The Question of Queer Christian Representation: A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part VI)

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In a 2015 interview, Rebecca Sugar, the creator of the groundbreaking children’s cartoon Steven Universe, indicated that one of her goals for the show was to address the lack of queer representation in mainstream children’s programming. “I hope to represent people who have felt a lack of representation,” she said, “but I hope to also show people who have felt represented that they can also relate to characters that are not heteronormative, and to families that are not traditional, maybe even more so than the more generic characters and families that they’ve been seeing on TV.”*

In other interviews she has spoken about how important this kind of representation is, that it is critical “that there are LGBTQIA characters in G-rated content,” because “as long as certain people are considered to be inappropriate for families and children, there is no equality.”* 

In creating a show like Steven Universe, in other words, Rebecca Sugar was not simply trying to tell a fascinating story with compelling characters and universal themes—though she was trying to do that too, and succeeded—but she was also trying to use her medium to address what she saw as a social problem, and effect positive social change.  And as far as I can tell, she succeeded in that, too.  Alex Hirsch, the creator of the Disney Channel’s hit cartoon Gravity Falls (which we’ve also discussed on this blog) has gone on record praising Sugar for “driving a race car way, way ahead of everyone else” when it comes to the representation of queer people in cartoons. 

In 2016, Steven Universe made animation history when it became the first cartoon ever to portray a same-sex marriage proposal, in its much-lauded episode “The Question.” In discussing that episode with Entertainment Weekly, Sugar wrote, “We absolutely must tell LGBTQ+ children that they belong in this world and they deserve to be loved. … We cannot wait until a child grows up to tell them they deserve to exist and that their story matters.”*

I am sharing all of this as part my on-going analysis of Steven Universe, because it illuminates a vital issue that Christians must wrestle with if they want to address LGBTQ issues biblically.  

I’m thinking here of the so-called “the gay agenda.” 

At least, that’s what the most ardently non-affirming Christians I’ve known would call it. The idea is that the relatively rapid shift in Canadian social mores—from viewing homosexuality as a crime up until 1969, to embracing gay marriage as a progressive leap forward in 2005—was the result of an well-organized political effort on the part of LGBTQ people, to change the world as we know it into one we no longer recognize. It is often used with an undertone of suspicion, as though those who have worked towards this goal have not just been trying to change the world but actually to destroy it.

I am writing as a Christian pastor, serving in a denomination which teaches that, biblically speaking, same-sex sexuality does not fulfill God’s creation-design for sex. In simple terms, my denomination is “non-affirming.” That needs to be on the table in the interest of full disclosure here.  And to be sure, as far as I can tell, there has indeed been a very intentional effort on the part of LGBTQ people and allies over the years, to see laws changed, to have school curricula revised, to ensure that queer people will not be unfairly mistreated simply because of their sexual orientation, and so on. I think this is relatively well-documented fact and shouldn’t cause a great deal of dispute.

But even so, I want to explain why I do not think it is at all helpful to talk about a “gay agenda” and why, as a pastor in a denomination like mine, I don’t use the term. It’s because when we do, we are treating the pain, and alienation, and isolation of another human being as though it were a threat to us, turning a very real hear-cry for compassionate acknowledgement into some sort of a diabolical conspiracy theory. This does not strike me as an especially Christ-like thing to do.

And this is why a kid’s show like Steven Universe is so helpful in this conversation, because it illustrates the problem with a term like “the gay agenda.” Did Rebecca Sugar have an “agenda” when she created this show?  I guess it depends on what you mean by agenda. It is well documented that she began with a particular end in mind—to help under-represented, and misrepresented children know that there was a place for them in the world, a place where they mattered just as much as anybody else.  Whether or not you call that an “agenda” (in the “gay-agenda” sense of the word) depends entirely on whether or not you think this is a “manipulative” or a “subversive” thing to do.

I don’t think it is, either manipulative or subversive. In fact, I think it’s the work the church should be doing, and it’s the work that we consistently see Jesus doing. I say this without settling here whether theologically the church be affirming or non-affirming. I believe very strongly that Christians can do for LGBTQ people what Rebecca Sugar was trying to do for queer children when she created Steven Universe, and tell them that there is indeed a place where they belong, without necessarily settling the theological question about same-sex sex.

What a show like Steven Universe shows us is how important, and indeed, how beautiful it can be to do that. It also gives us a hint of what it might look like to do it well—by telling stories that include those who do not fall into our typical, or “normal” categories for gender, marriage, family and so on—to use language that acknowledges that not everyone is part of the heterosexual mainstream—by going out of our way to represent those who are not “normally” represented in our discussions of what it means authentically to follow Jesus.

It may not look like a cartoon about a band of alien superheroes dedicated to saving planet Earth, for the church to do this.  I have a hunch, however, that if a church sincerely acknowledged the presence the LGBTQ people in its midst—if it included the queer experience its portrayals of what a well-lived Christian life might look like—if the church took a small cue from someone like Rebecca Sugar, I mean, and did the work of LGBTQ representation well—I think we would find we have a lot more in common with the so-called “gay agenda” than we ever realized. Not least of these would be a desire to see those who are on the edges of the social-circle brought close to the centre, those who are voiceless to be given a voice, and those who have always wondered if they were loveable, to discover that they are loved more purely and more divinely than they ever could have imagined.

