Years ago I read a book called “Surprised by Hope” by NT Wright. Wright is a Bishop in the Anglican church. He’s a complicated figure because in some respects his theology is grounded in scholarship and is quite progressive and in other spaces it’s completely regressive (like when it comes to women and LGBTQ+ folks. Or at least it was when I read Surprised By Hope.) But this book blew my mind. It gave me an entirely new way to think about the resurrection of Jesus, the Kingdom of God, and the “end times”. More recently I read a book called “Cruising Utopia” by José Estaban Muñoz. This book is a collection of essays about the idea of queerness as a future that never really arrives. It’s a heady book, dense in places, but there were so many parts I found myself highlighting not because I understood them but because there was something in the phrasing that I wanted to marinate on. 

Today I want to do something that might seem rather weird. It’s definitely an experiment for me. I want to put these two books into conversation with one another and see what comes out. 

Let’s start with Wright. In “Surprised By Hope” Wright is making an argument for two things: a better understanding of bodily resurrection (both Jesus’s and humanity’s) and a better understanding of the so-called “end times” (eschatology, to use the theological term). How do we understand the effect of Jesus’s death and resurrection on our world and the world to come both now and in the future? 

(a quick side note, if you’re not a Christian/don’t believe in a literal resurrection/don’t believe in a world to come, I still think there might be a nugget of interest here for you. Same if you’re not queer and not super connected to queerness and the queer community.)

Wright argues that the earliest Christian church believed that Jesus did raise bodily from the dead, that Jesus’s resurrection did change the fundamental nature of reality, and that there would be a new heaven and a new earth at some point in the future. However, their belief didn’t look at all like modern conceptions of Heaven. 

Right now, in pretty much all Evangelical circles (and some non-Evangelical circles) the belief goes like this: Jesus died on the cross because of the sinfulness of humanity. He was resurrected by the power of God and because of his resurrection everyone who believes that Jesus died to save them from their sins will go to Heaven (a place somewhere “out there”) when they die. 

They generally also believe that at some point God is going to come back to earth to judge everyone, the world will be destroyed by fire, and all the unrepentant will go to Hell forever. Generally the role of the Christian is to get as many other people to become Christians as possible before God comes back and destroys the world and we run out of time. (That’s oversimplified some, but the general belief in a nutshell.) 

The idea is that the coming judgment of God will be a terrifying one for most people. Even the Christians are a little afraid of it. But Wright says in his book, “We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.” Of course, that’s not at all the current interpretation of the Evangelicals. Their idea of the coming judgment is mostly God smiting anyone who doesn’t believe like them. Their work is all about getting more people to believe. 

Of course, this type of belief and thinking means that what we do here and now, other than trying to get more people to convert, doesn’t really matter all that much. If climate change wrecks the planet, if AI uses up all of the clean water, if we start wars and deploy nuclear weapons, well those are all just manifestations of the sinfulness of humanity and the reason God needs to come and wipe it all clean. Sure Christians should maybe not do those things, and can work to mitigate their effects, but in the long run that doesn’t really matter because this world is toast anyway. 

(side note: These ideas also mean that Christians aren’t really tasked with not participating in harmful systems or cleaning those systems up. Which, I think, is why they don’t automatically see the coming judgment as a good thing because I think deep down they understand that the coming judgment might implicate them, too.)

In the worst versions of these beliefs, Christians should just let all of the bad things happen because the worse it gets the quicker God will come back. (Which is why there is so much glee among certain sectors about what’s happening currently in world politics.)

Wright argues that this is the exact wrong way to interpret the Scriptures and the story of Jesus’s death. The story of Jesus’s death and resurrection shouldn’t place an emphasis on his death. Lots of prophets were killed. Lots of movement leaders were crucified. There was nothing unique in being executed by the state on a cross. The powers that be wielded that weapon of fear often in order to quell unrest, to show what happens when you step out of line. The earliest Jesus followers would have known this. 

But resurrection? That was something different. A movement leader the Empire can’t kill? That’s a threat. That’s something to pin your hopes on. When the Empire’s final and most powerful weapon, death, no longer holds any power, that Empire is in danger of being overthrown. Wright says “But already in Paul the resurrection, both of Jesus and then in the future of his people, is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it.”

But it was about more than just Jesus, the earliest Christians started to preach that message that somehow, in Jesus’s resurrection, the power of death had been destroyed for everyone. Everyone. Not just the people who believed. Not just one community. Something about Jesus’s resurrection broke open everything for everyone and fundamentally changed how the world works. 

