Secularisms, sexualities and theology

When we began to conceptualise the introduction to this themed symposium in Sex Education journal our initial instinct was fairly defensive. This came from, upon discussion and reflection, a bit of projection we later came to understand. Some background will be useful: our shared interest in the overlaps between sexuality, secularism, and theology in the field of sexuality education came about, as many collaborations do, at a conference. And the discussions with which we began were rooted in the various obliquely related projects upon which we three were working on, loosely organised around sexuality, gender, queer studies, religion, and education broadly conceived.

The so-what for our purposes here, though, comes in the call for the special issue and the attendant response, which is to say the general lack of responsiveness. Theologians we approached demurred from contributing because they saw themselves as not having the requisite expertise related to sexuality education; while colleagues within sexuality education clearly did not share our desire to root around in sexual theology. This is not a completely untrodden path for contributors to the journal, there have been a handful of papers in Sex Education in this space; see for example Lisa Isherwood’s (2004) engagement with feminist liberation theology where she imagines ‘Sex education in a Christian context has the duty of encouraging passionate lovers and justice makers’ (282) through to Alireza Tabatabaie’s (2015) discussion of Islam and adolescent sexuality Islamic traditions in which ‘adolescents are mature enough to distinguish between good and evil and to be liable before God for their religious duties’ (285). Contributors to the journal are keen to discuss religion – there have been no less than 463 articles in the journal that include this term, compared to the 12 (including the contributions to this special issue) – that directly engage with and interrogate theology.

So, by late 2020 it was clear that there were relatively few submissions for this particular special issue call. Our first instinct was to return to lamenting the exact kind of lack of conversation at the juncture of theology and nominally progressive sexuality education work that drove the call in the first place. But what that missed, of course, were the ways in which our construction of the call itself led to exactly the kinds of exclusionary practices we had hoped to elide and erode through the publication of the symposium itself. We had sought to ‘complexify not only the relationships between supposed secular, progressive sexuality education and its religious and purportedly regressive negative counterparts, but also looks to trouble the very idea of this clean split.’ Yet, we worry that we did not do nearly a strong enough job of arguing that sex, religion, theology and education already come together in multiple, interesting, and generative manifestations all the time in popular culture. A clean split there has never truly been. The problem instead may be, as Melissa E. Sanchez (2019) in Queer Faith pointed out, ‘In the modern West, the description of secular desire through a Christian lexicon of prayer, conversion, salvation, redemption, confession, sacrifice, revelation, and ecstasy is so pervasive that it is scarcely noticeable’ (1). We might have done well to explicitly note some such examples so to notice explicitly where religion, sexuality, and gender meet to educate an audience about sex and/or desire. We might have begun, quite easily, turning to popular music where these things are noticeable including:

· George Michael’s (1987) ‘Faith’

· Madonna’s (1989) ‘Like A Prayer’

· Depeche Mode’s (1989) ‘Personal Jesus’

· R.E.M.’s (1991) ‘Losing my Religion’

· Lady Gaga’s (2011) ‘Judas’

· Hozier’s (2013) ‘Take Me to Church’ and

· Lil Nas X’s (2021) ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name).’

Beyond popular music we could have noticed, as well, the role of God in scenes of quickening climax – ‘Oh god … Oh god … I’m gonna … ’ – and the bond between religion and BDSM in the form of a St. Andrew’s Cross. We could have looked as well to artists like Ted Fusby’s series ‘Saints and Demons,’ Andres Serrano’s controversial ‘Piss Christ,’ and the street performance organisation ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence;’ each of which have uised religious iconography to address sexuality and often hypocrisy in moral discourses. And we might have called attention to the discourse of the closet and coming out, a form of confession, baring one’s authentic, often LGBTQ+, self to the world. Each of these examples in different ways show the stickiness of the issues in play, not only through scandal and provocation as seen when the Vatican deemed Madonna’s music video for “Like a Prayer’’ blasphemous, but also for the possible generativity of religious iconography and theological discourses for making sense of a sexual, gendered, and moral selves.

For Marcella Althaus-Reid ‘every theology implies a conscious or unconscious sexual and political praxis’ (2000, 4). But to get to this realisation and apprehend its implications for sexuality education – maybe one first needs to engage with some theology. Yet, engaging with ‘some theology’ may not be of much interest to sexuality education researchers. So an explanation behind the flaccid response to our call for papers might be more prosaic – that the relationship between sexuality education research and theology verges on the antipathetic whereas once it may have been fundamental? At the same time as religious diversity is a ‘new normal’, at least in the Anglosphere, are sexuality education researchers increasingly secular at a time, when at least in Australia, younger people are more likely than older Australians to have no religion or to be Pentecostal, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or Buddhist (Singleton et al. 2021).

