Chris Greenough,Undoing Theology: Life Stories from Non-normative Christians

Abstract

The title of Chris Greenough’s book exploring the experiential theologies of non-normative Christians is a conscious iteration of Judith Butler’s germinal queer study Undoing Gender. This is not simply a book about subverting heteronormative theologies through an engagement with queer stories, but an attempt to create or propose an ‘undoing’ theology, a theology which itself ‘undoes’ the normative discourses of the discipline. Greenough contends that:

the problem lies in the fact that the church has been repeating a heteronormative, vanilla, understanding of sexuality and of binary gender, without critical difference. It is the task of undoing theology to rupture these repetitions, and through this rupture, the relationship between queer theory and Christianity can be theologically transformative. (pp. 171–2)

Citing another disruptive theologian, Marcella Althaus-Reid, the book relates the ‘biographies of sexual migrants’: Alyce, a self-identifying, intersex Catholic; Caddyman, a survivor of ex-gay ministries in which he was a leader and director as well as a participant; and Cath (Artic) who uses BDSM rituals (a portmanteau term that includes fetishistic practices such as bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism) as a source of theology. Greenough situates these narrative theologies between the practices of sexual theology and practical theology. From within feminist and queer theology, sexual theology ‘considers the transformative potential of sexual storytelling’ (p. 7). As well as Althaus-Reid, Greenough draws on gay storytelling through the ethnographic research of Andrew Yip, which prioritizes embodiment and experience rather than the ‘top-down’ approach of systematic theology as a route to developing a sexual theology and ethics. But these stories are, Greenough argues, more than a contribution to queer theology; they are themselves a revelation that theology has always been sexual. Practical theology, on the other hand, needs ‘perverting’ (p. 37). Borrowing Althaus-Reid’s idea of ‘per/versions’, Greenough suggests that queer views and interpretations exist alongside the normative hegemony, so that ‘critical engagement with sexual stories from non-normative lives is an act of practical theology’ (p. 38).

After engaging with the stories of non-normative Christians and the power of ‘vanilla’ theology on individual lives, the final chapter considers how to ‘undo the dominant repetitions of the Christian tradition in relation to gender, sexuality and sex in order to make it more inclusive’ (p. 158). This process involves the undoing of experience itself, its provisionality and temporality. Yet, because experience is ‘unreliable and unstable’ (p. 173), the telling of queer stories problematizes the dominant theological discourse by exposing its own provisionality and uncertainty.

Undoing Theology offers space for liminal voices, for those not attended to in canonical theological discourse, and incorporates them into a work of practical and sexual theology as voices that trouble the normative and the hegemonic. Yet, in ‘undoing’ theology, Greenough draws the reader’s attention to the interim and impermanent nature of experience, suggesting that queer theology is troublemaking but never systematized. The writings of queer theorists and theologians are often dense and opaque, even for the academic theologian. Undoing Theology presents complex, and maybe unfamiliar, ideas in a clear and engaging way.