But there was a bit of mystery here because Jesus was resurrected but the Empire was still in charge. And people kept dying. And it still seemed like the powerful were winning all of the time. So what actually happened?

The earliest Christians were coming out of the Jewish community and in the thinking of their community there was a belief in two ages: the age they were in now where everything was not right. And an age to come in the future where everything would be right. What the earliest Christian theologians did was take that two ages theology and add another circle kind of making a Venn diagram. There was the age before Jesus’s resurrection where everything was not right, the age to come when everything would be right, and a new circle that we are living in now where we’re living BOTH in the age that was AND the age to come. We are in the midst of transformation and everything we do in this time has an impact, an effect, on the age to come. 

So instead of head down waiting for a divine intervention, we are invited to become co-creators of the world to come. And, by doing this we start to bring about that world. We are, in some ways, dragging that third circle closer. Wright says, “They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.” And “Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.”

Hope, then, is lived in this intermediate space. It’s lived in the chaos of the here and now. It’s lived in all of the things that are not right. But it’s lived with a belief that not only will things be made right, but we can be a part of that work. Being part of that work becomes the role of those who follow in the way of Jesus. It’s not about converting people or waiting to go to Heaven when you die; It’s not about simply waiting for Jesus to come back and rescue us (or worse for Jesus to come back and destroy everything), instead it’s being a co-laborer with Jesus in bringing about a world of justice, peace, goodness, for all people right here and now. 

Hope is active. It’s working even when all seems hopeless. It’s doing the small thing even when it seems like it’s not enough. 

Wright says “Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable” and “Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did.” An active hope, an active belief about the importance of bodies and a transformed creation (that included all of creation, not just humans), this was the radical message of the earliest followers of Jesus. This is the message that could still be transformative today if we took it seriously. 

Now we jump from Surprised by Hope to a very different text, Cruising Utopia. A collection of essays about queerness, failure, and art. Muñoz argues that queerness isn’t something that we experience fully, but that it is always somewhat out of reach. We are always striving toward it but never quite getting there. But that striving, that commitment to reaching, is the beauty of queerness.

He says, “Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” (pg xiii) And “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.” (pg xiii) 

This “potentiality for another world” echoes the hope of God’s kingdom, here and now. But in Muñoz’s view, this hoping also leads to disappointment and heartbreak. “That hope will be disappointed, and fail us, is not its negation but its condition of possibility. When the acute failures and dangers of the present (of “normal”, “straight”, “white,” or “capitalist” time) threaten us, we turn to the utopian imaginary in order to activate queer and minoritarian ways of being in the world and being-together. We do so to *survive* the shattering experience of living within an impossible present, while charting the course for a new and different future.” (pg xiv)

He argues, “That we are standing before the possibility, even likelihood, of hope’s disappointment does not so much negate the principle of hope as confirm it.” (pg xiv)

Both Wright and Muñoz acknowledge that the world we are living in is not as it should be. Munoz claims “The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a *then and there*.” (pg 1) And in his mind it’s queerness that opens up the window to the “then and there.” He says, “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” (pg 1) And then, “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” (pg 1)

Those of us who are queer and trans feel, in our very bodies, the not rightness, but it is that feeling that pushes us to envision the possibility of a future where we will feel the rightness. 

Muñoz argues that queerness hints at the idea of a “utopia”, a place where all will be as it should be and that by so doing, “Utopia offers us a critique of the present, of what is, by casting a picture of what *can and perhaps will be*.” (pg 35)

Like the early Jesus followers’ idea of the post-resurrection world, the Kingdom of God, we get both a sense of what’s wrong here and now and also what could be if everything was as it should be. 

So we have this vision in both the early Jesus movement and in queerness about a world where all is made right. But how does that help us here and now when everything is clearly not right? When the powers that be continue to oppress, when death is still being acted out on our bodies? 

Wright says, the role of the Christian “is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.” We are to be signs of what can happen when hope is lived out. 

Muñoz says, “Utopia is an ideal, something that should mobilize us, push us forward. Utopia is not a prescriptive; it renders potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema. It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a *then* and a *there* that could be and indeed should be.” (pg 97)

These dreams, of resurrection, of utopia, push us to bring about those visions. But how? 

