Recently, I said something on The Sacred Resonance Podcast that got some people talking. I said that I had been delivered from heteronormativity into queerness. Some people appreciated the statement, while others had questions about what I meant. And, of course, there were those who insisted that someone cannot be both queer and Christian. Which is interesting, considering I’m literally doing it.
But beyond the reactions, I’ve continued thinking about that language of deliverance, particularly because of my own experiences within charismatic expressions of Christianity. In these traditions, deliverance is often understood as being set free from something that has kept someone bound. It might be something that has restricted their lives, diminished their sense of possibility, or held them captive in ways that prevent them from experiencing freedom. Deliverance is supposed to represent movement out of that bondage and into something different.
Historically, some Christian communities have treated queerness itself as something from which people need deliverance. Queer identities, desires, and relationships have been characterized as sinful, disordered, or spiritually dangerous. And for generations, people have been subjected to religious practices intended to free them from something that was never inherently wrong with them in the first place.
My experience, however, has led me to consider another possibility.
What if queerness isn’t what we need to be delivered from, but part of the freedom we’re being delivered into?
There is a freedom I’ve discovered in queerness that I did not find in heteronormativity. And that freedom extends beyond sexuality, although sexuality remains an important part of it. Queerness has opened up possibilities for how I understand myself, how I encounter the Sacred, and how I imagine the ways we might live together. It has also invited me to reconsider some of the assumptions I inherited about gender, relationships, spirituality, and what constitutes a faithful life.
Queerness and the Question of Normal
I recognize that the word queer carries different meanings and histories. For some, it remains a painful reminder of a word used to humiliate, exclude, and diminish. For others, including me, there is something powerful about its reclamation. Reclaiming a word doesn’t erase its history, nor does it require everyone to embrace it. But reclamation can create space for meanings that were previously unavailable, particularly when a word once used to restrict people becomes a way of naming their identities and possibilities.
One of the things I appreciate about queerness is that it invites us to question what we’ve been taught is normal. Heteronormativity, for example, isn’t simply the existence of heterosexual people or relationships. It’s the assumption that heterosexuality, along with particular expressions of gender, family, and relationships, represents the natural or preferred arrangement of human life. These assumptions become so embedded in our cultures and institutions that we sometimes stop recognizing them as assumptions at all.
Consider our expectations around gender. We inherit ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman, who is expected to lead or follow, who should provide financially, who should nurture, and who is permitted to express vulnerability. We also inherit assumptions about which relationships are legitimate, what a family is supposed to look like, and what constitutes a successful life. Much of this becomes so familiar that we rarely consider where these ideas came from or whose interests they serve.
And then, within religious communities, we sometimes give these cultural arrangements divine authority. We say things like, “This is how God designed it,” without necessarily examining the histories, cultures, and systems of power that have shaped our understanding of that design.
These expectations are not untouched by race, either. The histories of racism, colonialism, and white supremacy have influenced which expressions of masculinity and femininity are considered respectable, desirable, threatening, or deviant. The expectations placed upon Black men and women, for example, have not always been the same as those placed upon white men and women. And yet, we often speak about gender roles as though they exist independently of these histories.
What we call normal is frequently more culturally constructed than we care to acknowledge. And what we call sacred is not always separate from those constructions.
This is where queerness becomes particularly interesting to me. Not because everything normative is necessarily harmful or because everything outside the norm is inherently liberating. I don’t believe either of those things. Rather, queerness invites us to examine the assumptions beneath the arrangements we’ve inherited and consider whether those arrangements actually create conditions for human flourishing.
The late bell hooks offered an understanding of queerness that continues to resonate with me. In a 2014 conversation, drawing on the work of queer theorist Tim Dean, hooks discussed queerness as something more expansive than sexual relationships. She described an experience of being at odds with one’s surroundings and needing to create space in which to live, speak, and thrive.
I find something deeply liberating in that understanding because there are times when the world, as we have inherited it, does not make room for the fullness of who we are. Sometimes the structures we inhabit require performances that diminish us. Sometimes the expectations placed upon us leave little room for curiosity, difference, or honest self-expression. And sometimes freedom requires imagining something beyond what we’ve been given.
Of course, queerness can develop its own expectations and performances. There can be assumptions about what a queer person should look like, how they should behave, what they should believe, or which expressions of queerness are considered acceptable. We can create new forms of restriction even while attempting to escape old ones. And I think that possibility requires our ongoing attention.
I’m reminded of the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists, including Black lesbians, whose organizing and writing in the 1970s offered a powerful vision of collective liberation. Their analysis recognized that racism, sexism, heterosexism, and economic oppression were interconnected. They understood that liberation could not be fully realized by addressing one form of oppression while leaving others intact.
