Queer desires and emotional regimes in Swedish Free-Church contexts

ABSTRACT

This article is based on in-depth interviews with 29 Christian LGBTQ individuals and examines queer desires and feelings in Swedish Free-Church contexts. My point of departure is to analyze how the participants relate to religion and religious practices in connection with the tension that exists between their own emotions and desires and the emotional regime of the free churches to which they belong. The empirical data were interpreted through the theoretical concepts of emotional regimes, emotive dissonance, queerness and heteronormativity. The results show that to experience queer emotions and desires within a free-church community means to constantly be exposed to a hierarchical heteronormativity. Resisting and deviating from the Church's collective emotional regime always involves some form of sanction. Paradoxically, several interviewees testify how an exploration of queer relationships, sexualities and identities could be enabled just because of the heteronormative context.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQ
• Sweden
• Christian Free Church
• emotional regimes
• queer desires
• heteronormativity

Introduction

This article is based on in-depth interviews with 29 Christian LGBTQ individuals and examines queer desires and feelings in Swedish Free-Church contexts. The abbreviation LGBTQ¹ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer and to be an LGBTQ person means to have a gender identity, sexuality or relationship that goes beyond the hetero- and cis norm. In the article, I use the term ‘free church’² and refer to the communities that emerged from the great revival movements of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, including a movement sometimes called evangelical or biblical. The Christian free churches in Sweden have approximately 235,000 members. A free church is characterized by a strong emphasis on biblical authority, a personal faith in God and an active and committed membership in a congregation. The free churches in Sweden have several common denominators but also differences. What they have in common is that they belong to the revival-Christian tradition that Andersson, Spjuth and Wenell³ describe as characterized by a ‘strong belief in the Bible, a conservative view of the doctrine and an emphasis on personal experiences’ (my translation). The evangelical traditions include many religious practices that link bodies and emotions in producing religious experiences – for example, singing, worship, prayer postures, speaking in tongues and healing, among other practices. The free-church communities often encourage intense, emotional religious experiences. The connection of bodies and emotions is thus a central feature of the evangelical tradition.⁴ The free churches differ, however, in many aspects, not least when it comes to issues relating to intimacy, sexuality and views on LGBTQ people.

Sweden has historically been early in introducing legal rights for same-sex couples and parents. Same-sex sexuality was legalized in 1944 and homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder in 1979. In 1995 Sweden introduced registered partnership for same-sex couples, the third country in the world to do so after Denmark and Norway.⁵ The right to same-sex marriage in the Church of Sweden was approved by the General Synod in autumn 2009, the same year as gender-neutral marriage legislation was introduced in Sweden. However, the Christian free churches have handled the marriage law differently and to date, it is only the United Church that allows same-sex marriage. Van den Berg⁶ concludes her study on religious opposition to the introduction of same-sex marriage in Sweden, by stating: ‘After the “liberalization” of the Church of Sweden, religious conservatism now seems to be in the hands of the free churches’.

The aim of this article is to shed light on Christian LGBTQ people’s experiences of and ability to express queer feelings and desires in Swedish Free-Church contexts. My point of departure is to analyze how the participants relate to religion and religious practices in connection with the tension that exists between their own emotions and desires and the emotional regimes⁷ of the free churches to which they belong. The article also aims to develop the theoretical framework of religious emotions, formulated by Riis and Woodhead⁸ by focusing queer feelings and desires in Christian Free Church settings. The following research questions guide the analysis:

• How do the interviewed LGBTQ individuals relate to prevailing emotional regimes when it comes to queer emotions and desire?

• How are queer spaces created and what do they look like?

• In what way are queer feelings and desires expressed in free-church environments and what are the consequences?

Previous research

Several studies show that Christian LGBTQ people constitute a particularly vulnerable group in terms of discrimination and exclusion.⁹ Internationally, research has examined various areas in relation to LGBTQ, sexuality and Christianity. For example, studies have focussed on changes in views of homosexuality,¹⁰ Christianity and sexuality in relation to gender,¹¹ attitudes to and negotiations about sexuality,¹² bisexuality and Christianity¹³ and experiences of stigma and vulnerability.¹⁴ Wilcox¹⁵ describes the living conditions for Christian homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people in California. The 70 interviewees testified to experiences of vulnerability and oppression. O’Brien¹⁶ mentions three strategies for dealing with being both LGBTQ and Christian; distance yourself from the Church, distance yourself from sexuality, affirm both sexuality and faith and find your own way to combine them.

