Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith

by Mihee Kim-Kort

Queerness is an ethic. It is a decidedly intentional personal identity, but always, a social and political identity. It addresses the real world, the everyday, and all the struggles inherent inside and outside a person. It is always an act of protest, a revolt, a demonstration, a rallying around people’s humanity and dignity when larger institutions threaten it. It is advocacy. But more than an alliance, it is “allyship.” That means accompanying people in their journeys through listening, respecting, confronting, standing with, confessing, and being responsible. It means showing up even if you don’t get it or understand it or even agree with it. It means addressing all the bodily realities of people who are daily facing erasure and violence in all its forms—physical, structural, psychic, spiritual, and religious.

Jesus the Christ, the carpenter from Galilee, was viewed as a radical and confronted traditions and institutions. He implicitly and organically lived, ministered, and died in such a way that he was grounded in his context as a first-century Jew yet challenged the racial, sexual, cultural, religious, and economic realities and more around him.

Queerness matters. It is a matter of faith and a matter of spirituality. It matters to people who are trying to live but dying because of who they are and who they love. It matters to me as I struggle to orient myself in this world truthfully. It can matter to anyone, whether we identify with queerness or not, whether it resonates a little or a lot—because whenever we love ourselves and our neighbors with the boundary-breaking love of God, we enact this queer spirituality in the world. Queerness matters because we need to see all the ways that we ourselves are loved by God, and loved in so many ways. And then we see and feel this in the myriad ways people love each other, which deepens and widens the very love of God in the world.

Desire gives us a more authentic picture of who we are, and love is one way we know it and live it out. But, love, as we traditionally understand it, is fraught with conventions, rituals, traditions, and regulations.

When we are rooted in the queer love of God, all our existing boundaries dissolve—and these boundaries do not merely exist between people but are the kinds of lines drawn around people, marking off who we think we are or should be, and what that looks like.

A queer spirituality challenges the compartments that we, not God, have created. A queer spirituality encourages us toward candid questioning what stirs our hearts. A queer spirituality urges us not to blindly accept what culture gives us but to interrogate it thoughtfully, wholeheartedly, and prayerfully. A queer spirituality welcomes desire. The butterflies we feel, the restlessness and longing, all have so much to tell us about ourselves. Even more so, they have something to tell us about a God who desires life and love for each of us.

Identity is deeply important. It frames how we see, how we color, how we move and breathe through this world. It’s a point of contact for others and the way we get under each other’s skin and, eventually, connect to one another. But it’s mediated by generations, economic systems, and cultural processes, and it’s imposed upon us by social, familial, political expectations. Identity is clothes and gestures, language and eye shape, hair length and skin color, body shape and genitalia. Identity is reiterated through language and images, and then regulated by structures of power and ideology such as state agencies and religious institutions. We are all constantly negotiating our identities in relation to each other and to what is happening in the world, and this process takes place within the communities and networks we find ourselves. It’s no wonder that we gravitate to colors to begin organizing human existence. Identity is so complex, and we have to start from somewhere.

We are all an amalgamation of stories and dreams, histories and genetics, easily affected by lunar cycles, barometric pressure, and sunshine. We’re made of stardust, and each of us is a complicated mashup of ancestors, cultures, ideologies, and time period. We are created in the image of the one who is named “I am who I am,” and somehow we are called to the same work of creation, of imagining, of redeeming, of calling out, of sanctifying, of living and moving throughout this world.

God gave ha-‘adam dominion over all creation and empowered the earth creature to name all things in existence. In doing so, God bound creation to humanity and made humanity a co-creator with God. Naming is powerful but such a responsibility. Biblical theologian Phyllis Trible gives us a compelling reinterpretation of a passage normally cited for traditional, patriarchal roles and gender categories. She writes that this creature need not necessarily be thought of as male. Rather, the Hebrew text presents us with a word-play: ha-‘adam (“earth creature”) is created from the earth, ha-‘adamah.[2]

A queer spirituality reminds me that beneath any struggle and story is a desire to love and be loved, and to love extravagantly and capaciously—to love without holding back.

Hospitality is a continuous recognition of another’s humanity, and simultaneously, it’s a loving solidarity with that person. Further, it is seeing not only the humanity of the person in front of us but our own humanity, too.

This is at the heart of the Christian faith, to love my neighbor as myself, including love of what is traditionally categorized—whether by policy or prejudice, ideology or theology—as foreign, other, alien, or stranger. And then, even more strange—and queer—love extends to those who are deemed my enemy, that is, those who hate me. It means, then, that we do not see anyone as a stranger or foreigner or outsider or enemy; every human being shares our humanity. Every human being is our neighbor.

The irony is that “biblical marriage” is really twentieth-century norms that are rooted in some notion of the nuclear family and homophobia.

What I realize I need and want to be a part of is a kind of work that cultivates the expansiveness of love. 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. If anything, it’s absolutely clear that this world needs more love. Rather than focusing so much energy on categorizing and classifying sexuality and making it conform to narrow representations, I long for our world to encourage lovemaking, to spark in those around me a desire to love ourselves and love each other into more life and love. Because if there is anything I’ve learned about love, whether experienced among family, friends, or my children, it is that it is contagious and expands exponentially. It overflows the cup. Once released and liberated, it changes everything.