Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the fourth installment of a six-part series. For context, check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
God’s Brain
As of 2013, I was still trying to get into God’s brain. A few months ago, I came across an email exchange I had with a New Testament professor in 2013. It reveals a lot about where I was in my thinking then.
I told the professor I was haunted by the question of how to love my LGBTQIA+ neighbor. (That’s actually a lie: I said “homosexual neighbor,” though I understand now that this word has a painful and sordid history.) I knew as a biblical scholar that presuppositions heavily influence interpretation. I understood that my conservative theological presuppositions about sexuality biased my reading of the Bible. I also understood that human experience does (and should) influence our reading of the text. The following is a condensed version of what I wrote to this professor:
I don’t think I’ve been given the hermeneutical tools to think about the Bible and the contemporary world. It’s one thing to discern (on a surface level) what the biblical authors said about same-sex relationships – it’s quite another to figure out what God is saying. I know I have heavy layers of bias that seem almost impossible to wade through. I don’t know what it’s like to feel attraction to someone of the same sex. I feel torn because, on the one hand, I think I really want to believe that same-sex relationships are okay. Most of the biblical arguments I’ve seen against same-sex relationships are terrible. If Paul addresses same-sex relationships, it’s in the context of something larger and focusing on the issue by itself seems very myopic. If same-sex marriage is pleasing to God, then we’re committing a horrible injustice by not letting Christians of the same sex get married. On the other hand, if God is against same-sex relationships, it’s vitally important–I don’t want to cavalierly accept same-sex marriage as God-ordained and wonderful if it’s something that’s damaging to human beings. I’ll be going to Wheaton this Fall to do an M.A. in Biblical Exegesis. I’ve heard great things about the program. But I do wonder if I’ll really be able to engage in these sorts of questions or if the answers will be so “obvious” to everyone (except me).
That last sentence is salient because of what I encountered at Wheaton. The program I entered at Wheaton is indeed an excellent program if you want to learn the technical ins and outs of grammatical-historical exegesis.
But like most of white evangelicalism, Wheaton lacks critical self-awareness. (And I’m not talking about individual professors here–I’m talking about large scale, institutional attitudes, though of course individuals do play a role in this and are responsible for their complicity.) It doesn’t interrogate how its own presuppositions have been shaped. It’s good at historical reconstruction of the past (to a point) but doesn’t do a great job of negotiating how those histories inform the present. It’s very white in the sense that it’s disembodied, unaware of its own historical location and how that affects the thinkers it lets in.
In my program, we read very few cis women, very few authors of color, and no queer authors at all. The few (white) feminist scholars we read were assigned somewhat grudgingly with a sort of, “Well, we must read some of this drivel to be informed of what’s out there, but the really gritty stuff is this other writing over here.”
This other writing over here. I think that gets to the heart of it. You don’t need to ban books to keep ideas out. You just have to divert the reader’s attention. “The party’s here, not over there. Forget over there. That’s not worth your time.” I’m starting to catch on, though. I know to search for the writing over there.
Although I didn’t yet realize how white and heteronormative my education had been, I came away from Wheaton deeply dissatisfied. At Wheaton, something changed, and I link it directly to my experience of pregnancy and childbirth. Another vital detail: I gave birth at the end of July 2014 and started my second year at Wheaton that August, right when the Ferguson protests were happening. Before that, I was unaware that police shootings of unarmed black people (and Native Americans and Latinx people for that matter) are a routine part of American life. Ferguson was the start of my journey toward understanding racism as a systemic issue rooted in the myths of white supremacy on which the U.S. was founded.
What does this have to do with Wheaton and my birth experience? Stay with me. There are a lot of complex intersections here that I’m trying to condense into this short space.
Here’s one of the things about being white–or straight or cis or any identity you’re not forced to think about because your body’s just accepted by mainstream society as the norm. There’s this illusion that all those other qualifying identity labels are not for you. Biblical exegesis and theology are good examples. These fields are largely white- and male-dominated and tend to operate from these perspectives. But we don’t call them White Theology or Cisgender Male Theology. Instead, it’s just Theology with a capital T. Everything else gets a label to signal the frame of experience people are interpreting from. Queer Theology. Feminist Theology.
And even Feminist Theology should really be called White Feminist Theology because historically feminism (at least in the U.S.) has functionally most often meant liberation for white women, not all women. So, we’ve got categories for feminist theologies of color, like Womanist Theology and Mujerista Theology and so on. There are lots more. I should know them. I don’t. I have the luxury of ignorance because not-knowing doesn’t have an immediately adverse effect on my own body and well-being. That’s whiteness at work.
White experience often comes with the illusion of disembodied neutrality. We don’t tend to think of our white skin as a contributing factor to how we’re perceived or treated. In a similar way, if your sexual orientation or gender identity (or presentation) does not diverge from the “standard” heteronormative shape, it’s very easy to believe that your experience is the default and that most people think and experience the world the way you do. If no one’s harassing you or mistreating you for these aspects of who you are, you have less reason to be self-conscious about them.