Two Notes on the Heresy Trial of Thomas Jay Oord, Queer-Affirming Theologies, and Ethics of Love
My friend and colleague Thomas Jay Oord recently underwent an ecclesial trial in his denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, to determine whether he should be stripped of his ordination credentials as a result of his scholarship and activism delineating reasons the Church should be accepting and affirming of queer individuals.
Dr. Oord received the verdict on Saturday, July 27th, 2024 after passionately advocating a vision of love on the stand and unfortunately he was found guilty. All the worse, the disciplinary action the Church has decided to take as a result is to not only revoke his credentials, but his very membership in the Church as well.
As this saga has been unfolding these past few months, I’ve witnessed concerned friends question Tom as to why he even sticks around in his denomination when he experiences so much hostility and pushback from the authorities of the Church. His responses to these earnest and concerned questioners struck me very deeply: beyond mere fidelity and attachment to the religious community in which he was raised, Tom pointed out that there are, and will continue to be, queer kids who will be brought up in the Church of the Nazarene and they deserve to have someone advocating for them. They deserve to hear they are loved, accepted, and affirmed. They deserve to hear ideas that paint a different picture beyond the dominant perspective that their identities, forms of love, and modes of expression are perversions, sin, something ungodly.
This is a real, living ethic of love — to continue to place oneself in the midst of a community where one is lambasted, censured, and denounced in deeply cutting ways, all in order to pursue advocacy for others. Why? Because no one deserves to feel hopeless and forsaken by God merely for who they are, for their natural longings for intimacy. To dedicate oneself to such a vision, despite all the personal and professional sacrifice and hardship, is to truly take up the example of love Jesus disclosed in his ministry. Even as the Church of the Nazarene has made choices which seem to limit divine compassion and pastoral care to only those who fit a certain mold, I think Christians and people of all faiths are able to find a wonderful example of how to live out Jesus’ ethic of love in Dr. Oord.
Of course, there are open questions of sexual and social ethics brought to the fore by greater visibility of LGBTQ people and families these past few decades. To my mind, however, these do not extend to the question of whether queer people in their very identity are legitimate and worthy of love and acceptance. For all of my adult life, many of my closest friends and family have been gay, trans, and queer. The idea that these people who I love very deeply are — in their very existence as themselves — living in sin, involving themselves in something morally reprehensible, or corrupting social fabric is patently ridiculous. This sounds no more sane to my ears than if one attempted to make similar claims in regard to underrepresented racial groups.
Hearing Dr. Oord speak passionately in advocacy for his LBGTQ co-religionists has inspired me to be more steadfast in doing the same — even as it shall likely result in some controversy and opposition for me as well. Call me a heretic or a zindīq if you wish, but I know I will be in good company with those who live out an ethic of love such as Dr. Oord.
My own religious commitments are to a vision of pervasive and superabundant Divine compassion. If this was not what I found constantly foregrounded in my religious tradition, I would have continued my spiritual search elsewhere. I am queer affirming, not in spite of, but precisely because of my religious and spiritual commitments, even if this puts me at odds with much of the historical tradition. But that is nothing new — most abolitionists were also at odds with the human-historical religious authorities in their traditions, yet their perspectives have now become pervasive moral common sense. Today, to suggest slavery is at all acceptable is rightly viewed as ethically abhorrent and barbaric. I pray that such transformations may also occur in our religious traditions with regard to queer affirmation. May it happen in our lifetimes.
Since my initial discussion of Dr. Oord and his heresy trial, there’s been an interesting phenomena I’ve seen crop up repeatedly in the discourse surrounding this saga. I’ve witnessed many of the theologically conservative voices who are critical of Oord for his stance make points such as “If you don’t like the doctrine of your church, find a new one” or “I don’t understand the issue. He went against the doctrine of the Church he was representing, so they removed him. Some churches have more latitudinarian positions on these issues. Why should this Church keep a minister whose teachings contradict his Church?” I find these sorts of perspectives both intellectually incoherent and morally scandalous.
It is fascinating to see self-styled traditionalists making moral and ecclesial arguments based on such a secularized, commodified vision of religion. These are not complaints that Dr. Oord has a fundamentally incorrect perspective on human sexuality and flourishing when considering the relevant theological, moral, and anthropological facts, but that he is being disloyal or unfaithful to an institution with its own internal rules and norms. The issue isn’t that Dr. Oord has the wrong perspective on these issues in some fundamental sense, but that he’s going against his community with his views. As such, the moral issue here can quite simply be solved by a switch in denominational affiliation.
What an incredibly relativistic perspective! Are there not real questions of morality at stake? I certainly think so, and Dr. Oord does too — that’s why he put so much time and energy into trying to lovingly raise this issue in a community to which he has deep ties and about which he cares deeply.
I think those who a clinging to religious conservatism on queer issues have been forced into a very defensive posture considering some of the undeniable facts surrounding these topics — the perspectives that queer people are inherently sinful or degenerate in pursuing their visions of love or self-expression common in conservative religious spaces absolutely contribute to tragic trends such as high rates of suicidality, mental illness, and alienation among queer people. It begs the question whether a truly loving God or upright religious community would demand these sorts of social and theological perspectives. There’s some obvious tension here, to my mind.
So, many religious conservatives have shifted the goalposts, using very postmodern and relativistic arguments to castigate those with clear moral visions like Dr. Oord who wish to changes the tides of sentiment in their communities. The incoherence and irony here is that these traditionalists, who like to self-style themselves as representatives of Capital-T Truth, are taking up modes of argumentation that are entirely incommensurate with their hardline exclusivist perspectives on religion. But ultimately this is an easier and more sensible argument than wading into the deeper theological discourse, where it seems they’d be forced to argue that the divinely prescribed view on human sexuality is one that leads to excess death and apostasy, and that’s an acceptable externality for holding firm on this “truth.” This is, of course, a demonic inversion of the actual vision of universal love, compassion, and salvation at the heart of any authentic religion.
The moral abhorrence of this relativistic argument is that if it is generalized, moral shifts such as the abolition of slavery would have been immoral in their inception. Early abolitionists in various cultural and religious contexts were, like Dr. Oord, going against the enshrined perspectives of institutions and communities of which they were a part. Yet I hope it is self-evident that this opposition and this earnest desire to shift moral sentiments within a particular context or group is not only not immoral, but morally laudable. One may make similar historical analyses for other moral issues which we now take as basic common sense, but which in their own times were controversial. Though I am skeptical of large-scale meta-narratives of an arc of moral progress in history — one may find inspirational lights of ethical clarity and steadfastness amongst our ancestors, and likewise there are some modern and contemporary horrors which are entirely unique — I think any form of thinking which prohibits one from acknowledging genuine positive shifts which have occurred, and which are currently occurring, is pure nihilism — something both anti-human and anti-religious. And that’s absolutely what is going on here with these relativistic arguments from religious conservatives.
