Butt Sex, Baptism, and the Divine with Rev. Alba Onofrio

In this episode, Brian is joined by the inimitable Reverend Sex @reverand_sex (Alba Onofrio), executive director of Soulforce (@souforceorg), for a conversation about queer faith, spiritual violence, and the liberative possibilities of sex-positive theology. Rev. Alba Onofrio is a theologian and spiritual activist rooted in the U.S. South, engaged in human rights work for over two decades throughout the U.S. and Latin America. As a queer, feminist Christian pastor, their ministry moves at the intersections of religion, gender, and sexuality to heal the wounds of spiritual violence and weaponized religion. Also known as Reverend Sex and co-founder of the Sexual Liberation Collective, their global education work seeks to eradicate shame and fear around bodies and sex, reclaiming pleasure and desire as sacred centers of knowledge, healing, and spiritual practice. As Executive Director and Spiritual Strategist of Soulforce, Rev. Alba has published liberatory theological resources uncovering the ideologies of white Christian Supremacy. Their work has been translated into seven languages and shared around the world. Brian and Rev. Alba talk about Soulforce’s evolution from direct action to global culture-change work and unpack the realities of white Christian supremacy. They get into how it is important to name the lasting harm, and healing, around weaponized religion. Rev. Alba shares how moving beyond deconstruction into reconstruction opens up conversations about consent, pleasure, bodily autonomy, and finding the divine everywhere from drag worship to kink spaces, while also highlighting Soulforce’s projects like Shameless Theology and an upcoming book on spiritual violence. 

Resources:

• Learn more about Soulforce at: https://soulforce.org/ 
• Learn more about Rev. Sex | Alba Onofrio https://www.reverendsex.com/about 
• Learn more and join the Community at https://www.queertheology.com/community/

This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.

1 (10s):
Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G Murphy.

2 (13s):
And I’m father Shannon, T l Kearns. We’re the co-founders of Queer Theology dot com and your hosts from

1 (17s):
Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news to LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how

2 (23s):
Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here.

1 (33s):
Reverend Alba Onofrio is a theologian and spiritual activist rooted in the US South, engaged in human rights work for over two decades throughout the US and Latin America. As a queer feminist Christian pastor, their ministry moves at the intersections of religion, gender, and sexuality to heal the wounds of spiritual violence and weaponized religion. Also known as Reverend Sex and Co founder of The Sexual Liberation Collective. Their global education work seeks to eradicate shame and fear around bodies and sex, reclaiming pleasure and desire as sacred centers of knowledge, healing, and spiritual practice. As Executive Director and Spiritual Strategist of Soulforce, Reverend Alba has published liberatory Theological Resources on uncovering the theologies of white Christian Supremacy.

1 (1m 16s):
Their work has been translated into seven languages and shared around the world. And as you will hear In this episode, Soulforce shares a special place in my heart as it is one of the places in which I came back to faith. And what I learned there has informed much of my work and activism and spirituality since then. And so I’m so excited for you to hear this conversation with Reverend Sex. Abba, thank you so much for being here where it’s really exciting to have the Reverend Sex on the Queer Theology Podcast. So thank you for being here.

3 (1m 47s):
It is a pleasure and a delight. I’ve been waiting for my invitation with Baited Breath forever, so I’m glad to be here with you.

1 (1m 55s):
Yeah, and as, as you know and as like many of the listeners know, like I think Soulforce is what really like radicalize me, if you will. And so there’s definitely like a before Soulforce and after Soulforce. And so I’m so like, I’m just so jazzed I talk about your organ, what the organization that you are now of executive director of, I mean, have been for over a decade so much. And so I’m so glad that we’re able to have you here on the podcast with us.

3 (2m 18s):
Yes. I’m glad we could ruin you in the best way. Yes.

1 (2m 21s):
I was saying before we started recording you like really like talked, but like in a, in a delightful, delightful way.

3 (2m 26s):
Yes. Yeah, yeah, it is like that sometimes. So

1 (2m 29s):
For folks who don’t know already, like what is soulforce and relatedly like what is this like Reverend sex project or persona that you’ve got going on?

3 (2m 39s):
Oh my goodness. Big questions. I’ll try to, I know it’s like standing

1 (2m 41s):
On one

3 (2m 42s):
Leg. Short order.

1 (2m 43s):
Yeah.

3 (2m 45s):
Soulforce has been around for almost three decades now and we started as kind of a rabble rousing, wholly trouble making, calling attention to the issue of lgbtqia plus inclusion in Christian college campuses, in church denominations across the board, but on the heels of a very famous book that was written by our founder Reverend Dr. Mel White and his husband Gary Nixon. And that came out, it was about being gay and Christian in America called Stranger at the Gate. And that got so much publicity and press that this kind of communication strategy of calling a lot of attention to this issue through not being scared of the Bible and not being scared of theology and being willing to take our actual bodies into conservative Christian spaces to try to have dialogue that proved that we were willing to engage and honest and earnest in what we wanted to talk about.

