Wednesday, October 20, 2021 — 5
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com



































































In the Year of Our Lord 2014, I celebrated 

my golden birthday, turning 13 on March 13. 
And sure enough, the Pisces male, middle 
school version of myself was as emotionally 
charged, creatively centered and idiosyncrati-
cally idealistic as I am now. Yet, a corrosive 
force, turning what was supposed to be a gold-
plated pubescent period into a rusty era of 
remorse, stemmed from the staggering real-
ization I had that year as an increasing aware-
ness of my social identities became ironed into 
my subconscious. The mainstream media’s 
fervent fixation on Ferguson with the mur-
der of Mike Brown propelled this force into 
motion, prompting a prominent newfound 
perception of my own racialized identity as a 
Black male in (what I would soon learn to be) 
the settler-colonial police-state of America. 
But if this glass-shattering, innocence-appre-
hending awakening wasn’t enough to fuel the 
anxious adolescent fire inside of me, the sub-
sequent suspicion, scrutinization and specula-
tion of my sexuality in the seventh grade was. 
It was then that homophobia and anti-Black 
racism alchemized in antagonistic fashion, 
manifesting as a menacing mixture that med-
dled not only in my middle-school years but 
beyond.

The traumas troubling my life trickle down 

to the marginalization of these two identities, 
which are exacerbated by my working-class 
status and deepened by the damning forces 
of capital which control our culture. When 
I was 15, phrases like “faggot” and “queer” 
were hurled at me on the regular — all before 
I had figured out what my sexuality even was. 
Of course, this “figuring out” and my capac-
ity to inquire about my own queerness was 
complicated by my mutable relationship with 
religion, having grown up in a conservative 
Black Christian church. Reconciling my faith 
with my ever-changing sexuality has been, 
undeniably, the most challenging tribulation 
of my life. When your devotion to the divine 
is dampened by dominating ideologies of the 
time, how else do you ensure that your modes 
of metaphysical and spiritual sustainment 
aren’t stifled?

Perhaps it’s my predetermined Pisces char-

acteristics perpetuating my compulsivity. But 
in light of these painful predicaments, I’ve 
become fascinated with learning about dif-
ferent faiths and the rich complexities and 
insights that various worldly religions have to 
offer and seek to answer. If there is a silver lin-
ing to my suffering, then it’s to be found in the 
drive I’ve developed over time to discern the 
real from the fake, fact from fiction and truth 
from non-truth.

The interplay of sexuality and religion is 

severely complicated by notions of gender. In 
pre-patriarchal society, the divine was depict-
ed as feminine, with the female God being an 
ancillary function of the Paleolithic and Neo-
lithic era. In “The Great Cosmic Mother,” radi-
cal eco-feminist author Monica Sjöö describes 
ancient societies around the globe as advanced 
matrifocal cultures built on equality and kin-
ship as opposed to dominance. In this period 
of time — from the Dahomey and Ashanti 
peoples of West Afrika all the way to the indig-
enous Pueblo peoples of America — the pri-
macy of the mother was an essential element. 

By the Bronze Age, however, Sjöö asserts that 
the Great Mother was demoted in status as the 
“remains of a revolution shift from dominant 
female gods of Neolithic village to organizing 
and controlling male gods of the literate city.” 
Many of us are familiar with the famous Sume-
rian religious text, “The Epic of Gilgamesh” 
an epic that influenced religious myths and 
narratives within the Hebrew Bible. Sjöö dis-
tinguishes both this piece of Mesopotamian 
mythology and the Old Testament scriptures 
as a reactionary response to the Goddess-
centered religions preceding it. She claims that 
much like the patriarchy, the emerging male-
centered religions effectively “split material 
production from spiritual experience, science 
from magic, medicine from herbal knowledge 
and psychic/seasonal environment, sexual-
ity from the sacred, art from craft, astronomy 
from astrology, language from poetry — and 
to place the resultant ‘specialized,’ abstracted, 
and mechanistic knowledge in the hands of a 
privilege male elite organized into professions, 
hierarchies, and classes.” This split and sepa-
ration has been a sustaining characteristic in 
all major worldly religions, including but not 
limited to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths, 
Hinduism and Buddhism. 

