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Why is there no acknowledgement of queer identity or expression within the sex/gender ideology of conservative high-control Christianity? What does this tell us about how queerness is understood within this subculture? And why is queer identity simultaneously denied and perceived as an existential threat? Check out this week’s episode to hear what Dan has to say.
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The series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
As always...
I am Dan Miller, your host, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Really excited to be here with you.
As always, I want to begin by saying thank you for those of you who support us in so many ways.
Lots of great emails and feedback and encouraging notes and, you know, things like that from all of you, and that means the world to us.
It's a sort of a, it's a dark time.
I think we know that and it's hard to kind of keep going, but we're doing what we can do.
I'm doing what I can do and you help me do that.
So thank you so much.
In particular, I want to thank the subscribers, those of you who help financially support us to keep doing the things we do.
If you're not a subscriber and that's something that you would consider doing, you know, I'd ask you to do that.
But again, however you support us, whatever you do, the encouragements, all of it, keep it coming.
Keep the feedback coming.
Notes on these episodes, these episodes have struck a nerve with a lot of you and really appreciate seeing those things.
Upcoming episode ideas, all of that.
Keep them coming.
Want to dive into today's topic.
These episodes have been a little long, a little on the long side, and this will probably be about the same.
We're continuing this series.
We've got to talk about the sex stuff, looking at the gender-sex ideology at the heart of conservative, high-control American Christianity.
And by now, we've covered a lot of ground.
And what we're coming to today in this episode is an issue that I've touched on sort of indirectly, but we've put it off until now.
And I sort of promised we would get to it, and here's part of where we are.
And the issue here is queer identity in its relation to all the aspects of the ideology we've considered.
There's a reason why, for me, logically, if you're going to talk about queer identity, queer sexuality within...
In the context of this sex and gender ideology, you have to talk about the other stuff we've talked about.
You have to talk about the binary of two and only two genders.
We've talked about that.
You have to talk about the attribution of fundamentally different sexualities to men and women.
You have to talk about the privileging of heterosexual, you know, vaginal sex and the focus on the male sex act as sort of what sex is really about.
You have to talk about the notion that the purpose of sex is procreation.
And we talked about all those things.
If you're just jumping in or you're new to the series, you've missed some episodes, I invite you to go back and listen to those because they really are, for me, kind of a logical prelude to where we're going here.
But what's absent as an explicit focus within any of these dimensions is a consideration of queer, gender, or sexuality.
What I mean by that is, at the point where they discuss this and you say, what is gender?
What is sex?
Why did God create sex?
All of that.
There'll just be no reference to queerness.
And that is the point I want to look at today.
I want to look at the significance of the absence of such individuals and identities within these formulations, and the way that that absence, the fact that it simply isn't there, metastasizes into violence against the LGBTQ plus community.
So that's where I want to take us today.
So I want to start here with just a brief word on terminology.
I'm using the word queer, and those of you who've listened to me a lot know that this is how I'm using it.
To cover the full range of LGBTQ plus identities and expressions.
And I'm not trying to misuse the term.
I'm not trying to offend anybody.
I realize that that's a broad use of the term queer.
I realize that queer can also have narrower connotations.
The Q in LGBTQ is queer.
And I recognize that gender and sexuality are not equivalent concepts.
I understand all of that.
But given the constraints of time that we have and the need to just kind of move through the material.
I can't sort of nuance terms the way that I might if I had more space.
So I just trust that you as listeners recognize that I recognize that.
Certainly, you know, let me know about what you think about that if you have concerns.
But when I use the word queer here, I'm talking about, again, that full range of genders and sexualities that stand outside of that cis, hetero, patriarchal norm that we have been discussing.
Okay?
So let's start with this.
I mentioned the absence of queer folk or queer identity or queer sexuality or queer gender expression within the sex-gender ideology of conservative high-control religion.
Okay?
Now, that isn't to say that there isn't active and in many ways renewed opposition to all things queer within this subculture.
If you pay attention to America at all, you listen to this podcast, you listen to the Weekly Roundup, you listen to what we do, you know that that's a thing.
You know that we know.
That that's a thing.
I'm not saying that there is an opposition to that.