3 (3m 44s):
That’s how we started. Lots of civil disobedience, lots of colleges shut down. You would know about that better than I would ’cause you were on those equality rides back in the day. Yeah, that’s how we started. That’s how a lot of people know us as kind of a fearless organization, willing to have the hard conversations about things that most people are taught or taboo or not allowed or wrong or evil. And then over the course of the decades we’ve transformed into more of an ideological change work and culture change work kind of organization. And basically what that means is that we found that at the core of what was oppressing LGBTQI plus people in terms of religious violence is actually at the intersection of almost every social justice issue.

3 (4m 33s):
And we call that thing white Christian Supremacy. And that basic concept is just this idea that power and systems of power, whether it’s imperialism, white supremacy, pick a thing, takes on the false robes of Christianity in terms of text tradition lingo, how we talk to get people to be complicit with systems of power and domination. And we claim that as not Christianity. That is not about a faith practice that’s actually about keeping and hoarding power and greed. And so doing some of that work of helping de mythologize all of this Christian ease and all of these traditions that we come from that we find ourselves nodding along to things that are actually really horrific that we wouldn’t normally say yes to except for that they come cloaked with a fancy preacher in the good book and therefore we, we kind of go along with it.

3 (5m 23s):
So that’s what we do now. We do it a million ways from Sunday. We really love it. We work in the US South and in the global south to do some bridging work across the academy, the streets and activism as well as the church and communities in general.

1 (5m 39s):
Yeah, it’s really incredible. We’re talking about doing like a, an episode or a, a series about like diving into like direct action activism days with so forth. So if people are

3 (5m 48s):
I love that.

1 (5m 49s):
Yeah. But so that’s the last conversation for another day, I think. But to, but to get at the heart of it, I know that, so folks who are listening almost certainly came from some version of conservative Christianity or, or in some version of like maybe progressive faith. But so I know for a lot of folks either they used to wrestle with, is it okay to be queer or like Gay and Christian, L-G-B-T-Q, maybe they are okay with that, but they have like friends or family who are not fully accepting or like maybe they’re surrounded by love and affirmation, but they just sort of are aware that like Christian based homophobia is an issue. And so they’re like, have a heart for trying to to change that. And so you yes, you really specialize on like this sort of like change work, I think you called it.

1 (6m 33s):
So like what, what did, And I know that you’ve taken different tactics over the years, like what have you found, like is the thing that changes hearts and minds but also changes like policy and culture and are those the same things or, or, because I know, I know Scott, we were talking about this beforehand, like so many people just like wanna be like, let’s talk about so ga more. And I like, what does this word in like Romans Yeah, in Romans are in First Corinthians mean, and like blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And all the books that have been written about that, but like, is that it or is there something else? And like what is that?

3 (6m 60s):
Well, I am a believer in a multitude of strategies and tactics. So I will say yes to all of the above. Soulforce really specializes in how we work on healing our own spiritual violence. And that’s what we call that either spiritual violence or spiritual terrorism. When it gets to kind of the systemic from all sides level that hurt that comes inside us, really inhibits us from being able to try to participate in democracy from trying to demand our rights or even just respect in our own families, communities, et cetera. Because a lot of us carry these tiny little voices in the back of our head of someone we loved probably or respected who told us something about being queer, being trans, that we put away as illogical and not true when we deconstructed the Bible.

3 (7m 50s):
But maybe there’s a little question, especially when something bad happens or something goes wrong, which is like, oh, are were they right? Or does God hate me or am I going to hell? It’s like those little, those little voices that can really just leave really deep wounds or at the very least little splinters that are just irritating all the time. So that we call spiritual violence. And what our strategy is, is we start with working on ourselves because that’s the sphere over which we have the most control. We have the most agency, we have the most excitement, I hope about how we heal our own spirits and our minds. So some of that is education work.

3 (8m 30s):
Like until somebody broke down Sodom and Gaura for me, I was like, maybe it does say that. I mean I have been in places like South Africa for example, where I was doing work with a group of LGBT clergy and it was still almost panic inducing for folks to look at the actual text. Even though I was saying, this isn’t about us. It was so embedded in cultural speak, in family speak that so many of us don’t wanna even confront the text to look at it. And so that’s part of it is education. So we have a whole theological library that’s free for download online that talks about gender diversity in the Bible, Sodom and Gamora, Mary’s choice if you’re interested in reproductive justice, a zillion things in seven different languages.

3 (9m 17s):
So hopefully you’ll find what you need there. So that’s one piece is the education. Another piece is community and finding other folks who are doing similar work and peeling away so that we don’t have shame around. I can’t believe I believe that. Which is like, of course we believe that that’s what we were taught. Yeah. That’s what our heart was trained to respond to. So we actually have to peel back and unlearn those things. It wasn’t because we were somehow stupid or naive even, it was just what we were surrounded with, like the fish in the water. So we do work around creating community. Most recently that’s looked like our queer feminist podcast focused on Latinx folks in Latin America and the US who are theologically trained, who are working through issues of our time.

3 (10m 5s):
And it’s not always just about gender and sexuality, the intersection of that kind of harm, where weaponized religion comes for social justice is true for environmentalism, it’s true for democracy. It goes down the line for so many different kinds of struggles. So we really work at that intersection. And then of course there’s always a celebration. We have this really fun, wonderful experimental spirit space called, or Church of the Queerly beloved, that actually centers drag performance and trans burlesque and spoken word to different things like that from a local community in partnership with us where we do a reverse altar call where we offer a, a symbolic apology or where we do a trans Baptism, where we affirm folks with their new names or a revised communion based on the promise of milk and honey, a land flow with milk and honey.