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A Christian Conversation About Steven Universe (Part V): The Crystal Gems and the Christian Family

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In 1977, the psychologist James Dobson founded an evangelical parachurch organization dedicated to promoting traditional family values, known as Focus on the Family. The decades-long impact of this organization on the evangelical church is difficult to put into words, but then, so is the complicated relationship I’ve personally had with Focus on the Family over the years. 

As a Christian teenager in the late 80s, I found Dobson’s frank writing about puberty, sexuality, and growing up to be profoundly helpful.  As young parents, the title of his book Parenting isn’t for Cowards was kind of a catchphrase in our home.  Neither my wife nor I had actually read the book, mind you, but the expression itself, “parenting isn’t for cowards,” came up a lot when we were tempted to chicken out on our parental responsibilities. We have financially supported Focus on the Family in the past, mostly because we saw value in its pro-life advocacy at the time, and there are one or two episodes of Adventures in Odyssey that still stand out as meaningful in my memory.

At the same time, however, I have often felt that much of Focus’s work, and the tone with which they conduct it, is not theologically sound, and may even be harmful to the witness of the church. Its legacy of opposing human rights for LGBTQ people is one such example. In 2009 it sold  the so-called “ex-gay” branch of its ministry, “Love Won Out,” to the ex-gay organization Exodus International, only to see Exodus close its operations in 2013 and issue a public statement acknowledging the harm its conversion efforts have caused. Then there are the theological challenges posed by Focus on the Family’s political activities. I am generally cautious when it comes to making political statements as a pastor, because I recognize that there is a diverse range of political opinion represented in my congregation, but even so, I have to say that the day James Dobson publicly endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race was the day I finally withdrew any moral or financial support I had once given to the organization.

One of the most problematic aspects of Focus on the Family’s work, though, is also the hardest to pin down. Somehow it took a very good thing—supporting the nuclear family—and made it the most-important thing—the mark of a faithful follower of Jesus. I remember a theology professor of mine who once waved the red flag over Focus on the Family’s ministry by saying this: their work assumes that the church exists primarily to serve the family, to make the nuclear family strong and keep it growing spiritually; when theologically the reverse is true. If anything, the family exists to serve the church, to help it in its work of glorifying Jesus and proclaiming the Gospel of our Lord. My theology professor was riffing on Ephesians 5 when he said this, that part where Paul says that a godly marriage functions, primarily, as a living metaphor for—and thus a beautiful witness to—the love that Christ has for the Church.

I think there is something to this, and over the years I have seen the fall-out of a “misaligned focus” on the nuclear family in the church. Pastors who council abused wives to stay in the marriage no matter the cost, no matter the risk, may be part of the fallout. Christian families who leave a local church when the children’s ministry no longer meets the felt-needs of the kids, may be some of the fallout. Christian parents who feel that they have no other choice when their LGBTQ kids come out to them than to ostracize them, may be some. So might the alienation that divorcees often feel in the church, or singles who wonder why there’s never a sermon series on “how live without a godly marriage.”

This post isn’t a theological critique of Focus on the Family, however. It’s actually part of the “Christian conversation” I’ve been having over the last few weeks about a queer-themed kid’s show named Steven Universe, and what it can teach the traditional church about being a community of hospitality for LGBTQ people. We’ve talked about things like: learning the queer aesthetic, and the pain of feeling like “the other,” the role of hospitality itself, and the complex nature of human sexuality.  

Today all I want to point out is just that, theologically, the nuclear family is not the biblical ideal for human relationships; brotherhood (read: siblinghood) in Christ is, which is a relationship that actually sits above, and informs, all other human relationships.  And whatever else Steven Universe does, with all its intergalactic space travel and mysterious battles with the Gems from Homeworld, it helps us explore what a familial relationship that “transcends and informs” the nuclear family might look like.

I remember the day I realized the true significance of “siblinghood in Christ,” as the ultimate human relationship. One of my theology profs (the same one waving the red flag about Focus on the Family, in fact), explained to our class that before your wife is “your wife” she is your sister in Christ; and before your kids are “your kids” they are your brothers and sisters in Christ. This bond that we share in Jesus, he argued, comes first.

If he was right, it would explain why Jesus says that everyone who leaves behind their “brothers or sisters or mother or father or children for the sake of the Gospel,” will get them back—brothers and sisters and mothers and children—a hundred times, in this present age and eternal life in the age to come (Mark 10:29-30). Jesus is talking there, I think, about how the Christian Church functions—or at least it should function—as God’s compensation for any human relationships we may have had to give up, because they could not bear our commitment to Christ.  

Passages like these shed fresh light on those places in Paul where he uses the imagery of “adoption” to describe our experience of salvation, or when he talks about Christians being "members of the household of God" (an ancient term for the Roman family). It turns out it wasn't just a polite convention when the early Christians took to calling each other "brother" and "sister."  We tend to take it as “only metaphor” when the Bible says that we are all children of God, but I think the early church took it very seriously and tried to live out implications of this truth. They understood that in coming to Jesus they had been quite literally adopted into a divine family, and so shared a sibling relationship with each other, one that transcended even their natural familial relationships.

