Introduction

My remarks this morning emerge at a slant to the arguments Janet Jakobsen and I develop in Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Tolerance, which was published earlier this year. The book grew out of a set of dissatisfactions that Janet and I shared about the impoverishment of public arguments on behalf of lesbian and gay "rights." We believe that an emphasis on "rights" rather than "freedom" is already part of the problem, and that lesbian and gay advocates are asking for too little when they ask for tolerance. (And "we" would certainly be asking for too little if we settle for gay marriage.)

Love the Sin emerged, too, out of our shared frustration at the impoverishment of academic discourse about religion, especially at the way religion did and did not feature in the critical discourses with which we were centrally engaged: feminist and queer theory; and cultural studies. There seemed (and still seems) so little exchange between religious studies, on the one hand, and gender and sexuality studies, on the other. Actually, what exchange there is, is pretty much one way, with many religious studies scholars engaging questions of gender, sexuality, and race, but not vice versa.

Moreover, in general, when religion does enter into the frame, it tends to do so in highly reduced belief-centered terms in which religion gets figured as the expression of irrational superstition, fear, archaic holdover, modernity's remainder. Under the burden of such representations of religion, religious people are, at best, silly; at worst, they are the enemy of, variously, women, queers, progress, equality, freedom, futurity itself. This latter depiction-"religion as enemy"-was something I heard frequently from fellow activists when I was doing abortion rights organizing in the Boston area during graduate school, and this despite the energetic presence of a local religious coalition for reproductive rights. Versions of "religion as enemy"-with varying volume-also continue to animate arguments on behalf of lesbian and gay rights.

Now, there are good reasons for feminists, queers, and other passionate defenders of freedom to be worried about the way religion continues to work in U.S. public life. However, such blanket proclamations as "religion is the enemy" forget more than they know. They forget or overlook the many self-identified feminists, gay men, lesbians for whom religion remains a vital site of collective belonging and meaning-making life practices. They read past the best selling non-fiction list at most gay and lesbian bookstores, a list dominated (and we are talking about urban bookstores) by books about religion and spirituality (with such titles as What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality). Finally, it is a powerful will to forget that can organize side by side for abortion rights with women for whom feminism and religion are not mutually exclusive points of identification and yet declare religion irrational, woman-hating delusion.

As Janet and I argue in Love the Sin, and although this fact is often forgotten (by both the Right and the Left), progressive politics in the United States has not always been uniformly "against" religion (1). Just think of the rich history of progressive movements for African-American civil rights that were anchored in the Black Church; the movements for economic justice grounded in the Catholic worker movement in the U.S. and in Catholic base communities in Central America; long-standing traditions of Jewish progressive politics; and the Quaker movements on behalf of abolition and against war. These social justice movements, their histories and achievements, should make clear that the entry of religion into politics and public life is not in and of itself conservative.

And yet, when it comes to sexuality, religion is, by and large, invoked to conservative ends. Sodomy laws are - were? - an ur-example of this in the U.S. context. Renewed battles over same-sex marriage are another. Here, for example, is the Senate Majority Leader, Dr Bill Frist, weighing in on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage; his remarks came on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v Texas, in which they struck down Texas's sodomy law, and with it, the power of states to criminalize private consensual homosexual sex: "I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament. And that sacrament should extend, and can extend, to that legal entity of a union between what…has traditionally been defined as a man and a woman."

When the Senate majority leader invokes the religious language of "sacrament," he is blurring the line between church and state. It is also revealing how closely Frist's comments resemble those of right-wing Christians, such as Rev. Lou Sheldon, president of the Traditional Values Coalition, who reacted to the court's decision in Newsweek's cover story "The War Over Gay Marriage" by saying, "In this court, you do not have friends of the Judeo-Christian standard. We know who our friends are. And we know who needs to be replaced." (Hint: his name is not Antonin Scalia.)

