by Dr Penelope Doe, University of Exeter
July General Synod approaches and the interminable conversations on LLF and PLF continue. It’s over 10 years since The Pilling Report was published, launching Diocesan Shared Conversations amongst other conversations at Synod and elsewhere. I read Pilling when it was first published, was a little surprised by how superficial I found it, and was intrigued by the tension on display between provisionality and certainty. Its hermeneutics, like those of the CoE as an institution embodying authority power, privilege, and the unalloyed goods of progress, became the subject of my PhD and now my recently published book, Queering the Church: the Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure.
This is, I think, the first time that the hermeneutics of an institution have been interrogated using queer theory and disruptive readings of the Church’s neoliberal models of growth and success, alhough Charlie Bell makes a similar challenge to ecclesial models of hegemonic normativity presented as gospel truth in his recent book, Queering Redemption (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2024). Queering the Church uses Pilling as a paradigm of the ways in which churches construct authority, success and progressiveness, and embody power and privilege. Far from eschewing the liberal secular societies of the Global North, the Church has readily embraced their neoliberal identities and practices.
What do I mean by queer/queering as a methodology? Queer is better figured, perhaps, as a verb rather than as a noun; a doing rather than a being. Since queer theory is disruptive, transgressive, and troubling, it can have no definitive logic, discourse, or end. David Halperin apprehends queer’s slipperiness in his statement that the concept owns no stable reality:
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative – a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices; it could include some married couples with children… (Saint Foucault, OUP, 1997)
I often find queer theory richer and more disruptive than queer theology. My two main conversation partners in the book are Jack Halberstam, whose Queer Art of Failure provided a methodology for queering the church, and Karen Bray whose work on a Theology for the Unredeemed (Grave Attending, Fordham University Press, 2019) suggested Holy Saturday as a site of queer temporality in which the church could learn to experience the abnegation and alterity of that liminal day, as queer people have often been coerced into the acceptance of liminality in a heteronormative church. As for that motif of failure as a ‘queer art’, it derives from Halberstam’s book which posits failure as a kind of ‘victory’ for those who fall outside the cisheteronormative models enforced by neoliberal patterns of success and progress.
First, what can Halberstam’s work offer us? By adopting the potential of failure as a means of que(e)rying the hegemonic assumptions of church reports and report writers, the Church of England might be able to embrace those whom Halberstam calls ‘the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated and the melancholic’. The Pilling Report and its ‘afterlife’ showcase mostly those voices whose authority derives from the hegemonic norms of neoliberal ideas of progress and success. Such norms are represented as Christian, often as traditional or orthodox Christianity. These prevailing ways of knowing disregard the possibilities suggested by the failure of progress, success, knowing, agreeing, and predominating.
The institutional life of church reports and debates, which is predicated on the belief in the unassailability of church polity, could, perhaps, seek for ways of knowing outside this dominant framework. Rather than ‘success’ and ‘progress’, failure’s art embraces the queer hope of unbecoming, undoing, unknowing; the ways of negativity, passivity and immaturity. Halberstam focuses on what Foucault calls ‘subjugated knowledge’ – cultural understandings that have been regarded as childish and foolish notions of possibility. It is, perhaps, ironic that a religion that enjoins its followers to be childlike has such a problem with the radical and anarchic potentialities of childishness. Failure and negativity can be redemptive.
The academic or quasi-academic language of church reports and debates acts as a gatekeeper for this discourse, making access difficult for those who do not ‘speak’ the scholarly or ecclesial vernacular. Halberstam’s appeal to the silliness and childishness of some subcultures and popular culture reminds us that meaning is made outside ‘proper’ knowledge in failure, forgetfulness, wandering and improvisation. But if we dwell in the ‘queer temporality’ of Holy Saturday, the prospect of resolution is tenuous and uncertain. Failure and the almost fugue state of Holy Saturday are the suggestive ‘solutions’ I offer to the peculiarly intractable ‘issues’ that sexuality, or rather homosexuality, poses for the church.
As for Bray, her political theology borrows from the Holy Saturday theologies of remaining explored in Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), using the mystical theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr exploring the meaning of the wordless and abandoned ‘middle’ between the cross and the resurrection. Speyr’s mystical revelations began in the Holy Week of 1941 and continued until her death in 1967. Christ’s descent into Hell was presented not as a triumphant rescue of lost souls, but as an experience of experiencing utter abandonment by the Father.