Empirical research on Christianity and LGBTQ in Sweden is primarily based on experiences from the Church of Sweden. Mariecke Van den Berg¹⁷ explores the debates on same-sex marriage in Sweden, focusing on the construction of religious opposition and the public reception of it in order to reach a closer understanding of the ways in which religion, (homo)sexuality and marriage have been constructed in relation to each other. Van den Berg argues that, through the so-called ‘Protect Marriage’ initiative, the free churches were able to claim a conservative space in relation to the liberal values that dominated the Church of Sweden and the political landscape at the time. Greger Andersson¹⁸ analyses articles from the Swedish Christian newspaper Dagen from 2000–2015 and discusses homosexuality and Christian faith as a ‘rhetorical crisis’. He argues that the control over the situation regarding homosexuality has been lost and states that the churches previously had a picture of how they should handle the issue but that these approaches no longer give the expected results. According to him, the crisis relates both to the question of what problems are actually being discussed and to the question of where, how and with whom the debate should be conducted.

In a study of young people in the Uniting Church, ethnologist Maria Zackariasson¹⁹ examined the relationship between democratic and religious engagement. She shows, among other things, how her informants reason about how membership in the church entails certain expectations of how one should live, not least in relation to alcohol and sex. Daniel Enstedt²⁰ deals with questions about Christian faith, sexuality and cohabitation based on the Church of Sweden's decision to introduce an act of blessing for same-sex couples. He states that genuine homosexuality is created as the image of heterosexuality and only then can it have a place in the Church of Sweden. The ethnologist Susanne Lindström’s²¹ dissertation is based partly on interviews with 13 homo- and bisexual priests and partly on some of the Church’s own inquiries and documents concerning Christianity and non-normative sexuality. She analyzes ongoing constructions of heterosexuality as a norm in the Swedish Church and examines, on the one hand, how norms for homosexuality, cohabitation and gender are reproduced in documents created by the Swedish Church and, on the other, how these norms are reproduced, challenged and transformed in the life stories of Christian homo- and bisexual individuals.

Studies that examine queerness and LGBTQ within Swedish Free Churches are still a neglected area and my ambition is that this article can contribute to filling that void.

Theoretical framework

The article analyzes queer emotions and desires in a religious setting. I start by describing how I use the term ‘queer’ and then go on to frame the concept of emotion and other related concepts that I use in my analysis. To describe what queer encompasses is rather difficult but anthropologist Fanny Ambjörnsson²² points to ‘the violation of sexual norms, structures and identities’. Queer can be both a theory and an activism. Here I use queer as a tool with which to question the taken-for-granted truth – that there is a normal and an abnormal way to be sexual. Using the term queer, I follow theologian Linn Marie Tonstad’s²³ argument that ‘queer theology is not about apologetics for the inclusion of sexual and gender minorities in Christianity, but about visions of socio-political transformation that alter practices of distinction harming gender and sexual minorities’. Taylor and Snowdon²⁴ describe that queer religious subjectivity is ‘complexly negotiated via intersectional experiences, combining institutional official lines with everyday intimate realities and dis-identifications’.

An important concept within queer theory is heteronormativity. Heteronormativity works by maintaining and pointing out boundaries between normative heterosexuality and practically everything that falls outside it. Several earlier studies have described the free-churches context as completely heteronormative.²⁵ Gabriele-Black and Goldberg²⁶ state that, for Evangelical Christians, biblical teachings about sexuality and gender are firmly grounded in heteronormativity – whereby, for example, any gender identity that is beyond the male/female binary is regarded as a threat to or disruption of not only the structure of society but also a God-designed morality. Taylor and Falconer²⁷ explore how young people experience identifying as both religious and queer, and how they situate themselves within, and begin to reconcile, religion and sexuality in their lives. According to the authors, religion is often depicted as the conservative element that prevents the advancement of sexual freedoms and the right to be lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. At the same time, a substantial body of work on the LGBT population entirely disregards any religious aspect of LGBT lives or refers to such associations as negative, or harmful. For that reason, Taylor and Falconer state, more research into bridging the divide between religion and sexuality is urgently necessary.

My starting point in the article is that emotions are not primarily inner, psychic states but relational and socially constructed ones, helping us to act, perceive, assess and transform in interactions with other individuals. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild²⁸ combines a feminist standpoint with symbolic interactionism when she investigates the relations between emotion and structural imbalances of power. She sees social life as a scripted drama including ‘feelings rules’ and emotional ‘display rules’ that individuals must follow.²⁹ According to Hochschild there are norms for the expected display of feelings as well as what we are supposed to feel deep inside. The constant process of transforming unconventional feelings or emotional displays into conforming ones takes a lot of work and is always related to power. To maintain a separation between display and feeling over long periods is very difficult. Hochschild³⁰ proposes the principle of emotive dissonance to understand how individuals try to reduce the strain by changing either what they feel or what they feign.

