Doctor Who, Gayness, and the Church

I’ve recently finished the most recent series of Doctor Who, series fourteen (or ‘Season One’ as our new benevolent overlords at Disney+ are styling it.) It’s pretty fun, by the way. I can recommend it for light watching¹.

There’s a few discussion points coming out of that series that would be worth dwelling on. But I’ve been particularly thinking about the schizophrenic attitude the series has taken to Christianity, along with how gay this series is: and what these two themes might fit together, to give us something important to say about Jesus Christ, being gay, and the universe.

The Doctor’s schizophrenic relationship with Christianity

First, let’s look at that schizophrenic attitude to Christianity I mentioned.

The series ticks up an impressive tally of explicit or strongly implicit references to Christian beliefs and morals, and none of them are positive.

In episode 3, Boom, the far-future Anglican church has become an army, with the ranks of the clergy becoming equivalent to arms-bearing ranks in the soldiery. The Doctor claims that ‘the Church’ has been an army for most of its history², and that his companion Ruby Sunday (and therefore us) has been living in a ‘blip’. An all-powerful arms company has tricked the Church into fighting a non-existent foe in order to keep them buying weapons. The Doctor attributes their ability to fall for such a deception to religious faith:

I mean, most armies would notice that they were fighting smoke and shadows, but not this lot, Ruby, you know why? They have faith. Faith! The magic word that keeps you never having to think for yourself.

In episode 4, 73 Yards, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, head of UNIT, makes this offhand comment, suggesting the oft-repeated claim that all religion is founded in credulity³:

That’s what we do, all of us. We see something inexplicable, and invent the rules to make it work. Mankind saw the sun rise and created God: or we saw the arrival of a Sontaran, one or the other.

In episode 5, Dot and Bubble, The Doctor is rejected by the people he is trying to save. They rant that he is ‘not one of us’, call his claims about the TARDIS ‘magic’ and ‘voodoo’, and in the same breath assert that it is their ‘God-given duty to maintain the standards of Finetime’ (their space colony).

In episode 6, Rogue, a party of murderous aliens turns up at an upper-class Georgian dance party and demand to be married. The priest denies them, not on the grounds that they are unrepentant murderers with obviously no intention of taking their marriage vows seriously, but on the grounds that they are ‘creatures from hell’, ie ‘you don’t look like us’⁴.

There are other references to Christianity here and there which are, in themselves, neutral or ambiguous. This adds to the sense that Christianity is an important theme for the series.

But the message is clear. It’s consistently drilled in: Christian beliefs and morals are stupid and bigoted.

And yet, when the series culminates in its epic two-part finale, the story is plastered wall-to-wall with Christ-like imagery. It transpires that the Doctor has unwittingly been acting as an ‘Angel of Death’ by carrying the invisible God of Death, Sutekh, on his TARDIS, infecting everyone he goes near with the curse of death. Finally, through one of his children, the curse is unleashed, and everyone in the universe is given over to death. Even in death, they continue to suffer, and one of the characters describes themselves as being in ‘hell’. The Doctor battles Sutekh face-to-face and defeats him. Sutekh becomes one of the only creatures which The Doctor, usually a staunch pacifist, can bring himself to kill. Then, the whole world is restored to life. Ruby Sunday even gets to meet her birth mother for the first time, and their relationship is wonderfully restored.

So on the one hand, any outward sign of Christianity is despised, but the heart of the Christian story — the Resurrection — becomes the template for the climactic redemption story which ties the whole series together.

That’s what I mean when I say this series has a ‘schizophrenic’ relationship to Christianity.

What’s this got to do with gayness?

In series fourteen, Doctor Who goes gay.

I’m not playing culture wars here. The Doctor literally kisses a man in episode six.

But it’s not just that. When we first meet his companion, Ruby Sunday (in the Christmas special), she’s busy falling in love with a woman. Ncuti Gatwa plays The Doctor camp (brilliantly by the way). The Doctor refers to Ruby as ‘babes’. It’s got ‘gay’ written all over it, and this is definitely on purpose.

From this perspective, it’s not hard to imagine where the hostility to the Church might come from.