We're going to come to that.
But within the positive articulation of gender, sexuality, and sexual practice, there is simply no mention of queerness.
When I say the positive articulation, what I mean is when those who advocate this ideology, when they're not actively opposing something or responding to criticisms of it, when they are just saying, here's what gender is.
Here's what sexuality is.
Here's what sex is.
Here's the purpose of sex, and so forth.
There simply won't be any reference to queerness.
Okay?
And it makes sense.
Even the basic meaning of the term queer is a departure from a norm, right?
Queer has largely fallen out of common English usage, like it's just a regular adjective, because it's been so identified to the LGBTQ plus community.
But that's what it meant, is a departure from a norm, and that's why it was applied as an epithet to The LGBTQ plus community and initially gay men in particular because they marked a departure from a cis hetero norm.
They were queer.
And of course, that term then gets picked up by that community and taken on as a kind of identity becomes appropriated.
And that's where we get the term as we use it now.
But the point is that it was a departure from a norm.
It wasn't something in its own right.
And what that reveals for me, the silence on queerness, is that within the sex-gender ideology that we've been exploring, there simply is no place for any form of queerness.
There is no place for sexual desire or practice that doesn't map onto the cis-heteronorm.
There is no place for experiences and expressions of gender that don't map onto the male-female binary.
And I'm always struck by this in a really concrete way when I teach about this sex-gender ideology.
I teach a religion, gender, sexuality class.
I teach religion and pop culture.
I teach other courses, and in a lot of them I will bring issues of gender and sexuality in, and often it's in the context of discussing high-control religion and understandings of these.
And if I outline those and say, here's what they understand about gender, here's what they understand about sex, here's what they understand, you know, whatever, students will ask, especially students who might identify as queer, certainly students who have queer folk in their life.
Or just students, like, out in the world who are aware of, like, how it works, and they pay any attention to it, they are immediately and aware of this missing dimension.
And I will always get hands that go up, and they will say, but what about gay people?
What about this?
What about, what about, what about, what about?
And they're asking about queer identity.
Where is it, Professor Miller, within this framework?
And that's the point.
It has no place.
And so you get this situation where the overwhelming presence of queerness weighing on this ideology, and it is an overwhelming presence.
Queerness is an absolute fixation within this subcultural ideology.
But that overwhelming presence comes in the form of its absolute absence.
And if that sounds like a weird idea, I want you to just think about this.
If you have ever experienced loss of somebody that you care about, somebody that you love, a parent, a loved one, a sibling, If you have experienced that kind of grief, you know the way in which an absence can take on an intense form of presence.
The absence of that person becomes an overwhelming presence in your life.
That's how queerness operates within this ideology.
There is no place for it, and yet it takes on this super heavy weight.
And here's what I think that reveals.
Here's why I think that matters, that in their own positive articulation and so forth, people who advocate this ideology simply have no place, no language for queerness.
And the reason is, there is no such thing as queer folk within the subculture of conservative high-control religion.
And that sounds like a weird statement.
There's no such thing as queer folk.
Queer folk are not real.
Now, does that mean that I'm saying that they don't know that there are people who identify as queer or there are people who have, like, sex with, you know, people of the same gender or there are different kinds of sexual orientations and so forth?
No, of course they know that.
But none of that is real.
Okay?
What do I mean to say that queer people aren't real?
It simply means that they are broken, sinful, or misled cisgender straight people.
All human beings within this ideology are straight.
They are cisgender.
All of them.
There is no departure from that norm.
So when people go out in the world living some other way, they are denying what they actually are.
They are not real.
Queerness is not real.
Now, if that idea sounds weird, this is a really old idea within the Christian tradition.
We mention sometimes the sort of antique thinker Augustine, or Saint Augustine, if you're of a more sort of Catholic bent.
And there's a deeply Augustinian logic here.
Augustine was shaped by a philosophy called Neoplatonism.
And reflecting that background, he argued that evil or sin is not a thing.
It has no substantive reality in its own right.
It's not metaphysically real.
Rather, he said evil is not a thing.
It is the absence of good.
Evil has no existence in its own.
It is a privation, a sort of taking away from a lack of the good.
