Between Leviathan and the Beast: being Catholic and Queer
These thoughts have been gestating in my mind for several years, occasionally spurred on to finish it by events such: as the Nashville Declaration controversy in the Netherlands, Craig Ford Jr.’s brilliant article ‘LGBTI Catholics are a Reality’ in Commonweal, Sr. Mary Berchmans’ letter on allowing news of same-sex unions to appear in the Visitation school (USA) magazine, and the controversy about the USCCB’s guidance note for Catholic schools on teaching about gender.
The purpose of this essay, evolving through many drafts over years, has been to intellectually integrate my faith and my sexuality (according to Catechism ¶2337, “Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person”). Integration of all aspects of being fully human, I believe, is synonymous with restoring the Likeness of God. Intellectual integration is, of course, only part of the struggle. Understanding what is good and then consistently doing it are different things. I make no pretensions to being perfect, even by my own understanding, but I am sincerely unconvinced by traditional Church teaching on sexual ethics.
What I meant by the ‘Leviathan and the Beast’ title is: most of what passes for ‘religion(s)’ is actually instrumentalization(s) of religion for the legitimation of political power, which I’m calling ‘Leviathan’; ‘the Beast’ represents the range of essentialized ideas of evil, including the demonic images that both sides, more or less, tend to create about each other. The title I chose means that I believe the conflicts we see over integration of sexuality and faith are really between Leviathan(s) & the Beast(s), never with the Spirit of Wisdom.
I apologise in advance to the reader that the structure of this essay is still more kaleidoscopic (or chaotic) than it is logical, because it grew gradually, over many episodes, so I haven’t been able to make one overarching structure fit and still record authentically how I was also changing through the process of writing it.
Moral epistemology: the value of accepting that we make mistakes
If I do not care much about how I know what I think I know, it means I do not care much what effects my beliefs and actions will have on others.
Virtue is interdependent with the wisdom of knowing the means and limits of our own knowledge. What we call ‘epistemology’ now, is related to what the early Christian and pre-Christian Greek philosophers meant by σωφροσύνη — the kind of wisdom which leads to virtue. That kind of wisdom knows the limits of all means of knowledge and discerns the right balance between different kinds of goods, or in other words, the perfect moderation between all possible excesses in life, which is what the Greeks considered to be virtue (ἀρετή).
Scripture, the Magisterium, the opinions of ‘those great in faith’ (“maiores in fide”, in Aquinas’ terms), our consciences as developed so far, our interpretations of our inspirations, can all be mistaken. Tradition includes the recognition that it has been and can be mistaken (reviewed in Grimes, 2014)
The conflict between traditional versus modern senses of sexual ethics in the Catholic Church is more located in between different epistemologies than in ethical reasonings about actual harms experienced or perceived in others. It has become symbolic of wider politically delineated conflicts essentially about ‘how should we know what is good, and what is a virtuous person?’. That is why, I think, the attention spent on it is so far disproportionate and disconnected from the actual harms and benefits of the subject.
So it’s essential before trying to resolve the conflict between traditional authorities and personal conscience on sexual ethics to scrutinise to what extent traditional authorities, including Scripture, have been and can be mistaken, and of course the means and limits of our own knowledge too.
It may be shocking to some to say “including Scripture” can be mistaken, but this is actually not a radical position — even Joseph Ratzinger, acknowledged that some scriptural passages, such as e.g. “slaves should obey their masters”, show cultural bias rather than revealed divine truth (cited in Grimes, 2014).
From Sr Mary Berchmans’ letter—
As I have prayed over this contradiction, I keep returning to this choice: we can focus on Church teaching on gay marriage or we can focus on Church teaching on the Gospel commandment of love. We know from history — including very recent history — that the Church, in its humanity, makes mistakes. Yet, through the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, it learns and grows. And so, we choose the Gospel commandment of love.
I believe it’s important to realise that the Church can be One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, and make mistakes. Mistakes are a necessary part of learning and growing. Genuine inspiration and partially mistaken but gradually improving interpretations of it into ideas and words are not incompatible.
Abraham received an inspiration that he should be willing to sacrifice and return everything he had been given and entrusted with to God. He misinterpreted this to mean that he should sacrifice his son, Isaac, but the ‘angel of the Lord’ corrected him, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you revere God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” — the idea of sacrificing Isaac earlier in Genesis is attributed to God, but we have to understand that the revelation of God’s face to the prophets does not come in words, but the words are the prophets’ interpretations of the meanings of their sense of the presence of God in the events of their lives.
Divine inspiration and human interpretation are incarnated together. Scriptural examples of mistakes by holy people are surprisingly common, when you read scripture with fresh eyes — all the patriarchs, prophets and apostles made mistakes — Peter, to whom Jesus said “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”, when Jesus wanted to wash his feet, said “I will never allow it”, so to presume that his successor makes no mistakes is absurd.
When Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to the three women, the male disciples did not believe them. They were mistaken. Against whom then did the Gates of Hades not prevail against the whole Church? The three women. Not Peter. Peter’s three denials — out of fear of the authorities — that he knew Jesus, on the night of his trial and torture, until the cockerel crowed at dawn, is symbolised by the cockerel on the top of church spires all across Europe; yet we are supposed to believe that the successors of Peter make no mistakes.
Another example of a pope being very clearly mistaken — indeed, heretical according to previous and later declared dogmas — is Pius IX, 1846–1878:
The Errors of Pope Pius IX (link)
Most serious among them is that he claimed slavery was justified by Natural Law; a position which the Theological Council of the Sorbonne University and then Pope Paul III in Sublimus Dei 1537 defined and declared to be heresy —
“We define and declare by these Our letters, [] that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.”
The decision of the Theological Council of the Sorbonne is referred to in Rev. L.A. Dutto’s biography of Bartolome de las Casas O.P. who lived 1484–1566.
Repressive attitudes to sexuality were part and parcel of social systems with political repression, often racially delineated slavery, feudal hierarchy, etc. Those parts of the tradition are historically authentic — but they functioned as part of whole repressive systems evolved to demoralise and, if that failed, then to coercively repress adult human behaviours — especially personal moral judgement, with an adult level of independence of mind, including about sex.
The papacy for several generations justified conquest and colonisation under the so-called “Doctrine of discovery” whereby Christian rulers supposedly had the right to impose their sovereignty on peoples whom they discovered if they did not freely enter the Christian faith — when it was read out to them, in Latin. Also, numerous popes aided and abetted anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and persecutions, clearly contradicted by Nostra Aetate.
It is impossible to sincerely look at the Church’s history and not admit it has a long history of mistakes and systemic sins, mostly coming from the top of the hierarchy, and that we are all almost certainly partially mistaken now too.
To conclude this section on mistakes, methods and epistemological caution, I revert to William James, a quote from Varieties of Religious Experience (1901):
Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and needs, it would be absurd to affirm that one’s own age of the world can be beyond correction by the next age. Scepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from this universal liability. But to admit one’s liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. Of wilfully playing into the hands of scepticism we cannot be accused. He who acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance for it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for gaining truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.
More selected excerpts from William James book (google doc link).
Positively deriving a theological methodology from gospel first principles —
First, what was available to the prophets and apostles who formed the three branches of Abrahamic tradition was essentially the same as is available to us now: they turned to the face of God, successively approximating towards perfect openness of heart to the universal, infinite Other present in all beings, and they relied on their cultural inheritances, and their own and their contemporaries’ shared sense of faith, to interpret their inspirations. There is no good reason to assume that they made fewer mistakes in interpretation than we do, even though we believe them to have been sincere and holy.
“All that is left to us by tradition is mere words. It is up to us to find out what they mean.” — Ibn Arabi, in Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, 611 Hijri year / 1215 AD.
