Trans, Christian, and Proud @trans-catechism - Tumblr Blog

Something is bothering me about the application of "no true Scotsman" to saying something isn't Christian. This is true only up to a point. Because at a certain point, there is a boundary where someone isn't a Scotsman. I'm not a Scotsman, for instance. I could say that I'm Scottish, because I have ancestors who come from Scotland. But you can't compel Scottish people to accept me as Scottish.

Similarly, there is a boundary around what's actually Christian. The definition of Christian isn't actually "everyone who says they are." And it's not everyone who reveres or venerates Christ. Muslims and Manichaeans revere Jesus but aren't Christian. Not everyone accepts non-Nicene Christianity as Christianity. And movements can be destroyed by allowing in everyone who says "I'm a _____" without pushing back. Look at the watering down of feminism. "It's feminist to conform to the status quo, actually," was a devastating boundary shift.

So here we come to a charge that I must accept everyone who says they are a Christian as part of my faith. And it's difficult to create a satisfying response because we have two things that are true:

1. People bearing the name "Christian" are causing significant, real harm in our name and it doesn't do any good and it doesn't repair any harm to tell our neighbors "well, ACTUALLY that was a FAKE Christian and I'm different and better 😌"

2. Some of these beliefs aren't Christian. These are beliefs that cut you off from the body of Christ. White nationalism ISN'T Christian. Jesus crossed boundaries of nation and ethnicity all the time. And this is beyond being a church of wheat and tares. There is a swath of Christianity right now that has set up an idol in the form of a man they call Jesus, but they are not in any way worshipping the God revealed in scripture. I can't accept that as Christianity. Christian nationalism is idol worship.

I think it mainly comes down to we have a secular facing responsibility and a church facing responsibility. It's the difference between I wouldn't tell anyone recounting how they suffered at Christian misbehavior "that wasn't a real Christian™️" but I would tell (and have told) other Christians "that belief is not Christian, it's not scriptural, repent and return to the true faith."

We're not talking about "no TRUE Christian would say cuss word/take the Lord's name in vain." Yes, TRUE Christians would do and have done and will do horrible things and we can't absolve ourselves through distance. But we are also talking about a deep theological sickness in our body. We have the right to fight off that sickness. We have the obligation to fight it off before it kills us.

Mainline Protestants for a really long time have tried the strategy of "just BE a better Christian" while these conservative churches actively prey on our membership and guess what, it's not working. We need to SPEAK BACK to these people. And "this isn't Christian" is not a tool I'm ready to dump from my toolbox.

aevum-meditations

Calligraphy by Bip Pares (from Evelyn Underhill's book, The Spiritual Life, published 1937).

idylls-of-the-divine-romance

“Are you a man or a woman?”

“I’m the Public Universal Friend.”

“What gender are you?”

“Christian.”

“Yeah, but what’s in your pants?”

“The Inner Light.”

idylls-of-the-divine-romance

@u-eat-people-ur-a-people-eater

With all due respect, your transphobia is exposing your ignorance.

You are reducing the incredibly complex intersection of gender identity and religious experience to an incredibly simple conclusion that ignores the fact that

religious people relate to gender differently than irreligious people (because religious people relate to ALL of reality differently than irreligious people; we literally live in completely different cosmoses) and

the Public Universal Friend did not identify as a man, but as neither male nor female, as a genderless spirit inhabiting the body of a formerly living woman who had died and gone to heaven.

You are attempting to reduce a religious experience to sociopolitical one, and though it is fine to believe that personally (and I think it’s clear that the Wilkinson family as a whole had little problem adapting religious principles to fit political considerations: see Quakers and non-violence during the USAmerican War of Independence), it is not “obvious” nor is it the way that The Public Universal Friend articulated the Friend’s own self perception nor is it the way I think the Friend actually thought of themself.

The PUF was Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends, and a pretty devout one since the prophet took their new name directly from the title given to Quaker preachers: Public Friend. Women have been preachers in Quakerism since the Society of Friends came into existence 100 years prior, based on the idea that all people possess the inner light and God doesn’t discriminate based off of sex, especially since the apocalypse of Christ was imminent as evidenced by first the English Civil War and later the USAmerican Revolution.

