Queer Theory and Theology Can Help Widen Church’s Understandings of God and Creation

Catholic theologians are recognizing how queer theory and queer theology can provide understandings of both God and humanity beyond dualistic ideas about gender.

In U.S. Catholic, author Ellyn Sanna encourages thinking about God to move beyond categories of male and female into an expansive view that more accurately reflects the realities of nature, as well as the breadth of Scripture’s gendered language. Sanna observes at how difficult it is to think outside the gender binary paradigm:

“This binary division is baked into the Euro-American mind. We often think of it as something so obvious, so based on common sense, that we apply it to all beings, including God. It doesn’t matter that biological research reflects a far more complicated and varied reality; it doesn’t matter that other cultures and historical periods have looked at gender differently. Although both the Bible and earlier church tradition used gender-fluid metaphors and concepts, we’ve been overlooking those for centuries…we’re still applying them to every baby who’s born–and we’re still using them to understand God.”

Sanna utilizes scholarship from neurobiologists to religious leaders in rejecting these older categories and illustrating how the Biblical images of God range from masculine pronouns due to Hebrew grammar to feminine physical traits of the divine womb and God as “Many-Breasted” (El Shaddai). She points to the early church council of Toledo in the 7th century, which claimed that “the Son came from the womb of the Father,” and to gender-bending language from Julian of Norwich and St. Bernard of Clairvaux to drive home the point that thinking outside the binary is not new for Christian theology.

The author quotes Bishop John Stowe, OFM Cap., of Lexington, who acknowledges the primacy of male language in the Trinity, but also warns against any insistence of God as male, calling it “support of a patriarchal culture that diminishes the importance of females or only sees them as subservient to men.”

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, affirmed that male language for the divine causes people to image God as male: “The image that so many of us were given of God as the stern old white man sitting on a throne is exclusionary. If you’re not white, not male, not rich and powerful, not well-dressed with a team of angelic servants, how can you aspire to godliness?”

La Croix International recently featured an interview with theologian Anne Guillard of the European University Institute and Oxford University. Her work, too, engages queer theology, particularly around Christian anthropology, or our understanding of being human.

For Guillard, the very structure of the church is founded on patriarchy and a masculine God, and so to call into question male/female complementarity is to do the work of justice on the margins. Her book, Dieu.e, feminizes the French name for God, pushing beyond the binary even in its title:

“It is not a question of replacing one text with another, but rather of taking the spiritual and intellectual liberty to go beyond this need to categorize by feminine and masculine…why not accept that gender identity can take on an infinite number of forms, especially in qualifying God who always transcends all these categories?”

Guillard uses early church thinkers, such as 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, to make the point that even then, gender was a purely societal construct erased at the Resurrection. She notes that queer theology can “speak of the infinite singularity of bodies, without recreating categories or hierarchies among them. This is a theology of incarnation.”

Language shapes so much of our understanding of both God and ourselves. It also creates a church and culture that either rejects the LGBTQ+ community or welcomes all in the spirit of an expansive God who isn’t constrained by simplistic categories. A transgender teen interviewed in Sanna’s article explains the harm caused by patriarchal imagery as:

“The message I got at church was that God was male and I was a boy, and that was that.  I didn’t like myself . . . and I didn’t like God because he was like the big enforcer who’d send me to hell for being a girl. When someone told me God could be a woman, my first thought was, well, then, so can I.”

This radical acceptance is what Guillard means when she says that “queer theology takes the revolution generated by Christianity very seriously.” This work, rooted in love and justice, can continue to transform our understanding of God, of ourselves, and of our church if we think beyond the binary toward transcendence and awe.

—Angela Howard McParland (she/her), New Ways Ministry, July 26, 2023