Tradition does not give us perfection or salvation, neither can our being right or not in interpreting our inspirations or our received traditions save us. God graciously breaks open our hearts to loving the Other and each other, and then our cooperation with the Holy Spirit gradually restores our Likeness to God; the process of θέωσης theosis — sanctification. This point affects the whole of our religious practice — to understand the purposes and limitations of tradition, to regard traditions wisely, to use them in moderation, as mostly good means to the ultimate good end, but conversion means: “rend your hearts and not your garments” (Joel 2:13) — our traditions are like our clothes.
What I believe is essential to Abrahamic faith traditions is the sense of awe and openness towards the universal, transcendent Other presented to us in other persons. Our common patristic heritage is essentially a spirituality of hospitality to strangers, to people not like us. Abraham’s first recorded spiritual experience was when three strangers appeared to him when he was camping at the Oak of Mamre, a story also interpreted as the prefiguration of the Holy Trinity, and “when the three strangers had left, Abraham remained standing in the presence of the Lord” (Genesis 18:1–8,22). The tradition of sacred hospitality was common in his time and place, guests were imagined to possibly be divine beings in disguise, probably he inherited it from his parents, but Abraham’s new spiritual experience of hospitality was that in openness, respect and generosity to strangers he perceived the presence of God.
When Abraham remained standing in the presence of the Lord, it was the same face and eternal presence as Emmanuel Levinas perceived when he examined the ethical implications of perceiving others as persons and free to be themselves; for Levinas, to perceive and treat other persons rightly meant to be in awe of God. (Emmanuel Levinas, 1961, Totality and Infinity: an essay on exteriority, from the chapter headed ‘Ethics and the Face’, pp. 197–201.)
What we receive through our Abrahamic traditions is a layered mixture: there is certainly the fundamental layer of the common spiritual experience described in different ways by Abraham c.2000BC and by Levinas in 1961AD, but that is also expressed and filtered through cultural assumptions and developments which responded to the particular, secular (time-bound) needs, and layered with political instrumentalisation for the legitimation of power. It is foolish superficiality to take the mixture un-reflectively or too literally. To take Scripture seriously and truly respectfully requires us to not be literalists, as the apostle Paul said of the Church in Berea (Acts 17:11).
Certainly, some of the biblical authors and some of the traditional authorities regarded homosexual acts as morally impure — it is up to us to decide whether they were right, or partially right but partially mistaken about how, or wrong. Essentially, that should depend on our facing God and then looking on our fellow humans and the situations we find ourselves in with the same kind of commitment to relationship with which God loved us first (1 John 4:19). All our cultural traditions and all our own ideas should be secondary to that.
That is called the Primacy of Conscience, in Catholic moral theology. The role of Church teaching and magisterial authority is to help to inform and develop each person’s conscience, not to replace it. The Catholic ideal of virtue is a person with a carefully developed conscience, closely reading “the signs of the times”, listening to Church teaching, reasoning freely and responsibly, and then following their carefully informed and developed conscience. It is not unquestioning obedience and abject submission to traditional authorities.
It may be that homosexual relations as most often practised in that society at that time were often ethically inferior to heterosexual relations then, in the form of pederasty as a part of tutelage often with Hellenic tutors — but that is not necessarily so for all times and places, or for everyone then or since. If that was their most frequent experience of homosexual relations, then the generalisation that those relations were morally wrong was probably fair. But to extrapolate from that to all homosexual relations is not realistic or fair.
That was Ed Oxford’s conclusion —
I accept that the bible translations since Luther mostly used words for pederasty not homosexuality prior to 1984 RSV translation, but in earlier tradition there are certainly anti-homosexual strands too — most clearly St John Chrysostom, who, unusually among the Church Fathers, was obsessed with anti-homosexuality, rather like modern American preachers. Stephen Morris in When Brothers Dwell in Unity 2015, infers that Chrysostom’s focus on homosexuality may have been the result of his childhood trauma.
Secondly, from the Hellenic side of early Christian tradition, we inherit the idea of the kind of wisdom (σωφροσύνη) which discerns the perfect moderation between all extremes and leads to virtue, sometimes also called ‘temperance’. Virtue, or excellence in character, ἀρετή, meant a kind of complete integration and harmonious balancing of all aspects of being fully human. If that is your idea of ‘virtue’, then discerning what is perfect integration and balance between sexual eros which reaches out to a particular other, and spiritual eros which reaches out to God, the universal Other, is a discernment which can be applied to different circumstances now, without losing the principle by either literalist adherence to old rules or laxity.
The idea of ‘virtue’ in Western Christian tradition is more about obedience to Divine ordinances — an ‘ordered’ will is a will that obeys the rules ‘laid down by God’, which were selected or inferred by clergy appointed by political rulers. The emphasis on ‘virtue’ as a syndrome of neotonous (infant-like) traits: docility, obedience to authority figures, and asexuality, is an innovation, probably from about the 12thC onwards, when the Church in the West, which had more political power, had split from the more ancient and learned Church in the East, and then Pope Gregory instituted compulsory clerical celibacy. Clerical celibacy was originally in order to avoid distribution of Church property to priests’ widows and offspring, but it has become a de minima unique selling point for even mediocre priests — they are special and deserve to live on tithes because they are more holy since they are celibate.
To decide between these two different ideas of what is ‘virtue’, we have a guideline in Scripture about this too —
for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice or slavish timidity,
but rather a spirit of courage (dynameos) and of love (agapis),
and of the wisdom of knowing the perfect moderation in all things (sophronismou, which results in self-discipline and virtue). 2 Timothy 1:7
Σωφρονισμός sóphronismos I’ve translated as ‘the wisdom of knowing the perfect moderation in all things’ — because, if you look at pre-Christian Greek philosophical usage of the word and early Christian usage, it’s clear that its primary meaning is a kind of wisdom, with connotations of moderation/ balance, and hence self-discipline and virtue. In Western Christian tradition it’s often translated ‘temperance’ or even ‘chastity’. Again, a word for wisely knowing what is the perfect balance and prioritisation between different human needs and desires became a word implying that virtue = asexuality.
In its modern relatively ameliorated form, it’s possible to view that as merely ‘conservative about sexuality’, but if you look with uncomfortable honesty at the history of that idea, it originated in far more extreme forms, and if you look at other Christian and other religious societies globally where religious authorities are still closely interdependent with despotic political authorities, the same repressive strategy re-occurs, independently of which tradition.
The sexually repressive feature of religious traditions and institutions when they have become co-opted and instrumentalised as tools of despotic regime legitimation and for socially conditioning the majority of populations to be submissive to established traditional authorities and hierarchies is a convergently evolving cultural meme that has occurred in many times and places, even when the cultural lineages are not closely related.
(Perhaps it’s also similar to why repression of breeding by all members of the colony other than the breeding pair evolved in naked mole rats*, the only almost-eusocial mammal and also violently hierarchical?)
Here is an example from the Southern Baptist tradition in the USA:
Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state. Principled critics were exiled or murdered, leaving voices of dissent few and scattered. Southern Christianity evolved in strange directions under ever-increasing isolation. Preachers learned to tailor their message to protect themselves. If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could either abandon them, obscure them, or flee.
What developed in the South was a theology carefully tailored to meet the needs of a slave state. Biblical emphasis on social justice was rendered miraculously invisible. A book constructed around the central metaphor of slaves finding their freedom was reinterpreted. Messages which might have questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate could not be taught from a pulpit. Any Christian suggestion of social justice was carefully and safely relegated to “the sweet by and by” where all would be made right at no cost to white worshippers. In the forge of slavery and Jim Crow, a Christian message of courage, love, compassion, and service to others was burned away.
