The whole argument of queer theory basically boils down to, if we can eradicate the idea of the “good” or “healthy” or “normal” as a distinctive category, then none of us will have to suffer under the burden of being bad or unhealthy or abnormal. And that will free us from the psychological burden of that understanding, and that will make us good, healthy, and normal. Finit.

This burden, the burden of judgment, is a terrible burden our species carries. It is the burden of the concept of sin, of missing the mark, a burden that no other creature carries. They may have to live with the consequences of mistakes or disease or a lack of health and development, but they don’t have to know it or think about it. They don’t have to take any responsibility for it. If you know enough to be able to conceptualize the idea of health or normativity or hitting the intended mark, then you can conceptualize disease and abnormality and missing it. And because life is a mess, and so are we, you’re going to think about it a lot and suffer a lot.

If you have any idea of righteousness, any standard or aspiration, you immediately set up a qualifying test for sin. So some things, and some people, inevitably move toward the center while others are forced to the fringe. And if the standard is high, then most people are struggling toward it, laboring under the burden and compulsion of either guilt (if they’re moving away) or aspiration (if they’re moving toward it). And religions help us codify and deal with this issue, the issue of what goodness, health, and righteousness are, and therefore what badness, disease, and sin are. They help us understand and manage the problem of sin and responsibility that consciousness and a sense of choice and purpose and value hierarchies generate.

Because we are aware, we can see different possible ways of being. Because we can act, we must choose a way of being. Because outcomes diverge, not all ways of being will seem equally worth pursuing. Because we diverge and because we can choose, not everyone and everything will attain that way of being. And if it is elevated, which it is likely to be, it will be hard for most of us to attain or maintain. And that is hard. If we have any ideal, then we risk failing to attain it. And our very nature as conscious agents seems to make choosing an ideal inescapable.

Queerness solves that problem by positing an identity without an essence. A universal righteousness with no innate nature. And so what once would have been considered deviance or corruption or the violation of innocence becomes a means to freedom, a blow against the tyranny of conscience, a deconstruction of any fixed normative identity.

By abolishing righteousness as a standard you can no longer identify sin. If you cannot identify sin, then everyone is righteous. It’s a fairly complex argument for solving a very simple problem people have been dealing with through all of human history. In this sense, then, queerness is performing rhe function of a religious system or ritual. It’s goal is a cleansing of the burden of human guilt and sense of sin, which is a universal problem.

The heaven it promises, where sin is gone from the world, still lies in an unreachable future state for the moment (for many reasons, it’s hard to abolish the value hierarchy altogether), but that’s ok. This theory also has a way of dealing with the burden of sin in the temporal moment, by reallocating it and transferring it to an acceptable receptacle in the present. The thing in which sin can be vested and which can be continually sacrificed as a method of cleansing in the present fallen world. It’s sounds strange, but this is a longstanding and very effective psychological strategy. It is how we manage the burden of sin in the present and move toward our idealized state. It is a symbolic affirmation and ritualistic embodiment of our participation in our value framework.

That sacrifice, under queer theory, is our cisnormativity, our toxic masculinity, our internalized misogyny, our homophobia, our transphobia, our white supremacy, etc. These can all be brought into the public square and sacrificed in the view of the people under the watchful eye of the priests of the society. Those who interpret and teach the law, who hand out judgments and penalties to violators and distribute honors and demonstrate the proper rituals for righteousness. And we can identify the unrighteous, the heretics, and the unsaved. Those who haven’t been reached yet and who live in ignorance of the evil they serve, and those who knowingly and willingly maintain it. Converting one brings you closer to heaven, and combating the other brings heaven closer to you.

A good religion needs to do all these things: posit an elevated heavenly state to aspire to, establish a sinful state to avoid (these two making value and action possible and coherent), provide a way to deal with and ritually confront and relieve the burden of sin in the present while moving toward the heavenly future, establish a basis an authoritative and priestly class (those who help or inspire or provide judgment and criticism on the journey), provide a way to identify who is part of the fold and who isn’t (who is helping move the world toward heaven, who is ignorant, and who is working to prevent heaven).

The need to deal with sin and guilt isn’t some invention of one particular religion. It is the burden of universal hunanity humanity. It’s a necessary effect of our consciousness. All the most essential representational concepts in religion, as well as all the essential ritualistic behaviors of religion, are psychologically necessary. They’re emergent from human reality as it is. They are always present. The only question, as a postmodernist might say, is, how are you embodying them, how are you enacting them? This is what we do.

And that makes queer theory much more comprehensible, once you can see what it really is and what it’s trying to do, beyond all the jingoistic theological obscurantism. It can be set alongside other similar things to itself and compared as a theoretical structure. We can see what questions and issues it is actually addressing, what its aims are, what its core conceptions of key concepts are, and evaluate it alongside its competitors.

It’s a stealth religion. A non-theistic religion, which isn’t anything new. Such religions almost always degenerate over time into a kind of neo-paganism, though, as the natural tendency to idolatry and to fetishize certain aspects of the ideology, particular values, and their avatars takes hold. That’s why we’ve got all these rituals and iconography in Buddhism centered around a divinization of Buddha that makes little sense in the context of the actual teachings of Buddha. The tendency to ritualize and idolize is just too strong.

Whatever the basis for your religious philosophy is, the most natural course of all such psychological and social phenomena is toward the common features of the perennial philosophy, paganism, as Aldous Huxley called it. That why every culture everywhere ended up with something that we call or recognize as religion, because it takes certain familiar forms and uses certain familiar representational concepts, despite the enormous divergence in people, places, ideas, theories, context, language, technology, and custom. It’s all wildly different, and yet it is all so very much the same. And we are a silly people if we think that we are any different.