Queer Theology: Have some BDSM kink with your God
A professor at the Toronto School of Theology teaches students to infuse BDSM and kink into their sermons to queer Christianity
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Jesus is your daddy now.
The Rev’d Dr. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson is a professor at the Toronto School of Theology and Emmanual College, where she teaches a class called Queer Theology. She is an ordained Baptist minister.
On June 29, 2023, Reverand Natalie gave a talk at St. Andrew’s United Church in Toronto with the Progress Flag on the altar and Jesus and his apostles in the background. The conversation was streamed live on the internet.
And in that talk, Reverand Natalie told the audience that if they want to deepen their relationship with God, there are some wonderful Christian Kink Sex Clubs they can avail themselves of:
“…one hand you could have a fantastic Church movement for embracing Kink positive practices…there are Kink Christian Community dungeon places…there are places where you can go and have a community of Christians doing King kinky stuff together…they're like they're sex clubs, they're sex clubs for Christians…if you're a kink practitioner, maybe there's something in there that's helping you think through your relationship with God that would let you take on a new kind of power-laden prayer practice…”
Think that’s crazy? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Welcome to the kink-driven world of queer theology.
What is queer theology, you ask? Let’s allow Reverand Natalie to explain:
“I teach the first queer theology that course that's ever been taught at the Toronto School of Theology…the way that I try to explain it to my students is that this is a very different discipline than say doing what used to be called Gay and Lesbian studies…it moves quickly away from that in terms of trying to reimagine how we conceive of the Divine through the kinds of language Christianity…and relate with the Divine if we to were to remove from that all the kind of heteronormative all the kind of heterosexual underpinnings of all theological thinking”
SIDEBAR:
If you’re already feeling confused about the language Reverand Natalie is using, here are a few helpful resources.
Remember, “queer” is a far-left political ideology that seeks to destabilize the norms of society, not an identity:
Learn what heteronormative means in this article about why there are suddenly so many non-binary people:
Reverand Natalie has a deep, desire for God in a way that’s queered, and definitely not heterosexual:
“…at the heart of queer theology is this idea of desire for the Divine that we then begin to understand in many many different ways. If you think throughout Christian history of the ways desire for God has been understood it's always had a very heterosexual orientation to it and queer theology kind of takes that what do we say affective orientation to the Divine and begins to open it up to really think about all the ways that humans can experience desire and desire for God in ways that are, as the name goes, queered.”
Reverand Natalie believes that people yearn to be in a kinky BDSM relationship with God to explore the power dynamics between you and God.
“…this quote from John Dunn's poem…’batter my heart oh three oh three person God’…it became kind of a touchstone piece that people would criticize of well John Dunn wants to be beaten up by God and therefore that's bad. I was like well what if John Dunn was actually just a little into something a bit more kinky and was…it's not that he wants to be beaten up by God in a bad way but maybe wants to enjoy a certain kind of awareness of the power dynamics between the Divine and the human and that this queerness, this kinkiness to the poem that he's writing actually lifts that up….”
Reverand Natalie believes that engaging in kink and BDSM will lead to transcendence and greater awareness and connection to the divine:
“…there are practices these people have taken on throughout history that do look like contemporary Kink practices in many ways…and there's a lot of philosophical work done on trying to look at the similarities among these that are disciplining the body into forms of transcendence that open awareness and connection with the divine”
She also believes that Christians should open themselves up to more indecent encounters with God:
“…we have these kinds of ways of thinking theologically, constructing our Christian practice of approaching God that are shaped by certain kinds of parameters of what we might call decency…and that if we want to really unlock our theological imaginations to open up new ways of encountering the Divine it requires becoming indecent in a certain way….”
Reverand Natalie believes everyone should have a deep yearning for God and that God has a deep yearning for us:
“…if we destabilize the kind of normative underpinnings of the ways we think about God many new things become possible, and when we're thinking about God in different ways we're relating to God in different ways. And for me I'm always wanting to think about and relate to God through yearning, deep and wild yearning, because I believe that God yearns deeply with great desire for me, us.”
When asked what she would say to her critics that believe this idea is too extreme, Reverand Natalie assured us that most Queer Theologians are very traditional because BDSM requires strict structures and parameters. That is where encounter with the divine becomes possible.
“…a lot of queer theologians do work with deeply traditional approaches to theology because they give us these kind of well you know those of you who do know about kink and BDSM will hear where this is going but they give us these fairly strict structures and parameters that you can then rupture and rearrange in different ways to actually create spaces of performance activity creativity where Divine encounter becomes possible…”
Reverand Natalie just wants us all to be lovers of God:
“…how through certain practices do we become shaped as lovers of God, that's what excites me…”
Reverand Natalie is training ministers in her Queer Theology class to drop nuggets about kink and BDSM into their sermons without the audience knowing exactly what they’re talking about to help them find ecstasy in church.
“…if I'm helping to equip ministers who are thinking in much more expansive and disruptive ways about sexuality, then they're going to be (like I do when I preach) dropping little things into the sermon that might not sound like they're about sex or Identity or gender but are, again, sort of thinking about desire, thinking about ecstasy…who thinks about ecstasy anymore in church? I'm always trying to preach ecstasy I want to unlock and overflow and pour out and spill all over the place.”
Don’t worry! Reverand Natalie’s students will also be teaching your kids sex ed in church. She has them develop a lesson plan for it. What could possibly go wrong with teaching about sex in church?
“…Students in my queer theology class there's a few different things they can choose from…they can write like an education plan for doing sex education in a church for youth, and then we begin to think about so what are the starting points where would you start on sex education…we would start with the question I just asked you what's what's the desires inside of yourself and where do you go from there…”
She even used to use a movie about a man having an affair with a sex with a sex doll, until it became a big too normative:
Of course, there were mentions of disrupting the white supremacist concept of time, the biological family, and capitalism!
“…we've begun to find all the different many different ways in which this idea of a heterosexual nuclear family shapes so many of the ways that we move through the world and so many of the ways we understand what it is to be in a human body in the world be a human body in the world so one is time one is how we relate to time there's the idea that like this forward drive of time sort of this heterosexual intersection with capitalism that is always kind of pushing us into a certain set of sexual and economic norms…“
She also has “Kink Week” with her students:
I had a grad student who did an incredible activity during Kink week where we all had to blindfold each other and move each other around…you could sub/dom switch and I was sub and two of my students were doms…”
If you want to deepen your relationship with God, there are a ton of resources that will help you far more than 50 Shades of Grey.
“if something's ignited your imagination tonight about BDSM and prayer, there are resources out there for you…explore yourself! What are your fantasies what excites you that you don't say out loud to people…what do you think about when you're not allowed to be thinking about that thing, and if that's how your desire works, what does that tell you about your desire for God and God's desire for you?”
Queer Theology…coming soon to a church near you.
Thanks a lot, Canada.
Here’s a highlight reel of all the clips from this article and more, if you’d like something to share with your friends and family with everything in one place:
What do you think of queer theology?
Leave a comment and let me know.
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Thanks, Karlyn, for all you do to bring this info to our attention. I share regularly with my friends and family. I don’t know of any other person who digs as deep as you!
i predicted this . The tentacles of this ideology knows no bounds and will leave NO stone unturned. My optimistic side says it's all just a fashionable trend with zero sustainability, no?