Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools
Reposted with permission from RealClearInvestigations. You can read the original article here.
by John Murawski, RealClearInvestigations
June 13, 2023
Vignettes from progressive Christianity today:
- A Presbyterian church goes viral online for marking the Transgender Day of Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”
- The United Methodist Church boasts the first drag queen in the world to become a certified candidate for ordination. This traveling minister, who describes drag ministry as a “divine duty,” is lauded by a Florida pastor as “an angel in heels” after appearing in that church in a sequin dress to deliver a children’s sermon and denounce the privilege of Whiteness and cis-ness.
- At Duke University’s Methodist-affiliated divinity school, pastors-in-training and future religious leaders conduct a Pride worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The service leads off with a prayer honoring God as queerness incarnate: “You are drag queen and transman and genderfluid, incapable of limiting your vast expression of beauty.”
- And the Presbyterian News Service offers online educational series such as “Queering the Bible” (2022) and “Queering the Prophets” (2023) during Pride Month. A commentary in the former refers to Jesus as “this eccentric ass freak” who challenged first-century gender norms.
Isaac Simmons, also known as …
United Methodist Insight
These examples from this year and last are just a few illustrating how progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of “queer theology.” Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.
In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure.
… Ms. Penny Cost. (Shown also at top.)
mspennycost.com
Thus it is in the presence of the sexually marginalized – such as in a gay bathhouse or bondage dungeon – where we find the presence of Jesus. In the language of queer theology, queerness is a sign of God’s love because “queer flesh is sacramental flesh,” and authentic “Christian theology is a fundamentally queer enterprise,” whereas traditional Christianity has been corrupted into “a systematic calumny against hedonist love.”
Such claims may seem outrageous and offensive to the uninitiated, as do the antics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the group of provocative drag queen nun impersonators scheduled to be honored at a Los Angeles Dodgers’ “Pride Night” on June 16 — this coming Friday.
But queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors, said Ellen Armour, chair of feminist theology and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
A Presbyterian course offering last year for Pride Month. This year: “Queering the Prophets.”
justiceunbound.org
Courses on queer theology are offered at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School, whose spring 2023 catalog lists “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” The class trains ministers and educators in “subverting the heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression in American ecclesial spaces.”
Wake Forest University’s divinity program offers a course called “Readings in Queer Theology” and another course, “Queer Theologies.” The latter course’s catalog description shows how the field has proliferated and branched out into its own subspecialties: LGBTQ+ inclusive theologies, intersectional queer of color critiques, queer sexual ethics and activism, and queer ecotheologies.
Back in 2018, Duke divinity students walked out in protest during the divinity dean’s State of the School speech to demand a queer theology course. Today Duke Divinity School offers a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, Theology, and Ministry, “where we privilege questions of gender and sexuality in the academic study and practices of theology, ministry, and lived religion.”
Queer theology is punctuated by a penchant for the outrageous and the scandalous, deploying graphic, carnal – and at times pornographic – imagery for shock value and dramatic effect, but its core religious claims are dead serious.
Rev. Dr. Robert E. Shore-Goss: “Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present.”
mischievousspiritandtheology.com
“Critics will say that a ‘Queer Jesus’ is a perverse or blasphemous fiction, invented by queer folks for reasons of self-justification, or accuse me and other LGBTQI Christians of being deviant,” queer minister and author Robert E. Shore-Goss wrote in 2021.
Shore-Goss is an ordained Catholic Jesuit priest who fell in love with another Jesuit, resigned from the Society of Jesus, and worked as a pastor in the MCC United Church of Christ in the Valley, in North Hollywood, Calif. MCC stands for the Metropolitan Community Church, reputedly the world’s most queer-affirming denomination that includes churches that perform polyamory nuptial rites to marry multiple partners.
“Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present,” Shore-Goss wrote. “Jesus’s empowered companionship or God’s reign is radically queer in its inclusivity attracting queer outsiders. … Jesus is out of place with heteronormativity; he subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders.”
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
Robert Gagnon, theology professor: Queer theology is like Gnosticism — a heresy.
robgagnon.net
Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power.
“They’re only for subversion until they’re in power,” Gagnon said. “And then they’re adamantly opposed to subversion.”