Stripped of its compassion and integrity, little remained of the Christian message. What survived was a perverse emphasis on sexual purity as the sole expression of righteousness, along with a creepy obsession with the unquestionable sexual authority of white men. In a culture where race defined one’s claim to basic humanity, women took on a special religious interest. Christianity’s historic emphasis on sexual purity as a form of ascetic self-denial was transformed into an obsession with women and sex. For Southerners, righteousness had little meaning beyond sex, and sexual mores had far less importance for men than for women. Guarding women’s sexual purity meant guarding the purity of the white race. There was no higher moral demand.
This horrible variety of religiousity is not just particular to Southern Baptists. If you look at Catholic traditions globally with a long historical view, the kind of perversion of religion to serve the interests of a despotic and patriarchal regime, including by cultural neotonization and social repression of adult behavioural traits in the population was frequent. I also know from personal contacts that it functions similarly in some Egyptian Coptic communities.
The particularity of the Southern Baptist example was that the social hierarchy to be conserved at all costs was that between White and Black, whereas in most places and times it has been between rich and poor, or more generally, between the politically powerful and the politically subjugated.
The Nashville Declaration controversy in the Netherlands in January 2019:
Most of the people reacting on both sides probably didn’t actually read the statement — it’s a relatively moderate statement, has lots of ‘we love and respect you, but you’re still inherently disordered and sinful’ kind of lines in it. To be more exact, what they say is not that an LGBTI person is sinful, but if we do anything sexual in order to not be hopelessly lonely as an adult, it’ll be a sin.
My problem with it and the reactions is that both the Declaration and the critics of it mostly seem to assume that its position really is ‘Christianity’. The assumption always seem to be that more socially liberal interpretive versions of any religious tradition are less serious or less authentic, which is a form of the genetic fallacy. Because of the assumption that the strictest, most socially conservative version is the most authentic version, the Nashville Declaration controversy also reinforced more LGBTI people in rejecting Christians.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in the middle, and don’t want to be alienated by either side. My religious faith is my dirtiest secret, I feel like I have to hide it more than being bi and in practice mostly gay (in a committed relationship) now.
I think more people will alienate me because of their preconceptions of what it means if I say I’m Christian than if I say I’m bi. So this essay is also something of an apologia pro vita mea — a defence for my life. I also apologize that, since I was forced to learn Latin from the age of 6, and I chose Greek from 11, I still value going back to the original terms in the original language to clarify before building an interpretation based on that meaning.
What I noticed after the Nashville controversy here in the Netherlands, was from an argument with a former friend who is a gay refugee who volunteers in a LGBTI asylum seekers solidarity organisation, that his logic appeared to be: i) religions are against LGBTI people, ii) I am gay, therefore religious people are a threat to me, iii) ‘Assad is secular’ (they claim, in propaganda designed for and targeted to one of his audience demographics), iv) ‘therefore Assad and I are on the same side’ — incredibly simplistic logic, starting from all false premises, with horrific consequences, but sadly I think it is really widespread. What I learned from this is that the polarisation between LGBTI vs. religious people can also be amplified and instrumentalised deceptively by political powers for their own legitimation; it’s not only religious people being manipulated to hate LGBTI people that can be politically instrumentalised.
Craig A. Ford, Jr., got a brilliant article published in Commonweal — an encouraging sign of the times that he was able to find a widely respected Catholic publisher for this piece, and clearly makes the point that Natural Law reasoning necessarily begins from realistic apprehension of facts, not traditions nor authorities nor our subjective feelings, but natural facts first.
“the conversation that we should be having, [] is about how to bring our theology about gender and sexual identity into alignment with reality — that is, into alignment with what we know about human embodiment and sexual experience. Speaking as a theological ethicist within the [] Catholic Church, I tell my students, “Good ethics begins with lived human experience informed by the virtues of justice and equal regard, and by respect for better understandings of human embodiment that we’ve gained over time. Let’s begin here.”
This means that we cannot talk about what the world should be like until we come to an understanding of what the world is like. The same goes for understanding gender and sexuality. And for an understanding of what gender and sexuality is like, we need to turn to scientists (though, of course, not exclusively to them) who study the phenomena that we are interested in. For homosexuality, the results have been in for decades: same-sex attraction, far from constituting a psychological disorder, is actually a normal trait observed in human sexual experience. And as Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University, pointed out in a recent column in the New York Times, the complexity of gender identity is something scientists have been learning about since the 1950s. The existence of transgender, genderqueer, and intersex persons challenges the notion that gender comes to us in a prepackaged binary. Intersex persons challenge this binary at the level of biological constitution; trans and genderqueer persons, at the level of one’s psychological constitution. What do we know in 2018? Speaking specifically about intersex persons, Fausto-Sterling writes:
An XX baby can be born with a penis, an XY person may have a vagina, and so on. [At least 1.6% of humans globally have some intersex traits, sometimes without noticing it themselves (UN source).] These kinds of inconsistencies throw a monkey wrench into any plan to assign sex as male or female, categorically and in perpetuity, just by looking at a newborn’s private parts.
The truth is that our theology of sex and gender does not reflect the actual world that God has created for us. It reflects, instead, an understanding from the world of another time. But more importantly, such a theology does not reflect a truly Catholic method of studying sexuality, which has typically come through the framework of natural law. The natural law, as an ethical framework, represents an approach to human flourishing that begins with an honest assessment of what it’s like to be humans running about in the world. This requires, in the case of understanding human sexuality, a broad consultation with scientific and philosophical approaches to human sexuality. Only after this point can we begin to ask what light the Gospel shines on what it would mean for human beings to flourish as sexual and gendered creatures.”
My personal experience of becoming Catholic and Queer:
First, I’m Catholic by adult conversion, not by family background. It was not primarily an intellectual conversion, but I fell in love. In the first few months of going to Mass, I was submerged in love, both suddenly and gradually. I felt safely and completely reliably loved and trusted, really for the first time since my natural trust was broken as a child. It happened while I was just sitting quietly at the back of church, and no-one said or did anything to me particularly to trigger these feelings in me. In the tradition, it’s called the baptism of tears, or the grace of contrition; there was a moment I vividly remember and a gradual unfolding of it over months, and it still is.
The sense of being loved safely and reliably, that always was underlying but I couldn’t feel it before, was completely overwhelming for me. No-one “love bombed” me like they say sometimes happens in cults, no-one really interfered with me at all, except the granny next to me occasionally passed me a tissue. I cried with joyful relief, catharsis, for the first few months of going to Mass, still do sometimes. My ability to cry was restored then, as I no longer felt like there was no-one who loved me reliably enough for it to be worth crying to seek reassurance from anyway. Surprisingly to me then, no-one seemed to find me sobbing quietly through Mass something they had to fix or interfere with, and for that I’ll be forever grateful.
I realized I had found a community I belonged in — St Nicholas of Tolentino parish, Bristol. Gradually, I came to a good-enough intellectual accommodation with my faith, but it was never primarily a thinking choice for me, although secondarily I can geek about it too, as I did here. I came from Quakers, but my change of affiliation wasn’t about preferring the more socially conservative Catholic opinions, I still don’t.
I find interpreting ancient traditions, symbolic and poetic language, into relevant modern principles and inspiration, fascinating. The past is like a lot of foreign countries. Getting into the worldviews and social imaginaries of other people through history can give us relatively objective comparisons and empirical confrontations with which to adjust our social imaginaries and senses of ourselves. Religious language and other symbols are metaphorical, which is not to say untrue, but that they carry us across (μετά-φέρουν) to infinitely complex realities with simple enough mental analogies between material and abstract things for us to be able to handle.