Balthasar and Speyr both saw Holy Saturday as timeless, a space where redemption is begun in a tiny drop of love, originating in Christ’s wound that will blossom and fruit: ‘This residue of love is not powerful but weary and impotent. Its movement suggests that death does not fully govern it’.
Holy Saturday is (also) a Wordless space since the Word made Flesh is, according to Balthasar and Speyr’s mystical theology, now dead. Forsaken by His Father, the Son enters into a condition of suffering and separation, of passivity and failure: ‘the Father and the Son are from the furthest reaches of each other in Hell’. In this vision of Holy Saturday, not only does the Son take on our suffering on the Cross, but also He descends into Hell where He endures alongside the dead and damned; there is nowhere now that God has not entered and no condition, however perilous, that God has not inhabited.
This concept of Holy Saturday as a Wordless space – a site of absence and failure – could be a model for the Church of England’s engagement with the troubled waters of sexuality and gender. Non-normative sexualities and genders are not in themselves ‘troubles’ to be solved, but the number of reports and debates on homosexuality are evidence that they ‘trouble’ the Church. The Church of England’s response to what it views as aberrant ways of being human can itself be ‘troubled’ (or queered) in the queer temporality of Holy Saturday rupturing the cisheteronormative utopias that the Church creates and that deny – or attempt to elide – their queer beginnings.
Holy Saturday, this ‘middle’ day, is a Wordless site in which the Church of England can remain without anticipating the certainties and realisations of Easter day. Even in its paschal liturgies, the Church seems too eager to rush from the agony and failure of the crucifixion to the joy of the resurrection without pausing to experience both the abandonment and the exiguous hope of Holy Saturday. Following the death of a naked and tortured Messiah and bereft, therefore, of hope, the Church must encounter and admit failure, so that even if rescue comes, the experience of failure will always form a part of salvation. But the Church of England baulks at the prospect, or even at the possibility of failure.
If those who produce church reports could only enter the queer temporality of this ‘middle’ day, they could face the rupture of all their certainties, encountering a provisionality that does not expect the traditional answers. They might see negativity, not as a negation of the orthodox, but as an empty space that follows the rupture of the normative. Abiding in the desolation of Holy Saturday requires, in Bray’s terms, a ‘grave attending’ to different ‘becomings’; to how ‘transformation’ and ‘living obedience’ might work out for the unredeemed. In Grave Attending (p.31) Bray writes:
Current discourses on queer temporality seek to examine the ways in which heteronormativity and white supremacy fortify the neoliberal political economy. Many queer theorists uncover the resonance between the demand to be a productive member of society and the manipulated desire to be a reproductive member of the heteronormative family. Such demands nurture in us an optimistic belief that the straighter and whiter we become, the happier we will be. This cruelly optimistic promise (to borrow from Berlant) impedes alternate desires of community, family and self.
I want to use the uncertainty, provisionality and, indeed, failure of Holy Saturday as a site for queering the hermeneutic and teleological assumptions of church discourses produced by a stable, influential, neoliberal institution – the Church of England – that reflects the values of resilience, productivity and growth promoted by the market. For Bray (p.27), grave attending is
a style of life that does not wait for resurrection as much as it tries to remain with a difference on the day after damage and death. It does not and cannot rush toward redemption out of the gravity of such damage, because it is attendant to the damage of those who, in the wake of our resurrective impulses, we have let drown.
It is not those crucified by neoliberalist ethics – which Bray describes as ‘heteropatriarchal, ableist and white supremacist’ – who need to inhabit the queer temporality of Holy Saturday, even though it is a site in which queer folk are often required to suffer simply because their bodies are figured by some churches and by some Christians as unredeemed. It is the Church, as an institution, which needs to be gravely attentive and to experience its queer temporality, rather than those who may already have suffered ecclesial trauma. Being able freely to inhabit a site of suffering and failure requires a level of privilege not always afforded to those whose lives are marked as unproductive or liminal. As I write in the conclusion:
I want to end with the hope that, by troubling the waters of ecclesial discourse on (homo)sexuality, I have indicated a site – a place of desertion – where the Church of England might reflect on the art of unknowing, undoing, unbecoming; on the ‘queer art of failure’.
Any thoughts?