who come to ex-gay ministries in a sympathetic way.Not an easy topic to discuss! Erzen does a good but not great job. Good, because she has humanized a population generally vilified by nearly everyone. But not great, because she doesn't really go that deep. The men (and a few women) who spend a year or more at a place like New Hope are suffering from a kind of divided self (to use a term from William James I've been using in the class), a self so divided it might better be called tortured. Erzen doesn't capture the torture because she doesn't really get the religious part - if only these guys knew that homosexuality isn't mentioned in the Bible, she implies, if only they knew that the few passages taken to be about it can be read differently! If only it were that simple. She doesn't really get the sexual part, either - the experience of your own desire as anarchic, meaningless, destructive.
I took the occasion to unveil my new view of religious studies as the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real (which you saw emerge at AAR last November, at which point I mentioned questions like: is there life after death, do animals have souls, is there purpose in the universe, does the devil exist?). No other discipline really does this. It also requires that we find ways of writing which don't take sides. This may not be possible, ultimately, but it is certainly virtuous to try! Sexuality is a perfect (if very difficult) test case for thinking of the non-consensus on the real - way more demanding than maintaining a studied agnosticism about the existence of a distant God, or an afterlife, or other things which aren't right here right now. Erzen doesn't really make it, since she makes clear throughout that she accepts modern secular views of sexuality.
To show what Erzen doesn't consider, I found myself giving an account of the sacred mystery of reproduction: nothing human beings do is as powerful or mysterious. That you can do other things with the organs designed for reproduction is uninteresting by comparison, and the difference between different kinds of misuse less significant than that between misuse and proper use, which is, I suggested, on the order of the difference between the finite and the infinite. I suppose that's a more Catholic than Evangelical view of sexuality, but I needed to make the point in the strongest terms - and besides: Evangelicals have been cribbing sexual ethics from Catholics at least since the mid 1970s. I didn't talk about sin, though. Oops.
I was surprised at how easy it was to rehearse this view. Is it the internalized Catholic upbringing? Maybe not (there wasn't that much of it, to be honest), or not just. The flip side of my religious studies persona, which enjoys the possibility of alternative realities, is the one which is slowly but steadily coming to terms with the fact that human beings live in perishable bodies of a particular design on particular parts of a particular planet, surrounded by the contingencies of evolution, history, language... While sexuality is a modern construct and understandings of gender vary culturally, it is a "brute fact of the universe" (as my friend Kevin Olson used to say), along with mortality, that some acts create new life. This is an astounding thing in some way qualitatively different from everything else human beings do. This isn't at heart a religious view, I don't think, but I can see how it might inspire or require religious elaboration like that I gave in class today. (This isn't to say that it's the only or even main source of normative heterosexuality, which is held in place by all the structures, habits and pleasures of patriarchal hierarchy.)
What would an account of New Hope look like which called in question not only the idea of a distinct homosexual identity (which Erzen thinks she's rejecting) but the very category of sexuality which sees procreative acts as no more than a subset, sometimes marvelous sometimes inconvenient? Now try not taking sides between that view and the contemporary liberal understandings and experiences of sexuality. Is it even possible? Could one describe even a single episode of desire? Wish us luck! We've two more classes to discuss Erzen but the methodological questions - and ethical one, too - will accompany us through the rest of the course.