St Nick’s is an unusual parish in all the best ways — half or maybe more than half the parish community are refugees or offspring of refugees, the parish’s additional hymns book is in 64+ languages and growing, almost all in the community are actively involved in social justice work in many groups, including parish organizations for services for refugees and homeless people; instead of campaigning against abortion, the parish hosts and works in the diocese’s adoption and fostering service; instead of being against LGBTI people’s liberation and social integration, the parish hosts the HIV+ Catholics mutual support group, and has recently started hosting a special diocesan Sunday Mass for LGBTI Catholics and their families once a month; and on Good Fridays, after the traditional rite of the Reproaches, during which our priest prostrates for each verse gradually up the aisle, then we extend the meaning of the Reproaches to reflect on some of the ways we, the Church, or in wider society, have participated in scapegoating, persecution and sacrificing innocent victims again “for it is better for one man to die than the nation to perish” (Caiaphas) recently, including explicitly the Church’s historical persecution and ongoing discrimination against LGBTI people “Oh my people, what have I done to you? How have I hurt you? Answer me!” . That means, in my home parish’s Paschal liturgy, persecution of LGBTI people is symbolically identified with participating in re-crucifying Christ.¹*
I’m queer because I’m naturally bisexual (remembering back to earliest stage of puberty), and culturally I don’t believe in the predetermined categories of sexuality and gender exactly as we culturally inherited them. I don’t just not obey the conventional assumptions and norms about sexuality and gendered identity, as some gay or bi people don’t conform but still don’t consciously and explicitly reject the conventional assumptions and norms, I do not believe in them, and I’m openly saying so, which I call Queer, and I’ll explain why here.
Personalism and Social Trinitarianism
Sexuality and religion are both natural human behaviours that in different ways reach out to the Other¹. Both are forms of eros — the kind of love which reaches out, and leads to ἔκστασις ekstasis/ ecstasy. Ekstasis literally means ‘standing outside of self’, an experience of self-transcendence.
We fully reach out to and embrace the Otherness of others when we accept them as incomprehensible and unpredictably free. The Otherness of others, their freedom to be unpredictable, is the quality of personhood, which is an image of the infinite Otherness of the hypostatic persons in the pattern of relationships called ‘God’. That’s what ‘made in the Image of God’ means.
The typically human ability to love others justly and graciously is like the relationships between the persons in the communion of the Trinity, like the universal ‘Otherness in communion’,² also called ‘God’, so human beings are also ‘made in the Likeness of God’. ‘Trinity’ means that the nature of ‘God’ is community, or a pattern of relationships, in which the otherness of each person is fully respected, loved, and belongs in communion.
As St Augustine wrote, ‘Where justice and gratuitous love are³, there is God’. God isn’t just loving, God is love (1 John 4:7-21).
The distinction between ‘justice’ and ‘love’ ultimately dissolves for those who have understood the spiritual grace signified by baptism, because ‘justice’ means to restore the right pattern of relationships, and ultimately that means to love others as freely and graciously as we have been loved first. Baptism is a sign of the gratuitousness of God’s love — without the person necessarilyhaving understood or formed an intention to make amends yet, God forgives the entire human predisposition to sin. Forgiveness is gratuitous.
What each person ultimately deserves from us (i.e. justice) is to be loved in the same kind of ultimately gracious way as God loved us first. That is what ‘צֶ֖דֶק tsedeqah (justice) and חֶֽסֶד־ chesed (mercy) will embrace’ means (Ps.85:10). Merits and reciprocity are therefore ultimately irrelevant; our basic respect and love for others should not be conditional on any ideas of their worthiness or utility to us that we may have. If we had to deserve God’s utterly gratuitous kind of love, “who could stand?” (Ps.130:3). And “Lord and Master of my life, grant me the wisdom to see and understand my own faults and not to judge my brother” (from St Ephraim’s prayer for Lent). That means we shouldn’t be so worried about whether our brother is worthy as whether our response to him is fully just, i.e. as graciously loving as God has been to us.
19 We love because he first loved us.
20 Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
21 The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
1 John 4:19-21
Superimposing an image of ourselves onto others, not respecting their unpredictable and uncontrollable freedom to be of the Other, is un-Christian and especially un-Trinitarian. If we impose an image of self onto others, we make an idol out of ourselves, and next usually comes sacrificing others to it.
What we seek through well-integrated sexual eros and communal and personal religious eros is ecstatic union with others, and through those relationships to find and restore our relationship with the universal, infinite Other, so that we can be ecstatically in that same time-transcendent, eternal presence as all the prophets and saints have experienced (Nunc fluens facit tempus, nunc stans facit aeternitatum “the flowing now produces time, the standing now produces eternity”, Boethius), aka. “heaven” or “eternal life”.
There is no necessary or inevitable incompatibility or clash between sexuality and religion if they are both seen and practised as ecstatic self-transcending connection and belonging with others and with the universal Other, such that our way of relating to others matches God’s way of relating to us —overflowing, kenotic love . Willing vulnerability before the Other, intensity of love and trust and hope, are not incompatible with either good sex or good religion.
The cultural assumption that a person who’s more open about their sexuality must be ‘less religious’ and that more religious people must hide their sexuality, is an invalid dichotomy inherited from previous cultures that had not fully understood the Gospel. Cultures need integrating gradually too.
‘Holiness’, θέωσης, restoring the Likeness, is the result of integration, bringing all the aspects of being human into harmony, so that, among other things, our sexuality is in harmony with our conscience, inspiration, and preferably with our community’s best traditions too, not in conflict or competition, or alienated off in a split away section of our personality. ‘Purity’ by repression usually results in distorted forms of eros bursting out, doing their “dirty” things, shame for the part of ourselves which we fear makes us unloveable, then the need for reaching out to others in an autonomous adult way gets thrust back into repression, until it inevitably bursts out again, usually worse.
The more people are motivated by shame and desperation, the worse their behaviour to each other actually gets. There is far less emphasis on purity in sexual behaviour than on fairness and kindness to others actually in the Bible. Repeating the cycle of guilt, repression, alienated and desperate attempts to connect with others, however hard we try at it, will never lead to holiness. Holiness is integration, not purity by separating off parts of being fully human.
Sexual eros, I think, has the inherent tension that it combines both genetically selfish competition for mates, which we have in common with all other organisms, and the typically if not uniquely human possibility of truly ecstatic, other-regarding love, which is religious eros, the reaching out kind of love.
The vulnerability inherent in eros that we have to expose ourselves as we actually are, imperfect, not having the highest possible competitive mating value or status compared to everyone else, in order to be seen by the other person and to risk being loved or not, is also necessary for the love which possibly occurs to have a gratuitous element. Willing vulnerability and free gratuitousness of love are precisely what make it like, or part of, divine love.
There is real insight and truth in religious traditions, but they are not perfect. They are human traditions. We do not have to be perfect to be loveable, and neither do our religious traditions have to be perfect to be loveable. To love a religious tradition really means to love the community it came from, through time. We need to be in communities to become fully ourselves; that, I believe, is part of humans’ social nature. We need a good enough community to belong in, not a perfect one. What ancient religious communities had — liminal, ecstatic experiences, cultural traditions, human reason, are the same as we have now. They tried to make the best of what they had got, and so must we.
There is no good reason to assume generally that older religious communities got it right more often. I chose to join the Catholic community fully aware of its serious imperfections — “we” as a community have been partly responsible for every grave societal sin and structure of sin carried out in Western Europe or by Europeans for two millennia, involved in all the mediocrity and passive complicity, but also involved in, and often quietly leading, just about all the liberational and social justice movements, and the renaissance of science.
