Dirty Religion

For the last two years I’ve been experimenting with a hybrid spirituality. I’ve taken the Quakerism that has formed me so strongly over the past two decades and added in some new-monasticism, “Celtic Christianity” and neo-Druidry. I’ve called this a “patchwork” and “queer” approach to faith. Now, having read Adrian Thatcher’s Vile Bodies (2023), I’m wondering if “dirty” is another appropriate word. Thatcher gives a refreshingly candid survey of the bodies vilified by powerful Christian men over the last two millennia. Christian theology has demonised the bodies of women, Jews, Muslims, people with dark skin, LGBTQ+ bodies, and even the male body in its natural desires and emissions. For centuries Christian theology has encouraged and colluded with the abuse of vulnerable bodies, including the bodies of children. As a gay man, and someone who researches theology and race, I’m familiar with many of these theological scandals, but it’s still shocking to confront them page after page in Thatcher’s book. I was left wondering whether, in the light of such pervasive and prolonged abuse, Christianity is in any way redeemable. Is the Chrisitan tradition worth engaging with at all, considering its historical and continuing theological problem with bodies? I was struck by the importance of purity to Christian theologies of the body. Powerful Christian men have continuously tried to maintain pure boundaries between spirit and body, male and female, white and Black, Christian and non-Christian. I’m a gay man, and so the bulk of Christian theology considers me a violation. I’m seen as penetrable and penetrated, violating the boundary between male and female, a reminder that so much of this vilification always comes back to misogyny. I’m seen as dirty because of the kind of sex I’m presumed to have. In muddying the pure boundary between the penetrating man and the penetrable women I’m assumed to be a sexual threat, something unmentionable to children, a dynamic at the heart of the current transphobic moral panic. I could push back against this by expanding the definition of purity, by redrawing the boundaries so that I’m included on the acceptable side of the line. I’m more tempted by the opposite approach, to embrace my dirtiness and lack of purity. It seems like that’s where the joy lies. Who wouldn’t want to be as happy as a pig in muck? In my favourite film of 2023, All of Us Strangers, two gay men are discussing gay terminology, and one says: “‘Queer’ does feel polite somehow though. Like all the dick sucking’s been taken out.” I still embrace the label ‘queer,’ but I think there’s also something “dirty” about the kind of religion I’m searching for. I’m looking for a faith that is a rebellion against purity and the damage it inflicts. There are three illusions of purity that I reject as a theologian: the illusion of a pure tradition, the illusion of a morally pure community, and the illusion of pure religious ideals.

In our search for faith, many of us can be captured by the need for a pure tradition, a religion or spirituality with stable foundations and ancient, dependable truths. Many Christians have looked for this in “apostolic succession,” the idea that there is an unbroken chain of bishops going all the way back to St Peter, a succession that guarantees the handing on of authentic, orthodox Christian teaching. Those inspired by “Celtic” Christianity may look back to a pristine Christian community in 7^th-century Britain, before everything went wrong. Quakers today are constantly looking back to their 17^th-century roots, whilst the first Quakers saw themselves as reviving the “primitive Christianity” of the 1^st century. Even neo-pagans may hold to the theory of “pagan survivals” where the “old ways” were hidden beneath a Christian veneer, and the idea that the “old religion” has been handed down in secret by the common folk over the centuries. All these searches for a pure, unbroken tradition rely to varying degrees on some very dodgy history. As I see it, there is no pure tradition. There’s no ever-burning torch whose pure light has been handed down the generations. We cannot speak of Christianity in the singular. We live in a world of various Christianities. No tradition is timeless or unchanging. Neither are traditions completely sealed off from others. The religious cultures of our world are not individual units with hard exteriors. Although I don’t believe all religions are ultimately the same, I do believe the boundaries between traditions are porous. Religious cultures can merge and mix and create something new. Christians are highly suspicious of syncretism, the mixing of Christianity with other traditions to produce something new, like Haitian Vodou, but the dirtiness of syncretism is a living, and even life-giving, reality. Christianity itself has been syncretic ever since it merged Second Temple Judaism and Hellenistic philosophy. Instead of a pure singular light we inherit a collection of fragments, a tangle of broken threads, that we continuously put together in various ways.[1] Our theological house is constantly being repaired, refashioned and rebuilt, constructed and reconstructed.[2] Theology is dirty work. There isn’t an objective theological truth out there waiting to be discovered. Theological truth is something we do together. We use the fragments we inherit to construct something that works, to build a home that we can all live in. When the theological edifices that aspire to spotless purity become places of spiritual death, I need a different kind of home.