Nor is this a partisan issue. During the 1996 congressional debates over the Defense of Marriage Act, democratic Senator Robert Byrd took to the Senate floor, Bible in hand, and said, "One has only to turn to the Old Testament and read the word of God to understand how eternal is the true definition of marriage ... Woe betide that society that fails to honor that heritage and begins to blur that tradition which was laid down by the Creator in the beginning."

On sexual issues, church-state blurring is generally accepted in U.S. public life - in fact, is not even seen as blurring. Why? As Janet and I argue in a recent opinion piece in New York Newsday (July 13, 2003), from which the above quotations were lifted, the answer has to do with the role of Christianity in how the United States understands and governs itself. Invoking the language of religion or its code, "traditional values," is a way of reassuring "ourselves" that we still have morals, we are still a Christian nation (invocations of Judeo-Christian standards notwithstanding). Nonetheless, despite their cultural dominance many Christians understand themselves as a threatened minority, a point I will come back to.

For now, I want simply to point out that secularists, queer and otherwise, are not wrong to distrust public religious language or worry about the role of religion in U.S. public life. It is just that the story is far more complicated than usually supposed.

At the center of Love the Sin is the claim that all state and federal laws regulating homosexuality are, ultimately, religion by other means. However, this is not just about sodomy and sexuality and sexual freedom. There is not exactly a lot of religious freedom going around for religious people who are not Christian, nor for Christians who are differently Christian-never mind for people who are not religious at all. Instead, as Janet argues in her own new solo project, in practice, what religious freedom in the U.S. context currently means is the freedom to act Protestant, even when you're not. (She makes this case via a compelling analysis of the effective secularization of specifically Protestant ideas about bodily regulation in modernity-one might even say as modernity's wager.)

In contrast to this dessicated notion of religious pluralism and its equally thin counterpart, tolerance, in Love the Sin we call for a robust pluralism, a democratic life pulsing with complexity and contestation, and the freedom not just to "be" different but to act differently. This latter freedom-to do oneself differently-proceeds from our recognition (not ours alone, obviously) that selves do not come into the world ready-made, but are rather constituted through life practices and often in collective contexts. Religion is one such site for this kind of self-making. So is sex.

Too often, though, public discussions about religion and sex proceed as if religion and sex were opposed values. This is especially so in debates over homosexuality and gay rights. However, sexual justice and sexual freedom-and for a wider range of sexual dissenters than such terms as "gay" and "lesbian" capture-are not "anti-religious." They are actually part and parcel of any genuine American commitment to religious freedom. To repeat: To the extent that all U.S. laws and policies regulating homosexuality and denying gay men, lesbians, and other sexual dissidents full inclusion in American life are derived from specifically Christian ideas about the ordered body and "good" sex versus "bad," then, there can be no meaningful sexual freedom until such time as the twin promises of the First Amendment-disestablishment and free exercise-are actually enacted (and not just recited out loud as among the glories of American democracy).

The nutshell argument of the book, then, is that religious freedom is the condition of possibility for sexual freedom in the U.S., and as a way to get to this strong assertion, we draw an analogy between religious identity and homosexual identity. This analogy is not without risks. As Michael Warner warns in his autobiographical "Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood," "You can reduce religion to sex only if you don't especially believe in either one." (2) Accordingly, it will be helpful to make clear what Janet and I do not mean when we suggest that homosexuality is in some way "like religion."

II. The Religion-Sex Analogy

So, what don't we mean by the religion-sex analogy? We are not saying that homosexuality "is" a religion. We do not define, nor are we interested in defining, either gay identity or religious identity. Rather, we use a religion-sex analogy to jump-start more expansive considerations of not just what it means to be different, but, more centrally, what it means to do our identities differently.

This stress on acts constitutive of self (a self that is retrospectively installed as "before" the act) is offered, in part, as a response to opponents of homosexuality and gay rights who commonly assert that gay rights are nothing but "special rights" for chosen-and bad-behavior. The move to think "gay identity" "like" "religious identity" is also a reproach against mainstream gay rights organizations and advocates, who have attempted to short-circuit moral debates over homosexual "behavior" with analogies between homosexuality and race and, from there, to the assertion that, just "like" racial difference, sexuality too is in-born. In other words: sorry; can't change can't help it. (And we all know that assertions of race as immutable difference has meant the end of racial discrimination, right?)

Here, then, is one of the other intellectual joints of Love the Sin: When Janet and I first met, in 1993-at the academic's version of a blind date (we were put together on a panel at the American Academy of Religion)-Janet was already working on the limitations of tolerance and the promise of freedom, and I had begun mulling over a religion-sex analogy as a way out of the born-that-way/can't help it box.

The freedom to be different and act differently should not depend on whether or not an individual is "born that way." Frankly, I can help myself, but don't see why I should have to. Just consider the moral implications of linking rights claims to nature in this way: if individuals could change their-what?-race, gender, sexuality, they could be required to do so as a condition of full civic inclusion.

Despite the reservations many queer secularists-especially queer secularists who also happen to be queer theorists (and, frankly, I would align myself with both of these camps)-despite the reservations they may have with any invocation of "religion" that is not accusatory, the religion-sex analogy is actually far more congenial to social constructionist and performative notions of selfhood than are racialized appeals to "nature." It is also, I would argue, more congenial to the self-narratives of lesbians, gay men, and other sexual queers. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Janet Halley have both argued, if social constructionism has thus far had so little traction beyond the academy's walls, this is in part due to its perceived indifference to or, at minimum, its tone deafness for, the self-reporting of so many lesbians, gay men, and other sexual queers. These self-narratives do not reduce to one.

This means that the sincere and sincerely contested beliefs about the origins and parameters of sexual identity are not just a contest between opponents and proponents of gay rights. Gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals do not themselves agree on the question of "origins." Some would say they experience their sexuality as innate; others understand their sexual orientation as a mixture of chosen and un-chosen factors; still others narrate their sexuality as volitional, perhaps reframing their sexual preferences as a question of political preferences; and none of this even begins to exhaust the contradictions and tensions internal to any one person's self-narrative. If we turn our attention to the contested areas of racial and gender and religious identity, there too we find that individuals have very different ways of describing their experiences and self-understandings.

To say that religious identity is not encoded in the genes or passed through amniotic fluid or marked in the anterior region of the hypothalamus or telecast into your home and your child's heart by Tinky Winky or any one of "Charlie's Angels" (some of the more popular sites for locating the origins of homosexuality) is not to say that individuals who identify as religious or with a particular religious tradition understand their religious identity as chosen in any simple way. The First Amendment even implicitly recognizes the vulnerability of religious identity when it extends protection for religion (free exercise) and from it (disestablishment), whether that religion is my neighbor's or the President's.

The patterns of commitment entailed in religious identity may shift, but those patterns, which seem to touch the very core of a person-the soul even-establishing and anchoring an individual's moral center, are hardly a simple matter of "choice" or inevitability. Religion can be an individual experience as well as a deeply social one, forging common rituals, communities of shared interpretation, and relations between individuals too. For both individuals and communities, then, religion is never a matter solely of text and belief, but crucially involves-we could even say is instantiated by-practice. These practices are crucial sites for the making and remaking of self and community and through such exercises emerges also a representation of the good life. As with religion and religious identity, so too with sex and sexual identity: The religion-sex analogy lets us argue, in the teeth of "love the sinner, hate the sin" platitudes, that the right to be gay is effectively meaningless if it is not matched by the right to "do" gay-where "doing" gay includes not only (gasp!) homosexual sex but these other culture- and value-making activities: queer political organizations, lesbian and gay bookstores, lesbian and gay bars and clubs and music festivals, dyke tv, lgbt studies, queer theatre and performance on scales large and small.

Here is one of the challenges of the religion-sex analogy, for secularists, queer and otherwise. I have just argued for the necessity of making our theories and political strategies capacious enough for lgbt self-narratives (to use the term "narrative" is already dangerously to read past a life). However, we need also to be open to the self-accounts of religious people (some of whom, of course, may also be gay or lesbian) and create ways of understanding religious feeling and experience "without," as Ann Taves urges in her historical study, "doing violence to [our] sources and their categories" (7). A new or renewed openness to the categories of religious experience can pay unexpected dividends by revealing some surprising company-strange bedfellows, if you will.

In what time remains to me, I want to turn my attention to a relatively recent genre of religious self-narratives, the coming out of homosexuality story. This turning toward is also a turning back.

III. Varieties of Religious Experience: What's Sex Got to Do With It?

In July 1998, a coalition of anti-gay groups took out a series of full-page ads in The New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post. The particular ad that interests me appeared in the New York Times on July 13 and featured Anne Paulk, "wife, mother, former lesbian." In the fine print of the ad's text is laid out Paulk's story of coming out of homosexuality and into the "transforming love of Jesus Christ" (italics in original).

Because the ad is the focus of an extended analysis ("reading") in the third chapter of Love the Sin, I do not want to belabor the arguments presented there. Short version: the ad is a scrupulously measured interplay of text and image; a close-up of Paulk's hand fills the upper-third of the ad, her wedding band and diamond ring prominently signing newfound commitments to God, husband, and self. Her story, which unfolds over seven sections of text, follows many of the conventions of the conversion narrative, complete with unexpected detours, willful evasions, and an arrival that is also a coming home. Once she did not know who she was and so she grasped at answers provided by others; however, through self-study, through appeals to a power greater than herself, and through intense social engagement with others like herself, she was able to leave a false life behind and come to the truth of the self. In staging Paulk's self-discovery as a coming out of lesbianism narrative, the ad brilliantly and very knowingly recasts the relations between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Within the terms of the ad's repressive hypothesis, heterosexuality, not homosexuality, is secular culture's tabooed subject.

Nonetheless, the contours of Paulk's conversion narrative, its confusions and arrival, will be familiar, perhaps painfully so, to lesbians, gay men, and other modern sexual subjects who have struggled to come out to self and others about the felt truth of their sexuality. Moroever, even though the ad is obviously crafted with an eye to its impact on public political debates about gay identity and gay rights, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Paulk's testimony. Moreover, far from discrediting her, the public political repurposing of Paulk's testimony places Paulk and her story within a longer American history of Protestant revival, in which believers gave public witness to their sins and praised God for their salvation. These "exercise[s] in the collective performance of emotion," to use John Corrigan's terms (3), testified to the state of the individual participant's soul at the same time that they also served to enact and assert group membership (usually over and against non-members). Consequently, I'd argue, still more strongly now than I did in Love the Sin, that it is actually more helpful to take Paulk's narrative at its word than to dismiss it as so much political packaging/unapologetic homophobia (on the part of the ad's 15 co-sponsors) or wishful thinking/internalized (apologetic) homophobia (on the part of Anne Paulk). It is more helpful in that it testifies (a word I do not choose idly) to what may be shared structures of feeling between religious and sexual "identity." Taking Paulk's conversion experience seriously and locating its historical antecedents also point to the value of joining the history of sexuality (and its modern invention) to the history of religion (and its modern invention). In a deep sense, we moderns are that joining, to wit, hyphenated-but have we ever been?-secular subjects.

In my analysis of the Anne Paulk ad in Love the Sin, I suggested, in a footnote, that the ex-gay ad was thinkable as a kind of reverse discourse. The term "reverse discourse" is Foucault's, of course, and refers to a movement within discourse in which previously marginalized groups or identities come to speak on their own behalf, appropriating the same vocabulary that has previously been used to disqualify them as subjects. The one example Foucault offers of this phenomenon is an apparently approving one: homosexuality speaking in its own name (4). Anne Paulk's ex-gay narrative-with its sampling of a genre (the homosexual coming out story) and a set of assumptions (a core self divided from itself)-is an important reminder that "reverse discourse" is not just a strategy deployed by those on the cultural margins, but can also be used to reassert dominant values. One page on from naming homosexuality as his one example of reverse discourse, Foucault himself cautions us against assuming that reverse discourse necessarily belongs to any one strategy, moral division, or ideology (102).

I do not so much want to take back my footnote, as complicate it. First, for all the ways in which the ex-gay narrative reasserts dominant values-heteronormativity anyone?-this does not mean that the 15 groups that co-sponsored the ad nor, crucially, the individuals who people these groups, necessarily occupy the cultural center. At minimum, many if not most of them "feel" marginalized by secular culture. Moreover, there may be more accuracy to this feeling of marginalization than many of us on the cultural and political left, who feel equally (if differently) marginalized by Protestant dominance, care to admit.

Second, if Paulk's narrative is an example of reverse discourse it may also bear the trace of what Raymond Williams has called the "residual." By "residual," Williams means "certain experiences, meanings, and values" that cannot be expressed or verified or legitimated within the terms of dominant culture, but rather gain their resonance and life-value in relation to-as a relation to?-some previous social and cultural institution or formation (5). The residual is a survival strategy, and in at least two ways. First, it is the living remnant of cultural forms that belong to an earlier phase (and religion, notably, is Williams' first example of the residual); second, this remnant becomes a vehicle for self- and group expression for those whose experiences and values are, as it were, out of sync with the dominant.

Williams' discussion of the residual takes place in an enigmatically brief chapter entitled, "Dominant, Residual, and Emergent." This last term, ""emergent," is the most valorized of this chapter's three keywords. Williams argues that "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created," and this is one of the things he means to capture by "the emergent." It is also what sets the emergent apart from the residual; the latter term is freighted with putative known-ness and past-ness. Another way to put this is that, what separates the residual from the emergent is the past-ness and putative known-ness of the past, or at least the known-ness of enough of the past that those doing the reckoning can reasonably call it past even as we (or some of us anyway) persist in calling up the past in and for the present.

The teleological drift of Williams' language here-"new phase," and "earlier social formations and phases of the cultural process"-seems at odds with his caution one chapter later, his much-cited essay on "Structures of Feeling," against prematurely foreclosing experience and its living pulsing possibilities by naming it as past. In particular, he warns against assuming that the social is the fixed and explicit, knowable and known to the last and first degree (128). In fact, it is this worry about the habit of mind that regularly converts experience into the past tense of "finished products" that leads him to speak of "structures of feeling" instead of what he acknowledges is the "better and wider word," "structures of experience" (132; emphasis mine).

The distinction between the emergent and the residual is in service of something else, though. What Williams wants is to get at what counts as, and how will we know, what is really oppositional, a-slant to, the dominant versus what is merely a "new phase of the dominant culture" (122). Relations between the dominant and the residual, Williams explains, are easier to understand (and thus take the measure of) than between the dominant and the emergent. This is so, because, again in his words, "a large part of it [the residual] relates to earlier social formations and phases of the cultural process" (123). Significantly, Williams does not seem to imagine that active ongoing engagement with the past can contribute to the formation of new meanings and values; does not imagine that the new relations he entitles "emergent" might include an altered relation to the past in the present. Molly McGarry, however, argues that the residual remains emergent (6). The residual looks backwards and forward at once, making the present more livable and the future more imaginable by virtue of an ongoing tie to the past.