The humanist renaissance which the social practice of science developed from? Mostly Catholic. The campaign for abolition of slavery? Dominicans and Jesuits, ~250 years before Wilberforce and the abolition in English-speaking countries. The idea of intrinsic human dignity and universal human rights? That’s as Catholic as Mary. Over the centuries we haven’t only done horrific & shameful things.
Attention to suffering is also quite a Catholic thing (we have ‘redemptive suffering’, according to Catechism ¶1502, meditation on the Way of the Cross, and realistic crucifixion images, because Catholic tradition has the broadest understanding of the meaning of the Incarnation and of humanity among Christian traditions), in which the one suffering is not necessarily to blame.
So it’s disappointing when conservative Catholics refuse to even pay attention to the reality of LGBTI people’s suffering, which is partly caused by the beliefs that they repeat and promote which perpetuate social rejection and shame (‘shame’ = fear that I am unworthy to be connected with or loved by anyone).
The bodies of LGBTI people who commit suicide don’t appear to matter for them. LGBTI people kill themselves, out of alienation and despair, three times more often than cis-het people. We also have much higher rates of risky drug use, risky sex and STIs, higher rates of chronic social stress-related physical and mental health problems, which public health researchers conclude are all really symptoms of or complications deriving from alienation, shame, and a basic kind of loneliness which due to our cultural and developmental conditioning tends to feel fundamental and about who we are, not just what we do.
It is possible to look at these health outcomes and say “gay people are sick” — and yes, in a sense, we are, but it’s mainly due to social alienation, parental rejection, shame, self-hatred, and, in some countries and areas, persistent discrimination and persecution, not really intrinsic due to being LGBTI.
At the very least, Christians should listen and pay attention to people who are suffering. The reality of another person’s suffering should have priority over all our preconceptions. Even if people had totally brought their sufferings on themselves and their faults weren’t due to bigger, previous societal failings to live up to the standards of love and freedom that we’ve been given, it’s still more important, according to the Gospel, to love them first than to judge them. That is authentic Christianity, that is the kind of challenge we’re supposed to be gradually growing and learning to live up to. Being loving to LGBTI people, especially if we feel it’s a struggle because of our cultural and developmental conditioning, is not just a modern liberal Christian invention or a “less serious” version of being religious, it is authentic Christianity, which is “an asceticism of kindness” (Fr James Martin SJ, 2018).
Second, I want to deconstruct the conservative claim that LGBTI sexualities and genders are “unnatural” — typically, conservatives who say this don’t even know clearly what they mean, but I’ll take the clearest version, which is in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, 1485, and often referred to later.
While editing this essay, Craig Jones pointed me to a clearer and more thoroughly referenced, compatible argument by Katie Grimes, in, which shows, among other points, that modern traditionalists’ uses of Aquinas’ work as proof texts are probably not what Aquinas actually meant —
Free full pdf link here. The article is excellent, and impossible to summarise adequately and very much worth reading.
I don’t think it’s necessary to use Judith Butler’s epistemology as the comparator for interpreting Aquinas — any pragmatist epistemology would do, and I don’t believe, as Butler claims, that there is no such thing as a universal truth, but as a whole it may be impossible to perfectly comprehend.
I have learned from experience that ‘there is no objective truth’ positions are dangerous — when people are shot for protesting against a tyrannical regime, for instance, there is an objective truth about who shot them, when, where, and why. It is possible for everyone who cares to look to see that truth — universally. Without such a degree of universality of objective truth, there can be no practical humanist ethos or society. Excessive objectivism and excessive relativism are both dangerous, and can indeed be lethal.
Grimes’ argument goes that: i) Aquinas’ moral epistemology was more humble about its own fallibility than later interpreters of Aquinas have made it seem; ii) Aquinas’ reasoning about naturalness of sexual acts was based on physical complimentarity, not a personalist conception of complimentarity; c) Aquinas’ intention was probably showing a process of moral epistemology by integrating different sources of knowledge and trusting that when all the sources agreed they are probably right, not claiming timeless absolute truth.
Aquinas’ moral epistemology does not excuse us from the struggle to know what is good — it helps (imperfectly) to show us how to continue the struggle.
Aquinas’ (based on Aristotle’s) argument begins with the premise that each ‘act’ (implicitly, defined by its structure) has a purposeful cause (a ‘telos’), and that acting ethically means acting in an ordered manner according to the intrinsic purposeful cause of each object of intentional action. Second, Aquinas assumes that the purposeful cause of sex (a narrower idea than sexuality or orientation) is procreation, making babies. Thirdly, he concludes that any sexual act which is not directly ordered to the end of procreation, that purposeful cause, is “inherently disordered”, or as they say, “unnatural”.
There are a lot of problems with this argument:
i) modern traditionalists have made a logical jump from act to orientation — and it’s not clear that Aquinas could ever have encountered the idea of sexual orientations, as it is modern, so he’s only talking about acts, in this argument;
ii) why define an act only structurally and ignore its function, prior to defining an act as having a single purposeful cause, when purpose is a concept very similar to function? Is that not tautological (hiding its own conclusion in the implicit definitions of its premises)?;
iii) Why should we assume that an act must have a single purposeful cause, why not multiple purposeful causes? Aquinas presumably was attracted to the monistic teleological assumption because it appears to point back to monotheism, but we do not need to assume that all acts have a single purposeful cause each in order to assume that human existence ultimately has a single common purpose. I believe that the ultimate singular common purpose is to recognise the fundamental grounds for gratitude (i.e., creation, redemption and our personal charismata, according to St Ignatius Loyola’s Exercises) and consequently to make a fully free and generous return of love, throughout our lives and through all kinds of relationships;
iv) Why are we, as Christians, taking philosophical assumptions so uncritically from a pagan philosopher who also argued that slavery was natural and justifiable (“servi a natura”), a position which was officially defined and declared to be a heresy in a ruling by the Sorbonne theological council⁵, by Pope Paul III in Sublimus Dei 1537 and reiterated by Pope Paul VI in Gaudium et Spes 1965? Aquinas too endorsed slavery as ‘natural’. If they could be so seriously wrong on that, is it not likely that there are more fundamental faults in their philosophies? Aquinas himself believed that wisdom and virtue are interrelated, so a vicious or imperfectly virtuous person is not perfectly wise;
v) Sexuality is a much broader range of behaviours than just the act of sex. If we look at the whole range of sexual behaviours, then the far more common function (or ‘purposeful cause,’ if you like) of all sexual behaviors is social bonding, much more frequently or commonly than it is reproduction. (If you consider prairie voles, a model species for biologists studying evolution of sexual life histories in animals, their monogamous pair-bonding is social, not exclusively sexual⁶.) If you apply a teleological ethos to the full range of sex acts with the telos as social bonding, then you get a different set of priorities, which is much more like the secular modern social sense of sexual ethics.
There is no good reason to accept Aristotle and Aquinas’ account of what is ‘natural’ sexuality and genders — it omits facts which were not relevant to their main arguments, so to extrapolate from their conclusions is invalid.
The general principle of what Aquinas was trying to do — informing and forming our consciences with natural experiences and reason is, however, I believe, still valid and important. Aquinas was pointing towards the humanist Renaissance, which was essentially about re-balancing the epistemic value attributed to natural human experience and reason versus the weight given to tradition and authorities. But we have better datasets now about what is really natural, and more precise philosophical analysis. We can affirm Aquinas’ trust and hope in natural human experience and reason to lead us gradually into eudaemonia (flourishing) and theosis (sanctification), without hanging onto his mistakes in applying that essential humanist principle of ethical reasoning.
