Feminism, Non-realism and what Resistance looks like in Theology

By Alison Webster

This article arises from a talk given by Alison Webster at a Sea of Faith Network ‘In Conversation’ event and has also been published in Sofia, the magazine of the Sea of Faith Network

My first encounter with non-realist theology – in my late teens – was a personal liberation. My progressive Methodist upbringing had provided a pretty effective inoculation against theological dogmatism and conservatism, but my fate was sealed when I fell in love with Don Cupitt’s big idea, through watching the Sea of Faith TV series, and studying under Don himself.

Cambridge theology faculty in the mid 1980s was, however, a pretty conservative place, so it wasn’t until after I graduated that I encountered feminist and liberation theologies. Then the question became: can these differently-located theologies cohere?

There were two problems in bringing them together. Firstly, the accusation that non-realist theology is, at root, a quietist endeavour. The creative quest which was the reinvention of myself as a religious person which had seemed such an exciting prospect began to look too much like an individualist undertaking. Talk was of individual autonomy, but not much about institutional and structural power and our enmeshment in it. Don’s work in the late 1980s spoke of celebrating self-possession; of a newly born religious subject, blissful and unlimited in its range. His early ethical work valorised the human being as a creator with entrepreneurial drive and flair, someone with the self-confidence and the capacity to conceive and to execute an original work – a bit like art -autonomously.

Secondly, as social justice became the focus of my spiritual practice, and of my career, I sensed an implied realism at its foundation in most theological contexts. To give one example from the feminist theological sphere – how and why do we argue for inclusive language? Philosophically, you can advocate for two very different, some would say diametrically opposed, reasons. If you believe that religion is a human construct and that language is all there is, then one has a particularly acute responsibility to create religious language which is inclusive and non-oppressive if that’s the kind of world you want to build. On the other hand, if you believe that God is ‘out there’ – an objective reality – albeit that God is mysterious and bigger and more complex than we can know, then we need inclusive language to ensure that our God-talk represents an ‘authentic description’ of what God is like. My sense was that Christian feminist gatherings mostly worked from the latter set of assumptions. I was working with the former.

Feminist theology was (and remains) excellent at exploring how boundaries are policed within religious traditions: when is feminist theological work considered to have exceeded the boundaries of what can be called ‘Christian’? Who decides, and what is at stake? But this overwhelming concern with the function of various manifestations of Christianity and Christian teaching can leave questions of substance unaddressed. Take the example of God, for instance. Feminist theology has demonstrated how the God of patriarchal theology is very clearly gendered – very clearly male. And it has shown how this functions in a damaging way (a Mary Daly put is, ‘If God is male then the male is God’). But to question the substance of the nature of God felt like forbidden territory.

There are very good political reasons for leaving questions of substance unaddressed. For non-realism is potentially dangerous, especially in the ethical sphere. Doesn’t justice-making require a foundation of certainty that some things are objectively wrong: not least sexism, but also racism, poverty and all forms of discrimination and economic injustice? If we don’t start from there, where do we start from?

From a feminist perspective I believe we have to start with ‘reality’, by which I mean our lived experience: the ways in which we are restricted by our physical location and our positions within political structures. In the light of this, my question is, how can we overcome our restrictions and expand our possibilities? Non-realist theologies as evidenced by their male theological protagonists are in danger of aiming to speak as non-gendered, non-racialised, that is, disembodied beings who assume unlimited freedom either as a starting point or the ultimate aim. That’s a kind of theology that doesn’t take account of reality, and therefore doesn’t ask or answer my questions as someone limited by society’s constructions of power around my gender and my sexuality, if not around my class and my race.

From the mid 1990s onwards I found it more fruitful to engage with largely ‘secular’ philosophical movements in making sense of all this. Queer theory (as explored, for instance, by Judith Butler in ‘Gender Trouble’) helped by disrupting the ‘necessary connections’ between biological sex, gender constructions, and partner choice, blowing binaries of all kinds out of the proverbial water. This translated, for me, into a way of queering the binaries between ‘having faith’ and ‘losing it’ by problematising the content of belief and the action of believing (see my book ‘Found Out: Transgressive Faith and Sexuality’ for more on this). Butler’s other key move was to introduce the notion of ‘performativity’ – something Don himself explored in ‘Solar Ethics’ – the notion of coming out and putting on a good show. Both thinkers asserted, helpfully, that the human subject does not precede agency and identity, but is constituted by it. In religious terms, I become my faith identity through my spiritual practice. I don’t decide who I am and what I assent to intellectually, then live that out.