If there are relatively few scholars and educators in the field of sex education who have training in theology, what are the implications of this for the exploration of forces of faith and religious affects? How might conversations about religious exemptions and accommodations proceed in the absence of scholarship on the conscious and unconscious sexual and political praxis of our religious and secular theologies? There is, to put it another way, an expertise gap – and this will have consequences we cannot anticipate in trying to make sexuality education inclusive, relevant and engaging. We cannot hope to fill this gap here, only to nod to it while recognising that we actually do not know this to be true. If any enterprising quantitative researcher out there wants to survey the field to figure this out, in fact, we would be immensely grateful. But we write it out of a hunch and in the vein of Elizabeth Johnson’s (2011) suggestion that an omnipotent God is always named towards, since words will ever fail to encapsulate the nature of the infinite. However, we might find ways into theologies without formal ministerial training to wrestle with and bring to light new ways of encountering others as complicated sexual and gendered subjects.

All three of the editors were ourselves subjected to and emerged as subjects from religious educations that meant we had limited (and probably in many cases) bad theological training in some form. But we also were trained poorly in any number of other things in our general education years (just as we were trained well in others); the crux of it (pun intended) being that it takes work to pursue expertise in topics and we think there is value in sex education researchers developing theological expertise. Marcela Althaus-Reid (2000) the founder, such as there is one, of queer theology suggests that a personalist approach to the work is the point because ‘doing theology from people’s experiences and from their sexual stories’ means revealing ‘the falsity of the border limits between the material and divine dimension of our lives’ (148). There are reasons to be cautious about turns to the divine but there are also reasons to be open to them especially because ‘lust and love, and lust and justice do come together. No hymen separates them’ (66).

We begin our introduction with a tour of cultural and personal landscapes that make visible connections between the sexual and the theological to lead into the papers which emerged as signal examples of such challenging and beautiful work from academic perspectives. Each paper, in different ways, seeks to open up and peer into some of the complexities, paradoxes and possibilities that exist when we take seriously the need not to cede religious or sexuality discourses to a particular political orientation nor ignore the very real world challenges that religions and sexualities present for societies, whether we call them secular or post secular (Rasmussen 2016). Such work is, thinking about the materiality of sex itself, rather messy, but when consensual, highly pleasurable, and generative.

In Why? And how? Translating queer theologies for sex education, Seán Henry answers the question of what queer theologies might bring to the field of sex education by noting that they are inherently interested in the theological understanding of ‘the messiness of our embodied and sexual lives’ which offers ‘sex education researchers another way of thinking about, and with, religion, one that resists positioning religion invariably in deference to heteronormativity.’ Taking up the hevruta, homosocial Torah study partnerships, Henry suggests that this ‘conventional structuring of Torah study through male-and-male partnerships allows for forms of queer selfhood to emerge that point to the place of erotic desire in hermeneutical experience’ also allowing for interesting overlaps of Jewishness and queerness. That these relationships are rooted in study, a concept Pinar (2015) suggested is akin to “engagement in prayer (14) such that ‘the classroom must be considered a sacred place’ (15) helps us think with the complicated conversation that outlines the ongoing reconceptualisation of curriculum studies. But at a conceptual level, Henry extends his work to suggest that the work of translation that happens in the hermeneutical relationship of homosocial Torah study allows for the creation of a ‘space where the metaphor, symbol structures, and other tropes of queer theologies can speak to the commitments of sex education researchers.’ This is made manifest in his work through the imagining of the Abrahamic threesome, an overlapping of Judaic, Islamic and Christian imagery meant to widen out the aperture for considering the contours of queer subjecthood as it emerges when read back through queer engagement with traditional religious symbolism.

Jacob DesRochers suggests one way in which we might imagine field-based research at the juncture of queer religious entanglements and sexuality education is read through silence. This conceptual thinking through silence (or failure or refusal) is not new so much as it is a fresh call to think about the meaningful occurrence that silence evokes. Our initial thinking around the relative silence about the call for this issue was illuminated by DesRochers’ thinking about silence as both concealment but also redaction. Things get left out, purposefully, in all sorts of ways when we think with religion and sexuality and we would do well to think more deeply about how this kind of silence functions to help participants get on with the daily necessity of survival and thrival (Greteman 2016). The paper engages the ways in which the implementation of an inclusive sexuality education in Ontario produces a kind of silence that disincludes conservative faith groups or rather that includes them only as silent participants and foils to the larger work. DesRochers wonders, as do we at the outset of this special issue: ‘how does silence structure the complex and often fraught relationship between religion and sexuality?’ Part of what we are arguing is that this silence might be more strategically considered as a part of the field as we wonder, ‘who speaks here, who is silent, and what is lost?’