The Church has failed to teach well and Biblically on sexuality, at least in the last couple of centuries. Everyone has suffered as a result of this, but gay people often feel the sharpness of this particularly keenly⁵.

The Church has put its weight behind a variety of unhelpful teachings on sexuality over the centuries⁶. But two, contradictory, ones stand out as particularly salient today.

One is prudishness. Sex is evil. Sex is the origin of all evil: the Devil seduced Eve, and Eve seduced Adam, and that’s when it all went downhill. Sex is naughty. Sex is bad. Remember when Jesus said, ‘whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ (Matt 5:28)? He was saying that all sexual desire is sinful. Remember when Paul advised, ‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’ (1 Cor 7:1)? He was saying that it’s bad for a man to touch a woman under any circumstances.

This is, of course, false and dreadful teaching. The truth is that sex is a gift from God, given so that we can bear his image by loving each other in this most intimate and wonderful way. This is the consistent message of both Testaments. But the idea that there’s somehow something inherently wrong with sex has undeniably been a part of the Church’s teaching since at least the Victorian period (and possibly a great deal longer than that).

The other is that sex is an essential aspect of humanity. If you aren’t having sex, you’re missing out on an irreplacable part of your created purpose. This has reacted explosively with the ideas of the Sexual Revolution. The net result is that we have not so much been freed to have sex as we’ve been enslaved to have sex. Virginity is an embarassment – both for men and for women.

The radical Biblical idea that you can have a completely fulfilled life, deeply enriched by loving relationships, without having sex or getting married, is forgotten.

Everyone has been harmed by these teachings. But those who experience significant attraction towards the same sex have been harmed double.

Faced by the impossible demands of bad Church teaching on sexuality on top of the complexities of living with same-sex desire has left those people with nowhere to go. They can just say ‘no’, and be made to feel that they’re missing out on completing their full humanity. Or they can indulge their same-sex attraction, and be judged not only promiscuous but a pervert to boot.

No wonder so many gay people have given up on the Church (and I haven’t even talked about discrimination or violence towards gay people).

And no wonder that The Doctor has become strikingly anti-Christian at the same time as it has become strikingly gay.

What next?

Doctor Who’s criticisms of the Church hurt when they hit the mark. They hurt more when they’re unfair. But that’s not the point. That point is this: the Church has lost control of the conversation. And we’ve lost control of the conversation because we threw it away. We threw it away encased in bomb-proof concrete and left it to sink to the bottom of the deepest available ocean trench.

If we in the Church are feeling hurt, we should start by feeling hurt by our own sin.

The work of regaining trust on the question of sexuality will be the work of decades: and that’s if we start working full-pelt right now. But there is hope.

I was encouraged last December by the visit to my local church, Bruntsfield Evangelical, of Living Out⁷, a charity dedicated to helping churches across the UK talk about sexuality. Ed and Andy, both same-sex attracted men, led us through talks and discussions, and played recordings of perspectives from their same-sex attracted female colleagues who couldn’t make it on the day.

They were primarily there to talk to us about how to support people like them: same-sex attracted Christians who might be in our church who believe they are called to singleness, helping them to thrive, living their true selves openly, surrounded by love and empowered to share their love with others, just as we want for everyone in our church. In fact, I heard some of the best news I’d ever heard about my own sexuality, even though I am in the minority of people who have never experienced significant same-sex attraction.

Whether or not you agree with their stance that the right place for sex is within a marriage between a man and a woman, charities like Living Out are driving the Church in the right direction: serious, Biblical sexual doctrine which helps us to realise in practice how we are all made in the image of the God of love.

And how needed! How desperately needed! And Doctor Who gives us a little glimpse of that, too.

Because not only is the series apparently anti-Christian, it also expresses a need for Christian salvation. The Resurrection story is one which everyone needs to hear, to have their death transformed to life, to have their full humanity affirmed and celebrated and tended and to delight in it and to see it flourish. To know the God of love and life, behind all and over all, with a plan and a means to defeat the grip of death on the world.

So let’s keep having those frank conversations about sexuality in the Church. It matters for all of us.