Shore-Goss initially agreed to a phone interview for this article, then canceled with a rushed email: “Wait a second I searched Real Clear Investigations and it is a GOP organization, and I will not help you in the GOP cultural genocide of LGBTQ+ people. They are full of grace and healthy spirituality.” Isaac Simmons, the Methodist drag queen known as Penny Cost, also initially agreed to an interview, excited to hear that this reporter had read six queer theology books, sections of other books, along with other materials: “Just about all of those books are on my bookshelf!! You are definitely hitting the nail on the head!” But Simmons/Cost never responded to follow-up emails to set up a phone call. Other queer theology experts either declined comment or did not respond. One, based in England, requested a “consultation fee.”
Encountering the established scholarly oeuvre of queer theology is an introduction to titles like “Radical Love,” “Rethinking the Western Body,” “Indecent Theology,” “The Queer God,” and “The Queer Bible Commentary,” a tome co-edited by Shore-Goss that “queers” every book in the Old Testament and New Testament, exceeding 1,000 pages. Queer theologians invite readers to see God as a sodomite, Jesus as a pervert, the disciples as gay, the Trinity as an orgy, and Christian unconditional love as a “glory hole.”
By “queering” holy writ and “cruising” the scriptures – two of the ways in which queer theologians use gay slang to describe their hermeneutical strategy – God’s revelation is “coming out” (of the closet), and those who opt to transition their gender experience the power of Christ’s resurrection. In the apocalyptic proclamation of the pioneering queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid: “The kenosis [self-emptying] of omnisexuality in God is a truly genderfucking process worthy of being explored.”
Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news.
“Thus queer theology is a call to return to a more fully realized anticipation of the Kingdom,” states a 2007 overview, “Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body.” The queer theology movement has been likened to a “a rehearsal for the end times,” and a “new Pentecost” that allows the Holy Spirit to “blow where it chooses,” according to “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theory,” a 2011 book.
Linn-Marie Tonstad: “I’m fine with you doing your thing and calling that Christianity. You are allowed to live your life in a way that I think is deeply misguided and incredibly sad.”
Yale Divinity School
Linn Marie Tonstad, professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School who for the past decade has taught the nonsectarian divinity school’s first queer theology class, has no patience for conventional, outmoded assumptions about sex and gender.
“Like, if you think that, I’m fine with you doing your thing and calling that Christianity,” Tonstad said on a podcast. “You are allowed to live your life in a way that I think is deeply misguided and incredibly sad.”
For Tonstad, queer people and queer culture are where the future lies.
“I think if you’re lucky enough to be queer – Wow! Yes!” Tonstad said on the podcast. “I understand that there are some poor cis-straight people, and I sympathize with their plight in life. Like, that must be so boring. It must be awful. … I wish them all the best.”
Queer theology is an outgrowth of academic queer theory and Latin American Liberation Theology, a Marxist movement advocating for peasants, indigenous groups, and other oppressed classes, and builds on earlier social justice movements, such as radical feminism and gay rights. LGBTQ-friendly churches are typically at the forefront of progressive causes seen as united in “shared struggle,” such as immigration, climate change, and Black Lives Matter, said Heather White, an assistant professor of religious studies and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.
“It is very anti-establishment because it is the establishment that produces the marginalization,” White said. “And it especially works to identify and deconstruct how societies define what is normal and not normal.”
Bill Heming: This dissenting pastor left the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) for a more traditional church.
Parkway Presbyterian Church
Bill Heming, a pastor in Washington state, recalls his first exposure to queer theology in conversations with fellow students at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he began his divinity studies in 2004 and first heard the word “queer” a few years later used not as an antigay slur but in the positive activist sense common today. This was during a time debate was heating up among Presbyterians over homosexual ordination.
“Queer theology says: We’re queer, we have something unique to offer to the church, so we should be received as prophets,” Heming said.
To the young Heming, queer advocacy looked less like theology and more like the next skirmish in a never-ending social revolution. He asked activist students what the end point of their justice advocacy would be, when they would be satisfied, and the best answer he could get was “when everyone is free to be themselves.”
“At their core, they believe there must be this continual unfolding of liberation – which really is libertinism,” Heming said in a phone interview. “There always has to be another horizon, another battle, and you always have to go looking for it.”
Heming, who left the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination and joined the more traditional Evangelical Presbyterian Church, is now a pastor at Parkway Presbyterian Church, in Tacoma, Wash.
