Post-Secular Queer: Christianity, Queer Theory, and the Unsolvable Mysteries of Sexual Desire

Abstract

What could Christianity and queer theory possibly have in common? The two are often considered anathema to each other. Queer theory is generally committed to an existential skepticism regarding the possibility of a transcendent, divine source of meaning. Its intellectual lineage can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously articulated such skepticism by asserting, ‘God is dead.’ Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals provides the template for queer theory’s assertion that the concept of an ethically normative hierarchy of hetero- versus homosexuality is the contingent product of a specific historical context. While many Christians consider this and other ethically normative concepts to be non-contingent in the sense of being ‘natural’ or divinely mandated, Nietzsche insists that ethical norms are merely the invention of human cultures in particular historical moments – they have a genealogy, a history. In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault (1978) develops this thinking in regard to sexuality, arguing that sexual morality and indeed the very concept of sexuality have a history. This argument, one of the defining landmarks of queer theory, entails not just empirical but also epistemological claims: it assumes the kind of existential skepticism toward transcendent sources of meaning emblematized by Nietzsche. Thus in contemporary US politics, debates concerning sexual ethics are often stymied by an underlying disagreement about the epistemological grounds of the debate itself: by definition, it seems, Christianity and queer theory are not on speaking terms.