The Christian God is a queer God
I cannot begin to imagine anything queerer than the doctrine of the Trinity.
Imagine you’re back in the mid-2010s, a year or so before the post-truthers and other varieties of populist gasbags came to power in the United States and the United Kingdom and our democratic institutions came under relentless attack. Back then I was a regular on religious comment shows in the UK, wheeled in to add my own kindling to broadcasters’ attempts to fire up the culture-war issues du jour.
I’d been invited on a radio show based in Northern Ireland to talk about same-sex relationships in the church. I was in the “progressive” corner; in the other corner was a Presbyterian minister hewn pretty much out of the same rock as Ian Paisley, the hard-line Protestant leader who refused (for decades) to give ground to his Catholic counterparts, who was known for the catchphrase, “No surrender!” One might assume a battle royal would ensue. I certainly think the radio station hoped as much.
When it was my turn to speak, I sought, as a theologian, to contextualize my views in terms of the nature of God as relational and trinitarian, of the God who invites people to dwell in one another as they dwell in God. I sensed the presenter’s growing anxiety as the conservative minister made warm and sympathetic noises in response to my very obvious orthodoxy. At one point my Presbyterian colleague interjected, in his rich Northern Irish burr, “Well, I agree with Rachel.”