Academic practitioners are prone to spin verbal confections around queerness being “an identity without an essence,” unstable and ever-transitioning, defined by opposition to normativity, in defiance of power hierarchies – thus always on the right side of Eternity.
Mark D. Jordan, theologian: “I await the moment when genders and sexes beyond norms are accepted as sites of divine revelation.”
Harvard Divinity School
New language produces new genders, creating new worlds: “The rapidly evolving languages of trans groups encourage new imaginings of gender through dazzling blurs, ironic negations, or wild escapes into brave new worlds,” Harvard theologian Mark Jordan effused a few years ago in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
Still, in a society where queerness is rapidly becoming a personal status symbol and Pride a marketing slogan for many corporations, queer theologians are beginning to ask how queer theology can maintain its relevance at a time when drag queens, nonbinary pronouns, and gender fluidity are no longer outré.
In the Harvard Divinity Bulletin piece, Jordan remarked, “I once complained at a national meeting that we had written the same book dozens of times.” Now the time is opportune for queer theologians to seize the moment and push the envelope further so that queer identities are not merely accepted but revered – “I await the moment when genders and sexes beyond norms are accepted as sites of divine revelation.”
Tonstad, one of the leading figures of the movement today, said in a podcast that queer theology will need to exist only as long as the world is organized to marginalize and stigmatize “unimpeachable bodily practices.” Thus a task for queer theology is to validate these amatory practices by offering a vision of “what church would become if it was going to be a place where you could live like this.”
One emerging area that shows promise for queer theologians is polyamory, which refers to non-monogamous relationships involving three or more people. It’s already an emerging legal and moral issue and a potential culture war, now that some municipalities and states are beginning to pass anti-discrimination laws that expand parenting rights and housing rights to multi-partner unions. Within queer theology circles, God is sometimes described as polyamorous and polyamory is seen as consistent with the Bible. The Metropolitan Community Church denomination, formed in 1968 and ministering to queer congregants, offers itself as a “spiritual home” to polyamorous unions.
But even as the Lutherans elected a transgender bishop two years ago, it’s an open question whether progressive Protestants who adore drag queens and kneel to the Great They/Them will ever be ready to ordain a poly pastor or marry off their kids in polycules.
Within queer theology, the tyranny of sex and gender is often the organizing principle of colonialist, heterosexist global domination. If this reporter’s month-long immersion in the books, writings, commentaries, and podcasts of this movement makes anything clear, it’s that queer theology scholarship is an affirmation of all things sensual, sexual, lusty, and intemperate, a literature accentuated with allusions to anonymous hookups, communal sex, leather clubs, and sadomasochistic practices.
This wouldn’t be the first time that religious zeal scoffed at sexual norms as obstacles to holiness – the history of free-love communes and orgiastic rites offers plenty of case studies. Early Christians believed that grace and faith freed believers from observing the strictures of Jewish law, an idea called “antinomianism.” This idea historically reappears in extreme forms to make the controversial claim that breaking the earthly bonds of sin and death requires obliterating sexual taboos.
The late Marcella Althaus-Reid, irreverent foundational force in queer theology: “Was Mary’s sexual encounter with God committed love, or a one-night stand with the unknown? Did He or Mary have someone else in their lives at that time? Did she give God a blow job?”
Caorongjin/ Wikimedia
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.
Queer theology traces its origins back to at least 1955 when an Anglican priest, Derrick Sherwin Bailey, published the pioneering historical study, “Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition,” but Tonstad identifies Marcella Althaus-Reid as “the theologian without whom the term ‘queer theology’ would have little content or meaning.”
Althaus-Reid’s breakthrough book, “Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics,” published in 2000, opens synesthetically, awakening all five senses: “Should a woman keep her pants on in the streets or not? Shall she remove them, say, at the moment of going to church, for a more intimate reminder of her sexuality in relation to God? What difference does it make if that woman is a lemon vendor and sells you lemons in the streets without using underwear? Moreover, what difference would it make if she sits down to write theology without underwear?”
Althaus-Reid contends that heterosexuality is founded on a “denial of reality,” and works by creating a Christian culture of secrecy. At every turn, she mocks Catholic purity ideals about Jesus and Mary that she encountered in her native Argentina: “Was Mary’s sexual encounter with God committed love, or a one-night stand with the unknown? Did He or Mary have someone else in their lives at that time? Did she give God a blow job?”
