Centers & Margins

"Caring for the Marginalized"

“The Lost Sheep” by Sir John Everett Millais 1864

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This is part one of a two-part series on what I’m calling the “New Reformation.” So, if you read and enjoy this, stay tuned for part two.

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“It angers me when people are like ‘this woke stuff has got to go’ that’s telling me that you don’t care about my lived experience, you don’t care about the oppression of the LGBTQ community, you don’t care about the oppression of the disabled, you don’t care about the oppression of immigrants, you don’t care about your fellow neighbor and that is ungodly. That is not Christian.”

-Sunny Hostin, The View (click and skip to 30 second mark)

I am writing this for Christians who have heard comments like Sunny Hostin’s above, maybe on TV or from a coworker, and felt stuck. On the one hand, her words have some truth in them. Jesus did care for the oppressed and the marginalized. And He does command us to love our neighbor.

These are deeply Christian beliefs.

On the other hand, they may hear this and correctly sense that something is missing and feels “off,” but they aren’t exactly sure where it goes wrong.

Strange Creatures

I recently saw a panel discussion where the question that framed the conversation was “Is LGBTQ a part of Christianity?” It made me take some time and think about how I would answer this question.

Famous iconographer Jonathan Pageau once made an analogy about old gothic cathedrals and the LGBTQ movement today. He explained how there were often strange and odd creatures, goblins and gargoyles, on old cathedrals and churches. They were typically found on the outside and on the top of the buildings, around the edges and corners of the roof.

The gargoyles served two purposes, one practical and one symbolic. Practically, they conveyed water off of the roof in order to prevent damage and leaks. Symbolically, they reminded us of the ornate darkness, and otherness of sin that exists around us.

Though a reminder of evil themselves, they also were believed to function as something like a religious scarecrow, warding off evil spirits.

They were dark and odd, but also strangely beautiful and useful in a way. They taught us something about the world. They were on the edges, but also (literally) a part of the church.

They taught us something about ourselves, and our nature; we all have our eccentricities. In a sense, there is a bit of strange creatureliness in us all.

Pageau used the analogy to illustrate that, today, the real problem is not that strange and odd creatures are with us, as they always have been. (Maybe “the poor will always be with you” could today read something like “the queer will always be with you”). The real problem is their position or place; they have moved from being on the outside, on the edges and corners of the roof, to being on the inside, proudly positioned at the front and center.

Queer

More and more, the word “queer” today is becoming an umbrella term for anyone who identifies as LGBTQ, or, anyone who identifies as something other than straight (heterosexual).

Queer theory, a branch of critical theory, is “ …the study of gender practices/identities and sexualities that exist outside of cisgender and heterosexual ‘norms’.”

Pause, don’t miss the scare quotes around the word “norms” there, they are very important. They communicate a heavy sense of doubt that there is such a thing as “normal” at all, a fundamental component of queer and critical theory.

I think queer theory, and the queer label broadly ("I’m a queer person” or “The queer movement”) will continue to grow in popularity.

Carl Trueman

, in an interview discussing the LGBTQ movement, once said he believed that “queer theory will ultimately be the default.”

I think Trueman is right. Three or four years ago, it seemed like the T in LGBTQ had triumphed; moving forward, we will likely see the incoming triumph of the Q.

Center, Margin

The primary definition of the word queer is “strange, odd.” In recent years, the essence of this word has been warmly re-embraced by many who identify as queer. Thirty or so years ago the word was an insult. But today “queer” has been “reclaimed” by the LGBTQ community as a dignified, authenticating label.

Today, you will hear a lot about “normalizing” things. You may hear things like “we need to de-center cisgender heteronormativity” or “we need to center the marginalized.” These clunky and awkward phrases can be destabilizing and sound intimidating, but they actually communicate a very simple and strong desire for a fundamental reversal; when boiled down, these phrases translate to “make normal things not-so-normal” and “make not-so-normal things, normal”

(You may be tempted to pause here and ask, “Wait, didn’t the technical, scholarly definition of queer theory above put ‘norms’ in scare quotes implying there is no objective standard to which one can measure and define what ‘normal’ is? Doesn’t this sound like the queer movement is asserting a standard and norm they don’t really believe exists?” I stopped and thought the same thing, but don’t get too distracted with such reasonable questions¹).

But, and this should be obvious, attempting to “center the marginal,” as it relates to sexual minorities, doesn’t clarify or reinforce the essential meaning of “queer.” Instead, it has the exact opposite effect. It voids the word of any meaning at all.

Inverting the meaning of “queer,” trying to take a word that means “strange and odd” and reformulate it to mean “centered and normal,” doesn’t actually help the case for queer, so to speak. It renders the word meaningless and the movement powerless.

Before Obergefell, during the debates over “gay marriage,” conservatives argued that including the idea of two men or two women in the definition of marriage made the word meaningless. This seems true enough.

Leaving morals aside and speaking strictly to semantics, to take the word “marriage” that for all of human history has meant a natural union of different-yet-complementary kind of people that are oriented towards procreation, and, reformulate the word to also mean a union of the same kind of people that cannot procreate, doesn’t expand, clarify or enhance the meaning of “marriage.” It makes the word meaningless.