And if you want a model of this, the illustration that was often used is that darkness is not the opposite of light.
Darkness is the absence of light.
So evil is the absence of good.
And this notion that denies the substantive reality of what is opposed, evil, sin, what have you, is a logic that cuts deeply in the Christian tradition, and it cuts through it for two millennia.
And I think it's the same with queer folk.
They're just cisgender straight people who deny or don't recognize the real, authentic, God-given identity.
And I cannot tell you how many books I have read that articulate that, how many sermons I have heard that articulate that, how many discussions I've had with people who articulate that, how many people within that subculture trying to repress and deny their queer sexuality who articulate that about themselves, selves, that they have to recover their authentic identity that God has given them and turn away from the falseness of queer identity and so forth.
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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash RC. So when we look at the sort of positive articulation, again, I don't mean positive in a sense of like it's a good articulation.
I mean just them stating here's what we think about gender and sex and so forth.
When we look at that articulation of the sex-gender ideology, this is why queer folk are absent.
They are literally nothing.
They have no substance or reality, and therefore no place within that subcultural system.
Okay?
And I've had another experience that illustrates this.
I've had talks with those who articulate this ideology.
They wouldn't call it an ideology.
It's often not sort of fully formed and so forth.
But we'll, you know, ask about, okay, so what do you think gender is?
And they'll tell you, and it's, you know, that thing.
How do you think sexuality works?
What is the purpose of sex?
And on and on and on.
And some of us say, okay, but what about queer folk?
What about queer people?
And it's like a deer in headlights.
And they're just kind of like, what about them?
Like, what do you mean?
And you're like, well, like, how do they fit?
And like, there are literally people who get sort of caught flat-footed because the question simply doesn't compute.
I taught a course during COVID called Religion in New England, and it was...
Mostly it was like a kind of online hybrid course.
And so we would have online sessions where representatives from lots and lots of different kinds of traditions and faith communities and practices in the region would meet with the class online.
And this included a lot of different kinds of things, including some evangelical groups, Catholic groups, and so forth.
And one of the questions I asked every group, and I let them all know ahead of time that this is a question I would ask every group, was...
What is the place of queer folk within your community?
And I'm telling you, the conservative high-control ones really just didn't know what to do with that question.
Because there literally is no place for queer folk within their community.
It just didn't compute.
And I think it illustrates this.
Okay?
So there's simply no place within this ideology for queerness.
But I've got smart listeners.
I've got attentive listeners, and I can hear you right now.
Maybe you're driving down the road, and you're like me, and you talk to the radio or whatever.
Or maybe you're like, I don't know, on your coffee break at work or whatever.
And what you're thinking or what you're saying is, okay, Dan, I get it.
So you're saying that queerness is simply absent from high-control religious, sex-gender ideology.
There's no place for it.
Got some Augustine in there.
That all makes sense.
But what about the fact that this subculture and the advocates of this ideology?
They're not silent about the issue.
They're absolutely fixated on it.
If it's not real, if there's no place for it, what explains this absolute fixation?
I mean, when I say fixation, they often cast all things queer as like the central threat to Christian identity, to Christian America, and to civilization itself.
I gotta tell you how many of the culture warriors you can read on the right who will say that like Rome, because Rome, the Roman Empire is always their model of civilization.
The Roman Empire fell because of queerness.
Everybody, like, I don't know, started doing queer things and the Roman Empire collapsed.
Okay?
Queerness is presented as an existential threat, so how does that square with this idea that queerness is not real?
If it's not real, if there's no place for it, why is it perceived as such a threat?
And this brings us back to that notion that its absence is what, like, makes it such a presence.
And this is what I mean by that.
And stick with me, because it's...
It could sound a little weird.
Stick with me.
It's precisely because queerness is not something real, because it is not something legitimate, because it is not something that has a place within a divinely sanctioned natural or social order.
It is because it is not something real that it represents such a threat.
Its lack of reality grants it a kind of hyper-reality.
The same way or analogous to When you lose somebody really central to your life, that absence becomes an overwhelming presence.
Its lack of reality grants it a kind of hyper-reality.
It becomes a force of unbeing.