3 (11m 2s):
So we have a lot of ideas and then we execute some of those ideas into practice and try it out and see how it goes. And then try something else and then try something else and then try something else.

1 (11m 12s):
I love it. I love it. I could imagine for folks it’s like a little bit like greeking from a fire hose, every, all of that. And so like what, like it either you can take it in in two ways. Like what’s like a day in the life of, of Reverend Sex or like what’s like one story of like impact that like really sticks with you or I guess both. Ooh,

3 (11m 37s):
Well, there’s no two days that are the same. There’s a lot of meetings and coordination, but I, on, on our busy years, I can travel the circumference of the earth multiple times in a year. So there’s a lot of bouncing around to be with our lgbtqia plus community, particularly in the global south. And I think one of the things that stands out over and over and over again is that no matter where I am, so for example, I did a workshop with our team in a brothel in downtown keto Ecuador. And so I’m in this brothel with more than a hundred sex workers.

3 (12m 18s):
And that same experience can translate into an experience with a group of trans folks in Nairobi and Kenya. There are always these places where I hear really horrific stories actually about weaponized Christianity and about how our people are told that we’re not allowed to have access to God or to tradition or to rituals or practice. I think the thing that sticks with me so strongly is folks will always start with, especially if they’re feminists, which I love this about activists and particularly feminists, they’re like, all right, let’s start with a rib.

3 (12m 58s):
Like, and it just turns into this maybe hour and a half, two hour long session about the Bible and the Rowans and the Sodom Mangan war, like just going down list. It’s like testing my chops, being like, do you actually know what you’re talking about? Okay. Then we move from that stage to the next phase, which is like, this is, this is what I was taught. This is the horrible things that I experienced from conversion therapy to genital mutilation all the way down the line. And then there’s always this moment that for me is so impactful where the people or a person in front of me will always confess, I never really gave up on God. I just couldn’t go to church anymore.

3 (13m 38s):
Or I couldn’t believe that thing that was hurting me anymore. And that I think is such a testimony to our right as human beings to have spirituality in whatever form and how even those of us who have by and large been either tossed aside, given up on or demonized by a religious tradition and institutions continue to persist in our own faith practices and beliefs in spite of all of that. And that for me is such a hopeful and powerful moment because then it turns into this very frenetic chatter of like, but how can you be queer and a Christian? And you’re a pastor and you’re a woman, and how can that happen?

3 (14m 18s):
And are there more like you? And are you the only one? And, and, and and that experience that I could repeat for you on four different continents on any given year is so powerful about what is true about our people and where we are, whether we’re Christian or not Christian is irrelevant to me. We have every right to be Christian and every right to not be Christian, but it is that that reality that our people are hurting and spirit is very much alive and well regardless of what clothing or tradition it takes on.

1 (14m 52s):
Yeah. Oh gosh. So a lot of our listeners are in English speaking countries. Most of them are in the United States, like, you know, a smattering of, I mean, we’re, where are we? It’s, it’s wild because we realized a few years ago that I think we’ve had visitors and or downloads to our website from like over 200 countries. Like it’s basically like every country in the world about like seven Yes. Or six. And so like, so it, this also spans the globe like, and also a lot of them are in the US or in like Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, et cetera. And so I could imagine folks that are like at home, not on four continents every, every year.

1 (15m 33s):
Like, so there’s like this, all of this like movement happening all over the world. Like what’s the message for the like person at home, whether that’s in like upstate New York or Nebraska or like Johannesburg or like wherever, wherever they might be. Like they’re sort of like in their own home listening. The two of us talk in their ears. Like how does, like what’s, how do you connect the dots between everything out there and your, someone’s like day-to-day life?

3 (15m 59s):
Hmm. Great question. I love that question. That makes any sense. I think so let me try. I think that some of us who are full-time gay for pay activists, nonprofit workers, or just like out and proud in our workplace, I think we lose sight of how alive and relevant questions are. And I think in the US those are coming back around where we learned that some of the things that we thought were foregone conclusions in terms of our access and our rights is no longer a foregone conclusion. It isn’t yesterday’s news anymore. It continues to be on the horizon as a growing and ongoing concern. So I wanna just remind us all that there are so many of us all over the world in so many languages and cultures, and the vast majority of folks that I talk to have one never heard of being queer and Christian.

3 (16m 54s):
They, it just doesn’t exist in their world unless they’re one of the few who has snuck on to the internet. Our website, I don’t know about y’all’s podcast, but our website is banned in like many countries, including like the University of Mississippi, right? Depending on what country you’re in. Yeah. But

1 (17m 14s):
We clear the names

3 (17m 15s):
Out, Right? Literally it’s just really important to remember that there are so many of us who continue to exist in almost impossible circumstances, both within the US and outside of the us. And that colonizing religion, the part of Christianity that was used to say that some of us were more human than others, some of us deserved wellbeing, while others deserved less than that is still something that we have to actively fight against. And so if you’re not Christian, but you come from that tradition, then I feel like there’s a lot there for you to pull from learn from and help decolonize for other folks in the world who are on that journey.

