The late Marcella Althaus-Reid, an Argentine who taught theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, raised that point in her 2003 work, “The Queer God,” which stated that queer theology embraces sadomasochists, leather folk, genderfuckers, and transvestitism in an apocalyptic birth pang every bit as libertine as Marquis de Sade. “Genderfucking” is the culture of challenging, or fucking with, conventional gender norms.  

“Holiness is a Queer path of disruption made by curious amatory practices,” she wrote. “We may say that there is no possibility of justice in love unless law is transgressed. … Disruption then, fulfills the law.”  

The ultimate authority for these claims is not in secular or empirical knowledge, but in the very nature of God, whom Althaus-Reid described as a Sodomite, polyamorous, omnisexual, a divinized orgy. “Queerness is something that belongs to God,” and “people are divinely Queer by grace,” she wrote.   

Tonstad amplified these theological insights in her 2018 book, “Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics,” which stated that “Christ’s body is symbolically multigendered.”  

“Christianity, rightly understood, is about the transgression of boundaries,” Tonstad wrote. “Christians believe in a God whose love undoes every binary.”   

As goes the binary, so does the law.  

“All the laws are negated, including the law of contractual sexuality, that is, marriage,” Tonstad wrote.   

Tonstad is a living embodiment of her faith. In a 2022 online magazine profile that features photos of Tonstad resembling the flamboyant Elton John of the 1970s, Tonstad describes her scholarship as a “deliberate misreading” of past theologians. “To ‘queer’ Christianity, she believes, is to ‘reframe reality,’ a project which — if undertaken with care and rigor — can orient one’s life toward progress and social justice.”   

The daughter of a minister and New Testament scholar, Tonstad was brought up by Seventh Day Adventists, read the Bible cover-to-cover at age 9, and at least as of last year identified as a “queer dyke.” She is “now a staple of the New York rave scene,” the online profile states, describing Tonstad at her absolute queerest: “wearing a safety pin dangling from her septum,” pulling all-nighters in dance clubs, comparing God’s infinite love to impersonal oral sex through a “glory hole,” and writing exuberantly of “divine freedom and bliss.”   

In Tonstad’s theology, sexuality and politics and divinity converge. Her first book evokes phallic and clitoral imagery to illustrate that the Trinity has been misgendered and that queering the error points to an “abortion of the church.” It is a dense and cryptic work that scholars giddily praised as “brilliant, angry, and iconoclastic,” “fearsomely rigorous,” “an exhilarating read,” and “remarkably arousing.”  

“If we move from dick-sucking to clit-licking in touching God’s transcendence — if we no longer arrange ourselves kneeling around God’s Son-phallus or the priest-theologian’s asymptotic possession of it — we will no longer gag on God’s fullness nor be forced to swallow an eternal emission,” Tonstad wrote. “Instead we may find there already the differences of pleasures ‘outside the law.’”  

The point is not merely to titillate, but to use language to break down social structures. She explained her ambitions in a 2017 online discussion with other religion scholars.   

“Destroying the modern liberal-Enlightenment subject remains the project of much of the theoretical material I employ,” Tonstad wrote in an online discussion of her book. “That liberal-Enlightenment subject typically has its genesis, and thereby the genesis of the problems of (post)modernity (including racism, colonialism, capitalism and possessive individualism), assigned to Christianity.” Possessive individualism can be understood as selfishness and greed that thrives in heteronormative capitalist systems.