Their work also challenges us to consider the relationship between our individual experiences of freedom and the conditions under which other people live. What does it mean to celebrate our own liberation while continuing to participate in systems that diminish someone else’s humanity? How do we understand freedom when some people are able to flourish only because others remain exploited or excluded?
Queer people and communities are not immune from these contradictions. We can reproduce racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, classism, and other forms of oppression. We can create communities that affirm one aspect of our identities while diminishing other aspects of our humanity. And we can participate in the same oppressive arrangements from which we’ve sought freedom.
I want to be careful here because I am not suggesting that queer people must demonstrate political or moral perfection to justify their identities. Our humanity is not something we earn through correct behavior. But when we speak about queerness as a liberating practice, I think it’s appropriate to examine whether our practices are actually producing liberation.
Liberating for whom?
That’s a question I believe we have to keep asking, particularly when our understandings of liberation begin to influence how we organize communities, distribute resources, and relate to people whose experiences differ from our own. Freedom cannot simply mean changing who gets to hold power within oppressive arrangements. It also requires us to examine the arrangements themselves.
And I think this is just as important in our spiritual lives.
Our Identities Shape Our Spirituality
One of the things I continue to explore in my theological work is the relationship between identity and our understanding of the Sacred. I believe our identities shape our spirituality, and although that may seem obvious to some, I don’t think we’ve fully considered its implications.
There is sometimes an assumption that the theology we’ve inherited exists independently of human experience. We approach sacred texts, religious traditions, and theological interpretations as though they have reached us untouched by culture, history, identity, or political interests. As though the people who developed and transmitted these traditions were somehow capable of separating themselves entirely from the worlds in which they lived.
But that has never been true.
The people who wrote our sacred texts had identities, cultural assumptions, and particular experiences of the world. So did the people who interpreted those texts, developed our theological traditions, and taught generations of believers what it meant to be faithful. Their experiences shaped the questions they asked, the answers they found compelling, and the understandings of God they passed along to others.
This doesn’t mean their theological contributions are without value. Nor does it mean that every interpretation is equally convincing simply because someone has arrived at it through their own experience. But it does mean we should be more honest about the human contexts in which our theological understandings developed.
And it raises a question that I find particularly important: Why are some theological perspectives treated as universal while others are dismissed as merely subjective or identity-driven?
Why are theological interpretations shaped by dominant cultures frequently regarded as normative, while those emerging from Black experiences, queer experiences, women’s experiences, and other marginalized communities are treated as departures from some supposedly neutral understanding of the Sacred?
None of us encounters the Sacred from nowhere.
We bring our histories, bodies, cultures, questions, relationships, and experiences into our spiritual lives. We bring what we’ve inherited and what we’ve discovered. We bring the ways we’ve been wounded, the ways we’ve experienced freedom, and the assumptions we may not even recognize we’re carrying.
I certainly do.
My experience as a Black queer person shapes how I engage scripture and the theological traditions I’ve inherited. It shapes the questions I ask, what I notice, what I find troubling, and the possibilities I am willing to consider. And I don’t believe that makes my engagement with the Sacred less faithful or less intellectually serious.
In fact, I wonder whether acknowledging our experiences more honestly might deepen our capacity for theological reflection and spiritual discernment. Rather than pretending we can somehow remove ourselves from our encounters with the Sacred, perhaps we might become more attentive to what we’re bringing into those encounters.
This is part of what I appreciate about queer theology. It invites us to reconsider inherited interpretations, particularly those shaped by heteronormative and patriarchal assumptions. It creates space to examine whose experiences have been centered in our theological imagination and whose have been excluded. And it challenges us to consider whether the interpretations we’ve inherited are the only faithful possibilities available to us.
Sometimes this requires transgressing theological boundaries that previous generations treated as permanent. But transgressing an inherited theological boundary does not necessarily mean abandoning the Sacred. Sometimes questioning an interpretation is part of taking the Sacred seriously enough to continue wrestling with it.
I think this distinction matters because there are people who understand faithfulness primarily in terms of preservation. To remain faithful, in this understanding, is to maintain the teachings and interpretations we’ve received. But what happens when those interpretations are themselves shaped by assumptions that deserve reconsideration? What happens when our lived experiences raise questions the traditions we’ve inherited have not adequately addressed?
I don’t believe the only faithful response is to silence those questions.
My own spiritual journey has increasingly invited me to consider the ways people encounter the Sacred across traditions, practices, and ways of knowing. Although Christianity remains an important part of my intellectual and spiritual formation, I am interested in how our experiences influence the ways we engage spirituality more broadly.
This doesn’t mean all spiritual traditions are interchangeable. They have distinct histories, teachings, practices, and relationships to their communities. But across these differences, I think there is value in recognizing that we are never completely absent from our spiritual interpretations.
