
































Microsoft Word - CE+B-Document+11+Revision+Suggestions.docx


  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Transfiguration 
Christianity’s God as Newly Known Queer 

Angie Lopez, Stanford ‘23  
 
 

Abstract: The omnipresence of Christianity as a cultural structure that informs the cultural 
imaginary in Western society is undeniable. It is, among other interlocking structures of cultural 
influence, responsible for the ongoing centrality of the Western gender binary and the justified 
exclusion of non-white, non-male, non-cis, and non-heterosexual bodies in cultural and social 
spheres of influence. Conventionally understood as an antithesis to the anti-normative demands 
of more modern and queer conceptions of gender and sexuality, religion has retained an orthodox 
and disciplinary character. This paper however argues that this mutual exclusion of queerness 
and Christianity is inherently incorrect. It seeks to affirm that divinity and spiritual devotion are 
already fundamentally queer. The religious antagonism of queerness is not simply an obstacle to 
queer liberation but also, a denial of theological truth. Theology and queerness can rely on each 
other to be mobilized towards queer liberation in the Western cultural imaginary. To work 
towards this goal, this paper aims to create a queer theological understanding that consolidates 
the seemingly incompatible worlds of Western Christian culture and queer culture through the 
exploration of the queer transfiguration of Christian divinity and worship in order to assert a new 
unified vision of both the queer and the divine.  
 
 
 
 

 

 

 



  

Queer theology is a sentimental reeducation in divine beauties that we were earlier taught 
to despise (Jordan, 2020) 

 
 The first piece of jewelry that hung around my newborn neck was an ivory rosary. It had 
been passed down through four generations before retaining its relevance upon my body; 
Becoming tethered to Christianity preceded language, movement, and arguably even thought. I 
am but one of many who have had Christianity pressed upon them irreversibly. The 
omnipresence of Christianity, defined for the sake of this paper as the Abrahamic monotheistic 
religion based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as a “cultural structure that informs the 
cultural imaginary” (Bal, 2007) in Western society is undeniable, affecting even the most devout 
atheists. This monotheistic, patriarchally arranged religion has created a system of worship 
founded upon “religious symbols that legitimate and perpetuate social inequality in both 
ideology and practice” that contributes to the “moods [and] motivations” of our secular society 
(Christ 107 C.E.). It is, among other interlocking structures of cultural influence, responsible for 
the ongoing centrality of the Western gender binary1 and the justified exclusion of non-white, 
non-male, non-cis, and non-heterosexual bodies in cultural and social spheres of influence. 
Conventionally understood as an antithesis to the anti-normative demands of more modern and 
queer, i.e. non-heterosexual non-cis conceptions, conceptions of gender and sexuality, religion 
has retained an orthodox and disciplinary character (Pellegrini, 2020), and the Church, 
metonymically referring to all Christian institutions, its role as the organ of authority and control. 
Even so, I refuse to believe that queerness and divinity are intrinsically incompatible and that the 
queer struggle for liberation is one that is inherently at odds with the demands, beliefs, and 
history of Christian religious identity.  
 This paper argues that divinity and spiritual devotion are already fundamentally queer. 
The religious antagonism of queerness, the state not simply of being non-heterosexual and/or 
non-cis but more broadly being a state of non-adherence to cisheteropatriarchal standards of 
being, then is not simply an obstacle to queer liberation but also, a denial of theological truth. 
Theology and queerness can rely on each other to be mobilized towards queer liberation in the 
Western cultural imaginary. To work towards this goal, this paper independently addresses all 
three aspects of the trinity (the father, the son, and the holy spirit) to re-evaluate the current 
conceptualization of each key pillar of Christianity with the aid of both queer theory and 
Christian history. Overall, this paper aims to create a queer theological understanding that 
consolidates the seemingly incompatible worlds of Western Christian culture and queer culture 
through the exploration of the queer transfiguration of Christian divinity and worship in order to 
assert a new unified vision of both the queer and the divine.   
 
God is trans(cendant) 

 
1 The Western gender binary refers to the widely held cultural perspective, in Western societies specifically, that 
defines gender as existing in a binary that unequivocally defines men and women as natural and opposite, with 
differences between the two as being fundamental and enduring (West, Candance and Zimmerman 1987). 



