Brad's second (and hopefully final) response to Timothy Keller. Brad discusses Keller's reductionist view of modern conceptions of selfhood; the problematic approach he takes to criticisms that his sexual ethic erases queer people--and creates the context for violence against them; and the ways Keller uses academic and theoretical sources (Taylor, Asad, Foucault) to cover over what are classic evangelical maneuvers: reduce sexual identity to choice, label those who don't fit the heterosexual fold as deviant, and blame them for it by tracing their path to sinful desire.
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Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I want to just have a very brief episode today to respond one more time to Timothy Keller.
And after this, I am done.
I think it's time to be done with all of this.
But for those of you who have been following on Twitter, Timothy Keller, who is part of the Gospel Coalition and a minister, pastor, Presbyterian leader in New York City with Half a million Twitter followers has been posting some incredibly provocative, is a nice word to say, tweets about sexuality and community and selfhood.
And so one more response and then I think we're going to be all done.
Yesterday, Chrissy Stroop, friend of the program, published a great article at Religion Dispatches on Keller's tweets.
And I am quoted in the piece, just full disclosure.
But one of the things that Chrissy tweeted today is this in response to Keller that when certain beliefs are enforced in a cultural and institutional structure, human experiences that don't fit into the prefab abstract framework lead not only to the erasure of those who can't fit in, but also to violence against us.
So Chrissy was responding to a number of things, but the baseline of Keller's tweets started about a week and a half ago when he said that sex outside of lifelong heterosexual marriage is dehumanizing.
Okay.
And so Chrissy is saying that, look, you have a certain structure here about human experience that lifelong heterosexual marriage is the only place for sex.
And if that is not the case, then it's a dehumanizing experience.
So Christie's saying, look, those of us who can't fit in to that framework, i.e.
people who are queer in any way, trans, bisexual, gay, lesbian, and so on and so forth, right, are erased.
They're erased from the framework altogether.
The category of the person in question is not even considered as part of the framework.
So they're erased and there is violence against them.
We have talked about this on our show so many times when it comes to the trans community.
The rates of suicidal ideation, of self-harm, of other aspects of being a trans person in this country, especially a young person, are through the roof.
The statistics regarding violence against people in the trans community are just, they tell a story of violence.
OK?
So I think Chrissy has a very good point.
Now Keller responds that he understands the concern.
He's tweeting this, right?
So it's all there if you'd like to go look at it.
And says, you know, heaping abrasive language on people and trying to shame them doesn't, does not, that's not a good thing.
However, he says, and I'm quoting now, in the end, everyone asks people to quote, fit in to their community or leave it.
Every community, including ex-evangelicals, has boundaries, gatekeepers, heresies, and orthodoxies.
So he's saying, look, every community has a kind of set of boundaries, and those have to be kept, and that's all that you're doing, and that's all that I'm doing.
There's a kind of sense here of like, hey, you're in one community, I'm in another.
We have different standards, we have different ideas of what is good, what is humanizing, and so we just have to kind of like accept that, right?
He says in the next tweet, We all have standards about what is healthy sexuality and what is good for people.
Mine are different than yours.
We must urge people to align with the community standards in a non-abusive way.
But to do that urging is an unavoidable reality and does not constitute erasure.
It does though, Timothy Keller, if your community standards do not even recognize trans people as existing.
If they don't even recognize By or gay or lesbian people as having a legitimate identity It does constitute erasure period the framework assumes erasure from the beginning.
Okay in another set of tweets Keller says that Chrissy has sort of misread Keller's approach to ethics and Says that There is a need to recognize, quote, "We have two different visions of what leads to joy and thriving for human beings.
We are each contending for our vision of the good and opposing those visions we think are harmful." Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWAGE episode.
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