Silence could very well be framed as a form of violence and there is ample evidence that violence often rears its head not only when religions meet, but also as religious understandings of sexual morality meet in both the public and private spheres. Joshua M. Heyes considers in Sexuality education as political theology: Pathways to non-violence a political theology of non-violence as a possible way to engage cultural and moral differences. Heyes locates the issue ‘not in Christian sexual ethics, but rather in Christianity’s collaboration with violent and coercive systems of power’ (11). Mapping out some of the terrain in sexuality education as it has been articulated around morality, hygiene, risk, pleasure and fulfilment, Heyes reminds readers that attempts to find ‘ideal sexual subjectivities’ are all rooted in a ‘political theology of secularised Christianity’ (7). Critiques of sexuality education, as such, are inadequate without attending to such roots. Or, Heyes argues, ‘public health ought to be recognised as political theology insofar as it reproduces similar structures previously present in Christianity-dominated societies, even while functionally it evacuates the authoritative language and procedure of Christian discipline’ (7). Heyes illustrates the thorny realities involved in critique as such critiques are often less of a break from that being critiqued and more a reframing through a changed discursive field. A political theology of non-violence, rooted in a Protestant tradition, does not so much refuse religious discourse but rather ‘refuse[s] any form of coercive power that would ensure moral hegemony.’ This is, in our estimation, an accommodationist approach whereby diverse views and beliefs are able to accommodate one another so no one view becomes hegemonic. For Heyes, teaching rooted in this approach can be viewed as ‘an act of sacrificial, self-giving generosity’ that can (hopefully) be reciprocated by those involved with different views, even as those involved ‘might in fact think these [other] views to be harmful’ (12). We note, however, an elision here as it is necessary to recognise a difference between thinking a view is harmful and views that have caused material harm. This is, inevitably, an issue of interpretation since harm can be used to describe various situations, rather strategically, needing those involved to think not only about, but through the lesson, and how any harms are perceived and/or experienced (Butler, 2020). Such harms cannot be individualised but recognise the social relations that are always already implicated not only in education, but also sex and experiences of (non)violence.

Jo Sell and Michael Reiss have contribute a timely piece of research given the Government in England’s introduction in 2019 of new statutory guidance that mandates that all secondary schools must teach relationship and sexuality education (RSE). Sell and Reiss indicate that they were motivated to undertake research on intersections between religion and sexuality that was not ‘framed within a discourse of conflict’ and from an understanding that the mandate to teach RSE came along with the expectation that education about RSE would be inclusive and faith sensitive. This is a high bar, especially when beginning teachers themselves are rarely given any education themselves regarding what faith sensitive education might look like. The authors adopted a mixed methods approach using six semi-structured focus groups, workshops, individual interviews and a student generated questionnaire. Using this approach, they endeavoured to better apprehend diverse school students’ understandings of the relationship between religion and RSE in the English context. The study involved students from three inner city schools from geographical areas amongst those with highest levels of religious observance, and a rural school where religious observance was well below the national average. Conversations about how to adapt RSE so it reflects and engages the communities in which it is taught, including their religious and cultural diversity, is an important, and under theorised area of research in Sexuality Education. Sell and Reiss argue ‘schools should be places that are as safe as possible for all students and that they should be places for students to learn … to express views [which] can lead to some students changing their views’. With Valerie Harwood, Rasmussen has put forward a not dissimilar position, arguing ‘We need to strike a balance between protecting ourselves and our students from discriminatory truths and fostering pedagogical practices that encourage the practice of critique … At issue, is not the polarisation of the sounds of truth (do we or do we not silence truths), but rather, that at each turn we practise critique in such a manner that we can engage with its noise’ (2013, 882) Although Rasmussen would resist the language of safety; recurrent controversies over the provision of RSE in England and elsewhere speak to the continuing challenges teachers, parents and students face in engaging with the noise generated in relation to RSE.

As a way to conclude, we would like to gesture towards a sexuality education that is attuned to the types of worldmaking that emerge from the queerness of religions and their theologies. This is inspired by Niels Van Doorn’s (2015) reflections on the forces of faith in people’s everyday lives based on his observations of an African American gay affirming Pentecostal church in Baltimore. Van Doorn argues people’s lives ‘defy any clean separation between religious feeling, or “belief,” and secular reason, or knowledge because religiously affected feelings frequently inform the affective framework in which affective reason can take shape – tying together sacred and secular bodies of knowledge’ (659). By defying such clean separations, can sexuality education researchers untie and tie anew knots (of faith and belief, and of sex, sexuality, and relationships) that allow for the fluid messiness of everyday lives and which do not silence or inflict further violence?