Read an Excerpt

Peculiar FAITH

Queer Theology for Christian Witness

Church Publishing Incorporated

Queerly Called

Ecstasy, Hope, and Theological Method

The forbidden can prove quite attractive. Augustine had that insight many centuries ago, which I replicated as an undergraduate. The private Christian college I attended required all faculty, staff, and students to sign a statement of belief and its accompanying pledge of behavior. I made sure to engage in one of the items forbidden by the pledge as soon as I graduated: dancing. I relished that moment of feeling rebellious by kicking up my heels, but I had not anticipated stumbling into a theological insight. That happened some years later, at a gay dance club in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Not just the dancing but the venue and the particular clientele all contributed to my delighted surprise.

On a balmy summer night after sipping some beer, my friends and I plowed our way onto an already crowded dance floor and began to dance. I continued to dance for what seemed like hours, long after my friends had pushed their way back to the bar. I danced even as my feet grew tired and sweat poured off my body; it felt euphoric. I had never done that before, not like that. I had certainly enjoyed dancing over the years but not with that kind of abandon and uninhibited delight. Any self-consciousness I usually harbor over my less than gym-sculpted body simply vanished; I felt at home in my own skin. So this was new, this displacement of bodily shyness with joy. Many of the other dancers appeared to feel something similar. With very few exceptions the dance floor carried not couples but all of us. Each of us danced with all the others. The glances and smiles we exchanged did not for the most part signal seduction for a one-night stand but—how to name this?—shared ecstasy, perhaps. Right there and then, in the midst of all that dancing, I caught a glimpse of what it might mean to belong. "I belong here," I remember thinking to myself while dancing and with sweat running down my cheeks. "These are my people; this is my tribe."

Disenfranchised and marginalized populations of all types would recognize that kind of experience and longing. The yearning to belong—somewhere, anywhere—may well describe a universal human experience. As a theologian I recognized something else as well, a possible response to a question that had haunted me for years. In the midst of institutional church contestations over so many things (often quite trivial) and in the long history of complex theological development, what finally is Christian faith all about? Quite remarkably, in the middle of a gay club, I came to this: Christian faith inspires the hope of at long last being at home in our bodies, at home among others, and at home with God all at the same time. Augustine penned something similar more than fifteen centuries ago when he tried to imagine heavenly life. The character of that life, he supposed, would be knowing "peace in ourselves, peace among others, and peace with God."

I knew when that insight dawned that it would need considerable refinement, but catching a bodily glimpse of what it might mean mattered a great deal. My memory of that experience (even as I write this) provokes a deep longing, the desire to feel that way again, yet I also find parts of that memory troubling. The vast majority of the men in that club were white. I recall seeing only a few African-American faces, even fewer Latino ones and no Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders. The only two women there tended bar. Moreover, only a relatively small economic class of people can afford Provincetown in the summer. The men on that dance floor, in other words, may well have been "my tribe," but only a small portion of it, and I have no way to know how I would have felt about any of them after the music stopped. The glimpse I had of being at home was simply that—just a glimpse.

Yearning for what proves troubling marks a rich if vexing combination rife with potential for articulating the dynamics of Christian faith and especially Christian hope. That glimpse of an embodied home has stayed with me, lodging in my bones and muscles. Catching that glimpse in the midst of other gay men, all of us dancing, also provoked some unsettling questions. Why can hearing the rhythms of the kind of music I heard that night so quickly arouse my yearning for home in a way that most "church music" only rarely does? Why would a glimpse of home feel so palpable on a dance floor and so ephemeral in a church pew? Why did I discover more hope in that one moment among vacationing, anonymous dancers than I often do in moments of liturgical piety?

Some of my friends readily provide answers to these questions, especially those who insist on being "spiritual but not religious." For them, institutional religion belongs to a stultifying history of repression and ought to remain there, in the past. Others see no point in trying to sort through the difference between religion and spirituality; they just want to dance. Perhaps theology begins there, with that unmistakably embodied desire. Perhaps our peculiar faith as Christians draws continually from the sustaining energy of the dance itself, especially as it fuels a home-coming hope. If so, then queer home economists face a particular theological task: accounting for that hope with tools and methods sufficient for home-building. The task begins, though, with pondering why such hope matters before trying to account for it. Only then will a method for doing this theological work find the traction it needs.

DANCERS FROM THE DANCE

Many of my LGBT friends love to dance. The reasons vary, just as they do for everyone. Some dance for joy, others for seduction, and still others for social bonding. Yet a thread of commonality weaves throughout the many reasons LGBT people dance. In a world of oppressive social structures, unwelcoming religious institutions, and constant threats of violence—a world, that is, filled with homeless spaces—we dance for hope.

