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99 8 “It’s Important to Show Your Colors” Counter-Heteronormativity in a Metropolitan Community Church J. Edward Sumerau and Douglas P. Schrock The regulation of human bodies is central to organized religion, though it has received little academic attention (Smith 2008). Religious traditions have rich histories of controlling, for example, what we eat, what we wear, how we move our bodies, how we sing, and with whom we have sex. Religious leaders seem to understand the importance the body has in marking one as a member of a religious culture. Because religious identities, like all identities, are humanly created fictions, religious cultures regulate bodies in order to socially mark who is an insider and who is an outsider. Thus, when worshipers adopt the embodiment codes of their faith and imbue them with meaning, they in turn feel more connected to their religious communities and traditions. But what if your bodily practices contradict the religious tradition you grew up in? You could decide something is wrong with you and commit to changing your embodiment practices. If you decide changing is not possible or worth it, however, others may turn against you and make an example out of your bodily transgressions. While overtly challenging a church’s culture might create change, it could also lead to further isolation and stigmatization. Under such conditions, you might decide the organization is not for you and leave. This is exactly what some lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Christians have done. The exclusion of LGBT people from some traditional Christian churches reflects these organizations’ embodiment norms regarding what kind of bodies should be physically intimate and how people ought to embody gender. Christian churches often assert that God made men and women so different that they should not act or look like each other. Despite such differences, so goes the story, God approves of sexual unions only between men and women. These churches often have other bodily restrictions targeting heterosexuals: no sex before or outside of marriage and no birth control or abortion. Moreover, Christian authorities generally define the violation of these prescriptions as physical transgressions, sins of the flesh, or bodily threats to the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and the patriarchal family (Moon 2004). Such rules of embodiment reflect what social theorists call “heteronormativity” 100 Embodied Resistance (Warner 1991). Heteronormativity refers to an ideology that assumes men and women are not just physically different but are designed to be socially different. According to this ideology, girls and women should act in ways culturally defined as “feminine,” which includes being passive, nurturing, and concerned about appearance . Complementarily, boys and men should be assertive, emotionally reserved, and competitive. Also key to heteronormativity is a hierarchy of acceptable sexual behaviors : heteronormativity deems sex between men and women natural and normal, and sex between two men or two women unnatural and abnormal. Thus, for most traditional Christians, heterosexual marriage and the patriarchal family represent the primary expressions of God’s will on earth (Bartkowski 2001). Heteronormativity is a way of thinking that may promote and justify socially created inequality between women and men and between heterosexuals and sexual minorities. Having faith in this ideology, for example, may lead politicians to deny equal rights to LGBT individuals, men to believe women should attend to their emotional and physical needs (but not vice versa), and men and women to believe violence against women and sexual minorities is sometimes appropriate. True believers of heteronormativity can act in ways that cause others pain because the ideology itself provides an emotional shield. More specifically, because the ideology defines gender and sexual nonconformists as unnatural and immoral, adopting heteronormativity enables one to more easily ignore the suffering of those socially defined—and treated— as inferior. Some Christian churches’ tendency to promote a heteronormative worldview shapes how they respond to LGBT members. Church authorities often tell LGBT members that they must change their gendered and sexual desires or leave the church (Wolkomir 2006). Although 8.3 percent of Protestants and 8.4 percent of Roman Catholics report engaging in homosexual activity at some point in their lives (Turner et al. 2005), many still assume that one cannot identify as a Christian and a sexual minority. LGBT communities have responded by fighting to make some churches more tolerant and creating their own Christian organizations that define Christian and LGBT identities as compatible. These organizations represent a serious challenge to heteronormative assumptions permeating traditional Christianity (Moon 2004). Research on LGBT Christians typically focuses on how they...

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