If it is hard for us to process this idea, that God intends for us to experience in the Church a relationship with each other that is more compelling and intimate even than that which we experience in our nuclear families—if we find that hard to believe—it may be owing to the decades-long work of Focus on the Family, teaching us to focus especially on the nuclear family as the place where our need for love is met.  If it’s not that, at the very least it is owing to an evangelical church culture that has privatized the faith and relegated the church to the role of a simple dispenser of religious goods and services, instead of letting it be what God says it is: his divine answer to the deepest human longing for agape love.

In his ground-breaking book about being a gay Christian, Washed and Waiting, Wesley Hill argues that God meant for the church to be his “sanctified remedy” for human loneliness, God’s “compensation” to gay Christians for their sacrifice of homosexual partners.  He challenges Christians to recognize that “the New Testament views the church—rather than marriage—as the primary place where human love is best expressed and experienced.”  He is talking specifically there about marriage, but I think we could safely expand his point to include this discussion about the Church as God’s ultimate offer of “family,” too.  That many of us balk at this idea, because so few of the Christian communities we have experienced actually live up to this ideal, suggests a dereliction of duty on the part of churches, if not a complete failure of the Christian imagination.

To help our imaginations along, perhaps I could point you to the kid’s show that sparked this blog series, that sci-fi fantasy adventure known as Steven Universe. As I’ve mentioned, the central hero of the show, Steven Universe, is being raised by three alien life forms, gems from a planet called Homeworld. Steven himself is the son of a gem named Rose Quartz, a child she had through a love affair with an earthling named Greg Universe. Rose has since died, but Greg, Steven’s dad, is still very much in the picture.  What stands out to an astute viewer however, is that although Steven and Greg very clearly share a familial bond, Steven does not live with his dad (this despite the fact that Greg just lives a few doors down).

On the one hand, given the queer themes of the show, it’s easy to interpret this as simply an effort on the part of the writers to depict a child being raised by queer parents, in a non-nuclear family. This angle is most evident in the episode “Fusion Cuisine” (Season 1, Episode 32), where the parents of Steven’s best friend Connie want to meet Steven’s own parents, so Steven convinces Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl to fuse into a single gem, Alexandrite, and pretend to be his mom. Greg joins the dinner party too, as Steven’s dad, and in the ensuing hi-jinks Connie’s parents come to appreciate the fact that, even though Steven’s family is certainly out of the ordinary, still the gems have good parenting skills, and Connie should be allowed to continue playing with Steven.

Steven’s filial love for the gems and their paternal care towards him will become a more prominent theme as the show progresses, and it continues to deconstruct the traditional definition of what constitutes a “family.” In one episode, Steven meets a human cousin he never knew he had, a gruff traditionalist named Andy DeMayo. Over the course of the episode, Andy learns to let go of his conservative views and expand his definition of family so that it can, indeed, include the likes of the Crystal Gems. 

What we see in these episodes of Steven Universe is an effort to imagine human relationships that are just as rich, intimate, and supportive as those we might experience in the ideal nuclear family, but are formed not by blood and biology but by choice, by circumstance, and by a radical commitment to one another.

In this regard, I would argue, Steven Universe’s family is actually one of the best analogies for the church I’ve come across in contemporary children’s entertainment. Because like the Crystal Gems, the church is community of people with no biological relation, but bound together the way blood-brothers and blood-sisters are supposed to be bound together. It is a spiritual family created by the divine—but not less literal for all its being divine—adoption of strangers. In this adoption we are asked to identify with our fellow believers, who are just as much children of God as we are, with the same care, concern and mutuality we would show our biological siblings. From a biblical perspective, it is a family very much like Steven Universe's family, one formed by choice (first God’s, then ours), by circumstance (the divine circumstances of our adoption), and by a radical commitment (God’s to us, and then ours to each other).

Can you imagine?

If not, perhaps a couple of episodes of Steven Universe might help, as it explores the possibility that our deepest longing for family can in fact be fulfilled in ways far beyond our wildest dreams.

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A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part IV): Encountering the Queer Aesthetic

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When I was a child, my list of favorite cartoons would have included some of the following titles: G-Force: Battle of the Planets, The Smurfs, Dungeons and Dragons, and, when I couldn’t get anything better, The Mighty Hercules. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any of these shows, but as a kid they filled my head with epic tales of fantasy, adventure, and heroism.

What I never considered at the time, though see quite clearly in retrospect, is that they also reinforced a certain aesthetic in my imagination. The term “aesthetic” as I’m using it here refers to the principles we draw on, or the characteristics we look for, to make value judgement about what is and what is not beautiful. By “beautiful,” however, I mean something more than simply “lovely to look at.” The “beautiful” in this sense is that which awakens our longing, excites our imagination, gives us pleasure, and elicits our joy. Aesthetic values can vary quite widely from culture to culture, which is why the carefully-balanced proportions of the Athenian Parthenon, and the kaleidoscopic spectacle of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Russia are both beautiful in their own way, though each is so unlike the other.