If we believe that “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31), and if we acknowledge the fact that some LGBTI people are born with their homosexual orientation or their psychological gender identity not apparently conforming with their physical sex, then we have a plain contradiction between our beliefs and facts we’ve accepted — it cannot be that a benevolent God who created and saw that all he had created was good, very good, could create some people with an ‘objectively disordered’ orientation or gender identity that would make it impossible for them to fulfil human social nature, since “It is not good that man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18), without falling into sin or alienation from God. It is incoherent to believe that a benevolent God could impose such suffering on a person for their whole life — it is not just a ‘trial’ which one can learn from and grow, it is hopeless unbearable loneliness out of which the only escape would be suicide.
Third, I want to recommend some positive principles which I believe to be useful for integrating the sexual and spiritual aspects of being fully human; partly also so that this isn’t so easily misconstruable as just an argument for laxity, because my interpretation of the gospel ethos applied to sexuality is really more challenging in practice, not less, than the traditional norms.
I find it unacceptable that the Catechism has nothing to say about domestic violence, marital rape, nothing about using prostitutes or, surely much worse, using (i.e. raping) trafficked and forced sex workers, nothing to say about psychologically abusive marital relationships, but it says that masturbation is “gravely sinful” — I mean, please be serious! You could perhaps plausibly argue that when taken to excess, or while using pornography which has been produced exploitatively or which scandalises by encouraging objectification and instrumentalisation of human beings, it could be sinful, but claiming that a ubiquitously natural act among all social animals which harms no-one is “grave”, while not even mentioning most kinds of violent, abusive or exploitative sexual behaviours, is not even sensible moral advice.
Before that, an unfortunately necessary preface: Whenever Catholicism and sex are mentioned together, the child sexual abuse crisis comes up. I do think it’s relevant, and I have a sense that the official version of sexual ethics which makes it all about unthinking obedience to authorities and traditional norms, rather than reasoning and reflecting on your own and others’ actual human experiences and learning to be more kind, has the effect of limiting people’s psychosocial development to a stage like early adolescence but worse, and also makes it seem like subordinates can be violated with impunity, and I suspect that that is why the sexual abuse crisis is mainly about abuse of young adolescents, because that’s the psychosocial developmental age which most of the clergy and religious who committed the abuse were themselves stuck at.
I find the official version of Catholic sexual ethics, in the Catechism, neither sensible nor reasonable nor inspiring; it seems more like a committee-edited compromise between the social norms of centuries ago versus modernity, with no truly unifying principles. In my experience, conservative Catholics who take the traditional sexual morals strictly are not very kind. That’s a dealbreaker for me: if an interpretation of tradition makes people less kind than the average non-believer, that’s not a version of ‘Christianity’ my sense of faith calls me to even consider seriously. So I base my conscience formation on Levinas⁷ (Jewish), Zizioulas⁸ (Greek Orthodox), and an inspiration I had once during Adoration: that I should try to regard and treat every person I meet with the same level of respectful love that we cultivate towards the Blessed Sacrament; so, respectfully let them be themselves and learn to be more kind.
The earliest Christian texts (Bible, obviously, and I’m thinking of the Didache, the Letter of St Clement, and St Melito’s Peripascha) point out two kinds of sexual behaviours which are bad — μοιχεία (moicheia) — usually translated ‘adultery’; and πορνεία (porneia) — traditionally translated ‘fornication’, but I think it probably originally meant using forced trafficked sex workers.⁹
St Gregory of Nyssa defined them as: moicheia is any sexual misconduct in which another person is harmed; porneia is sexual misconduct without harm to another person, or with their consent and maybe with subtle harm that the partner might not even be aware of themselves; this also seems fairly sensible. I interpret both terms much more widely according to my sense of their gospel purposes, not just the traditional social norms in the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD.
To refrain from moicheia to me means: don’t violate anyone’s trust, especially after they’ve been intensely willingly vulnerable with you, through sex, including, but not only, by breaking mutually agreed monogamous bonds, either from inside or from outside the couple. Monogamy is not a biblically approved norm — many of the prophets had multiple wives and there was no assumption in the culture at the time that this was necessarily always wrong. You can believe that monogamy is best, but you can’t base that on the Bible.
To refrain from porneia to me means: don’t use a person as if they were an object, and I recommend Martha Naussbaum’s expanded version of Kant’s principle of humanity in her essay called Objectification¹⁰, which provides seven principles for recognizing the subtlest beginnings of objectification and learning to do the opposite more and more, in all kinds of relationships. The opposite of porneia is to positively regard the other person fully as a person, unpredictably free, not as an object and not to be used for any purpose outside themselves without their fully free and informed consent, especially when they’ve chosen to reveal themselves to you physically and spiritually naked, or through any other form of ecstatic personal connection.
I think it is worthwhile memorising Naussbaum’s definition of Objectification:
Martha Naussbaum, Objectification (full free pdf copy in the link), in Philosophy and Public Affairs; Fall 1995; 24, 4.
The concept is applicable across ethical concerns — e.g. it makes a clear and workable definition of the root form of racism as collective objectification.
Returning to the point I made earlier that ‘If you apply teleological ethics to sex with the telos as social bonding, you get a different set of priorities, actually much more like the mainstream social sense of sexual ethics now’, one of the implications is that the disapproval of sex which isn’t intended to be open to procreation (which the Catechism also considers to be ‘inherently disordered’) shifts to a disapproval of sex which isn’t intended to be open to a mutual attachment possibly forming. Sex inherently has emotional meanings; it is naturally ordered towards social attachment. I do not think that we are obliged to follow every nascent attachment through to complete commitment, but it is unfair to expect the other person not to develop attachment after sex, or to handle their attachment insensitively. This is intuitive common sense.
Two clergy friends (who I call Father not just out of convention but because they have genuinely been charismatic father figures for me), both say — but you should avoid casual sex and develop love first —I get it that they completely mean well for me, but it feels like advice suited for a world which no longer exists for my generation, and like demanding that the end of a process must come before its beginning. Our world has been thoroughly conditioned by consumerism, even our sense of ourselves and human nature. Economic precarity, rootlessness, the experience of liquid modernity, define my generation’s experience. Call these structures of sin, if you will. Yet we have to live in this world, and we try to make the best of what we’ve got.
Maybe a system of arranged marriages managed by wise village grandmas would be better than our individualistic, competitive, sex first and maybe love later, system of dating and finding partners and creating relationships now, but we don’t live in villages anymore and such a system is not available for us.
One problem with disapproving of ‘casual sex’ is that there really is no such thing — sex is never without an emotional meaning, even when its meaning is denied or unconscious. Good sex implies a willingness to bond and attach to the other person and to let them attach to me, and even if the experiment at bonding turns out to be an incomplete match, then unwrapping their tendrils of attachment as gently as possible so that they can carry on growing soon.
There is also the kind of sex which is like animals play-fighting for dominance, but it’s only play. That isn’t necessarily aimed at social bonding with the immediate partner. But it is a sort of social behaviour which gradually fulfils the person’s capacity to socialise and form reliable relationships; so indirectly, it is still oriented to the function of forming intimate social bonds.
Second problem: anyone who tries to practice ‘no sex before marriage’ in my generation would almost certainly remain single for at least the whole of their youth, and if they eventually couple up would probably end up with a mate whom no-one else would have. If Catholics actually followed the official Catholic norms, we would probably have died out like the Shakers did.
‘Experimental’ sex is a more efficient and accurate way to communicate and get to know the other person than words alone. The mainstream secular humanist sense of ethics about sex seems to me much more reasonably adapted to the social environment we live in now, including contraception.
