Shitting with the Bathroom Door Open

Divine Deviance as Resistance to Christofascism, Part 4

Having experienced vulnerability's sacred potential through early mystical encounters, I now navigate how that same vulnerability operates politically as a transgender woman facing rising Christofascism. Between those early spiritual insights and my current reality lies a battlefield where systems of power attempt to transform our fundamental susceptibility to harm into mechanisms of control.

A few years ago, before fully understanding my own transgender identity, I participated in a Queer-celebrating communion gathering outside Wooddale Church's Loring Park location. This was more than a passive act of solidarity—it was an embodied exploration of resistance. The choice of location was telling - they had bought a theatre space in a historically queer neighborhood, the very place where Pride is celebrated each year, with the barely-veiled intention of targeting LGBTQ+ people with their version of the Gospel. As congregants poured out, several insisted their hip church was queer-friendly. Meanwhile, a couple of members berated my friend in drag, telling him he was going to hell.

When I later met with the pastor, he insisted all people were welcome while firmly standing by their view of homosexuality as sin. "If the Bible told me to sleep on my lawn, I would," he declared, refusing to clarify whether queer folks could ever become members or serve in leadership. He deflected questions about their network's involvement in conversion therapy, though one volunteer freely admitted they offered such "services," asking: "If people want to be free from homosexuality, shouldn't we help them?" This wasn’t merely institutional hypocrisy—it was a calculated performance of pastoral power.

This deployment of pastoral power - what Foucault identified as a form of authority claiming to care for both individual and collective welfare - doesn't simply operate through threats of hellfire or promises of salvation. Rather, it functions through sophisticated mechanisms of care that position religious institutions as protectors while actually increasing precarity. The caring voice that offers "help" to those struggling with "unwanted same-sex attraction" is the same voice that creates the conditions making that attraction feel unwanted in the first place.

My own experience with a progressive church that claimed to be LGBTQ+ affirming proved even more insidious. After coming out as transgender, a pastor who had previously treated me as a peer began treating my transness as evidence of white American malformation. When I attempted to explain the importance of publicly embracing my identity to help normalize trans existence, he compared it to "shitting with the bathroom door open." Hs language revealed more about institutional anxiety than my own messiness. He insisted that my disagreement with him proved my colonized consciousness. Within months, several friends - people I had considered chosen family - broke ties with me, suggesting I was unstable or simply lying about my experiences.

This wasn’t just personal rejection. This was a systemic mechanism of control.

The pattern became clearer as I learned more. LGBTQ+ individuals had been pushed out of the church's communal housing, often abruptly and without secure housing alternatives lined up. Leaders instructed remaining community members to cut off contact with those who left.

When I tried sharing these stories with mutual friends, they dismissed them as exaggerations from "disgruntled" former members. Even more disturbing were the credible accusations of sexual misconduct against church leadership that had been systematically buried - each person's story discredited through the same tactics of isolation and delegitimization that I was now experiencing. The machinery of institutional protection proved just as efficient in progressive spaces as in conservative ones, perhaps more so because it operated under the cover of proclaimed inclusion. After all, institutional violence doesn’t announce itself. It whispers.

Their reaction taught me what many trans people already knew—that coming out often reveals the fragility of relationships we once thought solid. Progressive politics and verbal affirmation mean little when institutional loyalty and conformity trumps actual solidarity. Each dismissal reinforced the regulatory power of institutions—their ability to determine not just which lives matter, but whose reality gets acknowledged at all.

Such betrayals reveal how vulnerability operates on multiple levels - not just as personal exposure to harm, but as a condition that systems of power actively manipulate. When progressive friends retreat into institutional loyalty despite claiming trans-affirming politics, they demonstrate how deeply social norms penetrate even supposedly radical spaces. These norms don't just restrict behavior but actively shape what kinds of relationships and solidarity become possible. My precarity as a trans woman isn't simply about individual rejection but about the systematic isolation that makes certain forms of life increasingly difficult to sustain.

Vulnerability is not weakness. It is a sophisticated political technology. This understanding feels especially vital as we witness the resurgence of overt Christian nationalism in our political sphere. When religious authority merges with political power, vulnerability becomes a primary battleground. Through sophisticated networks of surveillance, economic control, and cultural manipulation, they seek to ensure that exposure to harm remains isolating rather than connecting. The movement's success depends on making individuals feel powerless while simultaneously demanding their submission to absolute authority.

Yet in this very exposure lies unexpected possibility. When we refuse to let our vulnerability be weaponized against us - when we transform it from a source of isolation into a foundation for connection - we create spaces of collective resistance. Our susceptibility to harm, when acknowledged and shared rather than denied or weaponized, can become an unexpected source of transformation. Our survival is always collective, never individual.

In this landscape of precarity, we might glimpse a radical reimagining of sacred presence—not as a supernatural divine mandate, but as the deeply human, transformative potential that emerges through our mutual recognition of need. This is not a call to theological belief, but an acknowledgment of the transformative power inherent in collective vulnerability, rooting itself in the lived experience of those who resist, who refuse to be isolated, who create meaning through solidarity.

The Spirit of Liberation moves in underground networks of care, in gatherings outside religious halls, in communities that refuse to let vulnerability become a weapon of control. When marginalized communities create spaces of authentic recognition, when we refuse to let our precarity close us off from each other, we demonstrate possibilities beyond what systems of power can imagine or contain. Their authority depends on making certain forms of life seem impossible; our liberation emerges through making them real.

The path ahead is undeniably dangerous. Those who claim authority will continue attempting to transform our fundamental susceptibility to harm into a tool of compliance. Yet in our very vulnerability lies the seed of their undoing. When we dare to remain present to each other's pain while refusing to let that pain isolate us, we participate in sacred resistance that their machinery of control cannot fully contain.

This is the invitation of divine deviance: to embrace vulnerability not as a personal virtue but as a form of holy resistance to systems that would isolate and dominate us. Together, we discover that our greatest strength lies not in achieving invulnerability but in transforming shared exposure into collective power. The Spirit of Liberation moves between us, opening possibilities where none seemed to exist, calling us toward a freedom that can only be found together.

Our vulnerability is not a wound. It is an open door.