3 (17m 59s):
And if you are a Christian, us more than anyone has a responsibility around this God that we claim to serve being stolen and co-opted and used not just in the us. Like just because we don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Yeah. For example, you know, I’m thinking about Exodus. Exodus, the ex-gay reparative therapy, miserable strategy of trying to make queer trans people straight and cis when, when that fell out of fashion here and there was apologies and all of that stuff, I feel like a lot of people in the US were like, Ooh, we’re done with that, thank goodness. Whew. But that actually that whole operation, that money making operation, because the point was making money, not just trying to quote unquote heal people, just move south.

3 (18m 49s):
So there’s a huge operation in Ecuador that’s like flowing all throughout Latin America. That’s also true all across Eastern Africa and Southern Africa. I don’t know a lot about, much more about the rest of the continent, but those things still exist and are alive and around. So us knowing about them and being in solidarity with others who have less access, whether that means you have less access is because you’re in a rural place, or whether you’re in a really insulated bubble inside your community or whether you’re on a different continent. Being vigilant about that and really doing the depths of taking responsibility for our religion or our religious traditions that we were raised in feels like one of the most important things that we can do as people of good conscience, whether we’re Christian or not.

3 (19m 37s):
Yeah.

1 (19m 37s):
And so that like brings me to, I, one way that folks can be like paying attention and learning is, is one of your podcasts, which I unfortunately don’t speak Spanish, so I’m not gonna try to say it in Spanish, but like your your shameless theology podcast, shameless, yeah. Which is now had this like a season in English, I believe. And so like can you tell us like about, like more about that project?

3 (19m 57s):
Totally. So it’s called, which roughly translate as shameless theology, but is a term used in Spanish. It’s a little bit different depending on the place and the culture throughout Latin America, but it almost always has this very gendered most of the time sexualized term. And I think about my granny, I grew up in Appalachia, so I think about my granny would saying something like, have, you know Shane? Like, it feels like that the Za. And so this podcast started during the height of pandemic in Spanish. We did 77 episodes in Spanish, and then we have a whole new season in English that’s focused on the US diaspora, which is brilliant and amazing.

3 (20m 40s):
And it’s basically folks who engage with queer and Latinx theology, liberation theology in thinking about how that applies to everyday life for folks in really important issues of our time, whether that’s divorce or human sexuality or the environment or the Bible. And so everybody’s theologically trained and we just sit down and have a conversation where we really try to listen to that person’s whole life and experience and how all those things go together to make this kind of juicy theology that helps us break away from all the things that we are taught. Because often in immigrant communities and first gen communities, we’re totally connected to our homelands and our homelands religious traditions and cycles of life.

3 (21m 26s):
And yet the far right, I mean the extreme right almost has an entire monopoly on all the airwaves, you know, especially in other languages. So we started in Spanish, But we recognize that not all Latinx people have access to Spanish either because they come from a non-Spanish speaking country or just because they were raised in the US where they don’t, we also invite all of our allies and other folks to listen.

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3 (22m 21s):
But if there’s something, if your only narrative about immigrants or Latina folks is one about fleeing war torn countries or immigration or the border or those poor farm workers, this is a way for those of us who didn’t, I mean, I went to Diviv school And I didn’t get any education around Latin American feminist theology at all. This is a way for those folks, for folks who are interested in that but didn’t have access to it in Spanish, can tap in and hear what we’re talking about in those spheres. What’s alive, what’s the new and current things that we’re thinking about, and how might that help us actually in the US in lots of other issues that we’re facing that countries in Latin America have already faced or been facing in grand part often because of us interventions.

3 (23m 9s):
So it’s a really juicy podcast to listen to voices that you wouldn’t normally hear here in, in mainstream media or in even in theological education for the most part.

1 (23m 22s):
Mm. Yeah. I mean there’s like some great theology coming out of like Latin America and, and like in addition to like, you know, James Cohen Black Liberation Theology, but like yeah. An American libert theology and like ourselves, like we’re not like place my heart. Yes. And so like, so I can imagine, because we get this also of like Shannon went to Union Theological Seminary, we do a lot, we like, so we like talk these like big ideas. And so I can imagine someone being like, well, it’s great theology podcast. Like, you’re like about ideas, but like how does, like how does that, like why is that important to, to, to to for, for folks to like listen to?

1 (24m 7s):
Like what, like what change does that making people?

3 (24m 10s):
Hmm. Well let me give you a couple examples. Just from this season alone. Yeah. ’cause I could go down the laundry list of all of our brilliant theologians from past years, but just in this season alone, we have a trans pastor who is from the Texas borderland region who’s doing summer camp for trans kids in this kind of incognito moves from here, moves to from there kind of thing because of that hostile atmosphere. There’s another theologian who lived and survived the dictatorship in Argentina. And so her focus on, y’all probably know of her, Dr.

3 (24m 50s):
Nancy Bedford, she does work that’s beautiful but also really relevant to this moment that we’re living in in the us. So hearing her talk about what church tradition was like for her, how she sees theology, the Holy Spirit when she’s talking about one of the most important resources for this moment, for this political moment as prayer that really perks my ears. And I’m like, what are you talking about? Prayer is like a deeply internal devotional practice, whatever. She’s like, no, this is a political strategy because, And I won’t spoil it, you have to go listen, hers is episode two. There’s another person who is undocumented. So they’re coming out and sharing their story of being theologically trained as a person who is part of the DACA and the Dreamers movement who was currently undocumented in the US and her lived experience around that.

3 (25m 39s):
There’s another one that part of an episode that is brilliant about someone who is a pastor of a UCC congregation inside a virtual reality called Second Life. So listening to how they provide truly and authentically accessible, meaning anyone in different countries with different needs. And like for example, one of, just a quick example of that is there was someone in Europe, I think in Sweden who was in a facility and wanted to be baptized but was super touch averse and so couldn’t go through the regular process of Baptism, but through their avatar in first life, they literally created the baptismal font.

3 (26m 21s):
They invited people, they had it live streamed so that their family could be a part of it. And that person got to have their Baptism through this virtual reality with all of their accessibility needs being addressed in the moment. How brilliant is that? Love it. How brilliant are our queer and trans people that they’re figuring this shit out in real time, in real life. So when I think about how does it impact our lives, one, it gives me endless amounts of hope to see the creativity Yeah. And strategy of our people, but also it helps us just rethink things that we were already taught and we just took for granted or we discarded because a lot of people would discard prayer as like, ugh, that thing that Christians do, but her focus on it as a meditative focusing practice to figure out what is our work in this time?

3 (27m 9s):
That’s a very different orientation to spending some time in prayer than going before God and asking for your like honey do list. Right? So that’s what I would say. That’s my short answer. Yeah.

1 (27m 20s):
Yeah. It makes me think of Laverne Cox’s idea, like a possibility model, but like, not just like on the, on the scale of a famous person, right? But like here, because like, I don’t know, like I’m not gonna be on a Netflix TV show, but like I, right. But I could perhaps like reimagine prayer for myself or I could like, I’m also probably not gonna start a start a UCC church in in Second Life, but like, they, like it turns something in you right about sort of like, oh, like what, what other possibilities are there? Whether you’re like a pastor or just like a person in the pew or someone who’s like no longer at church. And so I, I love all of that like inspiration. And so

3 (27m 56s):
It also helps you connect better to what’s going on in the world around you because we often have feedback loops that just tell us the same things we already know over and over and again in this echo chamber. And so getting outside of that to feel and hear what others’ lived experiences are from a very different position and how they engage with that and what things like radical self-love looks like is a brilliant study in how do I be ready to be a member of a global society because I will encounter people who are different than me, or maybe I will encounter someone with chronic pain even if that’s not my experience. So listening to somebody talk from a theological position and a position of faith around chronic pain is a really helpful entree into being like, okay, I know enough about this little thing that I would know how to engage with somebody if I met them at my church, at my kids’ school in the community.

3 (28m 53s):
And that is also such good practice in this moment where we’re taught to be more and more isolated.

1 (28m 59s):
Yeah, I know it’s really easy to like the algorithms and the feeds and the like in 24 7 news cycle, like everything is so terrible. The world is on fire And I, And I like not that the world is not on fire, right? Like it absolutely is. But I think, I think that like sometimes like progressive folks are leftist focused, it’s really easy to like only see all the stuff that’s like going wrong and there wasn’t all of the effects that need to need to happen. And so like I, I think it’s like so important for us to all stay plugged into all of like the hope and the possibility and this not just possibility, but the things that are like actually happening. Because I think if I, yes, so I, I think I’ve like curated my algorithm such that like, I, I don’t like, like don’t get depressed by it because I just, the podcast that I listen to the news stories that I’m reading that like the organizers that I’m following, I’m like, there’s like so much amazing stuff going on in the world.

1 (29m 46s):
Like you don’t have to just rage tweet all day long. Like you can go be a part of something constructive. And I know we were talking about that a little bit before the show of, but like before we started recording was like, you know, lots of folks don’t need to go through the process of deconstruction and, and you know, what are these clever passage us saying, let’s talk about Sodom and Gomorrah all day long and, and that that’s important work. Like, and also we were, we’re talking about there’s, there’s more to it than that. There’s a sort of a like, like a constructive work. And so I think that’s like a little bit of what Reverend Sex is doing. And so can you talk a little bit more about like moving from deconstruction into like reconstruction and like Yeah.

1 (30m 27s):
Not just that, but also like really going there when it comes to, to sex and sexuality.

3 (30m 33s):
Yes. I would love to, I think it’s easy to get stuck in the deconstructive part because we really wanna know and understand what happened. And I really applaud folks who are brave enough to look, that’s the most important first step is what is actually true, what’s actually there and being able to face whatever reality is that you encounter after you, after you look at the text, after you look at your tradition, your family, et cetera. But the thing that makes me come alive is what do we do based on all of that that we know to be true? What, what is the way of being in the world that isn’t just constantly being like, God loves us too, God loves everyone there that is, that has its role.

3 (31m 16s):
And for some of us that’s, that’s where we start. That’s as much as we can get out as just this clinging to this idea that God loves us also, which is not bad at all. And there’s a maturing in the faith that allows us to be more expansive. Because if we weren’t taught all of that terrible shit to start with, there is so much other basis of queer God. And that’s kind of where Reverend sex work comes in. So I go by Reverend Sex because I found that I kept talking with evangelical preachers in particular and we would start with the Bible and then we would start, then we would move, like once we addressed all the ber passage, us one by one in thorough detail, then we would move on to morality and goodness.

