Lyz Lenz | Vox

The long shadow of “hot Jesus”

2019-09-12T11:08:12-04:00

The temptation of Hot Jesus. | Zac Freeland/Vox; Getty Images

In the dark church, rows of people raise their hands to the ceiling, murmuring the name of Jesus. Yes, Jesus. Yes, Lord. Come into me, Jesus.

Bodies pulse and the band plays “Spirit of the Living God.” The chorus is chanted more than sung: “Melt me. Mold me. Fill me. Use me. Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on me.”

Sweaty desire for the lord fills this converted warehouse of a nondenominational church, where a handsome pastor will use intimate analogies to remind everyone to give everything over to the lord, their hearts, minds, and bodies. “Give it all to the man who gave it all to you,” he will preach as an image of Jesus appears on the two screens that wing out from the stage.

Jesus in this image is Jim Caviezel from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Bloodied and beaten, his heaving muscular body is stripped naked and he hangs exposed on the cross. His face is contorted in pain, ecstasy, and submission.

This is Sunday. Jesus is our desire.

The Passion of the Christ, 2004. | Philippe Antonello/Icon Distribution Inc." data-portal-copyright="Philippe Antonello/Icon Distribution Inc." />

The Jesus of my youth was hot. Everywhere I went to church — which I did every week without fail from birth to 18 in Baptist, nondenominational, and evangelical churches in Texas, South Dakota, and Minnesota — his face was depicted in Bibles and wall prints as white and hypermasculine, strong jaw, soft eyes, flowing hair that always seemed to be in movement from some invisible force. Probably the Holy Spirit. The Jesus of my youth had perfect skin and the large, capable hands of a carpenter. This was to whom I was to surrender. When thoughts of sin would overpower me, I would think upon the name of the lord and he would come into me, and I would be saved.

I was 10 when I first understood that sexual desire was sinful. Sitting in the living room, listening to my lessons on cassettes my mom had purchased at a Christian homeschooling conference. They were a series of lectures given by a homeschooling family of 20 children. The oldest daughter talked about how she often looked at handsome men in church and wondered which ones would be good husbands. “But that’s sinful,” I remember her saying. “My job is not to desire; my job is just to be a woman of God, and if I’m faithful, he will give me the desires of my heart.”

Four years later, when I had a huge crush on a blond boy at my church, who later told my friend Jenny, who told me, that I was too much of a nerd to like, I wrote in my journal, “This is what I get from focusing on boys instead of God.” What I should have written was, “This is what I get for wanting, for needing, for desiring.” In the faith I was raised in, there was no room for my hunger.

“Have thine own way, Lord,” we sang in church, a hymn of devotion yielding our bodies to the lord as the clay yields to the potter. Our devotion to God was physical, it was intimate. Our bodies were temples to the Holy Spirit, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:6, which is in us.

This belief was made manifest with a purity ring. My parents gave me the ring when I was 16. Made of Black Hills gold, a flimsy pale material, bent into the shape of a heart adorned with a pink and green metal leaf, this was my purity ring. It was a symbol that God owned my body and would possess it and I would stay a virgin until I married. This was the protection against my sin. The ring was part of a wider cultural movement begun as the “True Love Waits” campaign and picked up by many smaller organizations. Pop stars like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears sported purity rings at one time or another. We didn’t discuss it. Purity was just assumed, and we didn’t question it.

But at 16, sin was my desire. Sin was the thrill of my body when a boy brushed my arm, when he smiled, when I felt his heat against me in the darkness of the high school gym. Sin was the vibration of my body when he sat next to me on the bus on the way home from debate trips, his leg sometimes touching my leg. Sin was me living for every touch, but praying forgiveness for wanting.

Hot Jesus as theology

Love is a foundational Christian theological principle. In particular, the Bible talks about our love for God in the same breath as it talks about our love for neighbor, God’s love of humanity and our love of him. The Old Testament book Song of Songs tells the story of the desire between two lovers. It’s a passionate book full of metaphors about drinking the nectar of their bodies.

