Eroticizing Jesus
Reflecting on Peacock's Mrs Davis and "to Jesus Christ" by Kai Cheng Thom
(Spoiler alert for the new Peacock show Mrs. Davis. If you haven’t watched it, I’d recommend doing so first, then coming back and reading this.)
I don’t know how to explain the tv show Mrs. Davis. The plot involves an artificial intelligence that’s taken a unique place in society, a search for the Holy Grail, secret societies, political resistance groups — but it’s a comedy.
The main character is Elizabeth, a.k.a. Sister Simone, a nun who has a unique relationship with Jesus. When she prays, she visits him in an old-fashioned diner where he cooks and serves people. In fact, many people visit him in his diner. It’s a mystery who makes it there and who doesn’t, but some people manage when they’re in the middle of an emergency or near death.
It’s fitting: this Jesus behind the counter, feeding people while he listens and enjoys their stories. He’s gentle and inclusive, welcoming anyone who finds their way to his restaurant.
But the first time Elizabeth visits Jesus (whom she calls Jay), she doesn’t just eat: she falls in love.
And so does Jay.
Theirs is a physical relationship. And when Elizabeth takes her vows as a nun, it’s to truly marry the man she’s in love with. But, as you might suspect, marriage to the man in the diner isn’t straightforward.
For one thing, it’s an open relationship.
At one point, Simone visits Jay to find him preoccupied with another woman. And when feelings re-emerge for her ex-husband, Jay encourages her to go for it.
Watching this show felt like being given permission to reimagine the connections between my relationship with the Divine and my identity as a queer, kinky, polyamorous individual.
And there’s even a theological precedent for it.
In her pivotal work Indecent Theology, theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid speaks out against the Christian supremacist version of Jesus that Western theologians created. In this version of Jesus, he represents everyone equally. But this white-washed, asexual version of Jesus also represents the supposed spiritual ideal for all people.
“This has happened in Western/patriarchal theology; Jesus has become a monopoly with strict control on spiritual production of meaning and exchange,” she writes.
Liberation and queer theology begin to break apart a hegemonic view of Jesus, encouraging folks to see Jesus as someone who chooses a side and stands with the oppressed. But, per Althaus-Reid, this isn’t enough.
Some Queer liberationists may rightly see in Jesus someone with whom out-of-the-closet lesbians, gays, bisexuals and heterosexuals can identify. That is a very positive step, but an Indecent Theology must go further in its disrespect for the interpellative, normative forces of patriarchal theology. It must go beyond the positive identification with a larger Christ. It must have the right to say not only that a lesbian can identify herself with a liberator Christ but that it must sexually deconstruct Christ too. Then indecent theologians may say: ‘God, the Faggot; God, the Drag Queen; God, the Lesbian; God, the heterosexual woman who does not accept the constructions of ideal heterosexuality; God, the ambivalent, not easily classified sexuality.’ […] To say ‘God the Faggot’ is to claim not only a sexuality which has been marginalised and ridiculed, but … also a challenge to positively appropriate a word which has been used with contempt to humiliate people.
What I love about this is that it associates Jesus not only with the people who suffer for their identities or their sexual preferences, but it redeems the ways that these identities make society uncomfortable. If Jesus or God is a Faggot, then maybe there’s something worthy and powerful about being a Faggot.
I’d like to see God the adult baby/diaper wearer; Jesus the Furry; Jesus the femme bottom.
I’d wear those t-shirts. I’d go out for drinks with that Jesus. I’d stand on a picket line with him.
To me, the value of eroticizing Jesus is breaking down the weird wall we’ve put up between spirituality and our bodies and our desires. Because if Jesus can’t be slutty, kinky, poly, or queer — then we’re saying those identities or natural states of being are less righteous. Which is simply not true.
It does something else, too. It challenges the way we think of our relationship with the Divine, as being purely soul and not involving our bodies. What happens when God is part of our orgasms? What happens when pegging someone or swallowing a mouth full of cum is a spiritual act?
“i’ve been rekindling an affair with my old boyfriend Jesus Christ,” poet Kai Cheng Thom writes in her newest book Falling Back in Love with Being Human — a series of love letters to lost souls.
Per her bio, Thom is a “Chinese Canadian transgender girl,” as well as “an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer.” In her twenties, she worked as a sex worker and psychotherapist — a combination I’ve seen a lot of.
“he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that Jesus,” Thom writes as she describes her version of Jesus. The one she’s in love with perhaps. Or the one she envisions that brings her comfort. “he could have made smarter investments than the spiritual redemption of all humankind. but he’s an idealist, which i like. he’s a deep thinker and just a tiny bit self-involved. he’s got daddy issues, which, to be honest, i also like.”
As the letter goes on, it gets more physical: “Jesus likes getting pegged,” she writes. “he looks younger in the midst of pleasure.”
And the end, friends. The end is the point.
“Sometimes i’m the one who cries afterward. And he just holds me, my Jesus, and strokes my hair with his carpenter’s hands that still bear scars where they nailed him to the cross. and i say, tell me something i don’t know. and he says, grace is the divine love that all beings are worthy to receive even in light of all we’ve done wrong.”
What I appreciate so much about this letter — about Thom’s Jesus — is that I’m much more likely to be drawn to a Jesus who cries after sex. A Jesus with daddy issues. I’m much more likely to want a relationship with this Jesus than the surreal and untouchable one the church has created. And, in the end, they’re all just as fabricated.
More to the point, even as I actively reject the Christianity I was brought up in, I can still get something out of this erotic imagining of Jesus. I see the parts of myself that want to be holy and connected to the Universe and can connect them to the parts of me that want to get railed and urinate in someone’s mouth and be held and kissed on the forehead.
Because if we can’t eroticize our spiritual figures, then what does that say about our ideas of the holy?
Now, if you grew up in a different tradition, I can’t tell you whether you should eroticize your god, your Orisha, your Bodhisattva. Thankfully, there are — dare I say always — erotic roots you can find in any tradition if you look. And ways of questioning the false separation between the flesh and the soul.
Feature image by Milo Manara.