  

 For just under half of all Americans (Froese and Bader, 2015), God is seen as a “him,” a 
“Father,” a divine patriarch. American sociologist Andrew L. Whitehead, using data from a 
random national survey and applying multivariate analysis, found that misperceived divine 
masculinity is not simply a matter of personal error, but more alarmingly, it is “consistently the 
strongest predictor of a traditional gender ideology” (Whitehead, 2012). This traditional gender 
ideology is further directly correlated with an adherence to misogynistic and transphobic beliefs. 
For the believer, God’s assumed maleness is indicative of an “underlying assumption of a 
gendered nature of reality…strong[ly] influenc[ing] gender roles and ideology” (Whitehead, 
2012). In this sense, personal worship of a male God leads to the belief in the innateness of male 
superiority and authority and the creation of patriarchal social structures as reflective of good 
worship seeing as God, understood as masculine, is the ultimate authority and men are closer in 
nature to this authority than non-men. Seeing the prevalence of religious imagery that is founded 
in masculine conceptions of divinity, take the example of any image of the Christian cross with a 
figure of Jesus on it (his body emphasized as explicitly masculine), traditional gender ideology 
has been allowed to permeate through all aspects of Western society, inhibiting the socio-
political equality of non-male, non-cis, non-heterosexual populations. For this reason, it is 
fundamental to rediscover the true nature of God, one that is not rooted in traditional gender 
adherence but instead is proof of divine gender’s queer malleability and excess. 
 First and foremost, Christian conceptions of God, whether they refer to him as “he” or 
not, do not consider God to be male in the way humanity is biologically male. To begin, in  
lesser-known religious works, gnostic works, i.e. first-century Christian and Jewish texts that 
emphasized personal spiritual pursuits above orthodox teachings, rejected from the New 
Testament, “gnostic theologians correlate their description of God in both masculine and 
feminine terms with a complementary description of human nature. Most often they refer to the 
creation account of Genesis 1, which suggests an equal (or even androgynous) creation of 
mankind. This conception carries the principle of equality between men and women into the 
practical social and political structures of gnostic communities” (Pagels, 1976). It is not 
uncommon then for pre-modern Christians to conceptualize God outside of a patriarchal 
framework and do so with the support of biblical evidence. Furthermore, even in Orthodox 
understandings of God, which do adhere more rigidly to a conception of God as fatherly, an 
exclusively male God is still a misconception. God, as a divine figure, “transcends the human 
distinction between the sexes [and] transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is 
the standard” (Church, 2003). So, despite the rigid use of a male pronoun, even in the most 
orthodox and canonized conception of God, he is beyond human conceptions of maleness.   
 God as “He” must be understood as divinely and queerly excessive and elusive, 
transcending human thresholds and understandings of gender and sex. God’s masculinity is 
evidence of queer theory’s assertion that “masculinity has got nothing to do with… men” 
(Sedgwick, 1995) for God’s masculinity is completely disconnected from the male sex. Instead, 
God’s masculinity can be better understood in closer proximity to the queer masculinity of stone 



  

butch2 lesbians for it is a masculinity that destabilizes binary understandings of gender, overlaps 
with gender-queerness, and most notably, describes the identity of a lesbian that is not simply 
butch/masculine but more specifically characterizes themselves as someone who “does not allow 
[themselves] to be touched” (Zimmerman, 2000 ).  God, as a masculine figure, cannot be 
touched and cannot be contained within the constraints of a conventional cis masculinity seeing 
God’s transgression of mortal constraints of gender and corporeality. God as a “Father” most 
resembles the stone butch’s alternate, malleable, impermeable, visibly constructed, and excessive 
masculine identity, and least resembles the cis man’s one-dimensional, binary masculinity.  
 Furthermore, as a divine figure, God is not restricted simply to masculinity, despite the 
prevalence of patriarchal conceptions of him. God’s masculinity is equally feminine, 
androgynous, agendered, and gender-multiple. His gender multiplicity, like his divinity, is 
completely disconnected from and incomprehensible to human conceptualization. God is “both 
(male and female) rather than neither (male nor female) … the two add[ing] up to something 
non-numerical…simply gender-variant (Marchal, 2020 ). If God, as a divine being beyond 
comprehensible human understandings of gender, is incapable of being mortally masculine, it is 
undeniable that to consider God mortally, to use his supposed maleness to justify a patriarchal 
and heteronormative social arrangement, is blasphemous for it is reduces God to something 
comprehensible and categorizable by humanity and more dangerously, to humanity’s (especially 
men’s) equal. If we are to strive to build a society that is in adherence to God’s gender, we need 
not prioritize the authority of men, but instead strive to adhere to queer conceptions of gender 
and sex, aiming to consistently expand our current conceptions of masculinity and femininity so 
that they might mirror more closely the fluidity and expansiveness of divinity.  