She rejects this colonialist version of Christianity as a European imposition and perversion: “Purity is, like the Western whiteness which represents it, a single-frequency thought.”
Many other queer theologians have developed these themes, as described chronologically in “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology,” published in 2011 by Patrick Cheng, an Episcopal priest, theologian, and lawyer in New York City. Cheng describes one theorist’s “queer theology of sexuality” that focuses on the gift of “promiscuous” or “bodily hospitality” that many gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people exhibit. Another theologian has suggested that “nonmonogamous sex acts — including anonymous and communal sex — can be viewed in terms of a progressive ethic of hospitality,” one of the highest Christian virtues.
According to Cheng, we sin when we hew to sex essentialism and the gender binary, thereby rejecting God’s radical love, which essentially amounts to turning sinfulness into a rejection of queer theology. Cheng says that he is not endorsing total lawlessness – nonconsensual behavior like rape and sexual exploitation fall outside of radical love – but the reality is that those prohibitions are not defined, and thus, according to the precepts of queer theory, definitions are necessarily unstable, ultimately unknowable, open to new possibilities, and always subject to being queered at a moment’s notice.
For Tonstad, the most compelling queer testimony comes not from dispassionate, rational argumentation, but from the heart and body. She is committed to dazzling the world – on the dance floor, in the classroom, and on the printed page – with “a different reality that will have its own seductive power.”
“In a certain sense, to show that there could be another way of being in the world, and that way is better,” she said in a podcast appearance. “It’s more attractive, it’s more beautiful, it’s more interesting, it’s much more challenging, it’s much more dangerous.”
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Comments 66
“They must think the fires of hell are an abstraction. They’ll find out differently, when it’s too late..” Spoken like a follower of the god of wrath, vengeance and anger AKA the god who those of us who went to Catholic school were taught to fear. I’ve always felt Christ’s example is one of love, empathy, compassion and inclusion. You must worship some other god, the angry one who demands fealty and praise. I’m sorry, he sounds terrifying.
Surely you read the passages in Holy Scripture that also quoted Jesus as saying: Go and sin no more! When Jesus was teaching in the temple and the local synagogues, what do you think He was teaching? He was teaching what we call the Old Testament. The New Testament didn’t exist yet! He said He “….came to fulfill The Law!”. I’m sure you also remember what He did when He found the money-changers in the temple…right???
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.
I’ve been thinking about John’s Father’s Day column for days and was really looking forward to whatever came next.
I did not expect to read an entire column based on rubbish.
The quotes, comments, and theories espoused all remind me of that obnoxious little 10 year old sitting in the back of the 4th grade classroom making rude noises, just to get attention.
In all such cases, the only proper reaction is to ignore them all.
I am so sick of this feckin’ crap!
I’ll drink to that!
(Do you have to pay a buck for that version of the “F” word? Asking for a friend.)
Everything in moderation, including moderation. This goes for all cults, pastimes, obsessions, political, economic and cultural alike. If God loves us unconditionally, he loves the sinners too. He even loves Hitler, David Koresh, Trump too.
That’s what always gets me. The contradiction between the boundless love and compassion and the vengeance of judgement and retribution for “sin”.
We live in a society bound by social contract. We have free will and are free to think and live as we please, within some bounds of reason. We do not have to agree with each other.
If your faith is so weak as to feel threatened by a man wearing makeup calling himself “them”, then I feel sorry for you.
Also, if you hate yourself so much that you need to wear a costume and push your views on everyone else and punish those who disagree with you, I feel sorry for you too.
“If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also”. Matthew 5:38-39.
I just wouldn’t go to their church or read their literature.
There are countless entities out there who strive to steal our minds, our souls, our hearts, our money.
Moderation in all things is best.
Don’t you ever read the Bible? Where does IT state “God loves us unconditionally”, quoting you?
Try actually reading John 3:16,17 He loves the World (people) that He gave His Son, BUT one MUST BELIEVE IN HIM or ELSE! Again you just had to add Trump to your list, why didn’t you add yourself? I promise you, your sin IS greater! To be a zealot without knowledge is a fool! Welcome to that title too.
