Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and The Confusions of Christian Marriage (review)

Current debates about same-sex marriage assume that we know what characterizes traditional marriage or queer desires. (I follow Jordan in using "queer" to describe gender or sexual deviant homosexual desires.) Challenging this assumption is Mark Jordan's first important contribution. Underneath the political turmoil surrounding the issue of same-sex marriage lays a morass of confusing ideas about traditional Christian values, homosexual erotic love, and marriage. Given this situation, the book uses a multidisciplinary approach to explore the outlines of what Christianity could have to say about sex in general or about queer love in particular. Far from providing a blueprint for disciplinary decisions about who can or cannot participate in a church blessing, Jordan's ideal marriage theology is meant to intervene when we are too sure about how our sexual desires relate to the mystery of Christ.

The book's chapters trace (at times ironically) the stations of homosexual-coupled love from promising beginnings to an end in dissolution by death or divorce, via engagement, wedding, and post-festival life. In the central fourth chapter, Jordan demonstrates that historically there is no unified core of Christian marriage theology. He points to changing discourses and varying attitudes toward erotic love, ranging from endorsements of polygamy to a rejection of the idea that marriage could at all be compatible with Christianity.

Not theology but the production and promise of the American wedding keeps Christian marriage in circulation for us as an ideal to be fought over by queers (who desire it) and professional Christians (who claim to defend it). Modern Bride magazine, for example, provides the textual basis and wedding planners, florist, and photographers define the ritual appropriateness and lived theology of American Christian marriage (cf. 97). In it inherited theological tropes and Christian visions of erotic union are "reduced to chatter in thoughtless wedding sermons or in entertainment news about the latest Hollywood passion" (8). This chatter echoes even in Christian talk radio shows or "true Catholic" guide books for happy domesticities. They do not provide counter cultural imaginations, but rather recycled versions of the American wedding, as Jordan claims.

The Christian and queer debates about the great American wedding, however, turn on mass-marketed images of romance. "In Christian churches and (other) queer cultures, discussions about marriage or mating are controlled not only by enforced institutional silences [. . .] but also by the endless cycling of mass images of romance" (24). These images re-inscribe the narrative of seeking and (if all goes well) finding fulfillment on the body of the romantic lover. It is a fallacy to think that there is this one single thing (Christian marriage) that is now asked to accommodate this other single thing (queer love). Instead, we find incessant chatter drowning out what Christianity could say about erotic love and preventing queers to find words that could express their loves. What kind of language is available then for Christians and for queers?

Finding viable words requires according to Jordan the ability to listen to the chatter on both sides of the aisle, as it were (13). The Christian theologians and the queer theorists can learn from each other, if each is concerned with finding in the artifacts of the mass market some truths about erotic love (19). This exercise of listening forces Christians to be honest with their history and scriptures by acknowledging how difficult it is to develop a satisfying theology of erotic love (both heterosexual and homosexual). Jordan mentions shortly the exegetical problems involved in finding clear scriptural evidence for the condemnation of homosexual love (8ff); and, discussing the history of marriage theology and marriage liturgies, he finds a pervading deep Christian uncertainty about the character of sex. This ambiguity explains "the failure of Christian theology to counsel [hetero- or homosexual] erotic couples" (112).

Listening to the chatter would force, on the other hand, queer theorists to be honest with...