Building on Hochschild, the sociologists Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead have developed a sociological framework for making sense of religious emotions. Their analysis of emotion is constructed in the interplay between social agents and structures. Thus, the emotions are ‘both personal and relational; private and social; biological and cultural; active and passive’.³¹ To capture the way in which emotions are integral to a certain setting, they propose the concept of emotional regimes. These regimes persist over time and shape individuals in what they can feel, how they can feel it, the way in which they can express their feelings and also the kind of relations they are able to form. The authors state: ‘Those who exhibit the correct emotions in the right settings at the right time and in the right ways receive formal and informal approval’.³² In this way, emotions play an important role in creating and reproducing power structures and the emotional regime of a religious group can control and eliminate dissonant emotions and bring the members into line emotionally. Authorized emotions are expressed, imitated, enforced and internalized in formal and informal social gatherings and interactions.³³ Thus, the regimes serve to identify who belongs to the group and who is an outsider. Internal deviants may be stigmatized and banished. However, it is important to note that the regimes can never be autocratic and totalitarian. Modern contemporary society is characterized by differentiation and pluralism, which means that individuals encounter a range of different and sometimes contradictory emotional regimes.

Method

Data collection and sample

I have interviewed 29 Christian LGBTQ people with experience of a free-church context. I have used different recruitment options and strived for as varied a selection as possible. Initially, I contacted EKHO – Ecumenical groups for Christian LGBTQ people. I told them about the study and that I was looking for interviewees and asked them to spread information to their members. EKHO has several local associations, so-called seed groups, which I also contacted. I also got in touch with RFSL, The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights and the majority of their local associations. I connected with Christian student associations and Christian Facebook groups. In line with the so-called ‘snowball method’³⁴, I asked the interviewees to spread information about the study and to ask others they know if they would like to participate. I met the interviewees in their homes, at their workplaces, in their churches, at universities, in cafés and in restaurants. Some of the interviews were conducted via digital face-to-face conversations. When the empirical collection was, to some extent, completed in the spring of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the already planned meetings were rescheduled as digital meetings. All the planned interviews were conducted and no one canceled an interview. On some occasions, we did not have time to finish the conversation and therefore we met again for another interview. The interviews took between one and four hours. I used a semi-structured interview guide as support; however, the interviewees were allowed to speak as freely as they wanted. The interviews were recorded and then transcribed verbatim by the author.

The participants’ backgrounds vary regarding their gender, age, class and living conditions. They are between the ages of twenty and sixty-five. Fourteen identified themselves as women, sex as transgender and nine as men. The majority are born in Sweden. Seventeen of the informants live in one of the three largest cities in Sweden, and the remaining twelve live in another city or rural area. Most worked or studied, but a few were on sick leave or were searching for employment.

All interviewees belong or have belonged to a free-church community. Some have left the free-church context but still have a belief in God. A few no longer describe themselves as believers. The interviewees have experiences from every free church that is a member of the Swedish Christian Council (SKR): The Uniting Church, the Evangelical Free Church, the Salvation Army, the Pentecostal Church, the Swedish Alliance Mission and Vineyard. Experiences from the Faith Movement and Seventh-Day Adventism are also represented; however, these communities are not members of SKR and are involved only as so-called observers.

Data analysis

In my analysis of the interview material, the thematic analysis method as proponed by Braun and Clarke³⁵ was applied. After transcription, the interviews were read several times and important themes were identified through an overall coding. Then a second coding was done in which categories were created and filled with content and where patterns were identified. In the third step, illustrative quotes were compiled and became part of the content of the text. I have repeatedly modified the use of the theoretical concepts in a dialectical relationship with the stories of the informants. In this article, the analytical categories were interpreted through the theoretical concepts of emotional regimes, emotive dissonance, queerness and heteronormativity.

Ethical aspects

When someone showed an interest in participating, I emailed more-detailed information and a consent document. This latter was signed at the time of the interview. During the digital interviews, the interviewee signed the document and then sent it to me. The project follows the Swedish Research Council’s ethical guidelines³⁶ which involve informing the participants of the current research assignment, obtaining their consent and assuring them of the highest possible confidentiality and that any data collected are for research purposes only. All names and places have been anonymized. The interviews have been recorded and transcribed in detail by the author and the study approved by the national Ethical Review Board (Dnr 2019-04368).