The Friend’s theology was just Quaker orthodoxy: free will and the possibility universal salvation dependent on repentance of sin and obedience to the voice of the Trinitarian God, specifically as manifest in the prophet via the Holy Spirit, extremely important because of the imminent apocalypse of Christ. The only real unique aspect to this specific prophet’s vocation was that the Friend claimed to be the ONLY source of religious truth; this is what got the Friend into trouble with the other Quakers (this and attending New Light congregations).

The story of PUF’s “death and resurrection” is almost exactly the same as that of another very famous Quaker preacher, Margaret Brewster: also born female, also victim to serious illness, also “raised up as if from the dead” to “bear a living Testimony for the God of my Life”, and who distinctly does not become male nor sexless post resurrection. This was in 1677.

The distinct sexless nature of the Public Universal Friend is unique to PUF as an individual — one that, to me, makes the most sense within the context of the New Awakening theology of instantaneous rebirth in the Holy Spirit; compare Ann Lee also having an extreme somatic experience and being reborn as the adopted Divinity. And yet also its not to be surprising coming from a Quaker:

The Quaker reformation of the mid-eighteenth century reinforced the denomination’s challenge to mainstream gender norms and provided a more immediate example of female empowerment to the Friend and his disciples. Quaker reformers worked to reverse a growing separation of religious and social issues perceived as female concerns from a more masculine realm of politics and economic life. This ran counter to the feminization of religious life taking place in other Protestant denominations in the late eighteenth century. Many Protestant churches faced a reality in which women dominated membership and, as a result, they found their authority frequently limited to a set of issues—spiritual life, family, children, and charity—that society increasingly defined as female. In turn, they were losing their purchase on areas of daily life—commerce and politics—gendered as masculine. The advocates of the Quaker reformation countered this, contending that the values of love, humility, and philanthropy transcended sex and that religion was inseparable from politics and economics. This helped to stave off any effort to marginalize women in the Society of Friends. It also enabled Quaker men and women to construct gendered identities that were increasingly at odds with mainstream society. The Society of Universal Friends was in harmony with these developments. They, like the Quaker reformers, sought to erase any line between spiritual concerns and everyday life and deemphasized the difference between masculine and feminine—especially in the realm of religion.

The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America by Paul B. Moyer (emphasis mine)

What was that??? Relativizing gender roles leading to deemphasizing of sexed difference as a reality culminating in an abolition of sex itself??? Where have I heard that before? Oh right: my own lived experience navigating gender assignment. And that’s not even mentioning the religious aspect of it!

New Light theology was also radically saturated in “feminine” (as defined by patriarchy) imagery and language and symbolism: Brides of Christ, passionate emotional responsiveness, spiritual submission to God, instinct and intuition, receptiveness to the Spirit, etc. Think medieval Catholic bridal mysticism made Evangelical Protestant. And they centered women as authority figures… at first. This would eventually change during the Revolutionary era as efforts were implemented, secular and religious, to “put women back in their place” while also attempting to keep them satisfied: go see the classical liberal concept of the Republican Mother.

In contrast, the Public Universal Friend had women disciples who functioned as prophets. I think it’s worth noting that, allegedly, the Friend’s female disciples took the names of male prophets in recognition of their ability to foretell future events and discern God’s will. However, this story is NOT corroborated by Universal Friend sources, and all of the Friends female disciples that acted as prophets that we know of did so *as women*, consistent with Quaker theology and the theology of the New Light Evangelicalism. Again: the genderlessness of the Public Universal Friend is unique to themself and thus must be analyzed as such, not as a reaction against broader social or political factors.

Far more credible reasons would be anxiety around marriage and childbirth as a traumatic experience, or perhaps just simply psychosis/psychological dis-ease triggered by the disease that “killed her” — though again, that is attempting to find a secular answer to a religious question which just… as a devout theist, as someone whose gender is inextricably tied to their religious allegiance, I do not find that convincing.

*side note: it is not within my cosmology to say that the Public Universal Friend could not have had psychosis, or any other type of mental dis-ease; they very well could have. That perspective, however, does not exist in opposition with a perspective that beliefs this was a divine vocation. One can (and should!) believe both. Copy and paste for St Jeanne d’Arc, another prophet in Christian history who was genderqueer because of a religious experience they had.

