ABSTRACT
One of the central insights of Michel Foucault’s work on religion was to establish a link between the emergence of the discourse of sexuality in the West and the history of Christian ideas and practice. Foucault recognized that in order to understand the ‘cultural facts’ account had to be taken of religious history (perhaps even questioning the whole distinction between religion and culture).2 However, scholars both inside and outside the fields of religion and theology still appear to ignore the full impact of the interrelation between Christianity and sexuality. Scholars outside the fields of religion want, for example, to extend Foucault’s work on sexuality in the development of queer theory without reference to religion or theology, and scholars of religion and theologians fail to appreciate fully how these developments of Foucault’s work in queer theory may subsequently challenge religious thinking. Despite Foucault’s work, those writing on either religion or sexuality seek to maintain an isolationist agenda. It seems that Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical interweaving of the discourses of religion and sexuality has opened a Pandora’s box few wish to explore; it appears to threaten both those inside and outside religious worldviews. If Christianity is implicated in the discourse of sexuality, then the so-called ‘secular’ body can never be free of its religious boundaries and Christianity can never escape the sexual body. Perhaps, even more alarming for both conservatives and radicals, on either side of the divide, is the unsettling implication of fusing sexuality with theological concepts. Foucault had exposed the ‘queer’ world of Christianity and sex.