Sorry I forget to add: Remember the worst sinner is the one in the mirror, who also can be the luckiest sinner, by having their sin paid for by Jesus blood shed on that cross if only they believe! Chief of Sinners though I BE, Jesus shed His blood FOR ME!
Anyone reading a daily chronological Bible, is reading about the split kingdoms right now. Israel and Judah. How could the Israelites turn from God who brought them out of Egypt so quickly? It’s no different today!
Satan is busy, his time is short and he and his demons know it as their eternal torment gets closer every day. Unfortunately the Rainbow crowd is in the pot and it’s just starting to get barely warm, as Satan has his hand on the knob and he is happy, very happy, for the moment.
I agree that this was a very difficult column to read. I always considered Church sacred, but no longer.
Who would worship the god of ‘OR ELSE?!’ Why? God wants to be feared? If that is god, you can have him. Christ’s example is one of love, compassion, empathy and inclusion, not FEAR.
Let’s be be honest. Even a just and merciful God would have trouble loving an IMBECILE like the fake Beloit Wisconsin billionaire mogul Riga Tony. Tony is such an idiot that Hell has no vacancies and even Satan won’t take him in. He/She/It (Riga Tony’s preferred pronouns) lives in Its own private hell of empty, vapid stupidity. There is nothing there except the diaherretic noises emanating from He/She/Its empty cranium. Like a bad case of Montezumas revenge, it erupts every so often to contaminate its own surroundings. It’s truly a shame it contaminates ours also. Curses to the fake from Beloit, Riga Tony, imaginary billionaire that you are. May you never know the relief of Maalox or Kaopectate. Enjoy the private hell of your own stupidity. You certainly deserve it. Begone Idiot!
Seriously? Live and let live? That doesn’t work – if you believe in the Holy Bible and the teachings of Jesus. Hell is real, and all who choose to disobey the structure that a Holy God has set up in Scripture, namely the ONLY sex that is blessed by God is marital heterosexual sex. PERIOD. There is a devil, and he seeks to deceive the corrupt human mind. As the bible says, in the last days, before the final judgment, people will be doing what is right in their OWN eyes, corrupting the truth as we can see in this article. Tragic!! and just plain sick.
Thus, by your narrow interpretation of scripture (written by men I might add, not God..) God allows men and women to be born gay, thus damning them at birth to eternal hell, through no fault of their own, is that correct?? WHO would ‘worship’ such a god?? The answer is fewer and fewer people, as evidenced by empty churches and dwindling congregations, and voter rolls of Christians who support white extremist candidates. If that is god, you can keep him.
Don’t worry Riga- T, God doesn’t want you and you’re too stupid for Satan. You are condemned to a Purgatory of Your Own Stupidity. Enjoy…
The Bible WAS written by God, “He has spoken through the Prophets”.
Fear of The Lord does not mean to be afraid of Him but is an awe and respect for the absolute majesty of God.
God gave us free will to love Him or not. Therefore we are not forced to love Him or follow His word but we do follow because we love Him.
People are not born gay but most likely through misguided circumstance or lack of God in their lives, following their free will, they choose to be gay. They are not condemned to eternal hell as long as they repent. No one is beyond God’s saving grace!
A shockingly small minded minority, ignorant and misinformed POV on homosexuality. Remember Liberace? My guess is that era is right in your cultural wheelhouse. I bet you think he was just ‘flamboyant’, right??
That’s ridiculous! If you understand God even a little, you’d know that’s not true. Nobody is born gay then condemned to hell.
Sooooo, you’re good with a “moderate” amount of theft? Rape? Incest? Nope, sin is sin. No where did God say it’s ok “once in a while”!
No wonder church attendance it at an all-time low!
I’m a pretty open-minded gay man who believes in “live and let live”, but I feel like I need a shower after reading this.
Four pretty good words to live by.
Thank you, John, for reprinting this important article. Is there no bounds to the desecration of the Holy! This queer theology is heresy. Very few Christians have known this is being taught in seminaries. Martin Luther is turning in his grave!
PLEASE know that the “Lutheran Church” to which the author referred is a synod of the ELCA. It is NOT the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. It is also not the Wisconsin Synod, or any of the other regional aggregations of those who are Lutherans. The author did us no favor by writing in such a generality.
