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In switchingview Theme 2 - Queer Ministry I explored the huge number of reports across history, and across continents, of Intermediate Type people being valued for their involvement in religion and spirituality - as priests, shamens, teachers, counsellors, and in many other vocations.

Theme 4 - Queer Ministry in Church and Bible leads on from this study and uses a wider lens. I want to explore the intersection between sexuality, history, spirituality and religion, and ask what lessons we can bring from this to get a better understanding of how our modern homosexual and gender variant lives can relate to religion.

The list below contains my current planned list of videos.

1. What Went Wrong - Carpenter's Reformation Theory

I think it is important to ask exactly why the church developed such virulent teaching against homosexuality. Is it simply that God Hates Gays, or are there other systemic reasons arising out of how the early church developed?

This first recording is inspired by Carpenter's Reformation Theory given in his book Intermediate Types. He wrote

"Just as, according to Darwin, the sharpest rivalry occurs between a species and the closely allied species from which it has sprung, so in any religion there is the fiercest theological hatred against the form which has immediately preceded it.

Early Christianity could never say enough against the Pagan cults of the old world. . . . . Similarly the early Protestants could never say malignant things enough against the Roman Catholics; or the Secularists in their turn against the Protestants. In all these cases there is an element of fear - fear because the thing supposed to have been left behind lies after all so close, and is always waiting to reassert itself - and this fear invests the hated symbol or person with a halo of devilish potency."

Can it be argued that Christian and Jewish teachings against homosexuality and other intermediate types arose simply out of the fact that such behaviour was widely accepted and integrated into the Pagan and Canaanite religious traditions that Christianity and Judaism regarded as their predecessor and enemy?

2. What Went Wrong - Sex, Celibacy and Homophobia?

A second "What Went Wrong" recording

There was a very strong emphasis on celibacy in the early church, and a distrust of the sexual and the erotic. Whilst celibacy may have been been suitable for some people, it is a difficult discipline when imposed on those for whom it may have been inappropriate.

Can it be argued that some Christian anti-gay teaching is linked to an unconscious level of mysogyny and homophobia, arising out of an unhelpful overemphasis on a celibate vocation?

3. Repression in the Late Roman Empire and Europe

Christianity became the official state religion in the Roman Empire after Constantine's "conversion". This recording describes how church leaders used this power in the 4th to 6th Centuries CE to forcibly supress expressions of intermediate type and queer ministry behaviour. It then describes the ongoing brutal anti-gay supression within Christian Europe.

It is important that such brutality is known about, and not quietly forgotten.

4. Holy Servants and Holy Sex

Part 1 - A detailed look at the treatment of Sex, Sexuality, and Same Sex love within the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament).

In particular, I describe how mainstream Christian Bibles frequently and seriously misrepresent this sexual content when translating the text from Hebrew into English. The Hebrew Bible is much more strange and sexual and "queer" than many of us realise.

Part 2 - Going on to explore how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be created, and how the apparent negativity towards Same Sex love might have entered the texts and teachings.

5. Rehabilitating Shamed Women

Much of the scholarship challenging church teachings about sexuality is as relevant to gender questions as it is to questions of sexual orientation. In the "Holy Servants and Holy Sex" recording I discuss how Christian scholarship has a tendency to label women as prostitutes or shamed women in some way.

This recording explores the stories of Tamar (and Judah), Bathsheba (and David), Rahab, Saint Mary Magdalen, the Samaritan Woman at the Well, and the women around Jesus, to ask if those shamed labels are still justified.

6. The Nicodemites

In a fascinating book "Silence - a Christian History", Diarmaid MacCulloch uses the phrase Nicodemites for those people who had to keep themselves silent and hidden, for whatever reason. And being in the closet was one of those reasons for silence.

In this video I discuss the many reports of people in Christian history who may have been homosexual, and how these people contributed to our Christian life and tradition.

7. Warrior Love

This recording describes the many reports of how, in many military cultures, same-sex loving relationships beteen warriors were held to be a great virtue and the bedrock of military effectiveness. I then explore stories of Warrior Love within the Hebrew Scriptures (Saul, David and Jonathan) and the New Testament (the Centurion and his servant).