Summary

This chapter has demonstrated the operationalisation of power within institutional contexts, and the extent to which religious organisations operate as “total institutions” (Goffman, 1961). While much of the chapter has focused on Christian institutions, we have also emphasised that religions do not act in isolation but also contribute to broader sexuality discourses, in conjunction with other societal institutions, and even supporting the arms of the state. Indeed, although the relationship between states and religious organisations is complex and contextual, it is clear that in many examples, each has supported the other, with dominant discourses often promoting the powerful censure of individuals. Therefore, when considering the institutional context of a religious tradition, this is mediated with other social institutions, and impacted by the religious tradition’s status vis-à-vis the state. Yet the continued knowledge emerging of religious institutional harms perpetuated has led to a loss of credibility as a moral authority. This corresponds with major shifts in attitudes towards gender and queer rights in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, so that religions are constituted as forces for harm in sexual lives, and religions become dominantly framed as sex-negative. Although the implications of this negativity are well-founded, it can let secular institutions “off the hook”, so that emancipatory potential is premised in secular terms. Yet, as the examples of those seeking asylum show, secular institutions too promote harms and injustices to those at the edges of societal belonging. Meanwhile, beyond the West, in other countries historically impacted by colonialism and trying to cultivate new national identities in neocolonial contexts, the promotion of queer-positive rhetoric is deemed inherently Western, and against the principles of the nation. This generates new discourses aligned with conservatism and buttressed through religious teachings so that queer people living in such contexts are denied a space in the nation state, and are instead subject to harassment, imprisonment, and even death. But religion is a complex resource, and although many examples surface of its alignment with conservative causes, there do remain instances where religious narratives are used to contest the dominant discourses in operation.