Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith

by Mihee Kim-Kort

Purity isn’t just about sex or sexuality, or about gender identity and gender roles; it’s always about race and ethnicity, nationality, ability, and more. To define itself, it needs the Other. It needs those binaries of black or white, colonizer or colonized, father or daughter, male or female, chaste or defiled. These categories are necessary for purity to be useful as an instrument that propagates a certain system that gives power to some.

The virgin daughters at purity balls are caught in a similar system of oppression and coercion. Despite all their economic and social status, they are victims of the patriarchal institutions of family and religion. The only benefits they glean from their enculturation in this system are institutional approval and protection from the consequences, as long as they don’t break the rules of this system. They are passive participants with little voice or agency. Their bodies are used to perpetuate certain identities and sexualities—white, heterosexual, and Christian—which are privileged but lifeless outside of purity. These balls, then, are not just father-daughter dances.

queer spirituality resists these systems, and it interrogates the existence of purity as morality and purity as identity. A queer spirituality creates the possibility of a new kind of faithfulness that is oriented away from the center of power and privilege.

The people who demand purity want to control holiness and faithfulness, and in essence, they want to control people—their bodies, their souls.

But the value of a human being is love, not morality, not virginity, and not whiteness or proximity to whiteness.

Purity is insidious this way. It pretends that the categories are clear-cut, but it relies on the ways identity is full of paradoxes and contradictions.

Our value, our worth doesn’t lie in the abstract or ideal of virginity. And purity isn’t love. Morality isn’t love. Holiness isn’t love. Love is love. And every human being is worthy of it, of dignity, of agency, of grace.

What if all I really needed to do was simply be present? After all, God calls himself a lover and a parent, and perhaps there is something to learn in embracing my life rather than trying to escape it so I can have real communion with God.[1]

embracing the ordinary and everyday as a sacred act.

queering church means throwing open those doors and breaking down those walls, especially when it comes to participating in community life—the way we gather together, the way we worship, the spaces we find ourselves in. Queering church means queering our faith lives, too, and those boundaries and legalistic expectations to check off the religious to-do list. Queerness opens us to a more thoughtful and meaningful perspective, a willingness to see the possibility in what is different: all the different seasons and struggles, abilities, multiplicities, and convictions of each individual.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.

Thankfully, that peace is persistent; it won’t give up on me, even if it shows up in the queerest ways.

My living into queerness is rooted in belovedness and the beloved community. A queer spirituality makes space for cultivating belovedness, and though I have struggled with obligations to the church (believing and thinking that my faith and spiritual practices had to happen in the church), without the local church I wouldn’t have expanded my understanding of spirituality and church.

peace isn’t always accompanied by a feeling, but that it is a symptom of wholeheartedness.

When asked, “Why church?” a queer spirituality says, “Because we believe in each other.”

I dream often of the kind of world we could have for us, for our children, if we weren’t so concerned with regulating, disciplining, and closeting love all the time.