The Queer Samaritan: A moral and ethical argument for Beloved Community that disbands the Master’s tools

Essay Written for Beloved Community Ethics Course, Dec 2020

The Queer Samaritan: An Image Offering for Queer Beloved Community

Queer people throughout history have been marked with unique signifiers by society that separates them from the majority. We are a part of the community that has “backs against the wall” written into our collective human living-document. This distinction isn’t one of pride, it is quite the opposite. It’s a stain that no matter how hard we scrub our bodies, spirits, or minds we cannot remove itself from our person. For queer people of faith, there is an intersectional overlap of society’s ideals of us, the church, and our own discovery.  Like the Good Samaritan from Jesus’ parable, we are cast out from society – a mixed lot. Unlike the Good Samaritan, the Queer Samaritan, is represented by trans magical bodies and sexualities that would have not quite existed the same during Jesus antiquity. It is our queerness that leads our Samaritan ethics of care. Because within queer community there is a tight knit notion of chosen family and communal offering. We do not let a fellow queer sibling lay bloody and beaten on a roadside, we find nourishment at all costs. And in that call from our bones for our queer family, beloved community can be found and caressed forth without the master’s tools of which first oppressed us.

Circle of Oppression

The queer Christian community of which I work is comprised of all races, gender, class, cultural identities and ethnicity. In the broader community entities and organizations who have power and hold spaces for queer Christians is largely run and represented by cis-white gay men who often embody the master’s tools and privilege to maintain a status of not-other. A colleague of mine and I have created a collective called Bible Queery. Since August we’ve been working with 35 individuals from all over the world to create brave space, community, and learning ways to fully embody our personhood without disembodiment or societal binary. For most of those gathered with us, they’ve experienced larger organizations with cis white gay men in leadership positions as eerily similar to the evangelical churches that ostracized and kicked them out in the first place.

Social Myths

For Queer people there’s an embedded idea that we are only allotted the crumbs of communal living and should accept the scraps we can obtain. There is also a myth that stems from the master’s tools and our capitalistic society that oozes into our community spaces that we only can save ourselves. There’s a survivalist mentality buried into each queer person’s identity that stems from the isolation of oppression and continues through the use of the master’s tools which first oppressed. The use of the master’s tools is driven through capitalisms pursuit of creation, hierarchal orders created by race, class, gender, and sex and power. Consumed by this myth of thriving is actually surviving and a wright of passage, the beloved queer community remains faint in the distance as the community aches and cripples itself from the inside.  

 Cultural Identity / History

My upbringing in a rural town that was deeply defined by religion and a white centered Jesus is a truth that I hold in tension with my whiteness within the spaces that I bridge with my colleague who is a non-binary latinx individual. It is imperative for me to continuously check my own privilege so as not to bring my own baggage into the spaces of which I minister and organize. My interaction with evangelical churches and non-affirming theologies and ideologies of queer people places a deep knowing of the wider pain felt by this community. What must be held carefully is to not project or overshadow any space I inhabit with my own story instead of making way for the stories that have not yet been told.

This is where the Queer Samaritan helps, not only just me, but our collective queer community.

Queer Samaritan is for Equity, Rest, Resilience and Subversion

Practical Theologian Jeanne Stevenson Moessner’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan from a feminist lens helps make way for this working metaphor of the Queer Samaritan. In her image of care the Samaritan acts out of an abundance of feminist equity where he (she / they) takes the injured to the nearest inn and continues on their journey. From a queer perspective the Queer Samaritan is for equity of the beloved community by engaging the whole community to support one another’s wounds and needs. The Queer Samaritan is for rest as one community member gives what they can and seeks the help of another. The Queer Samaritan is for resilience because they are fueled by the deep belief in the beloved communal sense of being – this man who is injured on the side of the road needs a home - a community of compassion.

Audre Lorde writes in her powerful essay the Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House that it is “learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.” Lorde speaks to a beloved community model that also echoes to the queer experience and the Queer Samaritan’s reviled and unpopular existence finding common cause with the others with their backs against the wall. The Queer Samaritan takes their differences and makes them strengths by not behaving as the priest or Levite and instead stopping to love another well. The Queer Samaritan subverts the patriarchal order of being to disrupt structures to create a more unified and diverse community. And, in doing so, the Queer Samaritan doesn’t act in isolation or by the Master’s tools.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Lorde writes. “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Lorde shares that this fact is terrifying to those who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. For the Queer Christian community to bring about genuine change I argue that we need to follow the metaphor and image of the Queer Samaritan. We need to leave the Master’s house of the evangelical upbringings we endured and begin to disband copying that atmosphere within our communal structures. Subverting the norm by taking back our power of our uniqueness, disbanding the use of the Master’s tools to gain power, and reaching out to one another in communal support will change the way we as Queer people live in this society for a healthier and genuine flourishing.

Change in using the systems that we were raised in – even if they kill us – is still hard work, messy work. This is why beloved community is needed for the foundational success of more queer lives remaining on this earth. When we act in the way of the Queer Samaritan and choose to engage with others in new ways outside of the structures of oppression, we are chipping away at the Master’s house which silences our flourishing. And, as we chip away, we are able to build new houses for a wider circle.