And feminist epistemologists like Donna Haraway (see ‘Symians, Cyborgs and Women’) tackled the political problem of subjectivist ethics. Like Don, she asserted that subjectivity is present in all our knowing – like an onion, you keep peeling away layers, but there is no irreducible objective core at the centre. The perceived need for an objective basis for right and wrong is replaced by an arguably more powerful acknowledgement that all of our knowledge is situated. The task is to be accountable for what we do with our own situatedness – especially with regards to how we use our power and privilege.

Running in parallel with these philosophical developments has been the emergence of a plethora of creative, imaginative and embodied contextual theologies. All articulating God-talk from experience. These theologies are liberatory, challenging the largely unhelpful, Greek-influenced dualism of disembodied spirit (good) versus its carrying case, the body (bad). These were feminist, womanist, queer, Black, disabled, neurodivergent, and emerged also from experiences of abuse and trauma, economic dispossession, colonialism and slavery. And as the multiplication of specificities threatened fragmentation, identity politics developed slowly into an awareness of the power of intersectionality (nobody is just one thing, and all oppressions are linked) and the need for solidarity across difference. Through this we gain a fuller and deeper understanding of how oppressive forces (in our contemporary world, chief among them is White supremacist Neo-liberal Capitalism) seek to ‘divide and rule’ in the interests of the global caste of the super-rich.

And what of now? Emerging from our impending global climate catastrophe are post-human and post-activist movements. These challenge Don Cupitt’s (now quite old) focus on the Only Human, whilst also giving an enhanced role for his Solar Ethics. In her book, ‘The Body is a Doorway’, eco-writer Sophie Strand says this, ‘We have believed, for too long, that our minds belong to us as individuals. But advances in everything from forest ecology to microbiology show us we are not siloed selves, but relational networks, built metabolically by our every biome-laced breath, thinking through filamentous connectivity rather than inside one neatly bounded mind…I am not a noun on an empty page. I do nothing alone. I am a syntactical being, strung together by my metabolism and needs and desires to thousands of other beings. Together we are all a household, and every choice we make, whether mundane or explosive, takes place within the networked household of relationships.’ (Kindle pp 207 & 210). This puts Don Cupitt’s heroic individualist narrative in its place. However, in death they share a deep commonality. Strand declares, ‘It seemed to me that when someone died, their body became even more alive, an aliveness that was plural, polyphonous—suddenly an ecosystem of bacteria and fungi and beetles and beings all feasting, decaying, making love, making soil, making connections.’ (Kindle p. 47)

And Don says in his book ‘Impossible Loves’, ‘We are always subject to Chance, and Death is ubiquitous in the sense that everything is slipping and passing away all the time. All life is dying life, timebound, ambiguous, chancy, transient – and yet also, as I have always felt, heart-breakingly beautiful’ (p. 5). And, ‘We must cast ourselves into, and identify ourselves with, the continual passing-away that so terrifies. “Green and dying”, we must learn to live a dying life, and then we will find that, “the more I give, the more I have’”. (p. 6)

Cupitt and Strand share in a moving affirmation of human life is dispersed and in flow, intimately connected with all other networked life forms. This spiritual anthropology is picked up by Bayo Akomolafe whose work puts human aspirations to supremacy and omniscience in their place, ‘The thought that we might one day figure it all out, master the elements, and convene the tides to script the tales of our magnificence shocks the air out of my lungs. I struggle to breathe in the face of such an ideology not merely because it strikes me as troublingly hubristic, but because I am immediately crippled by a claustrophobic sense of capture. By the image of a universe frozen still under the clinical gaze of the human. Nothing hurts me more than the idea that I might inhabit a world so “little”, so flat, so unremarkable, so familiar, so known, so habituated, so conservative, and so without surprise or enchantment.’ (https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/everything-is-just-a-small-part-of-what-im-interested-in).

So we are being newly called to a vision of being spiritual that is not about singular, autonomous beings, but plural networks connected with an infinite number of other networks. We are more Mycelian than we are monad. Our spiritual growth more fungal than fideistic. The Enlightenment Human will not survive the climate crisis. It has brought us the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, both of which are doomed to pass away. We are being invited beyond rationalism into intuitive, embodied ways of becoming and resistance.

Alison Webster is General Secretary of Modern Church, and Mission Theologian in Residence for Citizens UK.

Modern Church members can read more inspired by The Sea of Faith in Modern Believing special issue 65:3