Ep. 59: Queer Jesus w/ Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk
Show Notes
Episode Summary
CW: strong language.
Christians were never meant to be normal, we've always been "holy troublemakers" who do not accept the world as it is but who insist on the world becoming the way God wants it to be. Our friends at The Center for Prophetic Imagination describe it as, “A world where all walls of alienation are torn down as we live justly with one another.” I like that.
From the very beginning, Jesus called us to be a beloved community of resistance to the brutal normalcy of a world dominated by the powers and principalities of darkness. Often, that darkness comes to us cloaked in day to day normality, in the run of the mill ideology of white, cis gender, patriarchal ideology. But racism, transphobia, homophobia, economic injustice, violence, patriarchy, and white supremacy are only normal in a world dominated by oppression.
In this prophetic episode, we talk with Ashe Van Steenwyk about what it might look like for you and I to "confront not only the institutions and systems and structures that control and constrain our material lives, but also the myths, beliefs, and ideas that shape and bind our imaginations." And what better way to do that than to embody the radical, subversive way of Jesus who came to upend life as we know it.
Some of the questions we seek to answer in this episode include:
What do we mean when we say Jesus was queer?
How do we discern what is real?
How do we push back against injustice without losing our souls?
How do we not only resist evil, but redeem evil?
What does it look like to carve out new possibilities in a world of forced conformity?
What if everything we call 'normal' is really just evil in disguise?
What if what we believe to be profane is actually holy and what we have been told is orthodoxy is just a set of lies created to keep us in line?
How do we resist dominance and power? And where have even liberal and progressive Christians been captivated by oppressive systems and structures?
Bio
M. Ashe (she/they) is the co-founder of the Center for Prophetic Imagination. She is a writer, teacher, organizer, and spiritual director. For nearly 15 years, she has sown seeds of subversive spirituality throughout North America. Ashe is the author of That Holy Anarchist, unKingdom, and A Wolf at the Gate. You can find out more about Ashe here. The Center for Prophetic Imagination works to subvert the existing social order through deep discernment culminating with creative action.
Quotables
“I’m currently 46 years old, and I learned that I was a transwoman when I was 45.”
“My interior experience of things, I thought were off, but the way I looked at and perceived things was always queer.”
“I always found myself in the nooks and crannies and the margins of places not because I was such a great ally, but because those places felt safe.”
“The queer magic was there even then.”
“There’s so many layers to what happens when you say Jesus is queer. It disrupts so many things.”
“In so far that we want to claim that God is present or real in some way, we have to start from this place of the oppressed and marginalized that God identifies there.”
“Homosexuality is a modern concept.”
“Queerness is just a framework for looking back and we can look back at a lot of things through that lens.”
“If we look back, things are queerer than we think they are. And Jesus did not fit the ideal of what some dude is supposed to be.”
“(Queer Jesus) exposes what people think not only as normal, but what people think of as holy. And it exposes the fact that they see me as fundamentally profane.”
“I’m all in on Team Jesus.”
“Even what empire means is a complicated thing. In the most generic sense an empire is a nation exerting coercive dominance over other nations. And America fits that definition.”
“The way we do empire now is different…the Bezos’ and Bill Gates, they are a superstructure of the super wealthy that exist at a global level.”
“An empire is a nexus, a cluster of oppressive systems.”
“We either go to war or we exert dominance in other ways. But either way, we have to normalize it.”
“We’ve been at war more often than we haven’t been, and we barely notice it because it is normalized.”
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Credits
This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.
Don’t just reconstruct your faith, ReWild your faith by trading in certainty for wonder and literalism for mystery. This episode with Holy Heretics host Gary Alan Taylor is an introduction to spiritual rewilding through the re-introduction of indigenous spirituality and Creation-centered Christianity.