 
Queer is Christ 
 Though reframing God as gender-transcendent has the most visible repercussions for the 
modern-day social structure, gender is not the only queer aspect of Christian divinity and the 
acknowledgement of these various other undeniably queer aspects of divinity have the potential 
to bring theology and the queer movement into even closer proximity. One of the most notable of 
these aspects is the queerness intrinsic to God’s dual corporeality and incorporeality, as 
manifested in the coming of Christ, non-coincidentally one of the defining features of 
Christianity. Christ evades the normative conceptions of divinity’s incorporeality and queers the 
relationship between the mortal and the divine. Acknowledging the queerness intrinsic to the 
nature of Christian divinity further encourages less orthodox and less binary conceptions of God, 
our relationship to him, and ultimately of ourselves.  
 Christ as God on Earth, divinity as flesh, “becomes the permanent disruption of godly 
abstraction and sovereign singularity…the porosity of flesh means incarnation can only be 
promiscuous” (Rubenstein, 2020). Christ queered our conception of God, complicating our 
perception of his immaterial character, debauching it in a sense, through the corporeal 
transgression of divinity as Other. “Th[is] coming to flesh of divinity disrupts the smooth 

 
2 A stone butch is a lesbian who displays female butchness or traditional "masculinity" (Halberstam 111) 



  

otherness of the divine, its separateness from the changeable stuff of earth, its abhorrence of rot, 
its innocence of death, and its ignorance of life or desire” (Rubenstein 294). This disruption 
irreversibly changes the identity of both divinity and mortality, humanizing the former and 
eternizing the latter. In Christ’s disruption of this binary, he can be understood in close proximity 
to Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza,” who similarly transgresses the binary between Chicanx and White 
culture and in doing so, develops a new consciousness that redefines both herself and both 
cultures. This new mestiza consciousness is a way of understanding the world that embraces 
dualities, ambiguities and serves, according to Anzaldua, as the most compelling perspective for 
changing the world for the better. Like the mestiza, Christ, in belonging to two worlds, that of 
the terrestrial and the divine, “develop[ed] a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for 
ambiguity…operat[ing] in a pluralistic mode…nothing thrust out…nothing 
abandoned…turn[ing] the ambivalence into something else” (Anzaldúa, 1987). Christ is known 
for his radical acceptance of all of humanity’s sins while not abandoning his sustained devotion 
to God. He is thus, like the mestiza, pluralistic, radically tolerant, and turning his dual status as 
mortal god into something else: the promise of divine salvation. Furthermore, in his coming to 
Earth as flesh, in working out a synthesis of the mortal and divine, Christ, like the mestiza, “has 
added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a 
new consciousness…and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual 
creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm. (Anzaldúa, 
1987). Christ’s new consciousness, the fulfilled Trinity, is greater than the sum of its parts for the 
Trinity is consubstantial and a source of intense pain, for to achieve this consciousness Christ 
had to undergo crucifixion. This fulfilled Trinity further enables the continual creative motion of 
closing the binary between the mortal and divine. Unlike the mestiza however, whose 
consciousness and vision for the future does not calls for universal hybridization as the goal of 
racial inclusivity, Christ’s new trinitarian consciousness does propel a unifying vision of 
universal and equalizing salvation under Christ. Nonetheless, the closeness to the new mestiza 
positions Christ in undeniably closer contact with the queer than the normative. As a result of 
Christ’s divinely queer transgression into the world of the mortal, God too is difficult to 
conceptualize as simply being an aloof monarch of the universe, and instead, must be more 
productively imagined in queer terms as well: a “lord who pursues pleasure and inclusivity over 
domination and control” (Hoke, 2020).  
 Furthermore, the coming of Christ queered worship by transforming the Church into a 
space of queer intimacy through the integration of the Eucharist. By ritually pursuing closeness 
to God through the performance of carnal closeness (the consumption of Christ’s flesh and 
blood), Christ’s coming to Earth made worship a visceral experience driven equally by bodily 
and spiritual desires. As Pope Benedict XVI, a contemporary figure in the Catholic world, firmly 
asserts, “the Eucharist [is] the ultimate erotic encounter with God…erotic love reach[ing] its 
climax…in the Eucharist” (Grimes, 2016). As God’s materiality became known to us, sensuality 
becomes an undeniable aspect of our religious sensibility, eroticism becoming a medium through 
which religious content can take hold (Bal, 2007). Furthermore, this eroticism is not 



