"The Natural Order of Creation": Naturalizing Discourses in the Christian Same-Sex Marriage Debate

Abstract

Same-sex marriage is at the vortex of a vitriolic debate in mainline1 Christian denominations in the United States. Both those who advocate for same-sex marriage and those who repudiate it employ naturalizing discourses to legitimate their claims. Mainline Christian denominations bring together liberal, evangelical and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT)2 Christians who employ disparate rhetorics that are usually examined in isolation. This diversity makes mainline denominations unique sites in which to explore the naturalizing discourses employed in the same-sex marriage debate. Yanagisako and Delaney (1995) argue that naturalizing discourses are used to authorize social power. Currently, there is a struggle in many Christian denominations for the power to direct the future practices of the Church. Same-sex marriage marks the site of that struggle.As Yanagisako and Delaney (1995) point out, discourses that construct aspects of human social life as render them outside of human agency and control. Naturalizing homosexuality, in fact, allows liberal Christians to state that homosexuality is actually ordained by God (Thumma 1991). The rite of marriage, therefore, must be extended to same-sex couples if the Church is to deal with them as Jesus would. This view is understood to be in opposition to an evangelical perspective, which claims that only heterosexuality is natural while condemning homosexuality as unnatural. Evangelicals purport that in marriage men and women exist in a complementary relationship and together reflect the wholeness of God's character. Hence marriage must be reserved for heterosexual couples in order to replicate the natural order established by God at creation.LGBT Christians negotiate between these competing discourses in their churches. They contribute to the naturalizing arguments of liberals at times, while at other times, they resist them in an effort to preserve their sexual agency. Many LGBT people do, in fact, experience their sexuality as natural, arising from deep, unconscious drives rooted in innate, physical causes. Nonetheless, many of the LGBT people I talked to had previous heterosexual experiences and some confessed to the occasional heterosexual attraction. Despite the complexity of their personal sexual experiences, LGBT participante frequently naturalize sexual orientation, thereby simplifying the representation of their sexualities. There is a minority discourse, however, among the LGBT Christians I spoke with that bypasses the f amiliar categories of sexual orientation with innovative contentions for a personal sexual agency that has the potential to shift the premise of the debate.In order to explore this situation, I engaged in participant-observation in mainline churches in upstate New York from 1995 until 2000. During the year 2000,1 interviewed 64 people including 18 individuals who actively opposed the inclusion of LGBT Christians in their churches. They referred to themselves as evangelicals. I also interviewed 23 people who actively promoted including LGBT Christians in their churches. They referred to themselves as liberals. These 41 people were mostly ministers of local mainline denominations in a small, postindustrial city in upstate New York. I also interviewed 23 self-identified LGBT Christians. During the course of participant observation and interviews it became clear that the status of LGBT Christians in the mainline was, in their view, epitomized by the debate over same-sex marriage.In the United States, one common script for sexuality is founded on the presumption that sexuality is a physically predetermined, perhaps genetic, attribute of every individual. Sexuality is naturalized. Like gender, it is constructed not as a matter of personal choice or social relations, but rather, it is an inborn state, independent of and a priori to social relations (Gavanas 2001; Rubin 1984). According to this discourse, we no more choose our sexuality than we chose our genitals. …