When I hold the cartoons that I enjoyed as a child up together, what stands out to me is that they are all working with a similar aesthetic. They tend to be centred around the male experience, and the women in them tend to be peripheral characters, usually disproportionately represented, and often serving as objects of male interest and affection. The heroes, too, tend to have qualities that were traditionally associated with a narrowly-defined masculinity: physical strength, confident resourcefulness, a rugged independence held in tension with service to the community. At the same time, there is a subtle romantic intrigue underlying them all: was Princess the love interest of Mark or Jason in Battle of the Planets? Which of the ninety-nine male Smurfs would win the affections of the one (and only) Smurfette in the village? When would Hercules finally settle down with the lovely Helena and make a bunch of baby Hercs?

These are all children’s cartoons, of course, but I think it is easy to underestimate how formative the aesthetic experiences of our childhood can be on our grown-up sensibilities, subconsciously influencing the value judgement we make as grownups about what is lovely, compelling, and desirable.

I say this, because when I first started watching the show Steven Universe with my kids, I was struck by how foreign the aesthetic of the show seemed to me, and how few aesthetic categories I had that I could use to make sense of it. Rebecca Sugar, the maker of Steven Universe has said that she had set out to make a show that was “definitely not heteronormative.” This is clear in the show's broad themes and philosophical underpinnings, but it is also subtly woven through out the show’s aesthetic, from its character design to its artistic choices. It is, as my queer child once put it, the “gayest show ever,” and in this, the whole thing is working with an aesthetic unlike any cartoon I’ve ever come across.

Both the show’s heroes and villains all are gems, which means that, aside from Steven himself, they are all exclusively female-coded characters. Steven is male-coded, of course, though the show explains that he is somehow an incarnation of his own mother, Rose Quartz, making his gender much more ambiguous as the show progresses. He is able to fuse with his best friend, a female named Connie, to form a non-binary character named Stevonnie.

At the same time, very few of the protagonists have any qualities associated with traditional masculinity. Indeed, an episode in the first season, called “Coach Steven” subtly deconstructs the entire trope of traditional masculinity. In this episode, Steven sets out to get himself and his friends in physical shape, adopting a “toxically masculine” drill-sergeant persona and running them through a rigorous workout regime. Through the course of the episode, however, he learns that there is a “real way” to be strong that does not require ripped abs and swole pecs, and indeed, that “muscular strength” is not the kind of “strength” he really needs.

I have to admit that when I first started watching Steven Universe, the “queer aesthetic” of the show took a long time for me to get used to. I’m a 46-year-old straight male, and hardly the target audience, I admit; but even so, I watched it with a traditional aesthetic in mind, one shaped by years of consuming narratives that presented traditional hetero-romantic, male-centric themes. As a result, I found the whole thing somewhat (in the original sense of this word) queer. All the pastel colors and glittering lights (which I would have associated, as a kid, with a “girl’s show”) coupled with all those intergalactic space adventures (which could rival even the best of G-Force for sci-fi thrills), made it hard for me to find my bearings.

If you’ve never seen the show, all this may sound somewhat bizarre, but the reason I’m talking about it  at such length is because experiencing the queer aesthetic of Steven Universe helped me see my own aesthetic sensibilities in a new light. When I experience a “text,” be it a story, an image, a work of art, or a philosophical idea, I do with it what all human beings instinctively do: I try to fit it into a pre-conceived aesthetic framework that helps me to determine if it is good, true, lovely, or admirable. This aesthetic framework is largely subconscious, built from a whole network of formative experiences and aesthetic messages that I absorbed from the culture I was raised in. I was enculturated, for instance, to look for male strength as a sign that something heroic is happening, and I was enculturated, too, to pick up on intimations of heterosexual romance as a sign that the story is moving towards something desirable.

Encountering a show that deconstructed this aesthetic, like Steven Universe does, and presented an alternative in its place, helped me to see both how subjective my traditional aesthetic is, and (more importantly) how strongly I identify with it. I think it is hard to really grasp how subtly our deeply-held aesthetic values shape the way we interact with and respond to the world, determining what we think is worth striving for in life, and how we ought to go about striving for it. A music lover who has encountered the musical forms of an entirely different culture, one that does not use traditional Western intervals or rhythms, perhaps, might get what I am trying to describe here: the cognitive dissonance of encountering a form of beauty for which they have no clear aesthetic categories, but they can still clearly tell is something joyful, emotive, and good.

One of the reasons I’m exploring all this, is because my experience with the show Steven Universe has prompted me to wonder how much the church’s response to LGBTQ people in general, is less about our theology than it is about our aesthetic values. This idea is hard to put into words, but if we have been spiritually raised in a culture that consistently presents heterosexual romance as the highest ideal, and only showed one kind of masculinity as good and one kind of femininity as lovely, then coming to understand and make space for the queer people in our community may actually challenge our aesthetic convictions just as much, possibly even more so than it does, our theological convictions, such as they are.

Like a 46-year-old heterosexual male encountering Steven Universe and having to learn how to read a queer aesthetic on the fly, I think that the church will have to re-examine those things it’s always held up as ideals of beauty, if it is genuinely going to embrace LGBTQ people with the gospel. This does not mean relinquishing our responsibility to make biblical value judgement on what is a godly and what is not a godly expression of human sexuality, or accepting an entirely relative morality when it comes to sex.