Results and analysis

A heteronormative context

There is no common line in issues concerning LGBTQ within Swedish free churches. Rather, the free-church environments can be described as extremely heterogeneous and the interviewees’ statements reflect this diversity. I have interviewed people who are members of free churches where there is active and committed work for diversity and equality. I have also interviewed people who have testified to strong condemnation, stigmatization and exclusivity by both family and parish, based on their being an LGBTQ person. There is thus a wide range of narratives but what unites the interviewees’ stories – and which has also been found in previous studies – is the heteronormativity that permeates the free-church environment. Liselotte started to engage with a Pentecostal Church when she was in her late teens. After almost 20 years of membership, she left that congregation and now belongs to a Uniting Church. She describes the free church's view of intimacy and sexuality as a ‘template’:

It is so very clear in what form everything should take place. There are even marriage classes that you can attend within the church. And there are ready-made frames and people to reflect yourself in … “This is how we do it”. As a finished template (…) But it is also very subtle how it happens. It's not just what is said directly, but it's about guiding people in that direction as well. And of course, that's how norms work, so it's nothing specific to the church, but there is no space for movements that think differently within the church.

Rosemarie, who has experiences from Vineyard and a Pentecostal congregation and defines herself as a relation anarchist, speaks of a ‘strong culture’ in the free-church context. I ask if she has felt discriminated against, due to her way of being sexual and having several partners and she answers

I don’t dare to be open so I do not know. I feel there is such a strong culture, so I do not dare. I do not know what the consequences would be. Maybe people would talk shit behind my back … I think that is what would happen.

In both Christina's and Rosemarie's narrative, the difficulties of displaying queer emotions are clear. What Rosemarie calls a ‘strong culture’ can be interpreted as a heteronormative emotional regime where space for emotions and actions outside the heteronormative is limited.

The interviewees describe feelings of loneliness and vulnerability from growing up as an LGBTQ person in a heteronormative Christian environment. Some say that they did not know that there existed such a thing as homosexuality, bisexuality or transgender identity during their childhood or adolescence. During the interviews, it becomes obvious that they have reflected a lot on sexual behaviors, relationships, practices and ethics. The interviewees point out, for example, the difficulty of knowing what it means to have a relationship and to have sex ‘in the right way’. They describe how they recurringly need to renegotiate norms and views that they have brought with them from church, as these clash with both societal and their own, later-formulated, norms. Talking about her first lesbian relationship, Liselotte says ‘It was both fantastic and very difficult, because I had no training. I could not really understand what was reasonable and what was not reasonable’.

Several of the interviewees have previously, in their lives, been of the opinion that LGBTQ is not compatible with the Christian faith but have since processed their values and come to a different, affirmative attitude. Anna is the only one of the interviewees who still believes that it is wrong to live out homosexual feelings as a Christian. She became a member of a Christian congregation about ten years ago. She looks back on the time before she became a Christian as one fraught with destructiveness and mental illness and believes that it was related to the fact that she lived in same-sex relationships. She says that God spoke to her and said that she should give up her homosexual feelings as they were not compatible with genuine Christianity: ‘I had a powerful experience of God's answer, that it was not good. I had this strong feeling from God when I asked God, that it was a big sense of danger’. I ask her: ‘To live as a homosexual?’ and she answers: ‘Yes, to live it out, as a homosexual’. As it is important for most people to find someone to love and feel a sense of belonging to, I ask if she feels that she is abandoning something by not living in a relationship. She says:

Yes … I totally understand all those thoughts and feelings because I have thought it through and felt all those feelings myself. It's not easy, I know that. But for me, I have so clearly felt that God has guided me. Every time I have felt that I will fall back … when the feelings have become too strong, like … now I am about to slip back, now I am on my way into a relationship again … Then I have to sit down and ask God why I feel like this, and then I have got that feeling that it is no good. (…) But when I see women in relationships, I think it’s wonderful, and it looks very loving and caring. That is with my own Anna-feeling, so to speak. I am very happy for the love that exists between people. I feel happy, I cannot help it.