Muñoz, quoting Samuel Delany says “Given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when the greatest number of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.” (pg 53) But also, “The state understands the need to keep us from knowing ourselves, knowing our masses.” (pg 64) And “Heteronormative culture makes queers think that both the past and the future do not belong to them. All we are allowed to imagine is barely surviving the present.” (pg 112)

In the idea of being both the “foretaste of the world to come” and the idea of a queer utopia we get a sense that Christians and queer/trans folks can be the symbols and signs of what’s possible. By the way we live, by the way we form communities, by the work we undertake, we not only become witnesses to what could be, but we also start to build the “could be” here and now. 

Here are some of Muñoz’s other ideas of how we can and do resist:

• “Queers make up genealogies and worlds. So let us write it down.” (pg 121)
• “I attempt to inhabit a queer practice, a mode of being in the world that is also inventing the world.” (pg 121)
• “staging a great refusal” (pg 143)
• “a critical imagination that begins with self-analysis and a vaster social critique of how the world could be and indeed should be.” (pg 143)

Both Wright and Muñoz point to art as a place where these visions can be cultivated. Wright says, “Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.” 

Wright also says, “When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission.” 

Art can help us both feel and understand more deeply what’s wrong while also pointing us to a new future. Like the images of queer joy seen in media that help isolated teenagers to understand a different future; one of love, companionship, and joy is a possibility for them, art can help us to dream and to give us courage in the present that the dream is possible even if we can’t see how at this precise moment. 

Muñoz, talking about dancer Fred Herko says, “he made a dance that was also a ritual. He magically ‘did’ something. Transformed something. It seems so simple now. But at that point many of us were groping our way backward to art as magick. This “magically doing” speaks not only to the performative force of Herko’s performance but also to how it was calibrated to provide an idea of another way of being in the world that was not allowed within an antiutopian hermeneutic.” (pg 165)

Ritual. A word that resonates in the Christian tradition, but also in the artistic tradition, and, I would argue, in the queer tradition as well. These things we enact, over and over, that help us to train our bodies into a new way of being and our minds into a new way of believing. Rituals shape our imaginations, they ground us, they fuel us for the work ahead. Rituals like baptism, the eucharist, service to others,  theatre, dance, engaging with literature, writing, painting; all of these things work in us to help us live into a new way of being.

The state wants to keep us isolated, feeling the press of scarcity, feeling like we have no agency, feeling like we barely have time to breathe, feeling like we are constantly at risk. The state wants control over our bodies. The state wants to delegitimize certain bodies and ways of being.  

The state wants queerness and transness outlawed because queer and trans lives say that we know our bodies better than the state, that we can create families and communities outside of the “prescribed bounds”, that there is another way to be and live that doesn’t need the state’s approval. 

The state wants to take following Jesus and turn it into a religion of Christian Nationalism and white supremacy because they are terrified that people will take following Jesus seriously and realize it’s a threat to the state. They are terrified that people will try to bring about the Kingdom of God here and now, a Kingdom centered on the most marginalized, where hoarding wealth isn’t allowed, where all have enough and we work together to build something beautiful. 

The state hates these visions because they cannot be controlled. They cannot be dominated by fear. They cannot be pushed into line. The state hates these visions because they strip away power and wealth and instead point to community and sharing. The state hates these visions because they are based in freedom and not fear and control. 

These Queer and Resurrection visions say “we don’t have to live like this. We don’t have to be afraid of our neighbor and we don’t have to be afraid of those in power. We can all have enough. Right here. Right now.” These Queer and Resurrection visions say “We don’t have to wait for anyone to come and save us. We can save ourselves. Now.” 

We can build now. We can plant now. We can create now. We can love now. We can dance now. We can participate in rituals now. We can do more than survive, we can thrive. We can claim hope now, joy now, peace now. 

These expansive visions aren’t just words on a page, but instead are invitations to a new way of being. Invitations to dream, yes, but also invitations to do. 

We hope, yes, but we also work. We dream of utopia, or Heaven, or a new creation yes, but we also build and plant and harvest. We name ourselves, yes, but we also open ourselves up to new ways of being in community with one another, especially with people who name themselves differently. All of this works to open us up, not close us off. 

Both Christianity and Queerness/Transness invite us into new ways of being; with ourselves and with others. We are continually being transformed and by our transformation we help to transform the world around us. 

We aren’t locked in to any one vision, but instead we create a rainbow, a prism, a variety of visions that keep expanding outward, that keep surprising us, that keep delighting us, that keep us filled with joy. 

And the Empire, the state, the oppressors, those in power cannot stand in the face of our fearless being and joy.