Bestselling author Charlie Bell discusses his new book, Queer Redemption: How queerness changes everything we thought we knew about Christianity ...
Your last book for DLT, Queer Holiness, was released two years ago – has the church’s attitude towards the LGBTQIA community changed at all since then?
Yes and no. I think we’ve seen some quite significant changes in some ways, and it’s definitely the case that there has been a recognition that we can’t just keep on kicking the can down the road. Yet here we are, a few years on, and whilst there have been a lot of warm words, there has been rather less in the way of action. Marriage remains off the cards, and there is still a feeling that queer people are a problem for the church to be solved rather than people to be embraced and learnt from.
As you state in your introduction to Queer Redemption, LGBTQIA people already have a place set at the table within the Church – what then is the central thrust your new book?
What I’m really interested in doing is moving us beyond the same old conversations arguing for queer people’s place in the church, towards a new starting point – we are already in the church, so what does that tell us about the church and Christianity in general. Questions of marriage and so on are important, but unless we are open to being changed by queerness rather than just trying to fit queer people into our previously defined categories, then our theology and our lives together are so much the poorer.
How is queerness a gift to the Church and how do you define the process of ‘queering’ the Church?
Queering can mean a host of different things, but in this context is a mixture between doing LGBTQIA theology, speaking in transgressive ways about God and our faith, and challenging the arbitrary categories that we humans love to create but which have little to do with the life of God. In other words, it’s about doing a theology of reality rather than a theology of the neatly packaged ‘un-reality’ that human beings find it easier to work with.
How central does the question of same-sex marriage need to be your thesis?
Equal marriage is important, and it’s important because if people are excluded from marriage then we do an injustice not only to them, but to marriage itself, but it’s not the be all and end all. I think queerness and queer people have the potential to help redeem marriage as an institution, but the church needs to be willing to sit up and listen rather than drone on about ‘one man and one woman’. We have gotten so used to mistaking descriptive language for prescriptive that we have lost so much of the excitement at the heart of Christianity.
When the institutional Church talks about sex, what is it talking about? Why do Christians seemingly obsess so much about it? And how can the Church engage with issues around sex, and indeed gender, in a more sincere and straightforward manner?
Goodness only knows! The church seems to be keen to control other people’s sex lives, but is rather more reticent to discuss what that sex might actually be! My feeling is that we need to move beyond the idea of ‘what goes where, this goes there’ towards a far more honest evaluation of the sexual within all human beings, its expression and how this is understood in the context of relationship and inter-relating. Human relationships are so much more complicated than we give them credit for, and the church could do an awful lot more good if we engaged a little more with reality.
The final section of the book is entitled ‘The Lazarus Church’; what, ultimately, do you hope readers will take away from it and from Queer Redemption as a whole?
I hope it will challenge them to see that queer people are a gift, that queerness itself can contribute to and build up the life of the church. We’re so used to being seen as a problem, and I hope this book might remind readers that we are actually part of the solution – the redemption, if you will.
Charlie Bell is a Forensic Psychiatry Registrar, and also the John Marks Fellow, College Lecture and Director of Studies in Medicine at Girton College, Cambridge. He is a priest in the Diocese of Southwark, Scholar in Residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City, and a Research Felow and Associate Tutor at St Augustine’s College of Theology. He is the tutor of Queer Holiness (DLT, 2022).
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