Obviously, one does not have to look very 

far or very meticulously to see this unfortu-
nate reality. The holy texts of today are tainted 
with a patriarchal positioning that has subju-
gated women around the world for thousands 
of years. And this construction of an oppres-
sive male-centered society has had damning 
effects for sexuality as well. Sjöö ascribes the 
Hebrew Bible’s heterosexism as “an attack on 
all shamanistic ecstatic religion, against the 
bisexual image, theory, and practice of the 
Great Goddess.” Her elucidation reminds us 
that holy texts don’t exist in vacuums, and are 
drastically informed and curated by the mate-
rial and historical conditions of the era. Yet, 
these are the same texts which play a profound 
role in the lives of many around the globe. 
How do we harmonize the holy aspects with 
the harmful? Is there still a Truth to be found 
in these faiths? Is there a Devil or divinity to be 
found within the details?

Attempts to answer these questions lie not 

only in the hands of hermeneutics (biblical 
interpretation) but in our conception of divine 
revelation. Biblical scripture, for instance, has 
the capacity to be interpreted from a literal, 
moral, allegorical and anagogical perspec-
tive. These differing angles of approach pro-
duce an infinity of interpretations, allowing 
us to arrive at an infinity of outcomes. This 
becomes even more complicated when we 
consider the dialectics of distanciation espe-
cially in relation to the written word. In this 
literary context, distanciation refers to the 
concept that the writer of any text is “blind” to 
not only the readers of their work but also the 
context that their work will be read in. They 
are “blind” in the sense that the separation of 
the writer and reader, as well as the reader and 
the world of the text, fundamentally blurs the 
writer’s intention and reader’s interpretation. 
This blindness allows for what French her-
meneutic philosopher Paul Ricœur — a key 
crafter of the distanciation concept — refers 
to as a “surplus of meaning” to be amassed. 
As you can imagine, this article alone would 
evoke an infinitude in understanding, com-
prehension and interpretation for anyone 
who stumbles across it. We can only imagine, 

then, the immensity as to which any one indi-
vidual relates to a religious text. In writing, we 
emulate the enigmatic enterprise of our own 
Creator to effectively communicate the com-
plexities of existence without exterminating 
the free will of creation. 

In this same vein, divine revelation (the 

reveal of a celestial Creator to creation) carries 
with it an abundance of perspectives as well, 
which can complicate our relation to religion 
even further. Notably, Swiss theologian Karl 
Barth’s notion of a conception of revelation in 
which he argues that while having the capac-
ity to express the revelation of the divine, 
human constructions, such as scripture and 
the written word, cannot be a divine revela-
tion in itself due to the fact they are mediated 
through fallible mortal concepts such as lan-
guage. Yet, nonetheless, Barth believed there 
is Truth to be found in what he labeled as the 
“Subject Reality of Revelation.’ Like him, I, 
too, believe wholeheartedly in the outstanding 
capacity of our Creator to use us as vessels of 
disclosure and divulgence. After all, through 
the arts and writing, especially, we often find 
ourselves able to communicate to and con-
struct knowledge within others that we might 
not even be privy to ourselves. As Black theolo-
gian James Cone clarifies in his seminal text, 
“Black Theology and Black Power,” “the Work 
of Spirit is not always a conscious activity on 
the part of the persons through whom God 
works.” In the Biblical scriptures there exists 
a labyrinthine nexus of Truth and knowledge 
to be ascertained above that which the origi-
nal writers even intended. Moreover, many 
of these Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious 
myths and narratives are what queer theolo-
gian Elizabeth Stuart refers to as “parodies” 
of “extended repetition with critical distance, 
improvising on a theme [with] non-identical 
repetition, freshly embodied on new context.” 
Much like Marxist theory espouses the notion 
of retaining the old within that which is new, 
we can still discover the liberatory essence of 
the Cosmic Mother and the matriarchal man-
tras of pre-patriarchal society in our current 
holy text.

Systematic theologian Patrick Cheng 

and feminist and queer theologian Marcella 
Althaus-Reid both do exactly this by putting 
forth theologies of liberation focused around 
this feat. In Cheng’s book “Radical Love” he 
advances a doctrine of queer theology stem-
ming from classical doctrines around (the 
Biblical) God. He claims that the doctrine of 
the Trinity, which posits God as the beget-
ter (The Father), the begotten (the Son) and 
the procession (of the Holy Spirit), which 
through radical love establishes a dissolution 
of self and other, of knowing and unknow-
ing and of flesh and spirit. This dissolving of 
dualisms gives rise to a God that “transcends 
gender,” encompassing supra masculinity 
and super femininity. In this vein, God is a 
relational God, not operating outside, but 
with/in us. Along these lines, Cheng char-
acterizes Jesus Christ as the embodiment of 
this radical love, exemplified through the 
crossing of the divine into the human realm 
and then back into the divine realm. Addi-
tionally, Cheng queers Christ in a multitude 
of ways. Beyond the androgynous imagery 
Christ is commonly depicted with, Cheng 
cites his transgression of societal norms, 
homosocial relationships with disciples (and 
loving relationship with Lazarus) and bio-

