Patriarchal religion is dying. And by patriarchal I mean the worship of the father god, that big guy in the sky, the bowing, the submission, the hierarchy of domination implicit in language, symbol and story. Mostly, I refer to Christianity (my lived experience), but also to a lesser extent Judaism and Islam.
Christianity is male supremacy. Women were seen as second-class for hundreds of years; while most denominations now permit women pastors, the Australian Catholic Church still does not allow women to be deacons or priests. This faith is also historically intertwined with white supremacy and colonisation.
It’s all getting a little old, isn’t it? No wonder millions have left the church. I was a Pentecostal for 13 years and now that I’ve washed that away, I believe Australia should abandon the cosmological bondage to daddy god.
Apostasy may not come easy. Among those unwilling, unready or unable to leave, I see an ambition to reform the system from within.
This is already happening around the world. The book Defecting in Place cites research arising from interviews with more than 4000 Catholic and Protestant (unfortunately mostly white) women in America in the 1990s. They found many women “defected in place”: they refused to resign to gender inequality and chose instead to become agents of change, transforming the tradition from within. This looks like creating new rituals, reimagining God as Goddess or reinterpreting scripture.
It’s time to take this a step further. If dying patriarchal religions are to survive, believers who want to keep the faith must queer religion.
The word “queering” comes from a “queer reading” of literature or film, where heteronormativity or gender norms are challenged with alternative readings of the text. So, how to join the profound number of rainbow believers in queering systems of faith?
The first step is to actively resist homophobia in religious communities, apologise for the violence of the past, and create a welcoming space for all genders and sexualities. Queers Be With You runs educational workshops to guide churches on how to be LGBTQIA+ inclusive. Radical inclusivity is so much more than a tick on a diversity checklist; it offers spaces where people can feel safe and free.
Queer theology asks us to decentralise the male hetero experience (this already happens in some spaces). The Pass. The. Mic. organisation invites a diverse range of congregants to interpret scripture, perform rites and speak – preferably with a feminist, queer and/or antiracist reading. Aisya Zaharin, a Malaysian Muslim academic living in Meanjin, reinterprets Islamic texts from her perspective as a trans woman. These diverse voices invite more people to feel welcome and seen.
The third act of queering religion is to widen the understanding of the divine. While the masculine image of god excludes women and non-binary people from seeing themselves as the face of perfection and power, the Holy Spirit’s pronoun differs between languages and traditions; following this logic, god could be gender-fluid. The borders of gender, narrowly defined and once seen as fixed, have been played with, reversed, dissolved. Rev Anna Karin Hammar, a gay priest I interviewed in Sweden, uses god-words like You, Source of my Life, Love of my Being. None correspond to gender. This allows a more expansive understanding of the divine, favouring a mysticism of questions over answers, paradoxes over clear lines – eroding rules and law, and hopefully judgment, guilt and shame.
Queering religion stems from a theology of liberation in which radical love is religion’s core, and god sides with the oppressed. To be queer is to be outside society’s norms. Aligning with the oppressed and fighting systems of domination – minus the saviour complex, please! – gives believers a chance to practise what they preach.
Are you like me – have you killed the god in your head? Or are you taking on the ambitious task of defecting in place? Be heartened – these urgent conversations are already happening across religious communities. It’s time to come together and plot a revolution from within.
