finding argumentative loopholes and for arguing that no truths are finally knowable or sayable. The sophist thus treats words as tools of interest and power. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, hold that the philosopher seeks truth rather than power, and they maintained that reasoned conversation aiming at truth must be conducted in good faith to the divine origin of realty, the Nous, Logos, and Goodness of God. Plato thus finds that if someone has no good faith commitment to truth, then you are wasting your time reasoning with them. Josef Pieper, in his short book, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, affirms this stance as basic for any real philosopher and all Christians.
Martha Nussbaum points out that Judith Butler is a sophist, not a philosopher.1 It is clear to me that the entire queer movement is a powerful enterprise in sophistry. Queer theorists and activists entirely reject natural truth, they reject revealed truth, and they reject metaphysical truth. All meaning is a poetry of self-creation and an exercise of power, precisely as the sophists of old maintained. As enemies of the truth they are enemies of Christ who is the Truth (John 14:6). And then as now, it is only the Truth that sets us free (John 8:32). ‘Identity’ constructed on subjective self-creation—rejecting the graces of God’s gift in one’s naturally sexed body, the grace of one’s name as given by one’s family, the grace of one’s sex-linked gender as given by one’s language and one’s broadly accepted cultural norms —is no identity at all. It is, rather, a tragic and idolatrous bondage.