Many divinity schools and some progressive churches are now promoting the concept of a “queer Jesus” and beginning to incorporate transgenderism and homosexuality into theological training, through queer theology, reports RealClearInvestigations.
“Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity,” it reports.
It gives many examples, such as at Duke University’s divinity school where “future religious leaders conduct a Pride worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The service leads off with a prayer honoring God as queerness incarnate: ‘You are drag queen and transman and genderfluid, incapable of limiting your vast expression of beauty.’”
Queer theology also denigrates things like marriage, capitalism, and monogamy. As RealClearInvestigations explains:
In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure.
A Presbyterian church commemorated the Transgender Day of Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”
“Queer theology” continues to spread, despite the fact that homosexuality is condemned in both the New Testament (by Saint Paul) and the Old Testament (such as in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13). RealClearInvestigations notes:
Courses on queer theology are offered at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School, whose spring 2023 catalog lists “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” The class trains ministers and educators in “subverting the heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression in American ecclesial spaces.”
Wake Forest University’s divinity program offers a course called “Readings in Queer Theology” and another course, “Queer Theologies.” The latter course’s catalog description shows how the field has proliferated and branched out into its own subspecialties: LGBTQ+ inclusive theologies, intersectional queer of color critiques, queer sexual ethics and activism, and queer ecotheologies.
“Jesus’s empowered companionship or God’s reign is radically queer in its inclusivity attracting queer outsiders.…Jesus is out of place with heteronormativity; he subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders,” claims a former Jesuit priest, Robert Shore-Goss, who is now a pastor at a church that performs “polyamory nuptial rites.” He accuses RealClearInvestigations, of being complicit in ” the GOP cultural genocide of LGBTQ+ people.” (The RealClearFoundation that created RealClearInvestigations is a non-partisan, tax-exempt foundation that routinely runs opinion pieces by both conservatives, progressives, Republicans, Democrats, and independents, especially at its Real Clear Politics and Real Clear Policy web sites).
Some have a negative reaction to Queer Theology. RCI notes:
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