I grew up when the word “queer” was a pejorative and I still give a start when I hear it. I note media coverage is extensive. I don’t criticize those who identify as queer but I marvel at the attention paid in academia outlined in this article. It’s pretty “out there”
I can verify that for decades the Methodist Church has run everything, including its finances and board of pensions on “consensus” aka feeeeeeeellllings (whoa whoa whoa). So no big surprise here. Glad I no longer work for them.
There is a young guy who runs a very fair assessment of denominations, Ready to Harvest, on YouTube. If this column sets your teeth on edge and/ or you honestly didn’t know, go see how the Methodist Church is duking it out with congregations who want to leave the denomination- and there are many.
This “acceptance” and “tolerance,” “As long as you do it the way we tell you, no other opinion allowed, and throw out facts” is seeping into a lot of ecclesiastical communities like rot in a damp basement. So sunlight, so to speak, is fabulous in this instance. Great disinfectant!
I do wish the author of the article would have been more specific when he mentioned “the Lutheran Church”. He was actually referring to the ELCA, not to the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod; not to the Wisconsin Synod, and not to any of the other conservative regional aggregations of Bible-believing Lutherans.
When the Pendulum swing it wings way to far in the opposite direction. I can’t think of a better example.
I won’t see it but in time the pendulum will swing back hard & far.
“Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.”
Philippians 3:19 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/php.3.19.NIV
Thank you for the education. I had absolutely no idea. Will try reading some of the named works to try to make sense of this. Am old enough to recall then-hippie tomes stressing the insights into the meaning of life through LSD. Some of the above column rings that bell. That bell turned out to be a wrong note.
This is sickening; blasphemy, pure and simple. Wolves dressed up like sheep, deceiving the non discerning and gullible.
All religions are, in the creation and practice, a belief based system of rules that govern, explain or justify certain types of conduct. Very clearly, this particular “religion” while calling itself Christianity has nothing to do with Christianity, other than it’s apparent hijacking of the holiest symbols in Christianity for its own purposes. One wonders why they chose Christianity, and then immediately realizes, this is about drawing attention to oneself by shocking the sensibilities of even those who are not Christians. Since Christians are forgiving of others based upon Christ’s teachings to us, that is a significant reason why Christianity is selected for this abomination. We need not look forward to this or any other group seeking to “Queer Mohammed” any time soon.
Thank you for reprinting this. I read it originally on RealClearInvestigations and sent it out to all my friends. I am glad it is now reaching a wider audience.
What is worse to me is that I am not hearing my church (I am a Catholic) speak out about this. I have reached the point in time where I attend Mass despite the hierarchy of the Church, as the Mass is about Christ and the Eucharist, not the the leadership, or lack thereof.
I am reminded of something a Lutheran pastor wrote re:Nazi Gemany. I am paraphrasing, but it ends with “And when they came for me there was no one to speak up.”
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
Thank you.
Thank you, Marianne, for articulating my view of the Church in your second paragraph. The Mass is a celebration of His love for (all of) us, and it is always a joy to hear a homily that emphasizes His love. The Church is the body of Christ, not some self perpetuating hierarchy.
As for the main article, I reflect on two principles: (1) don’t focus on the mote in your brother’s eye when you have a splinter in your own and (2) love the sinner hate the sin.
His ways are not our ways, and I marvel at “theologinians” who seek to explain it all for us.
Beliefs like “The Golden Rule” (Treat others as you hope to be treated.) are at the core of the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendments, rules of law to ensure public safety, etc.
The LGBTQIA+ community clearly has no respect for The Golden Rule. They respect no personal boundaries, including parents’ vulnerable kids in school.
Gender appearances may be easily revised with clothing, cosmetics, even non-functional cosmetic sex organ surgeries. But DNA is immutable. No one should experiment with irreversible drugs, hormone effects, or surgeries before age 25, when mentally and emotionally mature.
It should be illegal (with major criminal penalties) for any doctor, hospital, psychologist, teacher, judge, etc. to ignore parental rights and support gender-change drugs or sexual organ surgeries for any child under age 18.
Man I like to be in the know, but this was a tough read
I agree!
Simply, the Holy Godhead will pour out judgment in His time. These deviant practices are from the pit of hell, fostered by demons. God will not be mocked. The Holy Scriptures are the ONLY source of moral truth. I would not want to be in the shoes of those who perpetrate such deviant, demonic beliefs on judgement day, when they breathe their last. I have literally seen the demonic. May God have mercy on their souls – IF they repent and turn away.