logical intersexuality (Mary’s immaculate 
conception being devoid of a Y chromosome 
makes Christ chromosomally female while 
phenotypically male) as evidence. He goes 
on to liken the scapegoating of Christ in the 
crucifixion with the scapegoating of queer 
people in society. 

Reid elaborates on this queer-coded Christ 

even further. To Althaus-Reid, queerness is 
not an “oddity” or even a sexual/gender iden-
tity, but instead a zone of possibility, poten-
tiality and the essence of a denied reality. In 
her seminal text, “Indecent Theology” she 
inserts the notion of a “Bi/Christ” which 
refers not to sexual relations but ways of relat-
ing and thinking beyond binary. Over time, 
my own bisexuality has granted me the for-
tune of experiencing the world outside of the 
gay-straight dichotomy, which has, in turn, 
prompted me to perceive of reality along non-
dualistic lines. Christ, while deliberately walk-
ing in community with proclaimed “sinners 
and prostitutes” did so with an unfettered 
fluidity eschewing false dichotomies. The Vir-
gin Mary also experiences an “indecenting” 
or “queering” under liberation theology. No 
longer a representation of repressive Marian-
ismo and anti-sexual celibacy rhetoric, Mary 
instead in Althaus-Reid’s eyes undergoes a 
divinization through “spiritual clitoridecto-
my” and becomes a bearer (through the bear-
ing of the Begotten son) of radical love. These 
interpretations, from a hermeneutic lens, as 
divinity scholar Hannah Hofheinz describes, 
are creative interpretations which “create 
new liberative possibili[ities] by embodying 
knowledge as praxis within communities of 
struggle.”

Furthermore, these queerings are impor-

tant because they allow us to deconstruct the 
compulsory heterosexuality that has been 
so vigorously confounded into our culture. 
Althaus-Reid describes “heterosexuality” as 
originating within a pathological patriarchy 
operating through coercion and violence. 
Sjöö describes rigid heterosexuality as a men-
tal and physical limitation, stating that “it is 
as if on all levels of our being we are split in 
half — locked into one half, and forbidden the 
other … split against ourselves and against the 
self in the other by this moralistic opposition 
of natural polarities in the very depths of our 
souls.” She claims that this causes war and 
alienation as cisheteropatriarchy on behalf 
of capital continues to construct barriers and 
boundaries. If we have any chance of moving 
forward in our liberation efforts, we need to 
be cognizant of these constructions and the 
ways in which organized, institutionalized 
religion in their capitalistic efforts attempt to 
exacerbate them. 

Today, radical interpretations of Biblical 

scriptures are becoming increasingly com-
mon as more and more people begin to recon-
cile religion with their sexuality.* “The Queer 
Bible Commentary,” for example, is an 800+ 
page work providing an interpretative queer 
lens of every book in the Bible, and is just one of 
the many works seeking to unravel and resolve 
what Cheng describes as the typical “texts of 
terror” which supposedly condemn queer 
peoples to an eschatological fate of fire and 
eternal damnation. Beyond Biblical scripture, 
we should be interested in locating the righ-
teousness in revelation of all worldly religions 
and holy texts. However, we should do so with 
a discernment between historic literalism 
and mythic-symbolic interpretation, which 
Sjöö points out is often difficult to distinguish. 
Nonetheless, what we derive from the divine 
texts of our time is mostly ours for the mak-
ing and taking. In the context of the Trinity, 
the queering Christ is a queering of God, as 
our Creator. If this is hard for you to re-imag-
ine, consider how much we’ve constructed a 
mainstream conception of God as male, het-
erosexual and historically white. Indeed, as 
Althaus-Reid states, “To say ‘God the Faggot’ 
is to claim not only a sexuality which has been 
marginalised and ridiculed, but a different 
epistemology and also a challenge to positively 
appropriate a word which has been used with 
contempt to humiliate people.” 