It becomes a force of unbecoming that threatens to unravel everything it touches.
And this is why it is perceived as a threat that must be countered at all costs.
Because its lack of reality threatens to undo everything that is real.
And I think this dual logic, a dual logic of threat and a dual logic of non-being, these two ways in which queerness is understood, it runs through high-control religious opposition to all things queer.
I think you can look at that opposition and the shape that it takes and what it looks like and the vitriol and the energy behind it, and you can see this dual logic.
So, for example, you find this in the appeals to nature.
So queer identity is, quote, unnatural because it departs from the natural order of the binary gender system.
We've talked a lot about nature and how appeals to nature license a lot of this ideology.
Queer sex is unnatural because it can't lead to procreation.
And in both of these cases, we hear those appeals to the naturalness of very particular, in my view, constructed, that is not natural, articulations of gender and sex.
I've already talked about that.
I'm not going to rehash all of that.
Go back, listen to some of those episodes about the purpose of sex and the normativity of certain sex acts and so forth.
But in both of these cases, those appeals to naturalness become important because the unnaturalness of queer sexuality and identity means both that it lacks authentic reality.
It's not something natural.
It's not something that ought to be or ought to exist.
And that's what makes it a threat to everything that is natural.
And you encounter this every time somebody who's like, I don't know, they're straight, they're cisgender, they're married, they've got kids, they're doing the whole cis-heteronormative thing and it's fine.
And they're like super upset about queer sex.
And you're kind of like, what's the deal, man?
Nobody's telling you you have to have queer sex.
Nobody's telling you you couldn't have kids.
You wanted that.
That fits you.
Whatever.
Good.
You do you.
You're doing that.
Nobody is, like, contesting that or challenging that, and yet they're still so upset about the existence of queer sexuality.
That is part of why, this sense of it being unnatural.
And what we know, and we've talked about this within this context of high-control religion, is that, quote-unquote, nature has the force it does because it comes from God.
The natural order reflects the divine order.
God created things in a particular way.
So what is natural?
It's God's design.
So to depart from nature is not just to do something unnatural.
It is to depart from God's intended purpose.
So the threat of unnatural gender, the threat of unnatural sexuality, the threat of unnatural sexual expression threatens God's order, and it has to be countered.
It's unnaturalist.
It's irreality is what makes it a threat to what is real and meaningful and true.
And again, this is a perfectly Augustinian notion.
The same way that Augustine could deny the metaphysical reality of sin and evil did not mean for him that sin and evil shouldn't be countered or can be ignored.
It made them a threat.
They were a dire threat to Christian life, practice, and civilization, and they had to be contested.
The same logic is there, and that's what's operative with notions of queerness as they relate to this sex-gender ideology.
But of course, we know that all of this is about more than theoretical or theological interest.
We can talk about Augustinian concepts and all that sort of stuff.
But what matters on the ground and down where we actually live is that the perception that queerness is not real and the perception that it represents an existential threat, that is what licenses some of the most awful and pressing efforts of social control within high-control religion.
It's what licenses what can only be described as violence against all things queer.
So-called conversion therapy.
Tough love approaches of parents who disown their kids when they come out as queer.
The denial of gender-affirming care for trans youth.
The targeting of female-identified trans athletes just go on and on and on and on.
These pernicious responses to the queer community, and these are responses that literally...
Threaten their lives.
That is not overstatement.
But within that subculture, they are completely justified.
Why?
Because number one, they're not hurting anyone.
And you can point to be like, how can you say they're not hurting anyone?
Like you're denying who these people are or whatever.
But they're not because queerness isn't real.
These practices will bring people back to their authentic cis hetero identity and their sexual expression.
That's the aim.
They'll say, this is not about hurting, so this is about redeeming them.
This is about bringing them back to what they authentically are.
That denial of the truth or reality of queer identity and queer expression licenses these practices.
And if they don't, if the people don't come back, the fact remains that queer folk are still a threat.
They're a threat that needs to be dealt with, and ideally it would be dealt with by having people quote-unquote repent of that identity, break free of it, come back to their authentic cis-hetero identity and so forth.