  

heterosexually oriented; on the contrary, it is wholly and undeniably queer. As Benedict 
explains, “the Eucharist [is] a means of erotic encounter with other human beings... While 
marriage requires us to love monogamously, the Eucharist demands promiscuity…the Eucharist 
brings men union not with one wife but with all those who have become [Christ’s] own” (Grimes 
513) and in doing so, “sex and gender are destabilized as men take Jesus’s male body into their 
own and women become the male body of Christ... the Eucharist exhibits the very queer 
tendency of contesting and reconfiguring embodied identities. If the Eucharist truly provides the 
“source and summit” of Christian life, then Christian love cannot help both producing and being 
mediated through queer bodies” (Grimes, 2016). By contesting the heteronormative boundaries 
between bodies, their genders, and their sexualities, the Eucharist demands a queer re-
conceptualization of the self and of worship. It demands eroticism to be at the forefront of 
spirituality and universalizing gender-transcendent promiscuity, not singular heterosexual 
monogamy, to be at the heart of divine salvation. In this undeniably queering act, the Eucharist 
further asserts Christianity’s closeness to queerness and its ever-growing distance with the 
heteronormative. In acknowledging the intrinsic erotics of Christian worship and the queerness 
of God’s incomprehensible multiplicity of (im)materiality, we begin to lose grasp of any 
conceivable binary between the mortal and the divine, the bodily and the spiritual, the self and 
Other. Therefore, if we are to live a life guided by divine principles, we too should strive to 
conceptualize ourselves and our environments beyond the simplicity of binaries towards a 
sensuous appreciation of everything’s deeply unknowable multiplicity and queer 
interconnectedness.   
 
The Spirit’s uncanny timing 
 The other essential aspect of Christianity, the eternality and thus atemporality of God and 
biblical knowledge is also undeniably both queer and divine. The Bible’s continued relevance in 
the modern world is indicative of its queer relationship to time, one transcending 
chrononormativity3, one that resists the pull towards hetero-capitalist futurity by bringing the 
ancient in miraculously close contact with both the present and the future. Understanding God’s 
eternality as queer can unbound us from our own strict adherence to chrononormativity, making 
room for a re-imagined relationship with time that queerly and religiously values awe, 
unfamiliarity, and, above all, miracle. 
 The Bible’s “queer persistence” (Kotrosits, 2020) as a “timeless, eternal, [and] 
primordial” (Marchal, 2020) object undeniably relevant in the modern world is indicative of its 
revolutionary (both in the symbolic sense of dramatic change and literal sense of turning back) 
queer affect (Freeman, 2011). Its strength lies in its queer ability to “manifest the power of 
anachronism to unsituate the present tense…and to illuminate or even prophetically ignite 

 
3  The use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity (Freeman, 2011); is 
responsible for our understanding of time as being standardized, with certain life benchmarks (graduation, marriage, 
etc.) holding particular weight over other life events (like taking a walk or making dinner); delineates the past, 
present, and future as three distinct times that do not overlap. 
 



  

possible futures” (Freeman, 2011). For worshippers, this power is at the root of the Bible’s 
divinity for to have faith in the Bible is to reimagine one’s future as one tied to the eternality of 
Heaven and for non-believers, for whom Heaven has no affective resonance, the Bible’s queer 
persistence nonetheless calls into question the future and capital-oriented momentum of 
chrononormativity by insisting on the modern relevance of ancient mythos and non-productive 
religious affect. The Bible’s “multiple, even simultaneous temporalities…cross time and exceed 
periodization” (Marchal, 2020). The very essence of what makes the Bible miraculous both to 
believers and non-believers alike is its ability to both remain contemporarily relevant while also 
fully grounded in pre-modernity, often bringing these two worlds into collision through the 
regulatory nature of its religious doctrine. This is undeniably rooted in its adherence to queer 
time. It is no wonder why biblical adherence, i.e. faith in the bible, when viewed from a secular 
social point of view that does, in its secularity  adhere to chrononormative time, can be so 
defamiliarizing and often resisted, for the queerness intrinsic to its reimagining of time disrupts 
the hetero-capitalist illusion of the present, calling forth for a disorienting intimate relationship 
with the past, undermining the hetero-capitalist compulsion towards futurity and innovation.  
 Similarly, the image of God himself queers time through his eternality and warped 
relationship to futurity. To know God is impossible for his divine immateriality prevents it 
however; the knowledge that Jesus Christ once roamed Earth becomes part of the Christian 
“memory” for it is an event that took place in the past and often resurfaces in the religious 
present as proof of a promise of the afterlife, the future. In this way, we do know God but as a 
“memory of futurity… as the promise of the future” (MacKendrick, 2020). God is a strange and 
disruptive wielder of queer time that makes the future untenable through the present and timeless 
persistence of an unknowable past. God, like queerness, or more adventurously, as queerness, is 
something we can never touch but whose “warm illuminations of a horizon imbued with 
potentiality” (Muñoz 1) we can feel, and whose “queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be 
distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (Muñoz, 2019).  Like a queer utopic 
sentiment, a “remembered God is the non-foreclosure of the possible, is the possible, the open, 
the giving in the given, [making] all time…queer: always open to other than it is, as the very 
condition of its being” (MacKendrick, 2020). 
  Knowing God becomes, for individuals raised into Western religious thought, the first 
and only exposure to queer time that, when demanded to co-exist uncritically with the rampant 
upholding of chrononormativity, often results in religious disillusion. In this way, a critical re-
adherence to religion relies on the queer socio-political disavowal of hetero-capitalist time in 
exchange for the embracing of queer affective time driven by a corporeal receptivity to wonder. 
Therefore, to advance both the agendas of queer liberation and Christian worship it is undeniably 
important to re-imagine our relationship to time, avowing instead to the queer conception of time 
as malleable, affective, and driven by the miraculous and frightening endlessness of possibility.   
 