In the Year of Our Lord 2021, I still struggle 

to make this reclamation without reservation. 
Yet, in the midst of my misfortune, I remind 
myself that this struggle, much like the reli-
gious myths of the Cosmic Goddesses of 
Creation, is a collective, universal and transfor-
mative one. And along those same liberatory 
lines, I know now, seven years after my Golden 
birthday, that if all else fails, I can rely on what 
I learned in Sunday School seven years prior; 
the Golden rule — a principle permeating in 
nearly all worldly religions — reigns supreme: 
“For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in 
this; ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ 
– Galatians 5:14.”

Further Reading: 

“The Great Cosmic Mother” by Monica 

Sjöö

“Indecent Theology” by Marcella Althaus-

Reid

“Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer 

Theology” by Patrick Cheng

“Black Theology and Black Power” by 

James Cone

“Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for 

Theological Reflection” by James B. Nelson

“The Queer Bible Commentary” by Deryn 

Guest

“Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western 

Body” by Gerard Loughlin

According to the regularly updated Uni-

versity of Michigan COVID-19 Data, 96% of 
students and 88% of the employees at the Uni-
versity have been fully vaccinated, as of Oct. 12. 
These seem like pretty solid numbers, and they 
are, considering the University’s arguably inad-
equate COVID-19 health guidelines like the no 
mask mandate at football games and the deci-
sion to end COVID-19 classroom notifications. 
However, if we were to examine the vaccina-
tion rates across all of Washtenaw County, only 
65.3% of residents are fully vaccinated. At the 
state level, only 58.7% of the population is fully 
vaccinated. Across the country, as of now, only 
57% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated. 
For reference, that’s roughly 70 million people 
in the United States still unvaccinated, giving 
plenty of opportunity for the COVID-19 virus 
and its deadly variants to infect and transmit 
throughout the population. 

Non-vaccination seems like a very compla-

cent response to the adverse outcomes of the 
pandemic, but it’s not surprising or new that 
individuals are hesitant to receive the vaccine. 
While many shame this view as a politically 
charged, ill-informed opinion, vaccine hesitan-
cy is an understandable symptom of public dis-
trust in scientific institutions and government 
intensified by chronic inaccessibility to quality 
and transparent health care. 

As defined by the World Health Orga-

nization, vaccine hesitancy is the “delayed 
acceptance or refusal of the vaccine despite 
availability to service,” and this has been a 
recurring sentiment from the invention of 
the first smallpox vaccine to child immuni-
zation today. Amid the panic and anxiety of 
a pandemic, it is easy to overlook the strides 
public health has made in infectious disease 
control through vaccinations. Still, we must 
remember, it is because of vaccines that we 
have eradicated 14 diseases otherwise dan-
gerously prevalent in the United States, as 

identified by the Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention.

Though the Food and Drug Administration’s 

approval for booster shots and pediatric doses 
of the COVID-19 vaccine are underway, hesi-
tancy persists as a threat to immunization for 
extremely susceptible populations — from the 
5 to 11-year-old population who may receive the 
vaccine for the first time to high-risk individuals 
who may benefit from boosters. Vaccination is 
important, and in the age of the unpredictable 
coronavirus and rampant misinformation, it’s 
even more important to know why.

Successful vaccination campaigns have led 

to disease eradication because of something 
called herd immunity. Herd immunity is a 
theoretical threshold of fidelity wherein a per-
centage of the population becomes immune to 
disease, significantly reducing the chance of 
disease spread. This percentage ranges from 
70% to 90%, depending on the infectiousness 
of the disease. Herd immunity results in pro-
tection for the whole population, or “herd,” 
even for those who are not or cannot become 
immune, and it is achieved by either natural 
infection or vaccines. While natural infection 
will induce immunity once we actually get 
infected to the point of illness and complica-
tions, vaccines create preventative immunity 
without making us terribly sick. 

Vaccines work to stimulate the immune 

system by mimicking infection. They intro-
duce weakened or dead antigens — the things 
that cause disease — to the body to induce an 
immune response and produce antibodies. 
Antibodies are molecules that remember spe-
cific antigens and fight them, so we don’t get 
sick. In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, acti-
vation of this immune response relies on the 
injection of viral genetic material which serves 
as a blueprint for our cells to make harmless 
viral proteins. By safely exposing us to the very 
thing that causes disease in a harmless, yet nec-
essary dose, vaccines are essential in prevent-
ing us from severe disease and death. 

God the Faggot

Why vaccinate?

Design by Tessa Voytovich

KARIS CLARK

MiC Columnist

EASHETA SHAH

MiC Columnist

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