Dancing has enjoyed a long history of cultural expression and often with religious or spiritual significance. Consider the ancient biblical story of Israel's ruggedly handsome King David, who could barely keep his clothes on in public as he danced before the Ark of the Covenant as it returned to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:12–23). Michal, Saul's daughter and David's wife, was scandalized by this display of, well, what exactly? Joy? Eroticism? Perhaps David took his lead from Miriam, who danced on the occasion of her people's rescue from the Egyptians (Exodus 15:20). Or consider the Shakers, a small communitarian movement among early New England Quakers who established eighteen communities and, by 1850, had grown to 4,000 members. Known best today for their fine woodworking and elegant furniture, they were known at first as the "shaking Quakers" for their elaborate ritualized dances and spirit trances. Separating themselves from the outside world, these spiritual dancers affirmed the absolute equality of men and women and even supposed that God was "bisexual," endowing everyone with both male and female characteristics. Or consider Sufis, "whirling dervishes" in popular parlance, whose Islamic faith in the beauty of the one God with ninety-nine beautiful names rises up in mystical dances. These whirling, ecstatic movements purge the dancers of all desire but the desire for the one God.

To this list I would add the image of sweaty gay men, naked to the waist, stomping their feet to a pounding rhythm in a dance club late into the night. I would also add country-western clubs with lesbian cowgirls twirling their partners around the dance floor at wee hours of the morning, and urban ballroom dance schools as well, where, perhaps one night a month, bisexual and transgender people indulge in the fluid lines of a waltz.

We can quite properly refer to each of these instances of dancing as ecstatic. And that makes them queer. Each falls on the margins of day-to-day routine and each of them occurs among people living on the edges of a given society's dominant culture: ancient Israelites on the borders of powerful empires; the now nearly extinct Shakers, who retreated from the mighty tide of American industrial progress; Muslims, whose medieval civilization rivaled, and in many ways surpassed, that of Christian Europeans and who are now profiled in the West as agitators and terrorists; LGBT people on the borders of gendered sexual conformity, whose clubs and bars still populate the warehouse districts and industrial zones of American cities away from mainstream view. All of these locales vibrate with the queer energy of hope, the odd yet strangely alluring hope of carving out something like a home in otherwise homeless spaces.

Queerly alluring ecstasy resides deep within Christian traditions yet surfaces far too infrequently among today's theologians and pastors. It lures many people into church buildings on a Sunday morning without knowing precisely why; few, if any, venture an answer to that mostly unspoken question. The world of online social media brims with compelling tales of ecstasy of all types, either tapped fully or only glimpsed, and replete with musings on the transcendence of those moments—and nary a word from clergy. Modern institutional Christianity, from its theological formulations to its practice of ministry, has all but forgotten its own queer history in a world eager and at times desperate to hear it, to touch it, to dance to its seductive rhythms late into the night. A second-century Christian believed that "those who do not dance do not know what is coming to pass." Those who do dance would likely pose more than a few pointed questions to today's Christian leaders if they had even an inkling of the treasure buried on church grounds.

These dancers from the dance might wonder why so many books on theology seem so dull and lifeless. Have theologians forgotten the endlessly fascinating adventure into the fathomless mystery of the living God, which theology ought to inspire? These dancers might ask whether theology has any room for the kind of whimsical playfulness and childlike awe that can excite our deepest passions and desires. They would ask this not knowing that Christian theology began just there, with that poignant yearning. They would surely want to know why institutional religion turns so often to the policy procedures of bureaucratic machinery when Jesus preferred to speak of God with images of partying at a feast, celebrating with a banquet, and the joy shared by a bride and bridegroom. Why is this? Why do clergy rarely speak about the eroticism percolating in Christian traditions and the peculiar gender identities populating ancient spiritual practices?

If these dancers paused long enough in the dance to read the Bible for themselves (rather than hearing it selectively quoted in movies or in news media), they would likely notice four canonical gospels and not just one. Why, then, do so many insist on only one way to think and speak about Jesus? Reading those gospel texts, they would also likely notice that the gospel writers chose multiple ways to write about Jesus, even within a single gospel account, and that those writers often chose to portray Jesus himself as rather cagey about his own identity. If the Church created that much room for diversity and ambiguity in its own canonical texts, why does it turn so often to doctrinal conformity and split into so many sectarian groups? Indeed, why a canon of institutionally approved texts at all? These dancers would doubtless be surprised to realize that the earliest Christians lived for centuries without any officially canonized texts, or that what we mean today by the word "Bible" and "canon" differs from one Christian community to the next. During the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther made proposals for different versions of the canon and many canonical texts themselves underwent significant editorial revision over the centuries to reflect varying theological commitments.