Many of us also desire a religious community that is ethically pure. We want to be in the company of good people. We want to be on the right side of history and proud of our spiritual ancestors. Some people join the Quakers to, understandably, escape the moral failures and ethically deficient theology of the Church of England. Quakers often describe themselves by saying how they’re not like (and so implicitly better than) other churches. Neo-pagans might contrast themselves with the oppressive, patriarchal “revealed religions” who have lost touch with the natural world. But this search for purity can often be a self-deception. Just as there is no unblemished torch to hand on, so the fragments we inherit have jagged, bloody edges. Although we love to remember the heroes and victories of our faith, we just as easily forget the villains, victims and failures. To be a Christian of any kind is to inherit a history of antisemitism. To be a Quaker is to receive a tradition riddled with classism and entangled with colonialism. Even in such a new community as the neo-pagan movement, there are currents of racism, Orientalism, nationalism and transphobia. These failures aren’t just the isolated actions of people now dead. They continue to echo through and distort the theology we work with today. We still live in their shadows. As children of modernity we work with modernity’s fragments, regardless of our faith tradition. The damage inflicted by these fragments, and their potential to cause further harm, must be honestly faced. Only then can we learn how to handle them carefully to build the home we need today.

The third illusion is the quest for pure religious ideals. We can value these ideals to the point where they obscure the reality staring us in the face. I experienced this in an academic seminar last year. A guest speaker from an evangelical theological college felt comfortable enough to spout some of the most extreme homophobia I’ve heard in a while. I had to sit and listen to him say that opposition to same-sex relationships was intrinsic to the gospel. In softly spoken academese, this man told me that my 20-year relationship with my husband, one of the most deeply nourishing aspects of my life, was the antithesis of Jesus’ message and mission. I graciously asked the speaker to consider how what he’d said might affect people in his audience such as myself, but he was unmoved. He was clear that the academic context didn’t require any kind of pastoral approach on his part. This moment revealed how ethically warped his theology was. Here he was, in the same room as a person who was clearly distressed by what he had said, but he was unable to extend a hand across the divide and engage with reality. His theological ideals rendered him unable to engage with the real world. His quest for purity created a fracture in that seminar room. But reality is dirty and refuses such pure, hermetically sealed ideals. I need a faith that takes this dirtiness seriously because we are creatures made from dirt. The pure spiritual realm of ideals cannot save us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that those who love their ideal of community more than the people in it kill their community. Their love of the ideal prevents that ideal from ever being realised. Even traditions that aspire to earthiness such as neopaganism can work with an idealised view of nature, one that doesn’t consider the industrial actuality of much of the countryside. This is why Jesus said love of God is shown through love of neighbour and enemy. Loving our ideal of the intangible God is not a substitute for our loving the real, messy person in front of us. I want a faith that is wary of romanticism and confronts material reality. I still have hopes and aspirations, but I need to be continually open to a loving confrontation with dirty truths.

Where does this rejection of purity leave me? Does abandoning myself to the dirt leave me with anything solid to cling to? There are still fragments from the Christian tradition that speak to me. There are three particular fragments I attempt to hold gently with open palms, reflecting my own love of the theological poem that is the Trinity. First, God, the Ancient One, Grandmother of us all, the Holy and Unnameable, is beyond culture, beyond our traditions and ideals. The word ‘God’ is made up, one of our jagged and dangerous fragments, but what ‘God’ names is not something of my creation. Something that is beyond culture is beyond speech, beyond thought. It can only be pointed towards, never grasped. This is why I’m suspicious of any claim to unmediated access to God. Our experience of God is always mediated through culture, through our meaning-making systems. In this way my theology is ‘apophatic’, with a lot of room for Mystery. Second is the Incarnation, the idea that God is with us, that God is enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. I’m a Christmas-oriented Christian. In the Incarnation God chooses to enter culture. God gets dirty, is joined to the dirt. God is revealed in the joyful messiness of flesh. In this way my theology is ‘kataphatic.’ As well as the unnameable Mystery, there are things we can say positively about God. Third, the Divine Spirit of Christ is available to us now as comforter and guide. What brings joy and freedom? What brings abundant life? Where is love and truth? These questions help me to follow the Spirit’s trail, which appears to be leading me out of the institutional churches altogether. Maybe the muddy tracks of a pilgrimage route or the sweaty exertions of the gay club dance floor are better settings for the dirty religion I’m after.

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[1] I found the idea of living among fragments in Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 16; and David Tracy, Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time. Selected Essays, Volume 1 (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

[2] For a good introduction to constructive theology, see Jason Wyman, ‘Constructive Theology: History, Movement, Method’, in What Is Constructive Theology? Histories, Methodologies, and Perspectives, ed. Marion Grau and Jason Wyman, Rethinking Theologies: Constructing Alternatives in History and Doctrine (London ; New York: T&T Clark, 2020), 9–30.

Cover image by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash