Queer Women and Religious Individualism

1 Beyond the Congregation

Spirituality, Sex, and the Postmodern Self Spirituality seems to be booming in the twenty-first-century United States. So too, for that matter, is sex—or at least discussions about, debates over, marketing of, and media obsession with sex. Is there a connection between the two? Self-help books and DVDs promote a variety of forms of “sacred sex,” most of them severe misinterpretations (or cunning reinterpretations) of nonwestern religious traditions, and the more daring among traditional religious institutions offer workshops on inviting the divine into one’s marital intimacy. Yet while there is a niche market for the “spiritual element” of sexuality, to many in the United States sexuality appears as something separate from or even inimical to the life of the spirit.    Despite this clear separation of spheres, the forms taken by spirituality and sexuality in the twenty-first-century United States derive from the same larger cultural pattern, on the rise since at least the early twentieth century but best documented during its midcentury ascendance in Robert Bellah and his colleagues ’ famed book, Habits of the Heart.1 Individualism, understood variously by commentators as a driving force of entrepreneurial capitalism, the demise of community orientation, freethinking, or a moment of autonomy in the social construction of the self, has long been a powerful force in U.S. culture, albeit one strongly influenced by gender, class status, ethnicity, and other factors.2 1 Beyond the Congregation As Featherstone says, “When religion is defined as providing the most coherent set of answers to . . . core existential questions, a decline in religion must necessarily be seen as providing a threat to social integration and the social bond.” But what if different questions were asked? —David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times • 2 | Queer Women and Religious Individualism With the cultural, social, and economic changes of the 1960s and 1970s and the transition from a modern social world to one considered “postmodern” or “high modern” came an increased emphasis on the individual rather than the family or community as the basic unit of social exchange. Though marketing strategies had been focusing on lifestyle and image since at least the 1920s, by the late twentieth century a wide range of products were touted as expressions of the inner self and, ironically, of individualism and uniqueness.    An intrinsic aspect of these social shifts was a growing engagement with the self as what social theorist Anthony Giddens has termed a “reflexive” project.3 While many writers in the standard canon of western intellectual history have seen the self as an object of reflection, inquiry, and sometimes even active construction , Giddens and others argue that the conscious construction of the self has come to the forefront under postmodernity. Although these consciously constructed selves are still subject to important and sometimes crushing forms of social constraint, they also have opened for some the opportunity to explore alternatives in both sexuality and spirituality, not just as practices but as aspects of identity, parts of the self-in-progress. Thus, although the western concept of sexual orientation as an identity rather than simply an act of sexual object choice has its roots in the nineteenth century, it was in the mid–twentieth century that gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals began to lay open claim to such identities , leading to the rise of the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements in the 1970s. As the twentieth century drew to a close, sexual identities continued to proliferate, giving rise to the rapidly multiplying “alphabet soup” of sexual and gender identifications and the growing use of “queer” as a catch-all term for those claiming non-normative genders and sexual identities.4    Like sexual identity, religious identity has also become increasingly complex and voluntary in the United States during recent decades. Of great interest to contemporary sociologists of religion—beginning, in fact, with a chapter in Habits of the Heart—has been the influence of individualism on patterns of religious belief, practice, and commitment in the United States. Though earlier debates over the apparent secularization of the country have mostly died down, concern remains in many circles over the rise of what Grace Davie has termed in the British context “believing without belonging.”5 After the heights of membership and participation reached by U.S. mainline Protestant denominations in the mid–twentieth century, the decline of these denominations in the following decades led to concern that religiosity in the United States as a whole was weakening. As early as Marx...