As dancers eager to dance, all these textual questions would likely occur later, if at all. They would wonder first why Christians so often stress the texts of Christian theology at the expense of how people actually live with their faith. Might they wonder why a classic text of Augustine in the fifth century attained normative theological status with little if any reference to how fifth-century Christians worshipped and prayed—or even danced?

As the music beckons these dancers back to the dance floor, I imagine them both wistful and resentful: Why did no one tell us how queer Christianity really is? Poignant and charged with longing, that question traces the contours of a divine calling. In a world littered with so many homeless spaces, God has something rather peculiar in mind, and always has. God imagines a world where every creature feels perfectly at home, without exception. Few really believe this, but a long history of visionaries and prophets and mystics and the most unremarkable ordinaries have caught glimpses of it, and they still do. As it always has, that glimpse changes lives. Whether the change occurs suddenly or unfolds over a lifetime it nearly always comes with a calling: to work with God on making this world a home, not just for some but for all.

The image of homeless spaces tugs on the heart for more than one reason. Churches might open their buildings for shelter and church members might give money to alternative housing programs and some might make a spare room available to friends during a prolonged spate of unemployment. To these visibly homeless the Church properly reaches out with Christian charity. Less visible yet far more pervasive, modern Western society has left many of us with what Scott Cowdell hauntingly calls "homeless hearts." As modern Westerners create the conditions for comfort, from high-tech gadgets to single-family residences, many live with a lingering discomfort, a vague yet ambient sense of rootless dissatisfaction. Modern forms of religion mostly fail to address this dis-ease or even to notice it. Poet and essayist Christian Wiman echoes that analysis with an equally haunting observation about the anxiety that invades even our leisure. Recalling a dinner-party conversation with friends seeking relief from a world of busy-ness, Wiman notes:

Everyone has some means of relief—tennis, yoga, a massage every Thursday—but the very way in which those activities are framed as apart from regular life suggests the extent to which that relief is temporary (if even that: a couple of us admit that our "recreational" activities partake of the same simmering, near- obsessive panic as the rest of our lives).

Unmitigated restlessness and anxiety turned inward generates ever greater demand for antidepressants; turned outward, it manifests as racial prejudice, misogyny, and violent bullying. More severely still, Western society's inability to diagnose our self-imposed homelessness on this planet only fuels, quite literally, our addiction to earth's natural resources with the vain hope of numbing our collective pain. Most see the result looming large on our smoggy horizon with paralyzing clarity. Contemporary cultural, economic, and geopolitical realities now indicate what has been until recently unthinkable. The last generation to enjoy the benefits of the modern world—such as easy and affordable access to fossil fuels; a temperate, human-friendly climate; manageable disease and preventable epidemics; stable governmental structures—that last generation has already been born.

I believe the peculiar faith of Christians can rise to meet the challenge of homeless spaces, even on a planetary scale. Queerly enough, theology makes a difference. Theological texts may contribute to that difference, but I mean more than to aim for the doctrinal acuity that so many assume as theology's substance. Theology takes intimations of home—no matter how fleeting, perhaps intuited only briefly on a dance floor—and makes from them occasions for home- building and invitations for home-coming. LGBT activists for social change know what this means far less abstractly. From eighteenth-century English "molly houses" to twentieth-century dance clubs, "homosexuals" have persistently carved out spaces of safe haven, frequenting these spaces often at the risk of physical harm. Far more than venues for drinking alcohol and finding sexual liaisons (though that happened too), these spaces of homeward longing catalyzed shared reflection, analysis, strategizing, and the deep communal bonds of affection that redrew the cultural and political map of the North Atlantic. The second- and third-century catacombs of ancient Rome bear witness to the same persistence among the earliest Christians.

Catching a glimpse of home in a gay dance club can ignite a divinely queer calling, the passionate urge to bear witness to that glimpse and, even more, to build on it and expand it. Queer home economists need theological tools to translate this calling into sustainable vocations, to channel that hopeful defiance against despair into effective home-building. This daunting challenge facing twenty-first-century churches appears a bit less formidable by noting the lives and sensibilities of so many LGBT people who already occupy Christian pews and preach from pulpits. Their courageous witness frequently humbles me, one of the reasons why I find dancing with other LGBT people so compelling. I know that many of them bring painful personal histories to that dance floor and that some arrive there in the midst of distressing circumstances in their jobs, concerning their physical health, or with their families. And still they dance, and often with abandon, and at times with joy shaking loose from their bodies and gratitude lighting up their faces. Those moments make theological housework not only possible or merely bearable but enlivening and sustaining. More than this, such shared moments of translating musical rhythm into bodily gesture makes visible "the conviction of things not seen," as the biblical writer might remind us about faith itself (Hebrews 11:1).

---

Excerpted from Peculiar FAITH by Jay Emerson Johnson. Copyright © 2014 Jay Emerson Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---