To refer to the "residual" in Paulk's ex-gay narrative is to situate the present meanings and values expressed in such testimonials in relation to earlier, but by no means finished, processes and professions of the modern self. In an intriguing essay on "Religious Experience and the Formation of the Early Enlightenment Self," historian Jane Shaw argues that the rise of interiority and individuality, and the practices of self-examination associated with both, developed earlier and across more diverse social strata in England than in France (7). She identifies several reasons for this, but the crucial factor to stress here is differences between Protestant and Catholic forms of self-examination, forms and practices that, in both England and France, were being secularized over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, with contested religious experiences being transformed, under pressure of scientific "reason," into categories of medical diagnosis. Shaw, along with other religious studies scholars, here points us towards a recognition of the Protestantness of the modern rational self (8).

Attending to this Protestant connection means making some major adjustments to Foucault's history of sexuality, at minimum to its reception and circulation in an Anglo-American context. If we have become, as Foucault argues, a singularly confessing society, the chattering modern subject belongs as much, if not more, to such public and semi-public venues as meeting halls and public squares and church basements and theatres as to the screened off confessional box. That is, in practice, Foucault's confessional subject is closer to the Protestant testimonial than the Catholic confessional. I am still thinking through the implications of this for a history of sexuality and religion, but here, by way of conclusion (let's call it an open ending), are some pointers towards future research:

1) To speak of "testimonial," rather than "confessional" sexuality and subjectivity is to attune ourselves more systematically to the collective and performative contexts in which experiences, feelings, and practices make up people.

2) This also recommends performance studies as one of the sites at which the study of sexuality and the study of religion might be joined.

3) Much more work remains to be done on the residual, perhaps connecting it to the queer historical touch that Carolyn Dinshaw has modeled in her recent Getting Medieval. There Dinshaw presses us to take seriously the possibility that the past can renew the present and project the future, and that such a renewal and such a projection are not the same thing as seeing the past only in the light of the present (or vice versa).

4) Narratives of cultural declension (from Augustine to Oprah, Freud to "Fear Factor") will have to be rolled back to take account of the objectfication of emotion and commodification of personal testimony that were early on a feature Protestant practice (e.g., from Puritan diary-keeping to the Pentecostal revival tent to the spiritualist scéance).

5) Some of the persistent contradictions in homophobic discourse-in which homosexuality is attacked for being unnatural and for being too animalistic, or in which one and the same person considers it a sin (moralizing discourse) and a sickness (mdeicalizing)-may evidence earlier 19th century debates between religious and emergent scientific discourses, as well as within and between Protestant denominations, over such phenomena as trances, visions, speaking in tongues, communing with spirits, and religious emotion more geneally. Were such phenomena to be classed as true religion, or false? Genuine religious experience or hysteria? In such debates, a discourse of "the natural" was not on the side of science only. Spiritualist discourse about "natural religion" is a case in point.

6) Historical work with 19th century primary texts has yielded a rich and richly evocative language of "come-outers." The term refers to individuals who left-came out from-mainstream Protestantism and into the range of more enthusiastic Protestant sects born in the American 19th century (e.g., Pentecostalism, Seventh Day Adventism, Christian Science). Come-outers also migrated towards spiritualism. Work remains to be done pursuing possible connections between this religious language of "come-outers" (as well as "closet devotions") and 20th-century understandings of "coming out of" the closet and "coming out as" homosexual. Such research might ask whether/how the secularization of sex and its subjects has erased or written over earlier religious discourses and worldviews and how such "residual discourses" offer alternative ways to imagine and enact sexual as well as religious subjectivities in the present. What, for example, might be the points of connection between earlier and still active Christian understandings and practices of coming out from (witness: Anne Paulk) and the professions of sexual selfhood that help to make up the putatively secular and oh-so modern subject of sexuality?

7) Finally, I want to underscore the potentially valuable "disturbance" to secular self-conceptions that might result from identifying points of convergence as well as divergence between religious and sexual structures of feeling. (I suspect Jose Munoz's project on Latino affect will be an important contribution to any such discussion.) Anne Paulk, "wife, mother, former lesbian" may be more queer than folk.