Ducking the Question: Bodily Semiotics

The recent Duck Dynasty controversy exposed fault lines and tensions in America deeper than a rhubarb over reality TV. It exposed the moral deficiency of sexual essentialism in our culture, and the totalitarian impulse that emerges from it.

Under the uproar lies a largely unaddressed question: Can American popular culture today, in its often McCarthy-like search for “homophobes,” recognize that traditional Christianity involves a different semiotics of the body, and thus anthropology and cosmology of family, than secular materialism; a semiotics which need not involve malice or “phobia”?

To put it another way, can American culture, with its paranoid style of politics famously identified by the historian Richard Hofstadter, tolerate such authentic cultural difference?

Semiotics involves the making of meaning in a culture, the meaningfulness needed for sustainability, diversity, and social justice, which ostensibly form the key ideas in our new “secular natural law.”

But the farce of a reality TV character—Duck Dynasty “patriarch” Phil Robertson—highlighting a new reverse-totalitarianism in American culture wars shows the absence of serious intellectual dialogue on this issue.

As probably everyone in America knows (more than many do about more serious international and domestic news), Robertson voiced in an interview a hedonistic and mechanistically deterministic view of homosexuality. Many understandably took exception to the following:

It seems like, to me, a vagina— as a man— would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer…. But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man.

What was ironic in the ensuing controversy was that the underlying hedonistic and materially deterministic themes in the above quote also are used often to justify the current campaign against traditional marriage, in criticism of the views of traditional Christians.

Similarly, when Robertson went on to say that God can forgive all manner of sinners, whether homosexuals, drunks, or terrorists, it was understandable why such a list also was offensive to many.

Yet such comparisons also are made by “anti-homophobes,” linking Christians to violent fanatics and irrational addicts because of Christians’ different anthropology of family.

Still, that wasn’t all that Robertson said in the interview. He went on to give a close paraphrase from a letter by the Apostle Paul. Paul’s Christian teachings are neither hedonistic nor mechanistically deterministic, although they struck many of today’s biblically and theologically illiterate Americans as harsh in the context of the interview.

Robertson did talk about the need to be non-judgmental, amplifying as much further in a later follow-up statement. But the Orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher rightly noted that Robertson’s articulation of a Christian perspective on sex wanted for a dialogue with practicing traditional Christians struggling with same-sex attraction.

In any case, consideration of a Christian semiotics of the body, as both anthropological and cosmological but not moralistic, was lost even before the start of the controversy.

Traditional Christianity rejects socially constructed gender and sexual identities, whether homosexual, heterosexual, or other. It embraces an integrated human identity in the image and likeness of God, while recognizing the embodied human experience of sex in ascetic incarnationalism. Male and female in embodied form iconographically symbolize the relation between God and His Church. Kathryn Ringrose noted the following of Christian Byzantium, the longest-running Christian society in history:

As Michel Foucault has so ably shown, we must not assume that other societies operate using our categories…. In Byzantine society, gender categories were determined in ways that remind one of some American Indian societies in the nineteenth century in which the primary determinants of gender were social roles and conventions dictating external appearances, physical mannerisms, facial expressions, and manner of dress. While their inability to procreate was part of the construct, their sexual preferences, although sometimes discussed by innuendo, were not.

She also describes how Byzantine culture expressed a “single-sex” rather than a binary-sex structure, nonetheless related to the two biological sexes, following from Genesis, and using the category of “eunuch” to describe ascetics as well as the physically impaired.

Queer theory indeed comes closer in some respects to traditional Christian culture of sex than America’s essentializing identity politics. The lesbian feminist Camille Paglia declared during the recent controversy that, “What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” criticizing what she called a bourgeois denial of the biological differences between men and women. Paglia decried, additionally, what she calls a Stalinist-like New Sexism in twenty-first-century American technocracy. She argued that this New Sexism, seeking to erase bodily difference, results in extreme essentializing and objectifying of self and others, especially with its dissidents. It is as if the attempt to erase biological reality intensifies a neo-Victorian need for coercive denial: “Get out the smelling salts, there is a different point of view, and it’s based in physicality!”

