Queer Theoanthropology

Rene Girard often talks about Christianity through an anthropological lens. He talks of the prechristian, pagan, society and how its cohesion relies on a sacrificial process; a scapegoating; a purging of the ills of the world through the innocent sacrifice. He says every religion has a founding murder, and that Christianity comes to disrupt the whole paradigm of religion by revealing this murder; self-conscious self-sacrifice of his (Jesus’) own innocence rather than through the will of the collective. Evisceration, outsideness, exile, these tools no longer form any power base in the face of the loving autocide.

The Hebrew word satan translates to the accuser. This is the observation of Christianity, that the evils holding us back from whatever force it is moving us towards some idea or ideal of justice is the desire to accuse, to punish, to cast out and ultimately to sacrifice. It is a will to power, worship of strength at the cost of innocence. It is what pervades national socialism, discord servers, the Salem witch trials, the inquisition. Herein I separate out the moral project of Christianity from the particular institutions of Christianity, many of which have fallen short of their own standard. The figure of Christ, then, is that of advocate: he who resists pettiness and the social domination of the weak, the defenceless, he who disrupts the fabric of cohesion based on the scapegoat and forces us to become something more. Jesus, as a situationist, creates the spectacle of his own sacrifice as a lesson to the absurdity of sacrifice altogether- it is a rallying call that if we ever wish to purify our souls we must eradicate every sacrificial impulse from ourselves.

Justice is a slippery concept. It is not a numerical value we can optimise for, nor is it a specified end goal. It reveals itself to us as a force crying out for something other than where we are. Its existence is self-evident, but its nature every eluding capture or interpretation. In fact, it is often only at the borders of interpretation (economic collapse, social outcasting, even the literal borders of nations themselves), in the liminality of our collective consciousness, that it reveals itself to people. Queerness, as understood by queer theory, occupies this space. In fact, we can think of the whole postmodern project as a theological retelling of post-rationalism; an attempt to use the apparatus of rationalism to expose rationalisms own blind spots and expose the cracks through which the spirit of justice can seep through. The spirit of justice and the holy the spirit are one and the same, as a resistance to the impulse to murder and scapegoat; as an exposing of a mystical unknowable force that reveals itself to us and inspires us to act. Thus the theological status of the queer person is theoanthropolocially fascinating. It positions them at all times headlong into the stream of this force. While many choose to ignore it and go about a simulacrum of the idealised reality of whatever entity controls the material reality of the world, the vital force controlling that materiality will always be there like a stream, ready to drown in.

The civilising process, the process that fails for queer people, is one wherein the core response-infrastructure of ontopower is built. The tools we use to interpret the world, ‘common sense’, the reproductive social contractual fabric of the post-agricultural. The more fundamental class distinction than economic is that of civilised vs uncivilised. In becoming the lynchpin of civilisation in the west, Christianity failed in its own moral project. In embedding its priestly classes within the political-power relations of the world, their queerness is lost (they exit from the reproductive realm, to dedicate themselves to the liminality of god). We have been living with the farce of Christianity for at least several hundred years now. It is when Christianity embraces its essential faggotry, allows those perpetually ostracised to lead with thought, and embraces the downfallen, decivilised and disgusting as the source of all its use, then we will have something resembling a church worth worshipping.

Go back home.