Queering Christian Marriage: Re-examining the intersection of sexuality and religion 

Just as American politics is split between “red states” and “blue states,” more than a few people are divided on the issue of marriage and nearly everyone is confused about religion. Winning full marriage equality relies in part on making a clear distinction between marriage as a state-sanctioned legal contract and marriage as a religious covenant or sacrament. As last year’s national and state elections clearly showed, however, that distinction is quite blurry for many Americans, including religious leaders. The proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the Federal Marriage Amendment) that would restrict marriage to one cultural form amounts to nothing less than enshrining a supposedly Christian view of marriage in the American legal system.

Progress in the struggle for the freedom to marry therefore requires renewed attention to the complex intersection of sexuality and religion. Helping clergy and religious leaders understand marriage equality as a matter of civil rights and social justice, though critically important, is not enough. This struggle demands deeper scrutiny of the religious meaning of marriage, especially in Christian circles. The time has come to queer the very idea of “Christian marriage.”

Prior to the twelfth century, the Christian Church had very little to do with the cultural institution of marriage. The “wedding,” as it were, between Christianity and marriage is relatively new in Western culture, even though most Americans assume it has a long and stable history. “Biblical family values,” for example, bear virtually no resemblance to the way marriage is practiced in American society today. In ancient Israel, a common familial pattern was polygamy—one husband with multiple wives, and for the wealthy, many concubines as well. In the Christian scriptures, the two primary figures, Jesus and Paul, are unmarried and childless, and neither of them appears particularly keen to lend religious support to the idea of marriage. Jesus mostly critiqued the way his own society practiced marriage and Paul only grudgingly approved of marriage for Christians. Paul actually recommended the unmarried life as more spiritually fruitful.

In the centuries that followed, Christianity developed as a countercultural movement with respect to a wide range of social practices, including marriage. In ancient Greco-Roman society the gender of one’s sex partner mattered far less than the social status or rank of that partner. Penetrative sex was one of the key ways to secure and perpetuate relations of power over others: the old over the young, male over female, the conquerors over the conquered. Marriage in that cultural context served mostly a practical function, whether to secure political and economic alliances or to create a stable social unit for raising children, and only rarely entailed the kind of romantic and affectionate mutuality Western cultures associate with marriage today. Ancient Christian communities constructed radical alternatives to these cultural norms around sexuality and marriage, either by eschewing sexual relations altogether (mostly in monastic communities) or by insisting that “family” referred primarily to the Christian community itself rather than the cultural and biological bonds of marriage. The Christian church inserted itself into marriage only many centuries later, and for as many political and economic reasons as spiritual or theological ones.

The long history of religious marriage, in other words, has been far from stable and has undergone significant and often dramatic changes. That kind of instability has come to light in recent years under the banner of “queer theory.” Recognizing the failure of modern categories to capture the rich diversity of human experience and relationships, queer theorists critique the narrow restrictions of hegemonic cultural forms. More than that, and to borrow a phrase from Lee Edelman, author of Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, queer theorists also seek to open up “new zones of possibility” in which previously unexplored or uncategorized modes of familial (or political or economic) relating can appear. Given this broad scope, William Turner, who wrote A Genealogy of Queer Theory, wryly wonders whether everyone is in some sense “queer.” After all, as Turner notes, “queerness indicates merely the failure to fit precisely within a category, and surely all persons at some time or other find themselves discomfited by the bounds of the categories that ostensibly contain their identities.”

Cultural institutions can never neatly contain and define the energies of human interaction, and perhaps especially the energies of sexual relationships. Queer theorists can remind us that no one’s marriage is exactly the same as any other. A gay male relationship is different from a lesbian relationship and neither one is just a same-gendered copy of a mix-gender marriage. The shape and dynamics of all these relationships frequently exhibit profound differences. Collapsing all of that diversity into a single legal contract called “marriage” may be a legal necessity, but surely religious communities want marriage to mean more than the parameters decided by a lawyer or a judge.

Queer theorists can help those Christian communities opposed to marriage equality realize the spiritual importance of treating culturally defined categories with suspicion. Skepticism regarding cultural institutions resonates with some profound though mostly repressed theological insights in historical Christian traditions. From a traditional theological perspective, the institutional form of a human relationship (one man and one woman in a nuclear family of children) matters far less than the relational qualities and communal fruits of that relationship: mutual care and affection, hospitality, peace-making, and social justice. In fact, it’s precisely this kind of theological reasoning that compels religious leaders to condemn domestic violence even when that violence occurs within the culturally normative form of marriage. The fact that a couple in such cases just happens to be legally married has nothing to do with evaluating the quality of their relationship.

The near obsession with the cultural form of marriage in today’s public discourse has virtually blinded many religious leaders to the content of the marriage relationship and why communities of faith want to celebrate committed relationships in the first place. From this perspective, Christian clergy actually betray their own theological traditions when they privilege a cultural pattern, marriage as one man and one woman, and forsake the communal fruit marriage ought to generate in our communities: strong families committed to social and economic justice. Religious leaders should already know that regardless of the form a human relationship takes, mixed-gender or same-gender, the fruitfulness of that relationship is what makes it a marriage.

Queering Christian marriage in this way would not mean abandoning the cultural institution of marriage. To the contrary, it would enrich and strengthen that cultural institution by placing the emphasis where it belongs—on the common good to which marriage contributes rather than the cultural form marriage supposedly ought to take. In short, a religious appropriation of the insights gleaned from queer theory could result in a surprising and dramatic shift in the American political landscape. When I imagine that shift, I see clergy all across this country rising up and with a single voice opposing and resisting the Federal Marriage Amendment. And I see them doing so for religious reasons.

The Rev. Jay Emerson Johnson, Ph.D., is an Episcopal priest and the programming and development director for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California (www.clgs.org)