3 (32m 4s):
And then it would just be the progression at the end of the day. And I’m talking about many, many long multi-hour conversations. At the end of the day it was still panic around somebody is gonna treat my body, a man is gonna treat my body, how I as a cis man have treated or have been told I was allowed to treat other people’s bodies, whether that’s women’s bodies, children’s bodies, it’s about agency. And so I was like, if the panic is about Butt Sex, what if we just skipped the other stuff and went straight to the Butt Sex? Because we could talk about the Bible, we could talk about morality or we could just get to the thing that is actually why you are clinging to this so tightly, which is what if a gay man flirts with me?

3 (32m 49s):
And it’s like, well why don’t we just start there? What if a gay man flirts with you, what kind of theology, what kind of belief do we need to have in practice so that you straight cis man have bodily autonomy and agency to be able to say, thank you so much, I’m not interested, I’m not gay, or whatever the other million things that you could politely say and move it along, what would it, what would we need? Right? And then we’re talking about the good stuff now we’re talking about bodily autonomy. Now we’re talking about the right of bodies to be well to be informed. We’re talking about consent, all these words that I literally never heard growing up. So I just use reverence, sex as this shortcut to say, I’m willing to talk about the things you’re most scared to talk about.

3 (33m 34s):
You wanna talk about masturbation, you wanna talk about orgasms? The number of women I’ve talked to who are scared to masturbate because they think God will condemn them, send a lightning strike down, aren’t satisfied by their husbands. I mean these are straight women that I’m talking to of many ages, like 50 sixties more by going by Reverend Sex, I’m kind of leading with this. I’m here to talk about those things. So you don’t need to be shy. So when we get in session, lots of people are willing to talk about lots of things because I’ve just laid it out there on the front line. So I use Reverend Sex, I use Audrey Lorde’s uses of the erotic as my primary source text and comparing this idea of the erotic energy that is in all of us as the Imago de and connecting with that source of power that is instilled in the spark of the divine that is within all of us as made in the image of the divine.

3 (34m 31s):
And using that to be like, okay, if we start here, what’s possible? Because just look outside. Like just think about the types of plants. Even if you’re not a plant person, think about the types of teas, just the types of teas that you can drink or the flowers like I truly believe, I didn’t come up with someone else said it, but I truly believe that God’s orientation is much more drag queen than anything else. Because some of the colors in the same flowers, you have oranges and pinks and reds and purples, like the world is so full of difference and diversity and wildly creative things that I’m like, if you start from that position, God made this world, this earth, this cosmos, and it has everything from black holes to wooly worms, right?

3 (35m 18s):
And everything in between. We actually as queer and trans people are very normal. I know that’s a bad one for some normal, yeah. But we actually fit in really, really well here. What doesn’t make sense is that God would create these very rigid boxes that people are supposed to stuff themselves in. And anything other than that is bad there. There’s no proof of that anywhere around us in all of creation from plants to animals, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s kind of the orientation of the constructive theology is what happens if we start by knowing God through what God has created, where do we as queer and trans people fit in? Where do we see shame or not shame? And then from there we can see the constructs of white Christian Supremacy for what they are, which is instilled ways of thinking and frameworks to try to control us in different forms.

1 (36m 5s):
Yeah. Oh man. When you were saying like at the end of an eight hour day, people are like, what are we? But like Butt Sex is like gross, I feel like. Like, oh man, I like, I think the two big things I took away from my time with the equality, right? Having like hundreds and hundreds of these conversations was like, oh, it almost always, if you just keep digging, it comes down to like, but the parts just don’t fit. Or like, I don’t know, that seems kind of weird to me. You’re like, ooh. And so like you gotta like, you gotta address the like the ooh at some point. Yes. And that people think that they want, the other thing that I like figured out was that like people think that they want like academic dissertations, which like they do oftentimes. And also the thing that’s gonna like move people is like stories.

1 (36m 48s):
Like it’s the, the Bible is not, yes, there’s like some tical laws in there, but the Bible is mostly stories. Like that’s how we humans like transmit values and meaning. And so like, yes, I’m like we gotta skip breaking down Leviticus and like get into like let’s talk about sex like and and relationships and consent and autonomy. And it’s also like why Queer Theology is like it, it’s not just for queer people, right? It benefits like straight people too. Yeah. Because like we can break, it’s an oppo, it’s an invitation to like break up these conversations and be like, for straight CI men, for straight women, for like straight relationships. Like there’s just so, so much, so much bigger. And so I love

3 (37m 27s):
Invitation. Absolutely. I actually think that that’s part of why God created us is that for those of us who have to deal with our gender and sexuality in order to survive. And let me be clear that not all of us do survive. Yeah. But for those of us who make it to the other side of that very hard soul searching difficult process, we have something to teach everybody else because we have lived through what it means to come to terms with our own beings, our own desire, our own truths, and find God on the other side. So I actually think that that’s a perfect place where there should be leadership amongst our community, not just for our community, but for the wider community.