The two different kinds of relationships described above (hetero and homo) are ontologically opposed to each other. It’s not that they are simply different in degree, they’re different in kind. So to use the same word to describe both of them would vaporize the meaning of whatever word you choose.

This process mirrors a principle of mathematics called “the inverse property of addition” which states that the sum of a number and its opposite (inverse) is always zero. Example: 5 + (-5) = 0.

So, queer (strange) + queer (normal) = nothing.

Or, marriage (one man/one woman complementarity, oriented towards procreation in principle) + gay marriage (man/man, woman/woman, no real limits on number or kind of people involved and the intention to procreate is not necessary in principle) = nothing.

In an effort to “care for the marginalized” in our secular culture, we try to center them. We try to do this without appealing to God’s objective standard, His moral law.

When we do that, we completely lose the meaning of both “margin” and “center.” And we lose a clear vision of what it means to properly care for and help someone.

Our “crisis of meaning” meets our “crisis of morality.”

It is hard to “care for the marginalized” when all of those words have lost their true meaning.

Sheep Lost The of Parable The

For Christians, this gets especially difficult because we see Jesus consistently moving towards people on the margins. He cares for them, he goes to them. He heals them, he forgives them. They are clearly very important to him. And we are His disciples, we are supposed to be like Him.

But, again, in order for us to move towards and care for the marginalized, we need to know who they are and what that means.

In the parable of the lost sheep, Jesus leaves the 99 (center), to go find the one (margin).

But, the purpose of this pursuit is that Jesus rescues and reconciles the lost sheep back into the fold.

Today’s sexual revolutionaries seem to be telling a new, twisted version of this parable.

In Jesus’s original version, it is the lost sheep who is lost and rescued.

In the new twisted version, the lost sheep calls for the Shepherd and the fold to come to where he is; it is the Shepherd and the fold who are lost, and it is the lost sheep who is the center, the standard, the righteous.

The parable as Jesus tells it is about repentance of sin, seen in the last line of the parable, “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” Similar themes are echoed throughout the gospels, as in the parable of the lost son, the lost coin etc.

The question is not, “are there marginalized people, and should we care?”

The question is, “by what standard do we judge if one is marginalized and what it means to help them?”

When we listen to the words of Christ, two things can happen: we can break free from being stuck in the centered-marginalized/oppressor-oppressed binary, and we can see and know who the truly marginalized are.

A modern, worldly, oppressor-oppressed binary will only account for some things, like someone’s economic status or their sexual or racial characteristics. And it sees only through a lens of power and politics.

Ironically, it will miss the primary way that scripture says we are marginalized, our sin; our waywardness, lostness and estrangement from Christ.

It will also miss other ways one can experience a sense of marginalization: being extraordinarily beautiful, lonely, or intelligent.

A biblical understanding of the oppressed and marginalized transcends politics and economics.

As we grow in a knowledge of God, we can trade these worldly paradigms for eternal, universal, better ones; like good-evil, true-false, lost-found.

Then, we can identify who the really marginalized are, and we can know how to help them.

End

The blind man in John 9 comes to mind. He is blind from birth and the disciples ask Jesus, “‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him’.”

Christ sees the truly marginalized. Sometimes they’re on the margins because of their treason or sin, like tax collectors and prostitutes. Others are on the margins simply because of their social status or age, like the sick or the very young and the very old.

Many times, one’s marginal-ness is a mixture of social status and sin, like the woman at the well: she’s female, she’s Samaritan, she is also in sexual sin.

But with the man in John 9, it was not because he or his parents had sinned, he was born broken so that he could be fixed and so that “the works of God might be displayed in him.”

In Mark 2 Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

I think most of us would be willing and able to tell our loved ones who identify as queer that there is, and always has been, a place for them in the church.

But are we willing to also ask them, “Are you sick or are you well? Are you a sinner or are you righteous?”

If and when the opportunity presents itself, are we prepared to lovingly share with them that they are lost and in need of rescue?

Everyone is a sinner, and we are all in need of a savior. But ask yourself, do our friends and loved ones who proudly identify as queer, even those who would say they are a Christian, see themselves as lost?

Or are they, like the lost sheep in the backwards version of the parable, calling out for us to come and be where they are, to live and see the world by their standard?

The question for everyone is, “Are you sick, lost and in need of help?" If the answer is yes, the question then becomes “Do you truly believe, that regardless of your circumstances or your story, that Christ can forgive you and restore you? That whatever you have done, or whatever has been done to you, or wherever you have been, he can redeem you and reconcile you back into the fold?”

Let’s look back to the blind man at the end of his story in John 9. After being marginalized from birth, healed by Christ, and then re-marginalized by the Pharisees, Jesus again moves towards him,

“Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe’.”

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Thank you so much for reading. If you read this and have a thought, please leave a comment here or email me (below). I would love to hear your thoughts.

jeffreycharlescaldwell@gmail.com

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1. I didn’t have the time or space to get into this here, but this is something I write about again and again; we are, by design, political and religious creatures. It is an inescapable part of who we are. Which is why the queer/critical theorists will in one breath deny any objective standard for normal or what should be center, and in the next breath assert that racial and “sexual minorities” should be centered. There always will be a taboo or moral code, and there certainly will be a movement to center that code, it is not a matter of whether there will be religion and politics, only a matter of which religion and which politics. See this post for more on that.