A popular Christian interpretation of the book is that it is about Christ’s love for his community. (Christ is the male lover, while the church the female.) Another interpretation is that it’s about Christ’s relationship with the individual soul. Which would mean that in this verse, from Song of Songs, “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies,” Christ is literally and weirdly talking about my boobs. And how I was supposed to feel about this was never made clear.

St. Augustine wrote that because humans are made of desire, our desires can be redirected toward God. Ancient theologians like Origen, Plotinus, and Gregory of Nyssa described the church and Christ as bride and groom locked in a relationship of pain, yearning, and bliss.

But the people for whom the passion for Christ was the most important were the female mystics. While researching the history of Christianity for my book on faith and politics, I learned that in medieval Christianity, women were excluded from higher education and church leadership, and female mystics sought oneness with God by seeking revelations and visions from the Lord. They did this by swearing off worldly indulgences and seeking to experience the suffering of Jesus. They claimed to feel the nails of the cross and experienced stigmata, and each pain was their joyous release.

Locked in a patriarchal system that condemned their bodies and regulated their passions, erotic religious desire became a vehicle to communicate the subversive longings of the flesh justified in the religious passion for Christ. “Human passion is the reflection of divine passion,” said Andrew Greeley, the Catholic priest who often wrote about sex as a sacrament and an expression of communion with the lord.

Mechthild of Magdeburg, a medieval mystic in the 13th century, wrote of Christ as her “most intimate rest, my deepest longing, a stream for my passion.”

St. Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century nun, shared her ecstatic visions in writing that pulses with erotic imagination and desire. In her book The Mansions, she describes being visited by an angel who penetrates her repeatedly with a golden spear, pulling out her entrails, filling her with the love of God. “The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God,” she explains.

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When I first read about St. Teresa in college, I laughed. It seemed so obvious the conflation of love and sex and the divine, and the fetishization of Jesus. My sophomore year, my friends and I went on a retreat to a monastery with our honors class and stayed up writing stories about the mystics and their passions. We would not be the first to conflate the sacred with the profane.

Hot Jesus isn’t just a modern phenomenon; artists have been reveling in the body of the lord for centuries. Art critic Leo Steinberg observed an obsession with Jesus’s genitals in Renaissance paintings. In contrast to Byzantine art, Renaissance art often depicts Jesus as an adult and as a baby fully nude, genitals hanging out. Some artists even painted Jesus rising from the tomb with an erection, giving a very different meaning to the hymn “Up from the Grave He Arose.” A famous example of this is the work of painter Maerten van Heemskerck. The Catholic theologian and Jesuit priest John W. O’Malley noted that putting the genitals of Jesus on display emphasized his humanness.

Man of Sorrows by Maerten van Heemskerck depicts Christ after the crucifixion attended by angels. Some art historians claim the loincloth is wrapped around an erection symbolizing his resurrection and continuing power. | Wikimedia" data-portal-copyright="Wikimedia" />

It’s quite a contrast: the sublimated spiritual ecstasy of women and the full humanity of Jesus. It is his body and his blood we worship. His humanness is a necessary part of Christian theology. But the humanity of women is not. Some Catholics argue for Mary’s perpetual virginity, noting that no man ever touched her. The theory of perpetual virginity roots Mary’s holiness on the denial of her sexuality. But for Jesus, the embrace of his holy experience is the embrace of his body.

It’s supposed to be this way. A woman’s desire, her pleasure, the full experience of her body, has never found a comfortable home in Christianity. It’s easier to divide and conquer than allow a woman to be full and complete.

Hot Jesus tamed

During the Counter-Reformation, reformers covered up genitalia in religious art and chopped off the penises. Christianity split into factions. No longer dominated by Catholicism, Christianity became a lot more complicated, but the eroticism of Jesus has remained constant. In modern cinema, Jesus is played by Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, and Ewan McGregor. Clothed or not, hot Jesus dominates our imaginations with his Brad Pitt-like face. He is fully embodied, cross fit, his ripped abs on full display on Calvary.

