Constructing a Celibate Gay Christian Spirituality (Pt. 5)
Seven Theses on LGBTQ+ Culture
LGBTQ+ culture, like any culture or subculture, has genuine goodness, truth, and beauty, along with their distortions. Years ago, when I first publicly explored this idea,1 I relied upon a theological concept articulated in the Reformed tradition: “common grace.”2 This grace is bestowed by God on all human beings, regardless of merit or faith (it is “common”); it is scattered across the world like seed. Consequently, all human beings have the capacity create things that reflect the goodness, truth, and beauty of God—even if they are unaware of it. In other words, the bar is quite low when it comes to affirming the possibility that various cultures and subcultures might contain testaments to this goodness, truth, and beauty, even as we must also recognize that they are also characterized by the brokenness and distortions of sin. What we call “LGBTQ+ culture” is not an outlier in this respect. We should not be surprised to find God in all things, wherever we look—and we should not give in to the tendency to black-and-white thinking by categorizing entire cultures or subcultures as completely good or bad.
The Church is at its best, not when she has a posture of pure opposition to the cultures and subcultures of the broader world, but when she engages them in fruitful dialogue. It follows from what has just been established that Christians stand to learn much by engaging the various cultures and subcultures of the world in a nuanced way, “eating the meat and spitting out the bones.” There will always be aspects of any given culture or subculture that should be accepted as received by God, aspects that should be rejected as manifestations of sin, and aspects that represent distortion of truth, goodness, and beauty that should be redirected or redeemed. But it is important to note that it is not only inadvisable to refuse to engage with culture, but it is actually impossible. The Church is not somehow totally separate from the world, but began in a rich cultural matrix and developed through cultural engagement. It has never existed in a cultural vacuum. The Christian faith is incarnational—which means that it is cultural. A Church that intentionally engages in the diverse cultures and subcultures of the world is a Church that is truly herself.
The Church and the LGBTQ+ community are not separate categories, but often overlap. Oftentimes, in engaging in conversations about faith, sexuality, and gender, one can encounter what might be called the “bridge-building” approach: the Church and the LGBTQ+ community are separated by a wide chasm, and it is the responsibility of representatives members of each community to bridge the gap. While there is much to be commended in this kind of approach (and indeed, I have often relied upon “bridge-building” in my own work), I have come to see how sometimes misses the mark because it fails to account for LGBTQ+ Christians who are firmly rooted in both communities, and fails to recognize the real connection between the Christian faith and LGBTQ+ experience. A bridge already exists, so how can we help people walk across it? LGBTQ+ culture already has “common grace” that can act as preparation for the gospel, as well as cultural riches that can assist the Church in her mission; the Church has wisdom that is strongly resonant with LGBTQ+ experience.
LGBTQ+ culture, like any culture or subculture, thus has genuine lessons from which the Church can learn (and re-learn). These lessons should be accepted by the Church with immense gratitude, because they assist the Church in becoming herself. Among these lessons I would point out…
…an emphasis on chosen family. A common experience of many LGBTQ+ people is a dissident perspective on biological family (the family given to us apart from our will, oftentimes our family of origin) and a special appreciation for chosen family (or family established by the will through shared commitment). Armistead Maupin has helpfully described this as the difference between “biological family” and “logical family,” and recognized that the two are not always the same. LGBTQ+ folks are often often prevented from standard experiences of biological family: many are unable to have biological children themselves and many have difficulties in relating with their own biological families. It makes sense, then, that LGBTQ+ people have become especially alive to the task of building a family through non-biological means—of choosing a family. This is a task for everyone, regardless of their relationship with the idea of biological family, but it is in a special way the task of the Church. In his earthly ministry Jesus himself often prioritized the community of faith (a “chosen family” established by the will through shared commitment) over biological family. He promises that “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the good news who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30 NRSVUE, cf. Matthew 19:29, Luke 18:29-30). As the saying goes, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
…a healthy suspicion of the “natural.” The category of the “natural” is pretty ambiguous, actually. What does it mean for something to be “natural”? Does it mean something derived from the natural world, able to be supported by the data of scientific observation?” How can one discern what kind of data is relevant? Does it mean something that “feels right”? How can one discern whether this feeling is healthy or unhealthy, morally good or bad? The category of “the natural” is clearly not sufficient to determine the desirability of something; disease and natural disasters, after all, are “natural.” But the “natural” is also insufficient to determine moral goodness. A “natural” desire for self-preservation can be selfish; a “natural” aversion to pain or discomfort can be cowardice. Celibacy—a moral good, for those who are called to it—is in a real sense profoundly “unnatural!” The biblical text also contains some ambiguity and nuance about the category of the “natural.” For example, the phrase “against nature” is used in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans not only to decry the same-sex sexual activity of the Gentiles (Romans 1:28), but also describe Gentiles being “grafted into” the olive tree of Israel (11:17).3 LGBTQ+ people have often been characterized as entirely “unnatural,” and so we intuitively grasp that the “natural” is not as neat and tidy as many assume; the “naturalness” of rigid gender expectations, heterosexuality, and opposite-sex marriage and children for all, and the “unnaturalness” of gender nonconformity and same-sex love should be interrogated. Drag performance might be especially helpful in revealing some of this to us!
…a visceral experience of death and resurrection. I have written at length about this elsewhere (for instance here, here, and here; my friends make fun of me for how much I talk about this), so I will keep this brief. LGBTQ+ people very often—although not necessarily always—have an experience of what has come to be known as a “coming out of the closet.” The phrase is drawn from two metaphors: the “skeleton in the closet” and the “coming out ball.” This seems to suggest that the experience of coming out is not unlike resurrection: a skeleton becomes a debutante. When LGBTQ+ people describe our coming out experiences, we sometimes resort to language very reminiscent of resurrection: we are able to breathe for the first time, we emerge into the light, our life truly begins. The closet, on the other hand, resembles a tomb: a locked door, a place for inanimate objects and not people, darkness. A radical change occurs in deciding to live openly as an LGBTQ+ person, a change that feels like coming to life. The closet is certainly a great evil that should be dismantled, but is not this experience of something like resurrection also a great gift? What perspective might LGBTQ+ people who have gone through this experience have to offer the Church, whose members are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that [we] may proclaim the excellence of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9 NRSVUE)?
If you are interested in listening to the breakout session in which I explored this idea at length, you can find a lovely review of it from a friend (which contains a video of the breakout session itself) over at Spiritual Friendship. This breakout session was from several years ago, so there are certainly a few things I would change or say differently, but I still stand behind it for the most part!
I was especially influenced in that breakout session by Timothy Keller’s Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), in which he described the concept of common grace like this: “Every human culture is an extremely complex mixture of brilliant truth, marred half-truths, and overt resistance to the truth. Every culture will have some idolatrous discourse within it. And yet every culture will have some witness to God’s truth in it. God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill completely without regard for merit. He casts them across a culture like seed, in order to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world” (p. 109).
If you are interested in more exploration of this point, I engage with a particular argument for the affirmation of the morality of same-sex sexual activity along these lines (Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.'s thought-provoking essay, "Sanctification, Homosexuality, and God's Triune Life") more in depth in another post.
Yes: I can see that.
I especially like thesis #6, Grant.