Eritque Arcus
post #3
As we come to the end of our research into queer theology and traumatology, the idea of a tidy takeaway feels overwhelming not only because of what we have read and discussed, but also because of what we’ve experienced. We’ve lost a group member and therefore a unique voice in our conversation. The impact of her absence and the knowledge she would have brought cannot be overstated as we attempt to pull together as a partial group. But losing a member was not the only traumatic experience we have been through as a group. As queer people, we feel and experience the sexual trauma present in the christian world in a unique and poignant way. Through our experiences in the sexual margins, we can see with a different lens where trauma has entered the narrative.
We started with a book that largely held up a mirror to things we already knew, but also helped us to see past ourselves. With Tina Sellers’ Sex, God & The Conservative Church, we looked into purity culture, consumerism, church history, and how the church may heal from its past. Much of what was encountered in this book early on was not of a surprise. Men are presented as unable to handle their desire, while women are seen as being shameful sexually; sex is a commodity to be sold; and early ideas on sex in christianity were just as influenced by other philosophers of the day as they were the followers of Christ. While this largely was not shocking, what was was the possibility for healing. Tina’s approach to celebrating one’s sexuality and naming desire seems to be in direct opposition to so much of what we are taught growing up. In relation to queer theology, this feels even more liberating as it is something the queer community has had to do on a very public level in order to get any form of recognition and dialogue. But this book was largely not written for the queer audience as much as it was written for the much larger christian audience. Being able to see these themes presented as possible gateways to sexual healing for christians in general opens the gates to a much wider discussion on sexal health for all people under the cross. The table gets significantly wider.
From here, the readings in our groups diverged and we were taken down different paths.
It is here where the impact of our missing member is felt with the largest impact. Our third member had to leave due to an emergency eye surgery. In losing the voice of our third member, we also lost the voice of Pamela Lightsey’s book Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology, leaving a void in our research that is felt deeply. Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology by Patrick Cheung introduced us to christian theology that espouses the importance of unbridled love — a force that tears down barriers and stretches farther than previously thought. It shows how the love of God is in no way limited by sexuality. In Megan K. Defranza’s Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God,we see how gender and sex have changed throughout history and how the emphasis of gender in modern theologies leaves little room for those on the margins, especially intersex individuals. We have adopted theologies based on historically recent trends that leave us with a thin, sickly version of the robust sexualities and sexual identities we were created to have.
Yet more powerful than any book that we have read as a group are the stories that we have shared. The trauma that we have carried with us into our group is ever present and has caused us to approach the intersection of trauma and theology from different starting points. Much of queer theology as a whole is still gaining traction, and only some churches are even willing to have a dialogue. While we attempt to follow a theology and faith of freedom, we still carry the scars and burns placed upon us by those who espouse a warped form of purity. To live a queer life in a christian culture is to live in a life of trauma. While the theologies and traumatology we have read attempt to widen the road, queer people still live in holy saturday. To claim that any one of us has ‘arrived’ somewhere is false and misleading. For queer people, we are still desperately holding our breath for sunday.
