My name is Rev. Richard Bowles, I’m the Associate Minister of Simplicity Christian Church, a small progressive congregation in Edmond, Oklahoma. I’m married to a wonderful and supportive husband. A couple months ago, Dr. Steve Schmidt, the brilliant mind behind this site, decided to hand the reins over to me as the new Managing Editor for Impact. Here is a snippit of my story and a bit of my queer progressive theology.
I came out of the closet as a gay Christian publicly about twelve years ago. It was on Facebook. I was sitting down in a building called The Nowlin Center, which is a small commons area on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University, where I had just completed my bachelors degree in Youth Ministry. As is the case with a lot of the other queer people I spend time with, I knew that the second I posted the status was a dramatic paradigm shift in my life. I knew that a page had turned onto a new chapter. The minutes directly before hitting “post” and the minutes after were going to exist in two separate universes. I hit “post,” closed my laptop, and, refusing to look at my phone, decided to take a walk. I knew that my life was changing quite a bit online while I was walking from the Nowlin Center to the Student Center.
I had just finished working for a small Church of Christ in Tulsa. The Churches of Christ are, generally speaking, a fundamentalist and highly conservative Christian denomination. And it was the denomination that I had called “home” ever since I first walked through a church door at the age of fifteen in 2005. I had been invited by a boy I had a crush on. That’s why I said “yes” to the invitation. I was introduced to Jesus by a gay teenage crush.
The two summers before that, I worked as a youth ministry intern for one of the largest and most conservative Churches of Christ in the Pacific Northwest. The summer before that I worked for a fairly conservative church of Christ in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. A year before that I was a senior in high school at a conservative Church of Christ in Bixby, Oklahoma. I knew that most of those connections that I had built up over the years were now severed – possibly forever.
And yet I absolutely had to do it. In the pastoral world we call it “being called.” I learned a lot about what it means to be called when I came out of the closet. Because I was being pulled into the direction of worshipping the Bigger God – the God of the hurting; the Suffering God, the Crucified God. Coming out of the closet is choosing to walk in the truth, and the truth needs to be told. The mask had to come off. The False Self had to give way to the True Self. Light had to replace darkness. So I took a leap of faith and trusted in God that I would still have a place to land, even if God was the only ally I had.
There have been two Christianities at work in the world for thousands of years. And it’s inevitable because the Christian Movement is made out of beautiful and complicated human beings, which means that Christianity is always going to be multivalent. Our religion is a prism, and always will be. We receive what God shows us through our own unique presuppositional lenses, which then is interpreted by our own context and released back into the world as the amalgamation of divine encounter and our individual biases. An unfortunate consequence of the beauty of the spectrum of thought that comes out of this religious prism is that we have a Christianity that worships the god of the powerful and a Christianity that worships the God of the marginalized. Only one of those gods is real.
I am convinced that I would not have had the resolve to come out of the closet if I did not first abandon my faith in a small and insecure god and found the Bigger God, the Divine Source of all life, truth, and mystery. Our Creator is a Queer God. “Queerness” is the idea that people are not easily categorized. We cannot be easily placed within certain boxes such as gender, sexuality, political affiliation, or our different ways of thinking about God. It’s a word that’s been used to incite violence against the LGBTQ+ Community for decades and so we’ve captured it for ourselves and are now repurposing it to describe the beautiful queer truth of God’s creation.
So Queer Theology is a way of discussing God that does not place limitations of categorization on God. The Queer God is the Christ that became messy and beautiful and complicated humanity. It is the God who took the holy dirt on the holy ground, comingled it with God’s holy spit, rubbed that holy mess into someone’s holy eyes and made that holy person see. The Queer God makes the dust sacred.
The Gospel of Luke 18:1-8 says:
Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?
This passage is describing the difference between the binary god and the Queer God. The overall point of the Parable of the Unjust Judge is to emphasize the faithfulness of God’s justice for the vulnerable. Jesus contrasts the love of Christ to the shallow justice of an unnamed judge who does not care for the plight of the marginalized – in this case a widow in a first century Greco-Roman society. If even some random jerk bothers to have mercy on this widow how much more justice will be dispensed from the Source of all Existence? You can picture the Unjust Judge being the tiny petty ego-driven binary god of the powerful, while the just Christ telling the parable is the Queer Christ of the marginalized, the persistent and the hurting who will be heard regardless of how much the powerful try to shut them up.
