The Queerness of Christian Faith

This chapter analyzes the theological roots of secular understandings of erotic temporality and fidelity. It begins with a discussion of Saint Paul’s Epistles, in which the radical humiliation that manifests divine love is necessarily beyond human capacity. It then turns to Saint Augustine’s conviction that the divided human will renders confession incomplete and conversion provisional. Based on the premise that as a human creature he can always change, Augustine’s depiction of faith as a result of miraculous passion is cause for optimism as well as anxiety about who he will be in the future. Salvation for Augustine inheres in the consequent realization that professions of faith are in fact ambivalent prayers for it. Finally, this chapter traces the centrality of Pauline and Augustinian theology to the structure of fidelity in Francesco Petrarch’s secular love lyrics, which limn in excruciating detail the mille rivolte—the thousand turns, revolts, and returns—of his competing attachments to Laura, God, and his own worldly ambition. These poems confront a fragmented self incapable of the conviction and fidelity to which it desperately aspires but does not entirely want.

The Optimism of Infidelity

This chapter argues that whereas in modern thought secularism appears the only route to challenging lifelong monogamous marriage, the early modern writers John Milton, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth base their endorsement of divorce and adultery on the Pauline distinction between duty and love, letter and spirit. Milton’s divorce pamphlets and Sidney’s and Wroth’s sonnet sequences presume that any given commitment may turn out to be a mistake, so intimacy is inevitably provisional. In their emphasis on interiority, these writers participate in a cultural project of privatizing love, which scholars have rightly seen as an ideological foundation of heteronormativity, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Yet by taking this privatization to its logical extreme, they provide grounds for removing intimacy from institutional regulation and reward altogether. These writings are useful to modern queer thought not just as positive models, but also because they alert us to the exclusions upon which freedom may be premised. Sidney, Wroth, and Milton are part of the longer history that precedes and conditions present queer associations of secularism with Western reason and modernity, religion with superstitious and oppressive non-Western cultures. The ideal of sexual liberation, no less than those of monogamy and marriage, has its own racialized genealogy.

The Shame of Conjugal Sex

This chapter traces the effects of Pauline and Augustinian soteriology on Protestant views of marriage. The Reformation is conventionally understood as elevating conjugal love above the lifelong celibacy privileged by the Catholic Church. But this redemptive vision of marriage overlooks a key argument of leading reformers like Luther and Calvin: both deemed marriage superior to celibacy not because marriage sanctifies shameful creaturely desires, but because it publicly acknowledges them. This view of marriage as humbling confession of impurity runs counter to the ideals assumed by the US Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the majority affirmed the constitutional right to marriage equality on the grounds that marriage confers unique dignity. By contrast, Protestant anxiety that nuptial sex shares the excess and indignity of fornication structures the sexual and racial fantasies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion. When Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets cast poetry as a reproductive technology free of the contamination of lust, they valorize not only same-sex desire but also the preservation of specifically “fair”—white—life and culture. Spenser reveals that the ideal of chaste romance generates sadomasochistic fantasies that naturalize white male sexual violence and racialize female innocence.

The Color of Monogamy

This chapter examines how an ideal of monogamy helps sustain intersecting gendered and racial hierarchies. Woman of color feminism has long censured the association of female sexual respectability with whiteness and social privilege, but this work generally dates the advent of that association to the establishment of modern slavery and colonialism. William Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, register the development of a fiction of somatic, heritable whiteness as a correlate of respectable sexuality, one disseminated in classical discourses celebrating male friendship and in imperial allegories of sexual conquest. Yet in their depiction of a three-way affair between the poet, a “fair” young man, and a “black” mistress, the sonnets conspicuously fail to cordon off rational and mutual “fair” male friendship from the humiliating enslavement of “black” female appetite. Instead, drawing on the Pauline theory of sin and grace that influenced thinkers from Martin Luther and John Calvin to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, the sonnets dissolve the oppositions ostensibly embodied by the poet’s “two loves”—agency and passivity, mastery and submission, fidelity and promiscuity, purity and pollution—to imagine intimacies beyond the couple.

Coda

Queer Faith concludes by examining some implications of Pauline theology for recent debates about periodization, affect, and reading. The coda observes that the figure of the scholar whose work is spurred by love rather than professional aspiration, submission to texts rather than mastery over them, reparative rather than paranoid reading, offers a paradigm for scholarly commitments that are not defined in terms of traditional periodization. It also recognizes that an endorsement of amateurism and attachment might be a secular version of the Pauline hierarchy of faith and love over works and rewards. Rather than treat this theological resonance as a reason to dismiss the possibility that different orientations to reading can reinvent institutional norms, the coda explores what the persistence of this Pauline structure can tell scholars about ways of inhabiting academia. Pursing this framework to its logical conclusion, the coda proposes that a revaluation of amateurism and promiscuity—with all of their implications of infidelity and instrumentality, distraction and play—may encourage scholarship that resists the ideals of scholarly mastery and commitment that tend to reinforce the institutionalization of queer theory’s archive as modern and secular.

On Erotic Accountability

This chapter focuses on lyrics written from the point of view of the unfaithful lover. Theological concepts of charity, forgiveness, and confession can inform secular discussions of erotic accountability: what we owe those we love and those who love us. Understanding accountability in the dual senses of responsibility and narration illuminated by Judith Butler, this chapter considers how aesthetic creation—the struggle to tell a coherent story of the self and its desires—constitutes an unattainable ethical obligation. The devotional and libertine poetry of John Donne, like the writings of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin before him, represents confession not as what Michel Foucault called an act of truth, but as an imaginative acknowledgment of guilt in potentia. Donne’s attention to the entanglement of matter and spirit resists the ideals of romance and rationality that have often been deemed the signal characteristics of “human” sexuality; instead, he writes from the perspective of a being coopted by foreign forces within and without. Counterintuitively, Donne is at his most religious when he defends promiscuous, impermanent, and impure intimacies. For the indiscriminate desire that Donne’s speakers pursue is a secular approximation of divine forgiveness and caritas, the arbitrary yet generous love for imperfect creatures regardless of merit.

Introduction

The introduction surveys this book’s stakes in debates within queer theory, critical race studies, early modern studies, and postsecular studies. Discussing the affordances of taking seriously the religious metaphors that continue to shape discourses of secular love, it outlines the ways in which Renaissance love lyrics provide a valuable archive to modern queer challenges to norms of monogamous coupledom and sovereign subjectivity. It proposes that rather than assume the coherence of faith, this poetry explores an ethics of promiscuity in which awareness of shared vulnerability entails a more challenging acceptance of shared propensity to change, ambivalence, and self-deceit. It further traces the history of the concept of secularity from its Protestant roots and, joining a number of postsecular theorists, argues that attending to the persistence of religious thought in modern culture can compel a confrontation with the racial dimensions of queer views of the autonomy of desire. Moreover, in suggesting that we may never have been secular, the introduction shows how attentiveness to Christian theology’s queer assumptions can help to contest normative associations of Christianity with unique innocence and morality, and a progressive periodization that sets modernity off from its others.