Complete and reliable kind of relationships are the best, everyone wants that, but we cannot get to what is best without starting where we are and going gradually through the natural kinds and stages of relationships, including experimental relationships which mostly don’t develop into a complete union. Idealising marriage and pretending that all the other kinds and stages of relationships are inherently bad just because they’re not the best of all possible relationships, is really illogical and impractical. And “Il meglio è l’inimico del bene.” — don’t make the perfect into the enemy of the good.
Modern laxity on sex is not actually more lax than ancient social practices — if you look at historical social practices in ancient Christian and Jewish societies, what people actually did and accepted as normal⁹ was more about conserving paternity rights and land inheritance than really about relationship quality or fidelity. Catholic Roman Rite clerical celibacy also originated as a preventative solution to inheritance law disputes, and I think that and the extreme valorization of virginity (as if, avoiding sex = holiness) developed as a ‘unique selling point’ to justify tithing and the authority attributed to clerics when many of them were and are quite mediocre and not all that spiritually inspiring — but they are celibate, so that makes them special. Traditional Jewish and Christian communities didn’t afford much justice or kindness to those who didn’t have the power to socially enforce their rights. If what we value now is relationship fidelity, or justice, equality, freedom, love, or attention to developing the quality of relationships, then we really need to start from basics with natural experience, reason and reflection on our ethical purposes, rather than trying to renegotiate a compromise with the old rules.
I agree with Craig Ford that Christians really need to go back to basics, to the essential meaning of the gospels and re-apply that inspiration and reasoned principles to human experiences now. Compromising with ancient societies’ evolved cultural norms which evolved in very different environments with very different social needs and consequences, is not essential to the gospel.
“Love is patient, love is kind; love is not jealous or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
It does not keep a score of wrongs, but rejoices in clarity and understanding;
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
This is sensible moral advice for developing the completeness and reliability of intentional loving committed relationships.
I’ve given up aiming for this essay and record of three years of intellectually struggling to integrate my Catholic faith and bisexuality to have one overall logical structure — it’s granularity reflects how it grew along with me.
While editing it and discussing it with Craig Jones, I also read, at his recommendation —
Katie Grimes, Being Good And Doing Bad? Virtue Ethics And Sexual Orientation, in Catholic Women Speak: Bringing Our Gifts to the Table; 2015.Full free pdf link here.
Grimes points out that the current modern traditionalist position that LGBTI people are not bad but LGBT sexual activities are evil is incoherent in terms of the Virtue ethics which the Church proposes.
Craig A. Ford, Jr., Transgender Bodies, Catholic Schools, and a Queer Natural Law Theology of Exploration, in The Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 7, №1 (2018): 70–98. Free full pdf link here.
Craig asks Catholic moral theologians to take responsibility for their part in contributing to the serious harms perpetrated on trans people, mostly children, by people misinformed by traditional teachings on gender.
Recently there was another flurry of controversy when the USCCB published a new guidance document on education on gender in Catholic schools, called “Male and Female He Created Them”, alluding to Genesis 5:2–4. A rather superficial or obvious point — if the terms in Genesis 5 are taken literally in the way the USCCB is claiming about binary human sexes, then salt marshes were not created by God, because the Bible only mentions land and sea; dusk and twilight were not created by God, because Genesis 1 only mentions day and night — enough examples to show that it is an absurd interpretation.
About the Primacy of Conscience, or as the author above puts it:
That reference to an “informed conscience” brought to mind my own experience at Catholic school. I was in sixth grade when the parish priest visited our religion class to take questions. … He explained that God had given me a conscience and a good mind. In spiritual matters I must study church teachings and listen to the explanations of my elders and pray for discernment — and if I did all those things and nevertheless came to a conclusion at odds with my church’s position, I was not obliged to follow church teaching. In fact, I was obliged to do the opposite: to honor the moral wisdom of my own conscience over the teaching of my church.
The reason for the Primacy of Conscience lies in what we understand ‘sin’ to mean — intentionally doing what one understands to be wrong. If I follow a traditional authority’s command and disobey my informed conscience, I am sinning, even if I am actually mistaken about what is right and wrong.
It has also been my experience that living in the Queer community and in the Catholic community both have shown me different aspects of the inherent dignity of human beings and helped me learn to live accordingly. Catholicism emphasises the intrinsicality of human dignity; Queer theory emphasises its universality. It’s common in the LGBTI community to believe that, whether or not another persons’ self-presentation is to my taste or preference is irrelevant to my obligation to treat them with unconditional basic human respect.
Another claim of modern conservatives is that their current obsession with the idea that ‘more anti-homosexuality = more Christian’ has been the ‘unchanging teaching of the Church since the Apostles’. Historically, that is a gross oversimplification, as Ed Oxford showed for bible translations.* A well-reviewed historical study on Byzantine Christian social practices about homosexuality¹¹ shows that practices varied widely over time and between authors. Mainstream social practices were mostly more accommodating than the official rules then, and Byzantine pastoral practices appear to have been much more accommodating than modern conservative Christians are now.
The categorisation and grading of sins in the Byzantine period was very different from now: usury was considered the worst sin (except for blaspheming against the Holy Spirit) a Christian could commit, heterosexual marital infidelity was considered more serious than all kinds of homosexual behaviours, which ranked low on their scale of gravity of sins, and some kinds of homosexual behaviours didn’t figure as worth mentioning at all.
The exception to the rule that Byzantines were much less concerned with homosexuality than moderns was St John Chrysostom, who it appears from the texts was probably raped by his tutor when he was a young student, and we can infer, I think, that his extreme, generalized rage against male homosexuality probably was displaced pain and anger about his own unresolved trauma. (St John Chrystosum was also extremely anti-Semitic, outstandingly so; St Melito was the opposite — he was elected bishop by his community because he was so good at mediating and interpreting the Judaic and Hellenic sides of the Christian community and traditions to each other.). Adelphopoiesis, the rite of ‘brother-making’, was similar in form to the second or third marriage blessings in Orthodox tradition, and contemporary texts imply it was socially accepted in practice that these ‘made-brothers’ relationships were often privately sexual as well as being close and committed friendships.
Much of the talk of ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’, such as in the Nashville Declaration, is clearly cryptic language used to get away with hateful incitement of real harm (like referring to “Zionists” {a political category of persons, so not protected by law} in post-Holocaust iterations of the ‘global Jewish conspiracy’ when they obviously really mean Jews in general, in an attempt to side-step anti-hate speech laws), is betrayed by what they actually do: clearly intentional and harmful acts which effectively target LGBTI people.
My guess about why modern conservative religious people identify themselves so much with anti-homosexuality is that it has become like an enemy flag representing for them what and who they blame for their sense of alienation from secular modernity and their eviction from the public sphere.
Especially in the last 15 or so years, consumerist sense of ‘ethics’ has extended even more into the realm of ethics, because consumerist norms are built into the social media environment. It’s valid to be concerned about consumerist marketing / propaganda changing moral decision-making norms and any sort of reference to religious tradition in modern public spheres being suppressed, but the social acceptance of LGBTI people and relationships is coincidental or irrelevant to those problems; nevertheless it seems to have become an enemy flag for those who feel powerless and angry about those cultural problems.
What I mean by consumerist culture extending into the realm of ethics is: when we decide what we believe is right and wrong (or when we retrospectively justify what we’ve already chosen or done), by individualistic, subjective, sentimental or hedonistic criteria, and when we treat every kind of decision as if it was just an individually free choice to be made according to consumer sentiments and preferences, without valuing knowing first what are the relevant objective realities, nor thinking what are the actual or likely consequences of the decision we’re considering for others, nor referring back and comparing the decision with our community’s moral traditions.