Below the fault line lay two very different cultures of bodily symbolism—an embodied and outer-oriented Christian one, and a more interiorized and technologically enabled identity politics, reflecting consumerism. The traditional view largely has lacked a vocabulary to express itself in contemporary public discourse (witness Robertson’s remarks), or awareness of its own intellectual, ascetic, and symbolic history. It is as if Christians in America have become the rural pagans of the late Roman Empire, and secularist elites the priests of a new state religion. Yet the traditional view in many ways is more cosmopolitan, expressive of cultures around the world, ranging from Tibetan Buddhism to Orthodox Judaism, not only Christian ones.

Sexual identity politics today from a traditional Christian standpoint merely multiplies essentialist and objectified views of self and other, whether heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, bisexual, polyamorous, and so on. The Christian model is not only closer to queer theory, but to Charles Peirce’s semiotic view of self as formed in symbolic relationships including with the other—the biological—rather than Ferdinand de Saussure’s interiorized and binarized sense of semiotics.

The formation of sexual attraction is complex, including genetic, physical, environmental, personal, cultural, and social factors. This makes it hard to come up with a focused figure for the percentage of the population that is homosexual. Estimates of male homosexuals in the U.S. vary widely, from 2 percent (CDC) upward to 6 or beyond. Comprehensive studies found decreases in numbers of teenage boys reporting same-sex attraction as they age. The epigenetic quality of the mind complicates genetics. And there are grave ethical reservations to any simple deterministic view of sex.

Christians do need to recognize that complex factors forming sexual attraction can and often do take an involuntary form. But secularists need to recognize that those factors also often make traditional anthropology involuntary in the same sense. Children in traditional cultures in the West face severe stress regarding their anthropology and cosmology of sex, in the face of those seeking in effect to eradicate their sexual identities.

For example, one multicultural staffer on our campus described the situation of practicing Christians there as “pigeonholed,” “socially unaccepted,” and “ridiculed by students and faculty.” Recently a student told me of his own personal stress, affecting academic performance, resulting from such anti-Christian culture on campus (he also is a member of a racial minority and from another country). One administrator cavalierly responded that such students perhaps should “go to a Bible college,” effectually blaming the students.

Nor is it just students experiencing this. A conservative Anabaptist colleague (who dresses in Amish-like garb because of his faith) and I were publicly accosted at a restaurant near campus by two colleagues recently. One taunted my unusually garbed friend for being socially isolated. The other stood up and yelled, as I was arriving, that the restaurant should be cleared because I would “kill all gays and heretics.” All this because of our traditional Christian beliefs, not because we are haters or homophobes, which we are not. And these were faculty.

Coming from an Eastern Orthodox Christian background, only two degrees from the massive persecution of those of our faith in the secularist gulags of the twentieth century, such experiences (of which there are many more examples) evoke trauma. By some counts the number of those who died exceeded the Holocaust, both acts by anti-traditional, secular regimes. Nor is this only in the recent past. Christianity today globally is the most violently persecuted of world religions.

In twenty-first-century America, such persecution has been mainly “symbolic,” involving social exile rather than violence. But it becomes extremely psychologically hurtful for young people, given that social exile in a technocracy means effective erasure as a person on the bureaucratic meritocracy’s own terms. Such young people are confronted with what essentially is a form of cultural genocide targeting the family anthropology in which they were formed. The result can be devastating.

Approaching the New American Sexism as a confrontation of different cultures of semiotics won’t remove the stress. But it may open up room for some mutual understanding, if not agreement. This would involve Christians leaving behind an inappropriately moralistic mode of discussion for a cosmological and anthropological one, while providing secularists with an opportunity to practice what they preach on diversity and social justice.