And this brings me to another question that continues to sit with me: What might it mean to understand God, or Spirit, as queer?
I’m not necessarily interested in assigning God a human sexual orientation or gender identity. I’m interested in the theological possibilities that emerge when we reconsider the limitations of our inherited understandings of the divine. How have assumptions about gender, sexuality, family, authority, and social order shaped the ways we’ve imagined God? How often have we projected our cultural expectations onto the Sacred and then treated those projections as eternal truth?
Perhaps queer theological imagination allows us to consider the ways the Sacred exceeds our attempts to contain it. Perhaps it opens us to recognizing sacred possibilities in lives and experiences that religious institutions have historically dismissed. And perhaps it encourages us to question theological arrangements that have been more concerned with maintaining particular forms of power than with nurturing human flourishing.
These are not questions for which I claim to have complete answers. They’re questions I’m interested in continuing to explore, both intellectually and spiritually. But I do think they invite a more honest engagement with the relationship between what we believe, how we came to believe it, and what those beliefs produce in the world.
Our theological imaginations are never entirely disconnected from our social imaginations. How we understand the Sacred influences how we understand ourselves and one another. And how we understand ourselves and one another influences the worlds we create.
Delivered Into Possibility
When I think about queerness and freedom, I’m not only thinking about theology or religious belonging. I’m also thinking about how we organize our lives, our relationships, our communities, and our societies. If queerness invites us to question arrangements that we’ve been taught are normal, then that questioning can extend into areas of life that we may not ordinarily associate with sexuality or gender identity.
Consider our relationships. What might happen if we became more concerned with consent, mutuality, responsibility, honesty, and care than with whether a relationship conforms to familiar expectations? What possibilities for family, intimacy, friendship, and community might emerge if we were willing to reconsider some of the structures we’ve inherited?
Or consider our relationship with work and time. Why have we organized so much of our lives around productivity? Why is someone’s worth so often measured through what they produce, how much money they earn, or how much they’re able to accomplish? What might it mean to imagine lives in which rest, pleasure, contemplation, and community are not simply rewards for productivity but meaningful parts of human existence?
And then there are the larger social and economic arrangements that shape our collective lives. What possibilities might emerge if we began questioning systems that normalize exploitation, inequality, and exclusion? What would it mean to organize communities around mutual care rather than endless competition? How might our relationships with money, property, resources, and one another change if human flourishing became a more central consideration?
I don’t pretend these questions are easy, and I’m certainly not suggesting that calling something queer automatically makes it better. There are queer institutions and communities that participate in the very structures they claim to challenge. There are also people who have no relationship to queer identity or queer theory who are doing meaningful work toward justice and liberation.
But I do believe that queerness offers a valuable way of questioning the arrangements we’ve inherited and imagining possibilities beyond them. And if we’re serious about liberation, we must be willing to examine not only the structures that constrain us but also the ways we participate in maintaining them.
This brings me back to deliverance.
When I say that I have been delivered from heteronormativity into queerness, I am speaking about freedom from expectations that required particular performances of identity, gender, and belonging. I’m speaking about the possibility of encountering myself, other people, and the Sacred without assuming that the categories I’ve inherited are the only ones available.
And I’m speaking about the freedom to imagine differently.
That freedom doesn’t mean every question has been answered or that every oppressive tendency has been overcome. I still have assumptions to examine, questions to ask, and ways of understanding the world that will undoubtedly continue to change. But I am less interested in finding another rigid set of expectations to replace those I’ve questioned. I’m more interested in how we might continue becoming more free, more attentive to one another, and more willing to imagine possibilities that have not yet been fully realized.
Perhaps this is one of the gifts queerness offers our spiritual imagination. Not simply an opportunity to reconsider who belongs within our religious communities, although that certainly matters, but an invitation to ask deeper questions about the Sacred, about ourselves, and about the arrangements we’ve inherited.
I wonder what might happen if we approached more of our lives with that kind of curiosity. If we were willing to examine the assumptions we’ve carried without immediately defending or rejecting them. If we allowed ourselves to encounter other possibilities without needing to determine in advance where those encounters might lead.
Because perhaps there are still ways we are waiting to be delivered. Not necessarily from who we are, but from the expectations, assumptions, and arrangements that have prevented us from imagining who we might become and how we might live together.
And perhaps part of that deliverance begins with a question.
What have you been taught is normal that you’ve never stopped to question?
And what might become possible if you did?
This reflection accompanies “Delivered Into Queerness,” an episode of The Sacred Resonance Podcast, where I explore Black queer spirituality, prophetic imagination, contemplative practice, and the possibilities of encountering the Sacred differently.
Further Reading
bell hooks — Reflections on queerness, identity, and the creation of space for living and flourishing.
Combahee River Collective — The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977).
Marcella Althaus-Reid — The Queer God (2003).