Consumerist cultures and tech systems deny attention to things outside ourselves which are not consumer products. So, in order to get political success now, you have to package your politics as something individual consumers can use to socially perform their identities with. Politics has become like selling cosmetic products; it’s performance politics for enhancing your self-image on social media, not for participating responsibly as a person in collective judgements and actions. What is important about a politician or political movement in this socially constructed information environment is its branding, not its real utility, nor its effects on common goods.
I do believe that the prevailing consumerist culture, its worldview and social imaginary, and its implicit concepts of self and of human nature, are very damaging, but I do not believe there is any good evidence or reason to connect that cultural, systemic kind of ethical problem to particularly obsessing over modern mainstream society’s acceptance of homosexuality and social integration of LGBTI people. In a way, the conservatives obsessing over the fact that some people are gay, and their exaggerated social performance of moral outrage about mainstream liberal society accepting that reality, are also reproducing the cultural assumptions and norms of consumerist culture, because they are judging by and reacting to their own subjective sentiments.
If Christian conservatives were objecting to social acceptance of LGBTI people because of doctrines of complimentarity, naturally ordered ethics, fulfilment of the human person’s full potential for flourishing, according to their ideas of what personhood and flourishing (eudaimonia) mean, it would be a minor, very conditional, concern, but the identity formation and social performance narrative “Christian=anti-gay” and the obsessiveness of it, would not occur. It’s more a political totem to identify and form their political community with, to fight against secular modernity, than it is directly a moral concern in itself.
The Utopia envisioned by at least some of the authors in the Bible is not one of certainty and undoubting obedience to traditional authorities and rules, but: “Then, truth and mercy shall embrace, and peace and justice shall kiss; truth shall spring up from the earth, and justice shall look down from heaven.” (Ps.85:10–11). The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. ‘Faith’ (subjective faith, i.e. fides qua creditur) primarily is hoping and trusting beyond the current horizons of our imaginations, not adhering rigidly to an imaginary “pure” golden age in the past. The ‘deposit of faith’ (i.e. the objective aspect of faith, fides quae creditur) is only truly faith if we relate to it with an open, hoping and trustful attitude; the objective aspect of ‘faith’ cannot constitute faith if we just use it for defensive egoistic posturing.
We eat pork, we even accept interest on loans as normal, which the earliest Christian community, who were Jewish, traditionally regarded as contaminating, disgusting, and unclean immoral acts. The relationship between Hellenistic and Judaic early Christians resulted in a simplified moral code, not conserving all of either traditions and neither trying to compromise blindly, but as much as they were able to then, seeing through both their traditions to the needs and purposes they had arisen from, and re-integrating those into their contemporary lives. We can’t live in 0AD or 700AD or the 1950s now; we have to live in this world. Conserving tradition requires transforming it, not clinging nostalgically onto imaginary pure ideal pasts.
We are supposed to be hopeful and fully engaged in co-creating gradually a perfect future; “behold, I am making all things new” (Isaiah 43:18, Isaiah 43:19, Revelation 21:5, Isaiah 65:17, Ephesians 2:15, Ephesians 4:24, Hebrews 8:13; and Rerum Novarum — On New Things, Leo XIII, 1891). Setting aside old traditions and being open to what is new and better is actually a more frequent theme in the Bible than rigidly conserving traditions.
But what if I’m wrong? I hope that I have completely accepted now that I am almost certainly partially wrong about everything almost all the time. Fortunately, we’re not dealing with an angry authoritarian Father figure, exacting about our mistakes and sins, but like Moses was inspired to write:
Exodus 34:6–7 (see the Thirteen Middot, thirteen attributes of divine mercy)
6 The Lord passed before him, and he proclaimed,
“The Lord, the Lord, (Adonai, Elohim)
A God merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
7 keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity, and pardoning transgression and sin...”
In fully developed Catholic moral theology, the criterion we face in the end is: ‘did you make a fair effort to develop your conscience and to follow it?’¹² Following one’s conscience, even if you’re objectively mistaken, as long as one’s conscience is not insincere (which includes by failing to make a fair effort at informing and developing your conscience) is not sinful. To commit a sin, rather than just a mistake, one has to know or believe that what one intends to do is wrong. Listening seriously to (ab audire ‘to listen to’ is the root of the word ‘obedience’) Church teaching, for the baptized, is an obligatory part of formation of conscience, but even if a Church teaching were objectively true but your sincerely developed conscientious belief was that it is false, if you followed your conscience you would not have sinned, because ultimately your relationship with God — gratitude and generous love in response to God, depends primarily on obeying your conscience, your capacity to perceive the ‘face’ of God, more essentially than obeying the Church’s official teaching. The Church’s teaching exists to inform and guide and educate and nurture our consciences. But like with a loving parent, what matters in the end is: did you try to make a free and generous return of love?, not did you get everything right.
References:
¹* Refers to the concept of ‘Mystici corporis Christi’ (the mystical body of Christ), defined as dogma by Pius XII, 1943, which means that all of humanity was lifted up in Christ at his Ascension, also referred to in Matthew 25:31–46.
¹ Reaching Out: the three movements of the spiritual life, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, 1984; he was gay, celibate, a Catholic priest and a clinical psychotherapist. ‘Eros’ originally meant the kind of love which reaches out to the other/ Other, including but not only through sex.
² Communion and otherness: further studies in personhood and the church, John Zizioulas, 2006. John Zizioulas is Metropolitan bishop of Pergamon, Professor of Systematic theology and philosophy at the University of Thessaloniki, Chair of the Academy of Athens, and a close friend and theological advisor to both Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Pope Francis, bishop of Rome. His modern and more naturalistic sounding interpretations of Social Trinitarianism, deriving from St Gregory of Nyssa (4thC AD), who was the main early expositor of the doctrine of the Trinity, and from St John of Damascus (7thC), are as certainly orthodox and catholic as anyone can be.
³ The Latin terms are of course caritas and amor, but I think the Hebrew terms underlying the Latin words in Augustine’s intellectual lineage are probably tsedeqah (צְדָקָה) and rachim (רָחַם), so I’m translating based on what I think were probably the original terms, not the Latin intermediary words.
⁴ The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness, Michael Hobbes, 2017. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gay-loneliness/
⁵ The Life of Bartolomé de las Casas, by LA Dutto, 1902. https://ia800209.us.archive.org/34/items/lifeofbartolom00duttrich/lifeofbartolom00duttrich.pdf
⁶ What Can Rodents Tell Us About Why Humans Love?, Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, 2014. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-can-rodents-tell-us-about-why-humans-love-180949441/
⁷ Totality and Infinity: an essay on exteriority, Emmanuel Levinas, 1961; my favourite section is called ‘On Murder’ in the the chapter “Ethics and the Face”, pp.197–201. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ODA9A-lQ6h0OViZiY6lB1dQzHXK0OoUTkpUKdCG_kGk/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs
⁸ See above Zizioulas’ Otherness in Communion, and for example some nice excerpts — https://www.resourcesforchristiantheology.org/category/john-zizioulas/
⁹ The Sexual Use of Slaves: A Response to Kyle Harper on Jewish and Christian Porneia, Jennifer A. Glancy, April 2015. DOI: 10.1353/jbl.2015.0003 and
¹⁰ Objectification, Martha C Nussbaum, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1995; see especially page 257 http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/mprg/nussbaumO.pdf
¹¹ When Brothers Dwell in Unity: Byzantine Christianity and Homosexuality, Stephen Morris, 2016. See reviews from Byzantine history scholars — https://mybyzantine.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/when-brothers-dwell-in-unity-byzantine-christianity-and-homosexuality/
¹² Relativism, Conscience, and The Magisterium, anonymous blogger at https://smellnosmalllaugh.blogspot.com/2018/02/relativism-conscience-and-magisterium.html?m=1