Last Days in the Desert, 2015. | Gilles Mingasson/Broad Green Pictures" data-portal-copyright="Gilles Mingasson/Broad Green Pictures" />

Clothed, his eroticism is transmuted through our Puritan ethic — but it’s there in the music.

Many gospel songs, with their swaying rhythms, speak of needing Jesus, wanting Jesus, and how he watches us and loves us in return. So many of R&B’s most sensual singers began in gospel churches. And where did that longing, that desire come from, if not from the desire, pulsing, sweating, in our pews?

Christian crossover hits tend to be songs that are supposed to be about Jesus but could just as easily be about a man. “Baby, baby,” sang Amy Grant, a Christian pop singer popular in the ’80s and ’90s, “I’m taken with the notion, to love you with the sweetest of devotion.” Currently, Christian artist Lauren Daigle has a crossover hit titled “You Say” about a person in conflict who feels one thing but is told another: “You say I am strong, when I say I am weak,” she sings with her voice that sounds so much like the pop star Adele. The official music video for this song shows Daigle singing solo in a room as sunlight washes over her. The “You” in the song is a benevolent God, who gives her hope; on YouTube, Daigle looks like yet another woman dressed up as a doll on strings, caressed by a puppet master. “You say I am loved, when I don’t feel a thing.”

Jesus comes to us. He lives in us. He fills us up. I have to plug my nose in churches so I don’t snort-laugh when earnest men sensually strum guitars and croon about wanting the spirit of the lord to fall upon them. Or rooms full of teens shout an orgasmic, “Yes, Lord, yes Lord, yes, yes, Lord! Amen!” They think they are thinking of Jesus, but it feels more like they are thinking of sex. I want to laugh because the distance between the two is so small, it’s almost unholy.

The Jesus I was raised to want with all my spiritual and sexual desire was a white body. A male body. A heterosexual body (although he does travel in packs of 12 men). What if the body of Jesus isn’t the body you want? These depictions of Jesus, the instructions that he is the only correct outlet for human desire, further sublimate desire when it falls outside these parameters. Queer bodies, bodies of color, trans bodies — those are not the bodies given to us by Catholic churches or white evangelical churches.

Hot Jesus and me

In graduate school, a gay friend got excited when he found out I was raised Baptist.

“Is sex really hot?” he asked.

We were drunk in a bar in Cambridge. I was away from my husband, finishing my master’s degree in fiction. I never wrote about sex. Paul leaned close into me. “I heard when you grow up religious, the sex is good because it feels transgressive.”

He was excited, and I spun my wedding ring on my finger, the one that had replaced the purity ring. By the time I had gone to college, I’d tried to lose my purity, but I had no courage and no takers. Later, I’d lose all rings. Later, I would allow myself to be a body, fleshy and needy and complicated. But then, I was 25 and I didn’t even know the limits of my imagination.

I took a long drink of my Dark and Stormy. How could I tell him about sin and holiness and about the condemnation of my body — both a holy temple and an ungodly temptation? How my very skin was sin and how I’d been trying my whole life to separate myself from the thing that held me? How could I say all of this with this rum in my hands and hot Jesus looking on from somewhere in my heart?

So I just winked, and we laughed the most unholy laugh.

Lyz Lenz is a contributing writer to the Columbia Journalism Review. Her new book God Land was just published. She lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with her two children and two cats.

Move back to your dying hometown. Unless you can’t.

2019-04-08T11:08:51-04:00

A sunset over a cornfield. | Todd Ryburn Photography / Getty Images

Cedar Rapids is the second-largest city in Iowa, right after the capital, Des Moines. But here, as in anywhere in Iowa, you are never more than five minutes from a cornfield.

It can feel so small. But this closeness can be a comfort. I’ve lived in the middle of America my whole life, growing up in Texas, then moving to South Dakota, Minnesota, and finally to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I’ve lived for 14 years. I can walk into a restaurant on a Friday night and see any number of friends. My neighbors watch my house while I’m gone. I know that if I get sick or injured, someone will bring me a tater tot casserole.

A recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled “Move to your dying hometown,” told the story of a writer moving from Portland, Oregon, back to a small town of 14,000 people in central Minnesota where her grandmother was from. The writer, Michele Anderson, who is a white cis woman, argues that becoming a “homecomer” is part of a sustainable lifestyle that rejects the culture of chasing empty status and upward mobility of cities. “My work felt trivial and temporary,” Anderson writes about her career in Portland.

This article is one example of a larger narrative that fetishizes return as a way to revive America’s “dwindling” rural communities. In March of 2017, JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, wrote a similar op-ed extolling the virtues of moving back to Middle America. Like Anderson, Vance implies that his decision isn’t just good for him, but good for America. “Those of us who are lucky enough to choose where we live would do well to ask ourselves, as part of that calculation, whether the choices we make for ourselves are necessarily the best for our home communities — and for the country,” writes Vance. Living in the heart of America, they both argue, is the kind of noble choice that could bridge our nation’s deep divides.

But who is allowed to “move back?” Vance, like Anderson, is writing as a white cis person. For bodies that don’t belong — the queer, trans, disabled, person of color, or immigrant body — the close, tight-knit community that the Midwest prides itself on can be more isolating than uniting. It can mean violence, fear, and exhaustion.

The story of who leaves a place is just as important as the story of who stays.

Who’s allowed to “go home”

Much has been made of the outward migration from small towns in the Midwest to bigger cities. While urban counties are growing at the national rate of 13 percent, half of America’s rural counties now have fewer residents now than they did in 2000. And this loss is hitting small communities in the Midwest particularly hard, where there are often more deaths than births, and a large amount of out migration.

Even urban counties here, such as Cook County, Illinois, Wayne County, Michigan, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, have experienced more population loss than their coastal counterparts. But most of these losses are focused in areas that used to be farming communities, where corporations and trade wars have devastated land-based economies. It’s easy to look at this problem and see it as one that can simply be solved with some goodwill and a moving truck. But it’s not that simple.

I originally moved to Cedar Rapids in the summer of 2005 for a relationship. When I got here, there were no free-standing Starbucks, and that fact alone made me cry — not because I particularly enjoyed Starbucks coffee, but because it felt to me like a marker of civilization.

Years later when we divorced, that Midwestern town closeness was a godsend. When I moved into my new home with two children in tow, a couple of beds, and very little money, the father of a friend brought over a brand new chair just because he heard I needed furniture. My therapist grew up with my neighbor, whose ex-wife was my friend, and whose lawyer is now my friend, and whose new wife is also my friend. And yes, they all know my doctor somehow.

In both of their essays, Vance and Anderson seem shocked that they have made comfortable, fulfilling homes in small towns that provide more of a sense of belonging than the coastal cities where they once lived. Their writing idealizes Middle America as a place that encourages community. But it’s not shocking that Vance and Anderson fit into Middle American cities as cis white people.

In reporting out my book, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America, I talked to many queer Midwesterners who told me stories of cruelty and bullying in their hometowns. Leaving allowed them to find safety and relationships. Matt Anderson, a gay man who talked to me about his experience growing up in Indiana, spoke of abuse, silence, and religious exclusion.

People of color told me that they often find themselves feeling like the only black person in town, bearing the weight of systematic racism. Only 20 percent of the LGBTQ population lives in rural areas, and they often find themselves isolated and targeted for slurs and violence, and are often afraid to come out to their doctors. Disabled people struggle with lack of public transportation, access, and support. While there are very racially diverse cities in the Midwest, rural counties only share 4 percent of America’s immigrant populations. To put it another way, 79 percent of rural populations are majority white. And this didn’t happen by accident.

To pretend that the segregation of our country is some sort of choice made by liberals who reside in liberal bubbles and really love avocado toast is to ignore the deeply racist origins of our cities. Sundown towns, so named because black people were not allowed there after sundown, practiced enforced segregation. These cities exist all over the United States, even in the Midwest, where they still carry the prejudice of their history into the 21st century.