At least it doesn’t have to mean that. It could simply mean acknowledging that many of the narratives we assume to be good, and true, and lovely, are really values we’ve inherited from our culture, not absolutes we’ve derived from the Bible. The presupposition, for instance, that God intends everyone to experience heterosexual romance in order to be spiritually fulfilled (when Jesus himself never married)—the assumption, perhaps, that a certain set of superficial characteristics define “biblical manhood and biblical womanhood” (when Jesus himself often crossed gender boundaries in his day, speaking to women and admitting them into his company in ways that scandalized his 1st Century culture)—these are examples of aesthetic values that the church has often taken to be theological givens.

There are probably others. As the church makes authentic space for the LGBTQ people among us, I expect we will discover more; and as we do, I expect we will find, too, that there are all kinds of beautiful things to be celebrated in our midst, things we never would have noticed as lovely, except that we let our aesthetic values be challenged in this way.

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A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part III): We Are the Crystal Gems

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Back in 2011, when the movie X-Men First Class came out, I went to see it with a friend of mine who happens to be gay. As far as I knew, I was just taking in one more rollicking superhero romp, maybe not Academy Award worthy, but certainly worth the price of admission. My gay friend, however, had an entirely different take on the film.

“What did you think?” he asked as we were leaving the theatre.

I gave him my two-cent review: fun story, cool effects, though I’m more of an Avengers man, myself.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I thought it did a great job conveying what it feels like to be gay.”

If you’re scratching your head at that one, like I was when he said it, then maybe I should explain. One of the primary conflicts in X-Men First Class has to do with the search for a cure to the mutations that give the X-Men their powers. The feeling of being an aberrant “freak of nature” is a source of great torment for the super-powered mutants in the movie. Many of them hide, disguise, or suppress their mutations so that they can fit in with every-day society. One of the mutants, a blue-haired superhero named Beast believes he has found a way to medically “cure” their mutations and turn them into “normal” human beings; by contrast, the mutant named Magneto wants them to embrace their mutations and wage war against the human race.

The plot didn’t stand out to me on first viewing as an especially LGBTQ-themed story, but my friend helped me out. “Being gay,” he said, “in a world where everyone is straight and you don’t know if you belong, you can feel like that: like you’re a mutant with a mutation you have to hide, because if anyone knew you had it, they’d think you’re were a freak.”

It turns out that my friend was picking up on something the movie was intentionally laying down. At least, the screenwriters of X-Men First Class have since gone on the record confirming there was an intentional gay subtext to the story.

When I think back to that night watching X-Men First Class, though, two things stand out to me: one, how meaningful it was for my gay friend to see his own experience of queerness being metaphorically represented on screen like that; and two, how easily I had missed the metaphor, as a heterosexual man. That night at the theatre helped me to see my “straight world” through the eyes of someone who did not feel as though he fit into it, because the mainstream narratives of that world, where everyone found a romantic partner of the opposite sex, settled down with a family and set up a white picket-fence around it all, did not include his experience. It helped me see how painful the feeling of “being queer” can be for queer people, and how healing it can be when that pain is acknowledged.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been using the kid’s show Steven Universe as a starting point for this series on practicing hospitality for LGBTQ people in the church, because it too helps us to grasp what the “feeling of being queer” can be like for queer people. If you missed the background, let me explain that the central premise of Steven Universe is that a group of aliens called the Crystal Gems, beings that look and sound and more-or-less act just like you and I, have come to dwell among the “normal” citizens of planet earth. These aliens are really gems, whose only physical form are their gemstones, and whose anthropomorphic bodies are really projections of corporeal light that they emit.

As the show progresses, it becomes clear that the Crystal Gems are somehow meant to represent, if not the LGBTQ community, at the very least the queer experience. This is most obvious in an episode called “Rocknaldo,” (Season 4, Episode 18), where a character named Ronaldo is shown distributing pamphlets that warn the residents of Beach City about the “Rock People” living among them. The episode doesn’t dwell on this for long, and Steven quickly helps Ronaldo see the harm his pamphlets are causing, telling him that a term like “Rock People” is offensive, and that he is a Gem himself. With only a little bit of imagination, though, it’s easy to see this entire exchange as a way of exploring the problem of homophobia on a level that children would get. I may be reading too much into this, of course, but my experience with X-Men First Class suggests that even if this was not the main point of the episode, many queer people would resonate with it in this way.

If the Crystal Gems really are meant to help us to think about the queer experience, it strikes me as significant that whatever else they are, the Crystal Gems are alien. They do not fit the mainstream world of Beach City, and they frequently encounter situations that make them starkly aware of this reality. It is true that most often when this happens, and their alien natures are exposed to their human neighbors like this, the humans themselves tend to take it in stride, and life in Beach City sort of goes on more-or-less as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This is one of the endearing quirks of the show, that the most bizarre of storylines—from intergalactic space travel to extra-terrestrial invasions—do not leave the least lasting scar on the tranquility of Beach City. It is almost as if the show is suggesting to queer kids that, yes, the feeling of “being the other” is real and painful, but however painful it may be, life on the other side of coming out will find a way of carrying on. It’s sort of like a sci-fi fantasy adventure version of the “It gets better” message.