The concerns of religious people, leaders and their followers, are just that: religious. Many of us are activists and reformers, but before that we are mystics and theologians. People who pray and people who love God. Religion has social, political, and economic implications, but in the pre-French Revolutionary world, during the Great Awakening, in a time of denominational instability and spiritual innovation, those social, political, and economic realities are being dictated by serious genuine religious belief, not vice versa. And guess what? This is STILL true for religious people today! My gender identity, my political beliefs, my economic vision, and much much more — all of these are dictated by my theology, that is, the story that I and my community tell about God, a story that shapes who we are as we tell it. To suggest otherwise, both in my case and in the case of the Public Universal Friend, is at best a category error, and in reality is just transphobic and anti-theist.

u-eat-people-ur-a-people-eater

Retconning this mass psychosis onto historical figures is just another symptom of the mass psychosis. Self-identifying as a "mystic, theologian, activist, and reformer" while posting on here is incredible. If you have to call yourself those things, you aren't those things. The "category error" cope is also what the "our churches are for White people" dudes like Spangler and Wolfe claim when anyone tries to explain to them why kinism is wrong/wicked. "Male and female HE created them" is talking about us and God and it's in the first chapter of the book. Quakers don't even have sacraments. They're not real Christians.

Calling a woman who was murdered as horribly as Joan was "genderqueer" is insanely insulting. She went back to wearing women's clothes to prevent her sailors from raping her. Implying either of these people could be insane and claiming it wouldn't matter if they were is also insulting. It's like you don't fear God at all despite claiming to be a God fearer.

idylls-of-the-divine-romance

Retconning this mass psychosis onto historical figures is just another symptom of the mass psychosis.

You know you don’t have to call gender dysphoria “mass psychosis” in order to argue against it, right?? Also I would never, or more accurately I suppose haven’t yet, claim that anyone before the modern period (and by extension the two-sex model) had a transgender identity. But as a seminarian and good friend of mine has said, “transphobes don’t hate us for our identity; they hate us for our behavior”. So, for example, if I were to refer to St Jeanne d’Arc as “transgender” (which I don’t think I have but wtv), I would be referring to the fact that she, from a political perspective, transgressed and, from a theological perspective, transcended, the gender roles deemed socially acceptable for her sex. It is a label based in an observation about behavior, not a claim about anyone’s internal sense of identity. I don’t even like or agree with modern liberal obsession with “identity” and “identifying” as something. But this post isn’t about that.

Self-identifying as a "mystic, theologian, activist, and reformer" while posting on here is incredible. If you have to call yourself those things, you aren't those things.

Okay there’s a lot here.

First: I actually wasn’t talking about me specifically. In the context of that final paragraph I was simply making a statement about religious people. I am a religious person; “religious people” is an us. If I say, “we” referring to the United States of America “are guilty of genocide” that has nothing to say about what *I* as an individual did or did not do; it’s a statement about a community which I am a part of.

Secondly: I’d never claim to be an activist of a reformer. I never have and never will unless an external person who I valued can an authority declared me as such. Same goes for the words “theologian” and “mystic”. If what we mean by those words are “someone who studied theology academically” or “someone who experiences mystical visions”, then I’m not claiming either of those things either, though I could theoretically claim the latter (again, wouldn’t tho).

Let’s assume I did mean those words to refer to myself, because sometimes I do!

Words do not have meanings but people mean things by words and communities both construct the meaning of words and construct their identity around words. So, bear with me. The following definition of mysticism is my definition adapted from Bernard McGrinn:

Mysticism is the tradition, belief, practice, and theology within Christianity which concerns the preparation of the Self for the consciousness and the effect of a direct and transformative presence of God which results in new ways of knowing and loving based on states of awareness in which God becomes present in our acts.

This is literally just all of Christian theology. The cosmos was created so that the Creator could become one with it. God created humanity so that God could become humanity so that humanity could be made God (this is a bit heterodox on the level of time (Christ is incarnate and slain before the foundation of the cosmos) but that is all too complicated for the purposes of this post). By virtue of being a Christian who is pursuing union with God/salvation/sanctification/glorification/righteousness/etc, you are a mystic according to the definition im working with. I desire union with God via the annihilation of my Ego, emptying of my Self, and the union of my energies to the divine energies. Thus, I am a mystic.