I agree this was a very difficult column to read. It’s very sad what is happening in Church and how this will effect children.
God now is a kinky deity known for all different types of sexual behavior known to man/woman/it. Wow! NAMBLA must be jumping for joy! Just reading about “queer” theology makes my stomach churn. What struck me is the idea of purity is a white Western single frequency thought; so what about the idea of purity in Judaism and Islam? The idea of purity in those other religions track close to the conservative Christian idea of purity. In the end to me, these queer theologians are sad angry and lost people looking to justify their meagre existence by demonizing others.
When are ‘they’ gonna teach these theories in a Muslim or Jewish temple? Just asking,
I forgot to mention Black churches also.. Let’s see ‘their’ reception at these 3 venues.
This article was extremely disturbing (in a very sad way). I belong to a very conservative church (we still sing out of a hymnal!). I’m aware of how things have shifted theologically, but to this extent? I can see the signs in the community but am not personally exposed to this level of degradation.
I’ve been reading through the Bible and am currently reading the books of Kings & Chronicles, and one might wonder how things (idolatry, etc.) could go downhill so quickly from one king to another (mostly due to the leadership of the nation(s)!).
When reading the history via those books, time passes by so quickly, but the story(ies) cover many years. How patient was God while the northern and southern kingdoms kept moving further away from his law? They still worshiped at the Temple, but there were other alters to other gods scattered throughout the two kingdoms. After a period of time the northern kingdom was obliterated; however, the southern kingdom was only exiled due to His promise to David. It is amazing that God was very patient, as the stories of Israel/Judah cover a few centuries.
The USA has been around for nearly 247 years (longer including the first landings from Europe). We have seen such degradation in the last few decades, and the slide downward is getting steeper and faster. How patient will God be? Hundreds of years as in the days of the two kingdoms? Who knows……
I am saddened by all this and am one lone voice in this mess. When opportunity comes, I will speak out. I am sad, and I pray every day for my grandchildren, as they are to grow up in this increasing degradation.
I agree with you. My church, too, sings out of the old hymnal, and we read out of the Bible every week – Bibles in the pew racks for everyone, and the selected verses reprinted in large print for those who have need.
One (of the many!) things that grieved me about this article is the author’s statement about “…the Lutheran church….” without saying WHICH Lutheran church. If one took the time to follow the link he provided, one would see he was referring to the ELCA – which is wildly different than the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, the Wisconsin Synod, or any of the other regional synodical groups. He did us no favor, that’s for sure!
Please, no more of this. We see and hear enough of this on major media.
I’m having a tough time processing that transsexuals could be mainstreamed. It still seems very fringe to me. Will there soon be state or federal laws that mandate that health clubs allow self-identifying transsexuals to use women’s locker room? Do those laws already exist? Will these laws be enforced? Will transsexual use of these facilities become common? I must believe that >95% of all Americans consider that to be totally unacceptable. My mother and wife are lifelong Democrats, (as a younger man I was a Democrat – we now have interesting yet manageable conversations), and there is no way they could accept this.
Anybody remember the old joke about why Mickey and Minnie Mouse were getting a divorce? I think that applies here. I got out of the Army in 1969. Went to a Methodist service when I got home. The minister offered up a prayer to ‘our Vietcong adversaries.’ I got up, walked out, and haven’t been to a church of any organized religion since. They’re all f’ing goofy.
“They’re all f’ing goofy.”
At least two of us remember that joke.
It never occurred to me to pray for those little bastards.
Satan’s pawns. They will all find out in time. In the words of comedian Jim Gaffigan, “they are practically sprinting to Hell”!
This is a tough read as someone commented. The outrageous has a way of getting attention.
I earned a Masters in Theology years ago and was privileged to have had outstanding professors, male and female, religious and lay. Some were gay and some were straight but that did not overshadow what was taught and discussed in class.
Theology has gone through different phases, and trends, for many years whether one is conservative or liberal. Trends start out as very intense and then balance off or fade away.
In the above article I saw the word “love” once, don’t think I saw the word “faith”. Christianity’s most important belief is to love God and to love one another. Helping others isn’t about sex acts and dancing all night. Ministers are often present in the most vulnerable moments of peoples’ lives. In times of crisis and death people look for compassion and hope. No one ever woke up from a coma in an ICU bed and said “What’s your gender?” or
” How’s your sex life?”