In a recent tweet, Julie Rogers, a queer Christian and activist, observed, “Growing up in Texas and moving in evangelical spaces, I didn’t know much anxiety I carried in my body. I wasn’t aware of the depth of insecurity I felt in routine social interactions, always [self-conscious] about my clothes being too gay or my posture seeming too lezzy.” Rogers explains that just living in a place where others like her are visible has given her a confidence and lightness of existence she didn’t know was possible.

Who lives in a town is just as important as who moved away. And people deserve to live in spaces where they can walk down the street in their bodies and not worry about death or harassment, or at least know that if those things happen, they will be safe and find help. Not everybody can live in Middle America, just as not everybody can live in a city — America still needs farmers, ranchers, and all the land-based occupations, after all. To presume that the vitality of urban life comes at the cost of rural America is an oversimplification of a deeper problem.

This logic also sets up the divide in America as a strawman argument: We can solve it if only we just get along, as a popular Kenny Chesney song so glibly puts it. But the lived experience of “getting along” is only simple if you code as belonging: If you are white, if you are middle class, if you are cis-gendered.

Middle America defies labels

Vance and Anderson and others are often gamely shocked to find good food and culture in small cities in the Midwest, as if we have just been here farming and voting Republican and doing nothing else. And of course, all of Middle America is not a land teeming with prejudice and rage. Many of the states here have histories of progressive policies and politics, such as Wisconsin, which until Scott Walker’s terms as governor had a rich history of electing pro-labor union politicians.

But it is not a bucolic region of Jello salad and family values either. Fetishizing Middle America, and ignoring its complications, does no one any favors. Middle America is a dissonant space, pulled between the extremes of the coast. We have the reputation of being a moderating, milquetoast place, full of bland casseroles, and passive-aggressive assurances that we are fine. In the more elegant words of the Dar Williams song, “We don’t like to make our passions other people’s concerns.”

But to believe so fully in the bland passivity and unity of Middle America is to miss a more dissonant reality. Iowa was the third state in the country to legalize gay marriage, but also continues to reelect a bigoted man to Congress, Steve King. Places like Worthington, Minnesota, and Racine, Wisconsin, and Perry, Iowa, are deeply diverse, while each of those cities went for Trump in the last election.

Additionally, the “death” of small towns are often a result of the loss of farming and ag-based occupations, rather than some sort of liberal inclination to move closer to a Starbucks. As a single mom and a writer living in the second-largest city in Iowa, I struggle to find jobs. I worked four different jobs in town, before the 2008 floods and the recession caused massive layoffs. After that, I had few options, and my move to freelance was more of a necessity than a choice.

And is it a great place to raise kids? Maybe, but we are closing eight elementary schools in the next few years.

It’s easy enough to tell people to move back, it’s much harder to help them find a life, a job, and a sense of belonging once they get here. And often, those things are a facet of privilege in small towns where everyone knows everyone.

Where I live in Iowa, the land seems expansive. But the openness is a deception. I know that the places before me are filled with crops, commerce, fear, and expectation. The silence here is not an empty space, but one that is filled with expectations unsaid. The politics of our national divide are far more complicated than an American disavowal of our agrarian roots.

And narratives that presume that white people moving back to white spaces will solve a national identity problem ignore the realities of the racism, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism that exist across America. You cannot bridge America’s divide with bodies.

But the question of building bridges across America a fallacy in and of itself. The brokenness of America is something I feel acutely. I divorced an evangelical Trump supporter in the wake of the election. I had tried to make it work, compromising and bending my body over a divide too large for me to reach across. The moment I gave up was the moment I found relief.

I still live here in what is the opposite of a liberal bubble. I love it here. But I am not blind to the complications of this place. For some, the problems of America can’t be fixed with a moving truck or just by being “nicer.”

I no longer believe in bridges. I don’t even believe in fixing our divide. Instead, what I believe is that we need to together stare deep into the gaping hole in our country and have an honest discussion about the cracks in our nation. Which, by the way, has always been divided — it’s just that for too many of us, we were blinded to it by our privilege.

This essay is adapted from God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America.

Lyz Lenz is a contributing writer to the Columbia Journalism Review. Her book God Land will be published on August 1, 2019. She lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with her two children and two cats.

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