Anna differentiates between the emotional regime that she believes God conveys and that she has been internationalized into as a Christian and her own ‘Anna-feeling’ when she describes that she is happy to see loving women in same-sex relationships. Riis and Woodhead³⁷ state that ‘To join a religion is to experience a new way of feeling about self, others, society, and the world’. For Anna, to be a Christian meant to be socialized into a new regime of thinking and feeling. According to Riis and Woodhead, religious people learn to understand the emotional notes approved by the religions to which they belong and to do so in ways that are authorized by their communities of belonging. Anna says that she has been guided by God but also by pastoral conversations and individual interactions with people within the congregation, which can be interpreted as her having been internalized into the emotional regime authorized by the church. In Anna's narrative it becomes clear that love needs be denied in order to fit with the narratives of the church.

To (un)follow the emotional regime

Many of the interviewees have lived in a heterosexual marriage, several for the greater part of their lives. Kjell tells me that he was around 11 or 12 when he realized that he was homosexual. He soon found out that the Salvatory Church, the congregation in which he grew up, labeled it as a sin. The emotional regime regarding love, relations and intimacy was totally conservative and, even though Kjell was only a child, he knew that he had to keep the homosexuality a secret if he was to be accepted by the congregation. Here, it is obvious that the emotional regime served to identify who belonged to the group and who was an outsider. For Kjell, it was the beginning of several decades of performance:

I started very early with some kind of … I would almost call it some kind of theatre or roleplaying. I tried to be proper and say the right things and have the right opinions but at the same time, I felt like it was not right … so I created a kind of double play or how to put it? (…) When I was around 20, I met a girl, and we got married and had children. And it was as if I thought “This is how it should be”; it was not so well thought out … – like, if I do this, that will happen – it was more like “This is how you should do it – what is expected”.

Kjell did not accept, even to himself, that he was gay, ‘and because I had not accepted it to myself, I could not say anything about it to anyone’. According to Hochschild³⁸, a separation of display and feeling – what she calls emotive dissonance – is hard to keep up over long periods. When the difference between feeling and feigning is too great, it leads to strain. Kjell lived with his wife for more than 20 years. He continues:

I tried very hard but, in the end, it didn't work out. I felt mentally ill and went into psychiatric care from time to time. It was the whole situation, my hidden homosexuality and to try to be a good husband and a good father and then my wife was dissatisfied, sexually as well. As time went on it became more and more complicated, it became more … what I call the role play became increasingly difficult to cope with.

To reduce the strain from the emotive dissonance, both the required and the felt emotions need to be pulled closer together, either by changing what one feels or by changing what one feigns. For Kjell the situation finally become unbearable – he felt worse and worse and, after a few spells in psychiatric care, he told his wife that he was gay and they divorced. He left the Salvatory Church for another congregation where he felt welcomed as a gay man.

Closely associated with queer feelings and desires in free-church communities are feelings of anxiety and shame. Numerous studies have demonstrated a link between sexual guilt, behavior and attitudes and religiosity³⁴. In line with previous research, the interviewees in this study describe how queer desires and emotions gave rise to feelings of anxiety and shame. When I ask Laura, who has experiences of a Pentecostal congregation, if she has had feelings of shame and guilt in relation to who she is and her sexuality, she answers: ‘Oh yes. Oh yes. Those concepts have been like a neon sign in front of me, blinking. I have felt incredibly ashamed. Really been weighed down by shame. It's like having a millstone around your neck’. Even for William, a former youth pastor in a Pentecostal congregation, the emotive dissonance was pervasive and, like many of my other interviewees, he tried to think and feel differently: ‘I think I reprogrammed myself all the time – “No, no, no, now you must not think so, do this instead”. I have prayed thousands of millions of times to God, to get rid of my homosexuality, I would do anything’. After many years, William reached a turning point where he re-evaluated his emotional rules and changed his life to a way of living where the required and the felt emotions could be intertwined. Linnea has experience of a Uniting Church congregation. In her quote, several layers of shame appear:

I was afraid that my life would be very lonely. Because then, I did not see it as a possibility to be with another girl. And I probably thought … I felt disgusting. And I didn’t want those feelings. (…) I didn’t want anyone to find out, so it was clearly shame in front of the congregation as well. In relation to God as well, for me not having succeeded in being who he wanted me to be or in being as pure as I ought to be; not to think sinful thoughts.

Linnea was ashamed before God that she was not to be able to be pure and think sinless thoughts. She also expected external condemnation from the congregation if they found out and had internalized a self-condemnation that resulted from the emotional regime of the congregation. To go against the collective emotional regime is not only associated with anxiety and shame but is also always connected with some form of sanction.³⁹ Some of the informants have been accused of sin and witchcraft due to their resistance to the prevailing emotional regimes. Ulrika, raised in what she describes as an extremely conservative Pentecostal family, recalls her adolescence:

Dad could look at me during these years and say “You are possessed of a demon. You're not my daughter”. He could talk to me in the third person. And then I felt that, yes, maybe I am. Maybe that’s it! I just felt so bad, what a darkness I had inside me.