3 (38m 8s):
And you know, you said earlier like what changes hearts and minds? And I would, And I started with talking about how we work on ourselves because that’s where we have the biggest fear of influence. But I wanna just wrap that up to circle back around to that by saying, when we are sure about what we know, whether that is me and God are okay, I can’t tell you the number, number of grandmothers who have been pacified and calmed by their queer and trans grandchildren saying, grandma, me and Jesus are okay. Like I promise we’re okay. It’s like at the end of the day, if someone loves you, they want you to be well with yourself, with Jesus, with God, with whoever.

3 (38m 48s):
And doing that soul searching work does that. And so I would say the thing that changes the most hearts to minds, at least in my experience, is me claiming my own truth about my body, about my desire, about my life, and about God of being like, I have a prayer life. Me and God are good. We talk a lot. We have some very difficult and beautiful and affirming conversations. And that work I think is actually the hearts and minds work. But we have to, we have to have done the soul searching and had the community support to be able to get there, to be able to say, this is what I know to be true about myself, and this is what I know to be true about my relationship with God.

1 (39m 24s):
Yeah. Amen. And And I, I see sometimes, like in our work, L-G-B-T-Q Christians will be like, well I, I’ve like repaired my relationship with God and Jesus and so like, I just like wanna make sure that everyone else hears the good news about Jesus. Like, I want my partner to become Christian. Or like, maybe they’ve like, it’s okay to be gay, but like you still have to accept Jesus to go to heaven. And so I think that there’s also like some work that I know, like when I talk about my work, like it, it often comes up like at gay clubs, at gay beaches, I mean people who are like not ostensibly religious. That’s fun. It’s delightful. And like, I think that like people, I don’t, I dunno what people imagine, but like, and the ways that people like light up, like they don’t necessarily wanna go to church.

1 (40m 5s):
They might not even ever like wanna pray or God, but just like a, the idea that someone is like going to places and talking about come chops and communion in the same sentence is like, oh my God, that’s yes, that’s possible. But also like, oh, well maybe if I can see this dance floor as like something sacred like that, that like jives with me. Like yes. And so like I think there’s also an element of like deconstruction, reconstruction of sort of like what works for you, like might not be what works for some other queer person and, and to like finding all so the the different ways that people like might access the divine.

3 (40m 41s):
Yes. Brian, thank you for bringing that to the fore. It’s so true. And it’s so important because I will also do work with a, with a group called the Sexual Liberation Collective. And we’re working with sex workers, sex healers, sex educators, and the folks, I mean, I would say my primary ministry with that group of people is the kink community within queer and trans world. And that includes sex parties and other forms of expression. And we do writing workshops. It’s all kinds of really fun and interesting things. Many of the things that other people would be like, even queer people will be like, Ooh, this makes me a little uncomfortable.

3 (41m 24s):
Right? And so doing some of that own work, even those of us who feel like we’re marginalized or on the outskirts to understand well how if the divine is actually in everyone and in everything, where might God show up? And what if that include things like the bedroom or what if that included things like BDSM kind of engagements, like those kinds of things feel so alive and potent and so right for the possibility of connecting with the divine. If we get out of our own way without having to stuff God, this is the thing we tell. We get told that we’re supposed to be stuffed into these tiny little boxes, and then we turn around and do the same thing with God and try to stuff God in these tiny little boxes and be like, why couldn’t God be in a sex party?

3 (42m 9s):
Why couldn’t God be interested in pain and pleasure? And what that has to do with each other? Like, all these things are possible. Let me tell you, if you never thought about it before, it is possible. And some of our deconstructive work, knowing how religion has been used to hurt us, is understanding how other pieces of that same religion might be being used to hurt others and not perpetuate that same harm against others. Even if it’s a slightly different flavor or texture or with different words or with different marginal identities.

1 (42m 38s):
Oh my God, you, this is, we can’t do a whole other something on this because I, I touch upon like kink and pain and submission in my book Lovey Monogamy. But like it’s about yes, not monogamy most, more generally. And so like, but I’m like, oh, there’s like, there’s another book in me about like, just about kink and faith and it’s like, it’s rich absolutely richly.

3 (42m 58s):
I think kink theology has stuff to teach all of us actually because just the work consent, I never once heard that in all of my years of church. And even now in progressive Christianity, I don’t hear it very often. And the, the ideas and the scenes of the construction that, of imagination that happens in kink communities, I think those of us who are working out in the wider world for social justice and change could really take a lesson from that level of creativity, world building, construction, all of that kind of stuff. And I do a, a writing workshop called Jesus is a Power bottom. And

1 (43m 37s):
I love that

3 (43m 39s):
It’s, it’s a really fun workshop. But basically what it does for, for folks is it takes the relationship of how you see your relationship to God and then it switches the roles of the scene and says, well what if God played a different role? What if you played a different role? What if that role was sexual? Like how might that engagement feel and look and change what’s in your body in terms of your ability to connect with God? Because as one of the brilliant participants of the first time I did the workshop said is like God is just, this was a pk, so a pastor’s kid, and she was like, it just feels like God’s an evil Sky daddy sometimes. And sometimes that’s fine, but other times that’s not fine.

3 (44m 20s):
And it really stuck with me of like, what happens when we take God out of that evil Sky Daddy role and actually engage with God as a real entity. So we have a lot of fun, but it’s also about doing some of that deep deconstructive work in an embodied way.