According to the definition of one of my favorite theologians (by which I mean, attends a Jesuit university and is getting their masters in divinity) I probably would not be considered a mystic, and wouldn’t consider myself one. And that okay!

Okay, next theologian: my religion — in the Chestertonian sense of “the cosmos a human lives in” — is Eastern Orthodoxy, which informs my understanding of Christian life as theosis, and informs my understanding of “theologian” as “one who prays”. Which is why I said

[…] we are mystics and theologians. People who pray and people who love God.

It’s a chiasm:

“mystics” forms the outside alongside “people who love God” (my relationship with mysticism is primarily apophatic and affective)

“theologians” forms the inside alongside “people who pray”

However! I know that’s not the only way theologian is meant, and if I was using that definition I wouldn’t use that term for myself. This past year in particular has been rough prayer wise. The way I typically use the word when I refer to myself as a “theologian” is “someone who talks about God”. Theology is God-talk, it is “the story we tell about God”. This is a definition I clearly lay out in the post: “my theology, that is, the story that I and my community tell about God, a story that shapes who we are as we tell it”. And before anyone tries to fight me: story does not mean falsity; history is story; leave me alone.

Also,

If you have to call yourself those things, you aren't those things.

I actually was opposed to calling myself both mystic and theologian: I was first called this by others, others who as I stated earlier I value as an authority, and only then did I start using them for myself. A direct quote from one of these authorities was “why would you not consider yourself a theologian? A theologian is someone who discourses about God? What do you do if not that?” So yes, I am a mystic and a theologian. A baby mystic and an amateur lay theologian (tho… im discerning attending a catholic university), but a mystic and theologian none the less.

The "category error" cope is also what the "our churches are for White people" dudes like Spangler and Wolfe claim when anyone tries to explain to them why kinism is wrong/wicked.

Except it’s not cope lollll. This is actually the fundamental point behind the whole post: to make a materialist claim about an immaterialist belief system is a category error. Especially one that doesn’t even work within the given theology! Jemima Wilkinson does not need to pretend to be a man or a genderless spirit animating the body of a dead female in order to be a preacher. She can just. do that. She was highly educated and and well-spoken and perfectly theologically orthodox for a Quaker, aside from her families beliefs on violence (but they were already a part of a more “realist” sect anyway) and The Public Universal Friend’s claim to be the only prophet of God. You can explain why you as someone who is not a Quaker do not believe that the Public Universal Friend was a genderless prophet, but you cannot claim it is “obvious” because, as I said (1) it was not necessary within Quaker theology and (2) there are better skeptical materialist answers like mental illness and anxiety about childbirth, examples I’ve provided based on the what I know of Jemima Wilkinson’ s biography.

Also maybe DONT compare someone to racialized as black to racist white peoples???? Like are we for serious??? Unless they’re a fucking coon/house Negro, and even then if you’re not racialized as black, don’t compare racialized people to racist white people.

"Male and female HE created them" is talking about us and God and it's in the first chapter of the book.

Irrelevant because as we see in the Shakers — another religious sect with roots the Quakers — there were groups in Quakerism interpreting exactly this verse to mean God is both male and female. This is the basis for Mother Ann Lee being the second, female, incarnation of Christ.

Also: “there is no male and female. For you are all one [heis] in Christ Jesus” is ALSO right there in the book.

Also also “God is not male nor female; God is God” — the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which has as much bearing on Quaker theology as your interpretation of Genesis 1:27. So yeah nothing in your point has any bearing on the theology of the Public Universal Friend.

Quakers don't even have sacraments. They're not real Christians.

I have not made a claim about whether or not Quakers are real Christians. If I did what I would’ve said is “Quaker and Christian are distinct yet overlapping categories; one can be Quaker and Christian, but one can also be Quaker and not a member of the faithful” — though, I’d argue in terms of working out our allegiance to Christ in love of God and neighbor, Quakers have been chief, and if one considers Quakers not Christian, we’ll then you better be out doing them in the faithfulness, hope, and caritas.