Conclusion 



  

 Overall, the worlds of queerness and Christianity are not as diametrically opposed as they 
are conventionally understood to be. Both challenge the socially constructed limitations of 
gender, humanity, and time and do so with an unwavering commitment to affectivity, 
sensuousness, and miracle. In this sense, they are more aligned than opposed.  
 It is my hope that in highlighting the similarities these worlds undeniably hold, in 
bringing both worlds into close proximity to each other, that the antagonism these social spheres 
hold for each other can begin to unravel. Both Queerness and Christianity hold such great weight 
in the Western cultural psyche and so it is my hope that they can begin to jointly illuminate the 
miraculousness of expansive thought and transgressive behavior to unbind the hetero-capitalist 
restraints imposed on our lives.   
 
  



  

References 
 

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands = La frontera : the new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Copyright. 
 
Bal, M. (2007). Postmodern Theology as Cultural Analysis. The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern 

Theology, 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470997123.ch1 
 
Christ, C. P. (107 C.E.). Why women need the goddess. In K. Bagley & K. Mcintosh (Eds.), Women’s 

studies in religion : a multicultural reader (pp. 163–174). Pearson/Prentice Hall. 
 
Church, C. (2003). Catechism of the Catholic Church : with modifications from the Editio Typica. 

Doubleday. 
 
Freeman, E. (2011). Time binds : Queer temporalities, queer histories. Duke University Press. 
 
Froese, P., & Bader, C. (2015). America’s four gods : what we say about God - et what that says about 

us. Oxford Univ. Press. 
 
Grimes, K. M. (2016). The Erotic Eucharist. Journal of Religious Ethics, 44(3), 495–517. 

https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.12151 
 
Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Duke University Press. 
 
Hoke, J. N. (2020). Unbinding Imperial Time: Chrononormativity and Paul’s Letter to the Romans. 

Sexual Disorientations, 68–89. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823277544-003 
 
Jordan, M. D. (2020). In Search of Queer Theology Lost. Sexual Disorientations, 296–308. 

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823277544-016 
 
Kotrosits, M. (2020). Queer Persistence: On Death, History, and Longing for Endings. Sexual 

Disorientations, 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823277544-006 
 
MacKendrick, K. (2020). Remember—When? Sexual Disorientations, 277–291. 

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823277544-014 
 
Marchal, J. A. (2020). Appalling bodies : queer figures before and after Paul’s letters / Joseph A. 

Marchal. Oxford University Press. 
 
Muñoz, J. E. (2019). Cruising utopia : the then and there of queer futurity. New York University Press. 
 
Pagels, E. H. (1976). What Became of God the Mother? Conflicting Images of God in Early 

Christianity. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2(2), 293–303. 
https://doi.org/10.1086/493357 

 
Pellegrini, A. (2020). Queer Structures of Religious Feeling: What Time Is Now? Sexual 

Disorientations, 240–257. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823277544-012 



  

 
Rubenstein, M.-J. (2020). Response: Queer Enfleshment. Sexual Disorientations, 292–295. 

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823277544-015 
 
Sedgwick, E. K. (1995). “Gosh Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity!” In M. 

Berger, B. Wallis, S. Watson, & C. M. Weems (Eds.), Constructing Masculinity (pp. 11–20). 
Pyschology Press. 

 
West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. "Doing Gender". Gender & Society 1 (2): 125-151. 

doi:10.1177/0891243287001002002. 
 
Whitehead, A. L. (2012). Gender Ideology and Religion: Does a Masculine Image of God Matter? 

Review of Religious Research, 54(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-012-0056-3 
 
Zimmerman, B. (2000). Lesbian histories and cultures : an encyclopedia. Garland. 
 


