Naked Blasphemy

Divine Deviance as Resistance to Christofascism, Part 3

I clear a space in the center of my bedroom's beige carpet and strip off my clothes. The vulnerability of flesh against synthetic fiber seems fitting for this final rejection. If God has forsaken me, I will forsake God. I speak words of blasphemy into the quiet afternoon, expecting thunder or punishment or perhaps just more endless silence.

What happens defies every expectation. I feel a presence join me—not the crushing weight of divine authority, nor the mocking absence I anticipated, but a gentle solidarity, a quiet acknowledgment of grief. No demands. No absolution. Just presence.

This moment crystallizes after months of sweeping frozen potato fragments across the concrete floor of a McDonald's warehouse, my body and spirit numbed by more than just the cold. Each morning, I wander through forty thousand square feet of freezer space, taking pointless hourly breaks that do nothing to ward off the chill that has settled deep into my bones. The supervisor asks why I never rest. "What's the point?" I reply, my voice as hollow as the vast frozen space.

Each evening, I drive my beaten-down Datsun 200SX—broken muffler screaming, driver's seat propped up by a hardshell suitcase—to a subsidized apartment on the north edge of town, next to the trailer park. Inside, my mother sits tethered to an oxygen tank, surrounded by piles of crocheted afghans and scattered Squirt cans, the television's constant drone bleeding through thin walls. The apartment smells of dust and illness, every surface cluttered with the accumulated evidence of her hoarding. Life at nineteen has become an exercise in abandonment—by family, friends, church, and now, finally, God.

In this grey afternoon light, my nakedness becomes more than physical vulnerability. It is a stripping away of every pretense, every layer of obligation and belief that has promised meaning but delivered only hollow comfort. In this moment of raw exposure, I unwittingly enact what Philosopher Judith Butler suggests: our susceptibility to harm, when acknowledged and shared rather than denied or weaponized, can become an unexpected source of resistance and connection.[1]

My attempted blasphemy reveals this paradox: in laying myself bare, in renouncing every comfort of faith, I encounter something sacred that requires nothing of me. The divine presence I encounter bears no resemblance to the authoritarian deity I had been taught to fear and obey. Instead, I find presence emerging in shared sorrow, in the tender acknowledgment of mutual need.

My naked rebellion becomes a spirituality that subverts oppressive religious norms not through mere rebellion or counter-authority, but through holy resistance that refuses to accept domination as sacred. Where theologian Dorothee Sölle speaks of "creative disobedience,"[2] I discover my body itself becoming prayer—transgressing boundaries that separate us from authentic encounter with each other and the sacred.

The experience teaches me that vulnerability itself is open-ended—simply the state of being open to influence or harm. My shivering flesh against synthetic carpet becomes an experiment in openness. But systems of power, particularly religious authority, transform this basic human condition into a mechanism of control. They sanctify certain forms of suffering—martyrdom, sacrifice, penance—while condemning others—doubt, grief, dissent—as sinful rebellion.

Today, as Christian nationalism surges and religious authoritarianism tightens its grip, this distinction becomes crucial. Christofascism depends on a hierarchical theology that presents God as an absolute authority who legitimizes human systems of dominance. My body knows intimately how religious power demands certain performances of vulnerability—the bowed head, the bent knee, the properly gendered flesh.

In the cold warehouse, in the cluttered apartment, in this moment of naked defiance, I learn how isolation makes us feel powerless while submission to absolute authority becomes the only apparent path forward. Yet my body refuses this script.

The flesh rebels. Even as I try to renounce everything, my body discovers what my mind cannot yet grasp—divine presence emerges most authentically in our shared susceptibility to harm and hope. My trembling limbs teach me that spirituality flows not from supreme authority but from our mutual recognition of need. My failed blasphemy becomes and unexpected sacrament of this alternative—a revelation that presence matters more than power, that authentic encounter requires mutual vulnerability.

This is where Sölle's insight becomes vital. Unlike mere rebellion, which often remains trapped in the logic of power it opposes, creative disobedience imagines and enacts alternatives. My naked flesh becomes its own kind of theology, transforming vulnerability from a site of control into a wellspring of solidarity. Through creative disobedience, we discover ways of being together that resist domination not by claiming counter-authority but by nurturing connections that power cannot fully contain.

The Spirit of Liberation moves in these spaces of acknowledged need, in goosebumped skin and trembling breath, opening possibilities where systems of domination claim there are none. This is not destruction or deconstruction for its own sake but a subversion that points toward a more just and compassionate way of being.

In these dangerous times, our greatest act of resistance might be allowing ourselves to be seen in our raw humanity—our doubts, our grief, our longing for connection. The body itself becomes testimony. Not to achieve some higher purpose or prove our spiritual worth, but simply because we need each other in our shared vulnerability. When we dare to strip away the pretenses that separate us, we discover strength that no system of domination can fully contain.

Systems of religious control demand we cover our shame, hide our deviance, perform proper pieties. But my beige blasphemy teaches me something vital: authentic presence emerges precisely when we dare to strip everything away, when we make ourselves vulnerable to other possibilities. This stripping away becomes both metaphor and method for resistance. We remove not just the pretenses of faith but the very logic of supremacy that would have us believe power flows only from dominance.

The television still murmurs through the wall. My mother's oxygen tank hisses its steady rhythm. And somewhere a naked teenager discovers that even failed rebellion can become sacred when we dare to remain present to each other's pain. This is where resistance begins—not in assertions of counter-authority, but in stripping away every pretense until we find ourselves bare before one another, discovering that our very vulnerability becomes strength when we refuse to let it be weaponized.

Like that naked act of defiance transformed into unexpected communion, we are invited into a different kind of power—one that flows not from domination but from the fierce tenderness of our shared humanity. This is the heart of divine deviance: not rebellion for its own sake, but holy resistance that refuses to accept domination as sacred. The Spirit moves here, in our mutual need and creative disobedience, calling us toward liberation that can only emerge when we dare to strip away every pretense of supremacy and stand vulnerable before the possibility of transformation.

Our resistance to Christofascism must be equally bare and bold. We must dare to stand naked before its claims of absolute authority, not with counter-claims of power but with the holy foolishness that knows true strength emerges in our shared vulnerability. This is where divine deviance becomes most potent—not in grand gestures of rebellion but in the quiet, persistent refusal to let our vulnerability be turned against us or each other.

In the end, it comes back to flesh against synthetic fiber, to bodies and breath, to the sacred possibility that emerges when we dare to strip away everything that separates us from authentic encounter. The Spirit of Liberation moves here, in our holy defiance and tender need, calling us toward a freedom that can only be found together.

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[1] Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in In Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. J. Butler, L. Sabay, and Z. Gambetti (Durham: Duke University Press., 2016.

Butler writes: “political resistance relies fundamentally on the mobilization of vulnerability, which means that vulnerability can be a way of being exposed and agentic at the same time. Such collective forms of resistance are structured very differently than the idea of a political subject that establishes its agency by vanquishing its vulnerability”

[2] Dorothee Soelle, Creative Disobedience (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007).