Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Religious Studies
First Advisor
Tonstad, Linn
Abstract
For many contemporary theologians and theorists, the Christian doctrine of salvation is a problem. This is clearly elucidated for today’s context in the anti-social turn in queer theory, or queer negativity. This dissertation develops a Christian soteriology that takes queer negativity’s critiques seriously, without abandoning salvation altogether. Instead, I argue that honesty about the ambivalence that virtually always attends soteriology can allow it to mean and function differently. My attention to queer negativity focuses on the work of Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, and Stephen Best. All three, in different ways, argue that Christian redemptive logics shapes common-sense thinking in the U.S. about one’s relation to history and to politics. Namely: there once existed some better, more whole past, and it is the job of politics to recover or restore that imagined past in the future. The fantasy is that once the lost past is restored, a secular salvific future of social belonging free of conflict or antagonism can finally emerge. But, on Edelman’s account especially, there is always something standing in the way of that wholeness. The figure of the queer (which may look like any number of marginalized identities) occupies the structural position of that obstacle to flourishing. All manner of brutality is excused in the name of eradicating this figure for the salvation of the social body. In short, Christian salvation is reduced in popular and political imagination to a solution to a problem, and as such, authorizes violence for which its perpetrators need not take full ownership. To understand how Christian logics came to inform U.S. political imagination, I argue that one must look to sentimentality, the 19th-century literary form. To an extent still underappreciated in the secondary literature, this genre represents an overt theological intervention in U.S. religiosity—an intervention that generated all kinds of ambivalence around Christian salvation and the racialized, gendered logics that subtend it. I consider this ambivalence in three sites: in the secondary literature around the genre; within the genre itself, via Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar; and in literature in direct conversation with sentimentality, via Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig. The secondary literature on sentimentality is primarily feminist, and I argue that many feminist critics turn to sentimentality as a key site for working out their own ambivalence toward femininity and its salvific associations. A feminist politics that insists on honesty about this ambivalence, and refuses attempts to transcend it, serve as a guide for my readings of The Gates Ajar and Our Nig. The final chapter turns to Julian of Norwich, a theologian thoroughly associated with the sentimental. Rather than resist this association, I consider what it is about Julian that attracts and challenges a culture formed by sentimental thought and institutions. I argue that she offers a soteriology that confronts how two major sentimental themes—suffering and human difference/belonging—make salvation’s ambivalence not a problem to be solved, but a condition for theological thought. Considering Julian’s and Harriet Wilson’s ambivalent soteriologies together, I conclude that salvation can offer a way of living with suffering and difference, rather than serving merely as a solution to them, and in so doing can function as a check against redemptive logics that authorize violence in the name of the fantasy of social wholeness.
Recommended Citation
Griffin, Amanda, "The Ambivalence of Salvation: On Sentimentality, Suffering, and Redemption" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1350.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1350
