Out of the Closet and Into the Pews Rachael Borthwick

Dr. Todd Nicholas Fuist is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research interests include religion, politics, identity, and sexuality, with a focus on how culture serves to motivate socio-moral action. His latest work with Dr. Ruth Braunstein and Dr. Rhys H. Williams, titled Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories about Faith and Politics examines how terms such as "progressive" and "religious" may not seem to go hand-in-hand. This work focuses on the significant intersection of religion and activism, revealing that progressive religious activists are a driving force in American public life.

Listen to Rachael and Dr. Fuist's conversation today where they talk common perceptions of religion, and offer a more grounded and nuanced understanding of religion and the American political landscape.

Dr. Janet R. Jakobsen is a world renowned scholar and Chair and Claire Tow Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Her academic focuses include feminist theory, queer theory, religion and politics, ethics, activism, and public policy. Her newest book The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics offers a way to undo the inextricable American knot of sex, politics, religion and power.

Dr. Jakobsen speaks to Rachael today about how American politics are obsessed with sex. Rachael and Dr. Jakobsen also cover her book with Dr. Ann Pellegrini Love the Sin. Dr. Jakobsen shares her exploration of why secular institutions habitually use religion to regulate sexual life.

Dr. Heather R. White is a visiting assistant professor in religion and queer and gender studies at the University of Puget Sound. Their first book, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights investigates how religion and LGBTQ+ activism can to be perceived as natural enemies. It also tells about the surprising ways that progressive Christianity shaped the early movement for gay rights.

Dr. White speaks to Rachael today about the hidden histories of both sexuality and religion and points to the ruse in the 1970s of the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church movement as evidence that we can no longer assume that the histories of queer people and religion separate when the former becomes open and out of the closet. In doing so, Dr. White shares how this assumption has kept queer studies, and religious studies white.

In todays episode Rachael speaks with Dr. Melissa Wilcox about her scholarship on the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In asking questions in and about the often rough-terrain at the intersections of sexuality, gender, and religion, Rachael and Dr. Wilcox discuss narratives of sexual freedom, spirituality and safety.

Dr. Wilcox's book Queer Nuns follows the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence's through their longstanding activism, including sexual education, public manifestations and protests, and charitable fundraising. Wilcox defines this performative activism as “a form of cultural protest in which a disempowered group parodies an oppressive cultural institution while simultaneously claiming for itself what it believes to be an equally good or superior enactment of one or more culturally respective aspects of that same institution.”

Rachael and Dr. Wilcox discuss how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence draws attention to a new world of religion and activism, one which charts how religious studies and queer studies can intersect in profound ways and more in this episode.

In this podcast episode Rachael lays the ground work from her scholarship in order to underscore the ways in which religion has been constructed as an oppressive vehicle to overcome. In doing so Rachael depicts the difficult and unarticulated relationships among secularism, religion, and queer liberation to ask why the secular does not guarantee a tolerant state alongside LGBTQ+ rights, but also how it can be possible for LGBTQ+ rights to thrive primarily in secular environments. This episode aims to make clear that while secularity may be compatible with progress in some forms, it is not a linear process, and therefore, it does not lead to emancipation for all. Rachael shows us that stories that focus on queer religion challenge us to rethink the relationship between LGBTQ+ emancipation, queer rights, and religious forms and thereby provide an approach for analyzing the establishment of queer identities when navigating enactments of religious resistance and negotiation.

For LGBTQ+ folk, history is of particular importance. For too long queer history and existence has been denied and erased. In this podcast Rachael asks, who does Stonewall give legitimacy to in the queer community? In doing so Rachael states that not everyone has the same privileges that give them the tells of story telling or history making, or the power to amplify their preferred story if they do. She speaks with Dr. Heather White and Dr. Melissa Wilcox to ask whose interests are served by the prevailing history of Stonewall, and who gets to decide that Stonewall is the origin story for the LGBTQ+ community.