Schools of Desire under Legal Change: LGBTQ+ Contestations and Ecclesial Futures in Taiwanese Churches (2017–2019)

This paper analyzes LGBTQ+ contestations and ecclesial retrenchments in Taiwanese churches during the marriage-equality transition (2017–2019). Using a bounded public corpus—network statements and pastoral guides, recordings and handouts from an evangelical forum, and reflections by LGBTQ+ Taiwanese Christians—it reads these debates as theological anthropology-in-practice. I argue that the controversy activates a two-layer “grammar of desire”: a Cheng–Zhu–inflected tianli/renyu binary that codes desire as moral risk and a received Protestant idiom often imagined through a competitive grace/nature frame. When these grammars resonate, desire is construed less as a site of formation than as a danger-sign; LGBTQ+ lives become especially legible within a single moral register, and ecclesial futures are narrowed in advance. Drawing on Kwok Pui-lan as a lens on taboo and normativity, the paper concludes with an imago Dei-centered alternative that treats desire as formable and proposes examen-like discernment to reopen horizons of possibility for communion and vocation.