But if they don't, and if they take their own lives, or they fall into spirals of substance abuse or mental health disorders, or they become victims of sexual assault or physical abuse because of their identities, they engage in unsafe lifestyles because it's just sort of a coping mechanism that they have, if they do all these things because they live in a world where they can't be accepted as they are, then all the better.
That's the logic of high-control religion.
If the threat can't be eliminated by bringing people back into the fold, it has to be removed in whatever way is necessary.
And that's why I've had the chilling conversations I've had with people about this in my life.
I have people who have said, it is better that somebody is dead than queer.
It would be better for them if they took their own life and we hope that God has mercy on them and so forth, and if they continue to live in the world in a denial of God's presence and God's order and so forth.
Those are real conversations I've had with people.
So nobody gets to come at me with the line and say that the aim of these practices is not violence against queer folk.
It is.
They have to either deny the reality of who they are or they should simply be eliminated.
And we know that the more extreme forms of a high-control religion I've argued for the death penalty for queer orientations and so forth.
Okay?
So that's how all this fits together.
I want to make one final comment here, because we're kind of coming up on time.
I want to be really clear about this, too.
I hope this is obvious from things that I've said, things I've done, that all of you have listened to for years at this point.
I firmly believe that queer identity in all of its forms is real.
And I think it reveals the complexity and the beauty, frankly, of who we are as a species.
This wide panoply of genders and sexual expressions and sexual orientations and everything.
It's part of what makes us what we are.
It is not something unreal.
And as historians and anthropologists and others continue to show us, queerness has always been with us as a real presence.
I do not accept the Augustinian notion.
Of that privation theory, that what we call evil is an absence of the good and so forth.
I'm just, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not that kind of philosophy.
That kind of philosophy is not for me, okay?
It's always been with us as a real presence.
And even the Bible, and this is something to keep in mind maybe when you talk to Uncle Ron or somebody, because you know...
That when you talk about this with somebody who's part of this religion, they're going to trot out the Bible, and there's a certain range of Bible verses they're going to bring out to tell you that the Bible condemns all things queer.
Now, we could debate that, lots of debate about the meaning of those passages.
Do they mean what people think that they mean, and how to interpret them, and so forth?
That's interesting.
That's not what I'm here to talk about.
Here's my point.
They will often say, we live in this degraded society with all these queer identities, and it didn't used to be this way, and it's a departure from God's norm, and so forth, and they'll bring out the Bible.
And I've had this conversation with folks, I'll be like, you know what?
I hate to tell you, but if queerness was not a reality, if it wasn't a real thing, there would be no admonitions against it in the Bible.
The fact that the Bible, on their reading, Criticizes queer identity and queer practice means, guess what?
There was queer identity and queer practice when people were writing the Bible.
It has always been with us.
It is a real presence.
It has been around as long as human beings have been around and been experienced gender and been having sex with each other and everything else.
There has been queerness.
It has always been there.
Okay?
And the reason that matters is because it brings us back to this.
We're going to close with this.
It's the same place we go because we're talking about high-control religion.
Claims about nature and the unreality of queer identity, they are once again mechanisms of social control.
It's not about what's natural or not.
It's not about what's quote-unquote scientific or not.
It is about social control.
And surprise, surprise, high-control religion is always about control.
And we see this with the exclusion and the erasure and the denial of the reality of, Queer identity.
And again, it's that sense of its irreality that also renders it an existential threat that has to be countered at all costs, and that is what licenses the violence of high-control religion aimed at all things queer.
I want to thank you for listening.
Again, thank you for your time.
I'm always aware when I do these, and I imagine people listening to them, there's other stuff you could be doing, and a lot of things you could be listening to, and you're choosing to spend time listening to this and to spend time listening to me.
Please, keep the ideas coming.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always welcome feedback and comments on this series, feedback and comments, ideas for other topics.
I'm still soliciting comments.
If you've got—I want to put it in the header of things I couldn't ask in church, like questions you were not supposed to ask in church.
I'm continuing to compile those for a future series.
I'm doing a future series where I want to take on just a few of the kind of apologetic arguments people make about, like, why God has to exist.
So if you've got those that you've run into, you can put in your header something like anti-apologetics or apologetics.