However this likewise is irrelevant because this post isn’t actually about my beliefs (I do not believe the Public Universal was actually a divine spirit from the unseen realm), but about the prophet’s beliefs: and in the eyes of the Public Universal Friend, they were a Christian.

On the note of the sacraments: I adore the sacraments and I am a sacramentologist at heart — the theology of sacrament, creation, and eros is how I got into theology to begin with! And I firmly believe that, in normal circumstances, one cannot be saved from slavery to Sin and the fear of Death without the sacraments, specifically baptism and the Eucharist. My number one beef with the Quakers is the lack of sacrament. However, God is not bound by the sacraments. God is not bound by the Church. If God decides to accept Quakers who are faithful according to what they have been taught into the New Creation at the apocalypse of Christ, who is going to say no? Anyone who does say no should be careful that they themselves are not rejected in their place! For we know that God does not desire that any human should die, but that all should turn away from death and pursue life; and we all know that we must show mercy to all as God has shown mercy to us, and to refrain from condemnation, knowing that God alone is the judge of all the earth and that by the standard we use to condemn, we will be condemned.

Calling a woman who was murdered as horribly as Joan was "genderqueer" is insanely insulting.

Again: this is a statement of her behavior, not her identity. She engaged in gender transgressing behavior and thus is gender nonconforming or genderqueer or transgender (a word I could’ve used but didn’t to avoid confusion and unnecessary contention. oops). It’s also only insulting because you think gender transgression is insulting. That’s a you problem, not a me problem. I believe gender is a socially constructed biological class invented by the patriarchy to control peoples bodies. but idk maybe that’s just me 🤷🏾

She went back to wearing women's clothes to prevent her sailors from raping her.

le sigh. I’m just going to quote my seminarian friend verbatim for this. Credit to @iustuspeccator:

Joan's motivations for wearing men's clothing are unknown. She never spoke of her motivation herself (Hotchkiss). Although witnesses arrested that she endured guards attempting to assault her, there is no unified witness on why she returned to men's clothing or even if she did that herself or if guards forced her to. (Guards forcing her to wear men's clothing does not negate my point, I'll get there in a second.) The assertion that she wore men's clothes to protect against sexual assault is nonsensical, as scholars have pointed out that men's clothes don't afford a lot of protection when you're shackled in a jail cell (Hotchkiss, Schibanoff). Personally, I don't know what people who perpetuate this myth think men were wearing at the time that was assault-proof. She was in a tunic, doublet and breeches. Furthermore, if men's clothing made women so impervious to rape, why didn't ALL women crossdress in the middle ages? Analyses of Joan's crossdressing that treat it as a minor detail rather than central to who she was fail to deal with the fact that very few women crossdressed! Joan initially wore men's clothing to fight in battle. Why she wears men's clothing outside of battle she never comments on, except that it was her call. She only desisted under torture. Accepting women's clothes in order to go to mass after being tortured doesn't indicate that wearing men's clothes was not personally important to her but the exact opposite. After she returned to wearing men's clothes, which triggered her execution, she told the judge that she never intended to swear off men's clothing! (Warner). Joan herself never stated that it was to avoid assault; this is extrapolated from witnesses who described guards assaulting her. Only recent scholarship has dealt meaningfully with Joan's cross-gender behavior. The Catholic church, on the other hand, has a vested interest in myths like "she wore men's clothes to avoid rape." The Church must dismiss Joan's crossdressing as inconsequential in order to both canonize her and denigrate trans people simultaneously. But it is not a serious historical argument.

End quote.

Thank you Joanie and God bless you <3

Our only real disagreement (which isn’t really a disagreement) is that I would give slightly more credence to the constant risk of assault, without being as reductionist as the transphobes are about it. And I rarely if ever discuss St Jeanne d’Arc without discussing her vocation as a mystic and its influence over her gender presentation, performance, and performance. I simply fundamentally believe her acting as genderqueer or gender nonconforming cannot be understood apart from her mystical experiences and the context of Christian mysticism as a whole, especially in the Middle Ages.

Implying either of these people could be insane and claiming it wouldn't matter if they were is also insulting.