She continues to recount that, when she was subjected to a ritual to drive out the evil spirits in order to change her feelings and behavior … 

… [t]he doorbell rang, and four men in suits came in (…) They said “Your parents are so worried … we know Ulrika that you are so loved by Jesus and he will never leave you, he longs for you. Can we just pray for you”? (…) They had put one of our chairs in the room and they asked me to sit down and then they stood around me in a ring and someone put a hand on my head and someone on my body and then they started praying. Praying and pushing me down on the chair. I remember the pressure on my body and that Mum and Dad were there somewhere, walking around praying. And there is like an expectation in the whole home like “It is now, it’s happening. Now a miracle is going to happen. Ulrika will be free”. But I did not feel anything … no miracle happened.

Riis and Woodhead⁴⁰ use the term ultra-internalization to analyze what occurs in a regime that considers the ‘true’ religious emotions to be only those that conform with the authorized framework of the community. Incongruent feelings are regarded as dangerous or evil. In order to function, this type of regime generally calls for external control by the community and self-control among the members. Individuals must be guided, controlled and learn to feel appropriately. This is legitimized by presenting the individuals as sinners who need to be disciplined and purified or even, as in the case of Ulrika, to be exorcized. This kind of regime controls emotions, suppresses individual expression and displays a strong structural power combined with a low degree of individual empowerment.

As we have seen, the free-church environment in many cases seems inhibiting and restrictive, where the ability to express sexualities or gender identities other than the heterosexual seems to be very difficult and associated with various forms of sanction. I now continue to analyze how free churches can be a space that enables queer emotions.

Heteronormativity as a blindfold, enabling queer emotions

Some of the interviewees testified to how an exploration of queer relationships, sexualities and identities was made possible just because of the heteronormative context. Sam grew up with their parents and siblings in a Uniting Church in a big city.

Sam:

It was diffuse who was queer because we were very experimental with each other then, the whole group. All the stereotypes of a free-church incestuous were incorporated, like a context with teenagers who are just horny (…) people were together this way and that. Absolutely heterosexual relationships because we had not put into words that there was something lesbian or something queer about it (…).

Interviewer:

The free churches are often described as quite heteronormative environments but here it sounds like you tested and crossed borders. How did it happen? Did you talk about that?

Sam:

All of this was made possible by the heteronormative context. It would not have been possible in a queer-enlightening context to be as we were. We just had fun, we hung out but it was so … boys and girls belong together otherwise you are “like that” and sex is cock-in-pussy and it was absolutely 100 per cent that discourse, and that enabled what we did (…) There was a gap and in that gap we found a place. Absolutely a heteronormative environment and that was also why it became so easy in relation to the leaders, it was very much like … “It’s such fun that all teenagers are here” … I think that, if we had screwed this way and that, they would have been quicker to interrupt. But now they did, like, nothing. (…) If we wanted cock-in-pussy sex, we were very careful. Then we set an alarm in the middle of the night and sneaked out because it was a thing! However, I did not sleep by myself during the whole confa [confirmation, my note] camp, I slept with someone constantly for three weeks and nobody raised an eyebrow. We said “Oh it's so cozy to sleep together” and the leaders just said “Yeeeees” and what we did at night they didn’t care about.

Sam distinguishes between heterosexual acts and queer acts where the heterosexual act required planning and sneaking, while the queer exploration could take place without ‘anyone raising an eyebrow’. I ask if their acting was ever discussed and Sam answers:

No, never. Because how the hell would they have put it into words? That is also what made this gap, if it had been a boy and a girl who did the same thing, they would have been able to put it into words. Like “We do not allow this”. There were girls’ and boys’ rooms, for example at the camp, that division. So, it was in that very heteronormative context that we got space. For how the hell could they have labelled the activity, we could not even label what we were doing ourselves. We had no tools for what we did except that it felt nice.

