Christ’s queer body - Alex Clare-Young's Theology Slam reflection

LEFT-RIGHT: Theology Slam Co-Host Revd Sally Hitchiner, Associate Vicar for Ministry at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, with finalists Revd Alex Clare-Young, Victoria Green and Amanda Higgin, answering audience questions while the judges considered their verdict.

THE final of Theology Slam 2022 - a competition to find engaging young voices who think theologically about the contemporary world - featured a talk on the body by Revd Alex Clare-Young, a pioneer minister in the United Reformed Church (URC).

OTN Co-Chair Alex was one of three finalists who took part in a live final on 27th September as part of the HeartEdge conference, ‘Humbler Church, Bigger God’, in Leeds. Alex writes:

It was a blessing, and a highly emotional experience, to speak in the final of Theology Slam 2022. It highlighted, for me, the interweaving threads between young theologians and our ideas, and the importance of continual inter-generational dialogue. Here, I will share my script, for those who would like to read what I shared.

First, though, I would like to speak, with warm appreciation, about my fellow finalists. It was an absolute joy to be joined on the platform by Victoria Turner – a fellow young theologian in the URC, whose book Young Woke and Christian: Words From a Missing Generation is a vital step towards the eradication of the misleading idea of a ‘missing generation’.

It was also a pleasure to meet, and speak alongside Amanda Higgin, a Baptist minister in training who is also a biblical scholar in the vital area of trauma theology.

Victoria spoke about social justice, periods, privacy, agency, asylum seeking and Palestine. Her talk was vibrant and fresh, with a personal edge which was both vulnerable and authentic. Congratulations Victoria.

Amanda presented on trauma as an ‘Easter Saturday’ experience, in which one is suspended between the despair of Good Friday and the hope of resurrection. Amanda was both compelling and clear, with impressive insights into both scripture and experience.

Amanda was this year’s winner – congratulations!

Here is my contribution:

Alex presenting their ten-minute reflection on a theology of the body.

Christ’s Queer Body

Theology can inspire either hope or fear in the body. The linking of personal guilt and shame to the cross is an oppressive practice that embeds fear deep in our consciousness. The cross is misused as an instrument of oppression based on simplistic, supposedly either / or truths. Divine or human, good or bad, innocent or guilty… This misuse means orienting our gaze towards binary division, towards the piercing and splitting of the body and - ultimately - towards death.

“Jesus’s masculinity shatters the idea that you need X and Y chromosomes to be male.”

My name is Alex and my pronouns are they/them. My journey started with the obscuring, fear-inducing divisiveness of guilt and shame.

When I was a child I felt like an alien - completely unable to comprehend where I fit in a binary - male or female - world. That alienation led to terror in my teens as I began to understand the complexity of my identity but had no words to express it.

“I came to realise that my body is not a static fact but, rather, a queer, living, fluid collection of cells into which God breathes almost infinite potential.I came to realise that my body is not a static fact but, rather, a queer, living, fluid collection of cells into which God breathes almost infinite potential.”

When I began to describe my complicated relationship with my body, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria - extreme discomfort with my body and the way that society perceived my gender. The word dysphoria is heavy with the assumption that my mind cannot embrace and love my body. This supposed division of body from mind mirrors the divisive binary of man = XY chromosomes and phallus versus woman = vulva and XX chromosomes - a false binary that both school and church had tried to teach me as a child.

“My complex body is both part of the church and reflective of the body of Christ. Or, to put it another way, the body of Christ is both trans and gender-queer. The church includes members who are male, who are female, and who are not defined by binary gender.”

Theologians who start at guilt and shame often ask if I think God made a mistake with my body. I wonder why they assume that I hate this wonderful, resilient body, which I love. In asking this, they imply that body and mind can be separated, and that bodies should be revered.

“Christ’s body is inevitably trans, inherently queer, beautifully beyond binaries.”

The cross alone doesn’t allow for this supposed reverence for the human body, though. Instead, on the cross, the body is obliterated by hatred born of systemic oppression. The cross - with attendant guilt and shame - is a part of the Christian narrative that I have heard and experienced over and over since birth.

The incarnation, less so. Perhaps the inherent queerness of incarnation is why churches seem to talk about it less. Incarnation is all about changing things. God stretching flesh by bursting into time ruptures our normative understandings. In kenotic incarnation, God tumbles out of power into fleshy vulnerability. In prophetic creativity, Mary’s autogynephilic - or virgin - birthing of God stretches flesh, science, credulity and respectability politics to their very limits by producing a son who should, if genetics are to be believed, have been female. Jesus’s masculinity shatters the idea that you need X and Y chromosomes to be male.

The Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland exclaims that: ‘Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’. To believe in Jesus, I had to believe in complex bodies. I had to believe that the human body can be stretched to birth, to cradle, to contain, and, yes, to touch divinity. I even came to believe that the body can be stretched beyond death to new, transformed life.

After going on that theological learning journey, I began to experience my own trans, genderqueer body through the lens of transformative incarnation. I came to realise that my body is not a static fact but, rather, a queer, living, fluid collection of cells into which God breathes almost infinite potential.

My queerness mirrors the seahorse, which both fertilizes the eggs that their mate creates and carries them in their brood pouch, bursting forth in a display of androgynous birth. And my queerness mirrors the incarnate God, who chooses to embody fleshy transformation. My queerness is imago Dei - the image of God. My queerness is part of the Body of Christ.

So why is the body ecclesia - the church - still stuck at crucifixion, at division, at an orientation towards death? My complex body is both part of the church and reflective of the body of Christ. Or, to put it another way, the body of Christ is both trans and gender-queer. The church includes members who are male, who are female, and who are not defined by binary gender.

And that has to impact how we do things. We cannot go on pretending that the church is only one thing, or one way. We - the body of Christ - cannot - must not - be limited to normative binaries or polemical debates.

St. Paul refuses to separate mind from body from community. Paul’s vision of Christ is an image of unity in diversity, of a body which contains millions of human hands, and feet, and eyes, and ears and - yes - genitalia in a complex creative being which is all the better for its internal contradictions and constant recreation. Elizabeth Stuart suggests that the body of Christ is stretched by each new believer that joins it. Christ’s body is inevitably trans, inherently queer, beautifully beyond binaries.

The church must urgently learn to mirror incarnation, relying on the capacity to stretch, to grow, to change. We need to practice queerness, to pay attention to those voices who challenge normativity, ready to be transformed rather than to debate. We need to speak about the fleshy hope that we embody more loudly than we squabble over the norms we should be reaching far beyond.

And so, I choose the lens of incarnation over the blindfold of crucifixion. I choose hope over fear. I choose to dance towards new life, rather than to trudge towards inevitable death.

You can choose to be a part of the sorely needed transition from a terrified church that clings on by its fingertips, to a euphoric church that allows for the stretching of its skin to embrace its many unique parts, so that every person may encounter Christ’s queer body.

Originally posted on Alex’s website - republished with permission.

WATCH the Theology Slam 2022 final on the Church Times YouTube channel [2 hours]