Losing our religion? Faith, Feelings, and (Un-)Formation

“We’re undone by each other,” Judith Butler famously writes. “This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact” (2004, 23). What does it mean to be undone by one another? How do our feelings, shaped by our relationships, play a role in that undoing? How might we think about that undoing towards the pursuit of flourishing—which is to say, how might we pursue a kind of unformation, even as it pertains to faith? 

Over the past two years, I have led a collaborative humanities research lab comprised of undergraduate students in exploring these question as they pertain to intrasubjective intersectionality—how our different social identities related to one another—particularly at the intersections of gender and sexual identities on the one hand and faith identities on the other.

Through in-depth interviews with LGBTQI+ college students and alumni who identify as religious or as previously religious about their intersecting identities and their formational experiences, a notable trend emerged: those who narrated struggles with their faith reported higher levels of self-acceptance and well-being, and retained some form of spirituality. Conversely, those who did not report struggle, reported lower levels of well-being and lower levels of spirituality. These interviewees highlighted how their communities minimized bad feelings by drawing swift and clear lines or, paradoxically supporting easy acceptance—what one interviewee referred to as a kind of “shallow queer blindness.” 

Placing interview data in conversation with queer theologies and affect theories, this paper argues that, and examines how, formation towards flourishing calls for embracing unformation, and its attendant bad feelings—how intrasubjective formation calls for encouraging and supporting disidentification and desubjectivation, and considers what that looks like in terms of spiritual and religious identity. Riffing off Lauren Berlant’s idea that a “relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing,” (2011, 1) this paper explores how that which is seen as a threat to our flourishing and identity in fact supports and bolsters it. 

A number of contemporary feminist accounts of faith formation support this kind of undoing on some level—particularly with regards to gender identity. For instance, in Powers and Submission, Sarah Coakley places Judith Butler in conversation with 4th century theologian Gregory of Nyssa to argue for a feminist theological account of formation. Both, she argues, operate with a notion of gender fluidity via performative practices, that “possibilities for labile, fluid transformation towards a goal of liberation and personal authenticity is what Butler’s vision has in common with this more ancient wisdom” (2002, 65). For Coakley, spirituality enables to undoing of gender identity. Yet, for Coakley, the inverse is not the case. For Nyssa, our gender is rendered fluid as our spiritual lives move us closer to the Divine. She ultimately finds Butler’s vision lacking, as it has no telos, no eschatological end. This roundtable challenges Coakley’s claims, and argues for an account of subject formation where not only do our religious experiences undo and render our gender and sexuality fluid, but that the inverse is also true—that our gender and sexual identities might and should undo and render fluid our spirituality and religiosity.

Following Mark Jordan in Queer Callings, this paper explores what might it mean to take seriously how we “need speech that is more adequate and evocative than the terminology of identity,” with regards to how we think gender and sexuality, and with regards to how we think our religious lives and communities? (2023, 16) And, beyond language, it explores what might it mean to hold religious identity more loosely in our formation—to let gender and sexual difference undo our religious identities. How might we let intrasubjective difference compel to undo and transform our own telos and ideals of Christianity and our practices and formation towards those ideals? This paper demonstrates how through the process of losing and unforming one’s religious identity, something new is gained—that, as Lynne Huffer puts it, “new identities hardly cancel out the old ones; rather, the two coexist uncomfortably, even agonistically” (2013, 158). Huffer continues, explaining that it is precisely amidst such uncomfortable, hard feelings, “in that space of uncomfortable coexistence—where competing stories and contradictory identities resist each other—that new (unknowable) possibilities emerge.” 

Works Cited. 

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press. 

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso.

Coakley, Sarah. 2002. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Gender, and Philosophy. Blackwell Publishing. 

Huffer, Lynne. 2013.  Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer-Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. Columbia University Press. 

Jordan, Mark D. 2023. Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires. Fordham University Press.