Chaos, Law, and God: The Religious Meanings of Homosexuality

Jay Michaelson, Boston University Law School

Abstract

What is the meaning of gay rights in contemporary religious-political discourse? Though some explain homosexuality's disproportionate prominence in terms of homophobia, "church and state," or traditional values versus progressive ones, this article suggests that the legal regulation of sexuality has a far deeper, and more specific, religious meaning: sexuality is a primary site in which religious law is engendered, where the lawfulness of religion meets the chaos beyond it. Arguments about gay rights, same-sex marriage, and related issues are not merely arguments informed by religious values; they are arguments about the nature of religion itself.

The article begins by providing a taxonomy of the New Christian Right (NCR)'s longtime claims about homosexuality and comparing those claims with Biblical text. While most contemporary anti-gay arguments cluster around notions of family, pathology, and the decline of civilization, the Biblical texts of the Old Testament are chiefly about purity and impurity, order and disorder on the physical plane, while those of the New Testament are about creating "natural" order by subsuming the physical to the spiritual. In short, while the Bible does not regard homosexuality as the NCR does, they do share the basic underlying concern of order and chaos, and the siting of that concern in the domain of sexuality. The deeper meaning of homosexuality is chaos.

In fact, the article suggests, NCR leaders are perhaps more right than they know, because liberated sexuality is indeed a threat to the mythic nomos of religion as they understand it. When viewed according to developmental models (this article utilizes those of Ken Wilber, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Susann Cook-Greuter, and others), liberated sexuality represents a change in the meaning of religion itself -- moving from a "mythic" understanding of religion to a "post-mythic" one. And from the perspective of mythic religion, the post-mythic is anarchy. Indeed, two very different sets of GLBT thinkers -- queer theorists and the gay spirituality movement -- celebrate this very possibility.

Biblical concerns about law and chaos are still with us today. Now as then, sexuality is the site at which legal-religious order is contested. Now as then (though for different reasons), liberated sexuality threatens the mythic nomos and its notions of order and disorder -- especially when applied to mythic structures such as marriage. And now as then, neither conventional liberal theory nor the pathologization of homophobia is adequate to the practical task of religious state change. The article thus concludes, drawing on the work of Robert Cover and Kenji Yoshino, with an account of how experiential encounters, peak experiences, and world-shattering moments of growth are the most effective means in moving from one stage of religious development to another.

While questions of order and chaos have been with us for millennia, the answers to them are not immutable. The normative structures of religion appeal to the timeless, but, fortunately for many of us, they evolve in time.