Since there was no language for the actions, they could not be discussed and, in this space, or ‘gap’, Sam and the other young people in the congregation could explore queer desires and feelings. If the leaders knew what was happening, they probably lacked the words to discuss it with the adolescents and thus could not admonish or ban it. Likewise, Mika describes how they were enabled to live out their queerness in the community in a Uniting Church but, at the same time, they say that it was something that could not be put into words:

You could not talk about it openly, or put labels on each other but, at the same time, it was, like … at least in my confa group and teenage group … that everyone was so loving and cuddly and you slept with each other and it was very … wonderful and nice in that way. And in that way, I feel that I could live out much of my queerness there.

Sofia, a previous member of a Vineyard congregation, talks about how intercessions could constitute occasions when she experienced strong attraction to other women. Intercession means that one or several people pray for a person, a situation that is often described as intimate, including body contact to strengthen the prayer and/or the healing. Sofia recounts an occasion when she met a woman during an intercession:

I experienced very strong feelings (…) when I think back … uh … what if I had been a man and we were the same age and I really felt attraction to this woman and had my hands on her body and took a lot of her time … if I had seen it from the outside, I would have thought it was a bit uncomfortable.

Sofia reflects that the situation would probably have been interpreted differently (by herself and others) and in a more problematic way, if she had been a man with lustful feelings directed at a woman during prayers but, here, the lesbian desire became invisible in the obvious heteronormative context, which paradoxically could enable queer emotions. Sofia continues:

Often, I could experience that God “put on my heart”⁴¹, that is, to pray for and it was always girls (laughs) it was always, always … girls! It was never that God urged me to pray for an old man or a guy and that is interesting to think about afterwards [laughs].

Some of the interviewees also admitted that the queer feelings and desires could be defended as they did not involve ‘sex’ in the traditional sense – i.e. heterosexual intercourse. Christina recounts how an exploration of dominance and submission became a kind of ‘survival strategy’ when she worked and lived in a Christian treatment home, a life that she now describes as sectarian. The male pastor guided the staff and the residents with an iron fist and considered himself to have a direct link to God. She says that she developed a bondage relationship with one of her colleagues who also lived in the treatment home:

We went out into the woods, far out, and this somehow became a survival strategy and also a way to play with domination and submission, both to have power but also to release … but it's so insane, or do you understand? It became a way to survive. I developed an ability to create spaces outside. I did not involve God in this. This was a room of its own and it always took place in ritual forms. We had a total vow of silence. We would never talk to anyone, whatsoever, whatever happened … it was like it happened in a parallel reality and since we did not have intercourse it was not completely wrong. It was not sex. (…) We played quite a lot with leaving and to be left, to be tied up in the woods at night when it was dark. I did not know when he would come back and I was completely tied up and could not get loose, and this was a horror-mixed delight of not knowing what was happening.

While Christina was able to defend the BDSM exploration to herself by saying that it was not ‘sex’ (since they did not have intercourse), she understood that the actions were not allowed:

But it was so totally forbidden, it was not possible to link it into the rest of my life. Likewise, when I went to a Pride festival, it was placed in a box outside. What happened at Pride did not really happen. I needed to create social and psychological constructions for myself, otherwise it did not work.

Creating queer spaces by sorting them into ‘rooms outside’ was, for Christina, a way of dealing with the separation between display and feeling – the emotive dissonance – in the ultra-internalized regime of which she was a part.

Conclusion

No queer Christian ever had an easy time defining and inhabiting her form of life.⁴²

In this article, I have examined how the LGBTQ individuals whom I interviewed relate to prevailing emotional regimes when it comes to queer emotions and desire, how queer spaces are created and the ways in which queer feelings and desires can be expressed in free-church environments. Taylor and Snowdon⁴³ conclude their study on young British Christian lesbians by stating: ‘Religion matters for our “queer religious youth” as a site of significant self-identification, situated within a changing landscape and political climate’. In line with Taylor and Snowdon, the interviewees in this study see the Christian environments as a place for self-identification and exploration of queerness. However, to experience queer emotions and desires within a free-church community means one is constantly exposed to a hierarchical heteronormativity. To experience queer emotions and desires within a free-church community means that one is constantly exposed to a hierarchical heteronormativity. The interviewees both need to navigate and are affected by the conservative emotional regimes in the free churches. In a heteronormative context there is no queer role model to mirror oneself. Several interviewees point to the difficulty of creating relationships and having sex, since love relations, intimacy and sexuality have been closely associated with morality and feelings of shame and sin.