I realize that in reading Steven Universe like this, as an allegory for the “othering” that so many queer people face, I may be guilty of “othering” myself. When I see an alien on screen and assume that the alien in question must be a metaphor for a gay person, it reveals something, perhaps, about what I really think about the gay people in my own community (do I really think they of them as “aliens”?) This is part of the brilliance of the show, however, that it holds up the mirror to all of us, queer and straight together, and asks us to re-examine what we see there.

If I am on to anything in this reading of Steven Universe, I think there is a lesson here for the Christian Church. I have written extensively on this topic before, but in a community like the Church, where the focus is almost exclusively on the family, where ministries tend to presuppose marriage as the normative way of following Jesus, and where gay people historically have not been welcome or affirmed, this feeling of “being an alien” can be intense. Like I had done with my gay friend at X-Men First Class, it is easy for Christians to under-estimate just how intense, and indeed how painful,it can be to be made to feel like “the other.”

This is why we need to hear more stories like the one Steven Universe is telling, not just imaginative ones, either, but the real stories of real gay people; and not just hear them, but authentically engage with them. Only as we are able to acknowledge and address the alienation that our “heteronormative narratives” may be causing, will we be able authentically to include gay people into the life of the church. This will take more than watching a few episodes of a kid’s cartoon, of course, but if nothing else a show like Steven Universe might help us to understand how important it is to do this well, and give us some idea of where to start.

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A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part II): All the Fuss about Fusion

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One of the most intense debates I ever had my kids when I first started watching Steven Universe with them, was whether or not fusion was a metaphor for sexual intercourse.

I suppose a statement like that needs some careful unpacking, so let me open the suitcase. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, Steven Universe is a cartoon that aired from 2013 – 2019 on the Cartoon Network, and one of my kids’ favorite shows. It follows the adventures of a half-gem/half-human teenager named Steven Universe, as he defends planet Earth from invasion by the Gems of Homeworld. The Gems are an alien species of sentient gemstones, hellbent on colonizing the galaxy. These aliens themselves have no human form, but are able to project physical, anthropomorphic bodies from their gems (their gemstones then become “fixtures” on their projected bodies, allowing the gem itself to move about with the body it is projecting). Steven is aided in his mission by a band of rebel Crystal Gems, who themselves have revolted against the Gems of Homeworld to become the self-appointed guardians of planet Earth.

So far this simply seems like the stuff of a good, old-fashioned Sci-Fi adventure. Original, to be sure, but nothing especially controversial.

Enter the concept of fusion.

Because at some point in Season 1 of Steven Universe, the show revealed that most gems have the ability to “fuse” with another gem, so as to create a more powerful new gem, one that is a combination of the character, qualities, and powers of them both. In order to initiate fusion, two consenting gems (that is to say, the “physical forms” of two consenting gems), engage in an elaborate and, truth be told, somewhat sensuous dance, at the end of which their two bodies come together and merge, forming a new body in a blinding flash of light.

The first time I saw a scene in Steven Universe depicting the fusion of two gems, it seemed so obviously a cipher for intercourse that I almost blushed. I was, admittedly, watching it with my two middle-school-aged daughters at the time, and, well, I’ll let you be the judge:



I have not delved very far into the Steven Universe universe online, but my understanding is that there is a bit of disagreement in the fandom over whether or not fusion really is meant to be a metaphor for sex. Certainly my family had our own debate after the show. To be honest, my kids were somewhat chagrined and more than a little offended to hear my wife and I suggest that fusion could be anything other than the innocent merger of two superheroes’ super powers for the sake of creating an even greater super hero.

Here are the arguments they advanced against our reading that fusion was an intentional, if subtle metaphor for intercourse. A) The gems are asexual aliens. Yes, their physical forms are always female, but that’s part of the aesthetic; these bodies are merely projections of each gem’s gemstone, and the gems themselves are gender neutral. B) The gems are able to fuse with each other in all sorts of combinations (even three gems at a time), on and off pretty much at will. If fusion were really a metaphor for sex, the gems would be grossly promiscuous. C) Dad, this is a kids show!

Over the course of five seasons, however, the evidence seems to mount, that the show is using fusion as a narrative device for exploring and discussing sexual relationships. A) Steven fuses with his best friend Connie (creating a hybrid human named “Stevonnie”), proving that under certain conditions, humans are able to fuse, too. B) It’s revealed that Garnet, one of the main characters in the story, is really a fusion of two gems, Ruby and Sapphire, who fell in love with each other back on Homeworld and were sent into exile for engaging in fusion with gems of a different variety (normally, rubies can only fuse with other rubies, and so on). C) Later on in the series, Ruby and Sapphire get married, fusing into Garnet at the end of the ceremony. D) When Pearl is threatened by Greg (Steven’s human father), because Rose Quartz is falling in love with him, she fuses with Rose to form “Rainbow Quartz,” as a way of making him jealous. E) And then, of course, there’s the sensual nature of the fusion scenes themselves.