It’s only insulting because you believe there’s something wrong with being psychotic. Do you deny that God loves insane people? Do you deny that God can carry out his purposes through mentally dis-eased people? Do you deny that people with mental disorders are created by God and called to reign and rule in the power and love of God by defeating darkness and chaos and by sub-creating in life and goodness and beauty? St Catherine of Siena had an eating disorder and regularly engaged in self-harm; is she less of a saint, less of a Doctor of the Church? Simone Weil — one of the greatest theologians, ethicists, mystics, philosophers, and political thinkers of the last century — also died of an eating disorder in what I would term a suicide; I wanted to read her work during the summer but haven’t specifically because I know she is dangerous to those, like me, who are not mentally stable enough to prayerfully discern what is good and true and beautiful, and what is a theological justification for self-harm in her work; do we then throw out her entire theology? St. Óscar Romero was officially diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). He was also a really cool guy in general and a leading figure in Liberation Theology. Religious scrupulosity, which is thought to be the religious variation of moral OCD, was generally common among Catholic saints. Notable examples are St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Blessed Rutilio Grande was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. Venerable Matt Talbot had Alcohol Use Disorder. St. Joseph of Cupertino experienced fits of anger and had serious trouble with schooling. Many people have interpreted him as having some kind of developmental condition like ADHD or Autism. St. John of God was committed to an insane asylum and likely experienced some form of depression. Nonpsychotic and neurotypical people are not better or beloved more by God or more capable of imaging him in the works than psychotic and neurodivergent people. Once again, the fact that you think so if a you problem and has more to say about your sanism.

It's like you don't fear God at all despite claiming to be a God fearer.

I don’t know what to tell you either than you do not know me in my essence; only God does. I know that I fear God, for the fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom and the love of God is its end. I know that I am often afraid of God, though I’m trying to be less so, with God’s grace. I know that I love God, not as much as I should — nowhere near as much as I should — but that the love is there nonetheless. I know that God loves me, more than I could ever know or could ever return, but that I will spend all of eternity, like St Gregory of Nyssa said, stretching out in union with the Infinite. If you are really concerned for me and the state of my soul, you should pray for me. And I will pray for you. <333

May the favor of Our God and Lord Jesus the Anointed One be with you. May the God of loyal love snatch and repossess us from slavery to the evil one. May the God of Peace crush the adversary underneath our feet. May the God of Justice raise up the lowly and bring down the mighty. May the God of compassion restore all those who are lost to himself.

algebraic-dumbass

happy pride month, be gay do math

queerlittlelamb

happy pride month to queer people of faith! God loves you for who you are, not for what other people think you should be.

voskhodart

Happy pentecost! You mentioned at some point wanting to talk/rant about religion more, I've always thought mariology and pneumology are very interesting, and pneumology is in theme today :3c

Happy Pentecost!!

I'm assuming you meant to type pneumatology, but some Pentecostal Pneumology would also be very appreciated today (I have a respiratory infection 💔). You'll have to remind me to go off about mariology come other time, because I looove Mama Mary and I could probably sit here and type about her for hours.

But for today! Pneumatology in general is a really fascinating subject for me because it's so mysterious and also probably one of the most commonly misunderstood things we worship.

Over here in the Anglican Communion, our central idea is to be comfortable with mystery. The Holy Spirit isn't supposed to be either extreme-- not a purely emotional experience or dry doctrine. It's a thing that exists everywhere all the time and is extremely difficult for the human mind to understand, which is really awesome and surely never leads to massive misunderstandings. It proceeds from the Father and the Son (unless it doesn't) and it has an interpretive authority over scripture (unless it doesn't).

I'm not a fan of visible depictions of the Spirit, whether it be as a dove or a humanoid figure. (I'm also not a fan of depictions of the Father either, but that's a different tangent.) I think the way people describe the Spirit as being the breath of the church is pretty good, but I've always had the easiest time conceptualizing it as the connective tissue.

Also, shoutout to every time the Holy Spirit is referred to with feminine terminology. The gender of the Spirit is a fun topic, because there really is no definite answer-- it uses all gendered language and is said to speak in masculine and feminine voices alike. Its term is feminine in Hebrew, neutral in Greek, and masculine in Latin. When I was growing up, I was taught that God was a fully masculine figure, which I hated. But this more fluid aspect is something I take comfort in, alongside the more elevated and wonderfully feminine Mary that I get to bring into my practices today.

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