These authors try to outshock each other but they all have the same pounding,
punishing message.
I am tired of the anti-religion, anti-Christian, anti-Family rhetoric.
Thank you John Murawski and John Kass for presenting this article.
Isaiah 5:20
1) I wouldn’t have given this column space. 2) Crap like this has been on TV and it’s why I couldn’t watch “Lucifer.” Having a story line about God being divorced was/is not in my belief system. 3) Maybe “climate change” is just the beginning….like Sodom and Gomorrah. And being “woke” is like the creation of the Tower of Babel. 4) We give too much media attention to the depraved, mentally ill and just plain wicked beings that live among us. 5) You need someone to write a POSITIVE column that counters this and talks about all the good that religion and it’s organizations continue to do.
“Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power. ” i.e. “Behind every desire to change the world, is a hidden desire to rule it.” – H.L. Mencken
Fear is weaponized to push extreme views, both political and social. Left and right does this. If you use fear to push God, a political movement, or anything else but facts and practical pragmatism and peace, count me out.
BTW, it’s estimated the as many as 1 in 20 Chicago archdiocese are rapists or child abusers of some sort.
Send them your money! Or else!
Holy crap: I can’t remember the last time I needed a dictionary and a thesaurus to get through one of your articles. I can’t wait to recycle the paper I used to print this expose of how far into the world of goofy these people have taken the gender thing.
Mental illness is a serious topic and generally disregarded until you read in articles like this how sereious these people take themselves.
I agree that this was a very difficult column to read. I always considered Church sacred, but no longer.
That’s sad, and unfortunate. Not all churches are the same, and not all churches should have been painted with the broad brush the author chose to use. In particular, his statement about “…the Lutheran Church….” should have been fairly tempered by saying “The ELCA – Evangelical Lutheran Church in America….” That particular denomination has always been wildly liberal, but has precious little in common with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, with the Wisconsin Synod, or with any of the other regional aggregations of Scriptural Lutherans. He needs to be more careful in his writing.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. There is very little wisdom in this stuff. People so enamored of their sin that they constantly have to re-cast it as “good.”
We have free will. Those who go to God through free will and with a good heart are noble.
Those who are intolerant and push fear and hate of those who think differently are not acting with God in their hearts.
Now, being tolerant, kind, loving, doesn’t mean the Catholic Church has to embrace “queer ideology” whatever that is. It’s the Catholic Church.
If you want to practice this queer ideology i your own church, thatn. So be it.
I must say though, I believe personally that homosexuality is not a sin, priests should be allowed to marry, and women should be ordained as priests.
Also, I think the child rape covered up by the church should result in their losing their tax status. In fact, any organization whose members routinely violate innocents and then cover it up as the church did should immediately lose their special tax status.
Further, I think Pope Francis would be amenable to most of these ideas, but, much as the POTUS and the monarchy inn Britain, the pope is a figurehead.
A “deep state” runs the church and these people are greedy and power hungry and would resort to anything to keep their power.
John, this kind of article is extremely difficult to read. Causes one to pause, go get a cup of coffee and come back to it. BECAUSE it is so hard to read, we see how important it is that someone have the courage to dig into the reality of the issue.
If I may, I sincerely hope that the author would amend his writing for the sake of clarity. In his “roll call of denominations” and his recitation of their varying levels of participation in this insanity, the author made a GRIEVOUS mistake only slightly addressed by providing a hot-link, should the reader choose to follow it. He gave as an example the antics/activities of what HE said was “…the Lutheran Church….”. Were he to be accurate, he would have said “the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America)” They are well known to be exceedingly liberal in their viewpoint and practice. They are NOT, however, connected in any way with the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, nor the Wisconsin Synod, nor any of the other regional synods of The Lutheran Church. He did us a great dis-service, and I hope a correction is coming. This one is a whopper, and should not go unaddressed.
God help us.
I am glad I didn’t have breakfast before I started to read this nauseating piece of disgusting trash. What a waste. I couldn’t finish reading it. Maybe this was meant for your liberal readers, if you have any. I don’t opine on this site very often, but I had to vent.
Matthew Marciniec
John, I haven’t received your column since the end of April. What’s the story.
Leo