Most of the interviewees have been exposed to what Hochschild⁴⁴ calls emotive disconnection. For example, many have lived in long heterosexual marriages as homosexuals. Resisting and deviating from the Church's collective emotional regime always involves some form of sanction. The interviewees talk about feelings of shame and guilt, about exclusion and the expelling of evil spirits. Paradoxically, several interviewees also testify how an exploration of queer relationships, sexualities and identities could be enabled just because of the heteronormative context. Since there was no language for that kind of practices, emotions and desires, it was not possible to talk about them, let alone ban them. In this way, a space was created where queer desires and feelings could be explored and be lived out, despite the utmost heteronormative context.

Since theory and empirical material have been set in dialogue in the process of analysis, my ambition in the article has been to develop the theoretical framework of emotional regimes, formulated by Riis and Woodhead.⁴⁵ By focusing on queer feelings and desires in Christian Free Church settings I present a new theoretical angle of how the emotional regimes can affect individuals in what and how they can feel, and the way in which they can express their feelings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Forte [grant number 2018-01200].

Notes on contributors

Charlotta Carlström

Charlotta Carlström is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interest concerns sexuality, intimacy, hbtq, power and Christianity.

Notes

1 In the article trans includes various forms of trans identification and experience. It can indicate someone who was female at birth but who is now male or vice versa, or someone who identifies as trans without any transitioning to or identifying with a particular gender.

2 Here and in the following, the term free church covers Evangelical free churches that are members of the Christian Council of Sweden, namely the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden, the Salvation Army, the Uniting Church, The Pentecostal Movement, The Swedish Alliance Mission and Vineyard Nordic. The Quakers, Word of Faith and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Sweden are not members but participate as so-called observers. https://www.skr.org/en/.

3 Andersson, Spjuth, and Wenell, “Unga i Karismatiska,” 2.

4 McGuire, Lived Religion.

5 Van den Berg, “Rings for the Rainbow”.

6 Ibid., 241

7 Riis and Woodhead, Sociology of Religious Emotions.

8 I explain the term “emotional regimes” in the theory section (Hochschild, The Managed Heart).

9 Nkosi and Masson, “Christianity and Homosexuality”; Subhi et al., “Intrapersonal Conflict between Christianity”; Yip, “Leaving the Church”.

10 Cragun, Williams, and Sumerau, “From Sodomy to Sympathy”.

11 Burke, “What Makes a Man”; Sommer, “Christianity, Gender and Sexuality”; Isherwood, “Feminist Critique of Sexuality”.

12 Page, “Sexuality and Christianity”; Trammell, “Homosexuality is Bad for Me”.

13 Toft, “Researching Bisexuality and Christianity”.

14 Enstedt, “Blessing Same-Sex Unions”; Gårdfeldt, Hatar Gud bögar?; Wilcox, Coming Out in Christianity.

15 Wilcox, Coming Out in Christianity.

16 O’Brien, “Wrestling the Angel”.

17 Van den Berg, “Rings for the Rainbow”.

18 Andersson, “Homosexualitetsfrågan: En Retorisk Kris”.

19 Zachariasson, Gemenskapen: Deltagande, Identitet, 136–137.

20 Enstedt, “Blessing Same-Sex Unions”.

21 Lindström, “Kamp om Rummet”.

22 Ambjörnsson, Vad är Queer?, 16.

23 Tonstad, Queer Theology, 3.

24 Taylor and Snowdon, “Making Space for Young Lesbians in Church?”.

25 See, for example, Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin; Trammel, “Homosexuality is Bad”.

26 Gabriele-Black and Goldberg, “LGBTQ Activism”.

27 Taylor and Falconer, Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth.

28 Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules”; The Managed Heart.

29 Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules”.

30 Hochschild, The Managed Heart.

31 Riis and Woodhead, Sociology of Religious Emotions, 5.

32 Ibid., 49.

33 Ibid., 71.

34 May, Social Research.

35 Braun and Clarke, “Using Thematic Analysis”.

36 Swedish Research Council, http://www.codex.vr.se/index.shtml.

37 Riis and Woodhead, Sociology of Religious Emotions, 11.

38 Hochschild, The Managed Heart.

39 See, for example, McClintock, Sexual Shame; Murray, Ciarrocchi, and Murray-Swank, “Spirituality, Religiosity, Shame”.

40 Riis and Woodhead, Sociology of Religious Emotions.

41 “God put on my heart” is an expression common in evangelical contexts. The person is saying that he or she has received a message from God and this is experienced as a spiritual feeling.

42 Larrimore, “Introduction,” 8.

43 Taylor and Snowdon, “Making Space for Young Lesbians in Church?,” 410.

44 Hochschild, The Managed Heart.

45 Riis and Woodhead, Sociology of Religious Emotions.