When God is outside of our boxes, God does not begrudgingly and half-heartedly toss little mercies at us. God is actually with us. God is right next to the persistent widow. God is seeking justice right alongside her, God’s fist is shaking with hers at the unjust god worshipped by so many who have not tapped into their imaginations.
To really get a picture of the difference between these two gods, I find that one of the most helpful word choices is simply life and death. The Queer Christ is the Source of our Life and our Hope. The binary god can only lead to death and despair, and we can tell just by looking at the rotten fruit that god produces. Which god tells the gay kid that they do not belong in the house of God? Which one creates homeless youth? Which one convinces parents that their children are somehow dead because they are living into the truth of their creation? The truth is that the Queer God, the Creator of the Universe is the gay kid getting kicked out of the house. Our God is not merely cheering for us on the sidelines but is right there next to us. That is a God that I can have faith in.
I do not have faith in a binary god. I do not have faith in a god that is merely black and white – without nuance. I do not have faith in a god that sides with the powerful and leaves the marginalized defenseless. I do not have faith in a god of the status quo. I do not have faith in a god of heteronormativity. I do not believe in a god of Patriarchy. I do not have faith in a god who bears rotten fruit that gives no life to creation. I do not have faith in a god of death. I do not have faith in a god of systemic power structures that injure the vulnerable. I do not have faith in a god of injustice. I do not have faith in a god that looks just like me or my idealized vision of what I think God should look like. I do not have faith in a god of Empire, Pharaoh, America, or Caesar because that god is not and cannot be interested in creating a new world.
Just like I cannot have hope in a petty binary system. In the twelfth chapter of Romans, the letter so often used to bludgeon LGBTQ+ people, we find, instead of a defense of bigotry, a call to not take part in dead systems. Paul says to not “be conformed to the patterns of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Rom. 12:2, NIV) I know that for so many, that passage was basically taught as meaning “don’t smoke, don’t drink, and don’t have sex.” People have tried to water-down the message being discussed here in order to fit the wrong narrative. When the Bible talks about patterns of the world, it’s talking about what we sometimes refer to as “The Powers and Principalities” – the forces that exist over humanity that try to stifle our lives. That renewal cannot happen within the boundaries of the binary.
The renewing of our minds cannot conform to the dead systems of power that have been used to undermine humanity. Patriarchy, racism, homophobia, greed, and other Powers that exist over us cannot be given the final word, and we definitely cannot conform to them. All of those sins are attempts by the powerful to step on those who they believe are voiceless. But God gives women a voice. God gives voices to those of us in the LGBTQ+ Community. God gives a voice to People of Color crying out against senseless murder by those who are supposed to be protecting them. God gives a voice to the immigrant struggling to find a way in a world that cages their children.
I am an atheist to the god of privilege. The seemingly powerful straight white cis-gendered masculine American perception of God is a figment of the imagination of comfortable people, made in their own image. A god that is Israeli but not also Palestinian is no god at all. A god that is a white straight male is not and cannot be the Crucified and Resurrected God. Ours is a God of many voices. Ours is a God of Divine Mystery and Truth – the Holy Spirit and Breath that blows throughout all of creation. Ours is a God that is able to be both Rock of our Salvation and Breath Flowing Through Us.
I did not merely come out of the closet, but I was called. God calls all of us to live into the truth in which God created us. When we come out of the closet, we are ministering to those who have not experienced a multivalent Creator. We are missionaries to a church that does not yet know itself.
So my fellow LGBTQ+ people and our allies, keep the faith. Our God is with us. We do not worship a god that ordains violence against the vulnerable. Ours is not an unjust judge who could not care less about those who are seeking justice. Ours is the God of the renewed mind. The truth is, I only have faith in a Queer God. Because the Queer God is the creator who makes creation sacred and holy. The Queer God is our advocate. The Queer God was crucified at the hands of binary thinking. And the Queer God has Resurrected and is in the continual process of Resurrecting our beautiful and tumultuous queer universe.