In the eyes of a heterosexual middle-aged male, it’s hard to see how fusion couldn’t be about sex, whatever else it is about.

But this brings me, at last, to the real point of this post. As I mentioned previously, one of the reasons I’m spending time exploring an obscure kid’s show like this—besides the fact that my own kids were such fans—is that I think it allows us to look at LGBTQ issues with a fresh set of eyes, from a perspective that is one step removed from the issues themselves, and so, hopefully, more objective.

When I look at fusion from this perspective, one of the things it helps me to understand—and this is so crucial for understanding same-sex relationships in the church—is that sex isn’t just about sex.

What I mean is that our sexuality is this integrated part of ourselves that touches on, and is touched by, all other aspects of our lives. Our emotional well-being, our financial stability, our status in community, our prospects for the future, our physical health, our spiritual maturation, and more, all impact, and are impacted by our sexuality. If I am married, for instance, I have more financial stability and career options than I do if I am not. If I have a consistent, faithful, sexual partner in my life, I am more likely to be physically and emotionally healthy. Shoot: even my life expectancy increases if I’m in a committed, monogamous sexual relationship. The benefits are more pronounced if I am married and part of a church, where I have all kinds of ministries devoted to me—from marriage enrichment seminars and well-run nurseries—and all kinds of preaching series tailored to me—from how to have a happy marriage to how to enjoy God’s plan for sex.

If fusion really is about sex, then the truth is that it’s not only, or even especially about sex; because sex itself is not only about sex. Sex is a thread woven into the big woolen sweater of human life, and you can’t start pulling on it without all the others bunching up and coming with.

To be clear, I’m not saying that sexual activity is itself necessary for a person to be healthy, happy, well-adjusted, and so on. Far from it (you can read my series on celibacy, if you want, to get a sense just how far I am from saying that). Chastity and celibacy, properly understood, can both be vibrant expressions of human sexuality, in their own right.

So I’m not saying “you have to have sex to be happy.”

What I am saying is that often discussions of LGBTQ issues in traditional Christian circles focus almost exclusively on the physical “sex acts” in question, as though a gay relationship is only about sex; only a means to a strictly sexual end. Statements like “It’s okay to be gay, just don’t act on it,” tend to communicate this. So do statements like “love the sinner hate the sin.”

To do better, we must recognize that people are integrated wholes, and as such our sexual experience is connected to all the other things that make us who we are. We can’t talk about the one without touching on the others, and if we want to talk about the one well, we will have to address the others also. To have the theological conversation about same-sex sexuality honestly, we will have to acknowledge first that same-sex relationships are about far more than just sex, just like gay people are far more than just a “sexual orientation.” More than merely acknowledge it, we will have to compassionately and humbly admit the ways in which our posture towards same-sex sexuality, whatever that posture may be, may be impacting, influencing, or causing harm to these other areas of the LGBTQ person’s life.

Strange as it may sound, as someone who has been working at a doctoral level on this stuff for more than five years, it was the concept of fusion, in the kid’s show Steven Universe, that made me wrestle with this fact most profoundly. Seeing Garnet and Amethyst fuse on Steven Universe actually helped me notice the prejudices, the presuppositions, and the assumptions that I had when it came to same-sex sexuality. In an ironic twist of logic, I looked at fusion, and because it was clearly about relationships, togetherness, mutual love, care, support, friendship, and even sensuality, it must therefore be about sex; and then I turned around and assumed that, if it’s about sex, than it can’t be about any of those other things. It’s only because it was a kid’s show that I realized how unfair I was being.

But thank God I came to see.

It may not be a kid’s show that does it for you, but what ever it is, I hope you, too, have opportunities to come to understand how much more same-sex relationships are about, than simply some particular sexual acts. And may you find the conversations you are having with the LGBTQ people in your life becoming deeper, richer, and more compassionate, as a consequence.

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A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part I): Becoming a Community of Hospitality

This spring I completed a Doctor of Ministry program through Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, NY, one that I began in 2016 and have been working at, on and off, over the last four years. The topic of my dissertation was LGBTQ ministry, and in particular my research focused on how churches can become communities of hospitality for LGBTQ people.

One of the reasons this topic is so important to me is because I currently serve in a denomination that is not affirming of same-sex sexuality, and I have been trying for many years to get my denomination to grapple with the implications of its theology. In keeping with my denomination’s non-affirming position, I wrote my dissertation from this theological starting point. Essentially, I was asking: if this is where we are starting from as a denomination, then what does ministry for gay people really look like? And as a corollary question: what are best practices for churches in our denomination to do effective ministry for LGBTQ people, if we are unwilling or unable to reconsider our theology?

I hope it won’t take much work to convince you that this was an extremely challenging topic to work on, in a non-affirming context, and an extremely challenging approach to take. On the one hand, I personally have a vested interest in seeing the denomination I belong to do better when it comes to its response to LGBTQ people. On the other hand, many of the biases, assumptions, and prejudices that I encountered among otherwise well-meaning Christians made it difficult to engage in the kind of open-hearted, open-handed conversations that are so crucial if a denomination like mine is going to do better. At the same time, throughout my research the Lord was stretching me, challenging me, and pushing me continually to examine my own biases, assumptions, and prejudices. At the end of the day (and the end of my degree), the best I could say was simply the word “hospitality.” Churches that are unwilling or unable to reconsider their theology regarding same-sex sexuality can and should, in the meantime, strive to be communities of hospitality for LGBTQ people.