1 (44m 38s):
Yeah. Okay. So talking about workshops makes me, makes me wonder if, if folks are late listening at home, what are like various ways other than obviously the podcast that folks can either like get plugged into, learn about support, be a part of experience, your work, y’all’s work, either you’re work or soulforce worker? Both.

3 (44m 56s):
Yeah. Well, on my website, reverend sex.com, you can, it says Find me at church or something like that. And it often has where I will be preaching next or where I’ll be, we do conference circuits, so you’ll find us at places like Creating Change sometimes if you hit those kinds of places. Or Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina where I’m from. And then I would just say, check us out on social media soulforce org or if you speak Spanish at robot for the Spanish language stuff. We do lots of workshops. I think on the horizon we’ll do a community cohort kind of class around the upcoming book, which is on spiritual violence.

3 (45m 37s):
And its different forums. And so we often will do a community course. When we did it in Spanish, we had a community course that had like a hundred folks from 10 different countries that kind of came together reflecting on their experiences, learning some of this new vocabulary like spiritual terrorism or spiritual trauma and then moving from there. So just stay tuned. There’s so many different places to plug in.

1 (45m 59s):
I love it. And I always like to ask folks like, what’s, what’s coming down next? And so can you share a little bit more about, about this, this upcoming book?

3 (46m 6s):
Yeah, I’d love to, well, we’ll have another season of, in English and it will be centered around some of the folks who contributed for this book project, which is called Spiritual Violence and Religious Phenomena that defile the Faith. And it’s a US adaptation of a book that we put out a few years ago in Spanish that we did a whole Latin American tour and it identifies white Christian Supremacy, spiritual violence, spiritual terrorism, religious abuse and spiritual trauma. So for folks who are hearing those words for the first time and they don’t quite sure how they go together and what that means, it’s a book that has somatic practices.

3 (46m 49s):
If you feel that in your body, it has surveys of, you might have been a target of this kind of violence, if these things have happened to you or you’ve experienced them, it has intellect for those of us who are sapiosexual has the intellectual theory parts that we dive deep on what these concepts mean. And then there’s some space to engage with real people’s case studies of real lived experience, real people’s lived experiences that explain that idea or that that framework a little bit more for each of those five concepts. So that’s coming out in January. We’ll be doing lots of things around that, around those issues, how it connects with Latinx communities, how it connects with gender and sexuality.

3 (47m 30s):
And folks should look very much look forward to that.

1 (47m 33s):
I love it so much. And so for folks wanna connect with you on Instagram, you’re Reverend Sex, Reverend Sex over there. Any other, any other places that folks should be connecting with you

3 (47m 44s):
At Sexual Sex Lib, co Sexual Liberation Collective, sex Lib co or soulforce org all together, those are the places where you’ll find us on social media and we’re out and about a lot actually. So you should get on our Soulforce newsletter. We send one a month. It’s not a overload of emails, but it gives you a look into things, it gives you all the latest connects to the podcast or other things that we’ve done that you have access to from your home.

1 (48m 13s):
Also if, if you give money every now and then you’ll get something in the mail. I got like some really sweet art not not too long ago from y’all on like a postcard or a magnet or something. Yeah. That I have in my fridge. So that and and, okay, so let’s, now that the, now that the logistics are out of the way, we like to close by asking like, what’s one thing that’s bringing you joy?

3 (48m 31s):
Ooh, so much joy. So much joy. I’m doing this series called Love Letters with Reverend Sex, which I was a little bit strong armed into doing. They’re shorts, 15 to 30 minute reflections. And even though it, it was hard to get me to say yes, it’s been bringing me so much joy to revisit some of the things that I was taught as a young person. And looking back decades later, I just completed my 10th anniversary of ordained ministry. So you know, almost 20 years of digging into these kinds of things and going to school for them. And it was, it’s been a real joy to kind of circle back and be like, oh, the Rapture was a big deal growing up.

3 (49m 15s):
The Left Behind series really impacted me. I don’t know if you were paying attention, Brian, but in many parts of the world that we were supposed to have rapture happen, not twice, but three or four times. Just this past fall.

1 (49m 28s):
Yeah,

3 (49m 29s):
Yeah. So, So just circling back and being like it, searching my own heart and spirit and being like, what is true about that for me now? And how do we engage in conversations that can be healing for others? Because that, for example, was a hugely traumatic thing for me when I was a young person. So being able to see, oh, we do heal over time, we do this work and it’s hard and we do land in a different place that’s more loving and more open and more ourselves. And that brings me a lot of hope. ’cause I’m a very stubborn person, so it’s hard change is hard for me.

1 (50m 2s):
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for being here, Alba. It’s been a delightful conversation and hopefully the first of many.

3 (50m 9s):
Yes, what a pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. I’m so happy to be here.

5 (50m 13s):
The Queer Theology podcast is just one of many things that we do at Queer Theology dot com, which provides resources, community, and inspiration for L-G-B-T-Q Christians and straight cisgender supporters.

2 (50m 22s):
To dive into more of the action, visit us at Queer Theology dot com. You can also connect with us online on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

5 (50m 30s):
We’ll see you next week.

The post Butt Sex, Baptism, and the Divine with Rev. Alba Onofrio appeared first on Queer Theology.