Hospitality is far easier said than done, however. In the modern world we have lost sight of the biblical vision for hospitality—xenophilia—which had more to do with welcoming in the stranger than it had to do with inviting over your family and friends. We have lost sight of how deeply moral and spiritual the practice of hospitality was in the ancient world, replacing it instead with Martha-Stewardesque images of well-set tables and tastefully decorated guestrooms, used especially for entertaining people who are "like us."

Biblically, however, hospitality is about making space for the person whom we have been taught to think of as “the other.” It’s about opening our communities to the person who is least like us, and in doing so, opening our hearts, our minds, our ears and our hands to them as well.

In concrete terms, I argued that a church can be hospitable to LGBTQ people only if it is willing to do things like: end the silence, nurture safe pathways for coming out, address the power imbalance, and listen to the stories of the gay experience. At the very least, as I tried to do those things in my own life, I came to understand the need for including and affirming gay people in the community of the church far more clearly and profoundly than I ever had before. I came to understand the unique challenges that gay people face, the unique questions that have to grapple with, and the unique gifts that they contribute to the community in ways I never would have otherwise.

I would like to share some of the things I’ve learned about how a church can do better when it comes to the gay people in its midst, here on my blog over the next few weeks. If nothing else, this will keep the conversation I started with my dissertation going, now that my actual degree is finished. But there is something else: because there are gay people in church, and gay people who want to be in church, and gay people who are not in church but the church should be reaching out to them; and unless the church can really learn to open its ears to understand their experience as gay people, it will, I think, do harm to them and dishonor Jesus, both at the same time.

Of course, one of the things I learned, studying this topic for four years in a non-affirming context, is that these issues themselves are fraught with tensions (see my preceding paragraphs where I mention the biases, prejudices, and assumptions). Tension makes us anxious and anxiety makes it difficult to hear well. As a way of trying to alleviate these tensions, then, what I would like to do for this series, instead of presenting one more stuffy theological treatise—you can read my dissertation for that—is to present it as a sort of theological conversation about one of the most fascinating children’s programs I’ve come across in recent years. I’m talking about the show: Steven Universe.

Steven Universe is an animated cartoon created by Rebecca Sugar that aired on the Cartoon Network for five seasons, from November 2013 to January 2019. I got into the show on the recommendation of one of my children, who identifies as queer and non-binary and is a major Steven Universe fan.

Steven Universe revolves around the adventures of a half-gem/half-human boy named Steven Universe.

Yes, I said “half-gem.” In the show, the gems are a species of alien life forms which are literally gems, but they can take on various anthropomorphic shapes, projecting these forms from their gem-like “bodies.”

But wait: it gets weirder…. and awesomer… because Steven Universe is the child of one of these aliens, a gem named Rose Quartz, who fell in love with a human named Greg Universe. Rose has since died, but her spirit lives on in Steven, her half-gem offspring. Steven himself is being raised by Rose’s band of rebel gems—Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl—who are the sworn protectors of earth and together make up a team of adventurers known as “the Crystal Gems.”

Yes, I said “rebel gems.” It turns out that long ago, planet earth was invaded by an army of evil gems from a planet called “Home World,” who wanted to convert it into a Home-World colony. Rose Quartz and her companions fell in love with the our little blue-and-green chunk of rock hurling through space, and rebelled against Home World, driving them off and saving the day. Rose herself is long since gone, but still the Crystal Gems continue the fight she started, defending earth from the on-going attacks of Home World.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with a dissertation about hospitality for LGBTQ people, stay tuned. Because one of the things that Rebecca Sugar was attempting to do in creating the show was to imagine a cartoon that was not (in her words) “heteronormative.” That is to say, she was trying to create a show that worked as a children’s show in its own right, regardless one’s sexual orientation, but at the same time, it presented issues, characters and themes that young people who did not identify with the heterosexual mainstream could resonate with.

As a result, watching Steven Universe as a Christian Pastor helps me to see the world through a unique set of eyes; and because it's in the genre of a children’s cartoon—and a good one at that, with real adventure and compelling characters and imaginative story lines—it allows me to really see with those eyes. The usual things that make seeing so hard (see again my paragraph about biases and prejudices) are bracketed out so that the story can get told. In this way, the show allows the viewer to “enter into” queer issues, themes, and questions, without all the usual anxieties and tensions.

As unlikely as it sounds for me to say it, having worked on this topic at a doctoral level for 4 years, watching Steven Universe has taught me some of the greatest lessons I’ve yet learned, about what hospitality for gay people really looks like, by asking me to bracket out my biases and assumptions so that the story can simply be told.

All that being said, I hope I’ve piqued your curiosity enough that you'll join me for the next few months as I start a theological conversation about some of the themes in Steven Universe, and more importantly, I hope that learning to appreciate these themes will help us all do better—becoming more inclusive and more affirming—when it comes to the gay people in our lives.

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