postscript: an interview with Jenna DeWitt
the voices behind my asexuality feature for Sojourners magazine
Hey everyone,
There was no way I could fit everyone I interviewed into my feature story with Sojourners, as much as I wanted to and tried. Regardless of whether some interviewees were quoted once, a couple times, or not at all, everyone I spoke with meaningfully shaped the article with their insightful perspectives.
I think it’s important to lift up voices of asexual people and people who study asexuality for Asexual Awareness Week, so I’m taking some of the interviews and posting abridged versions for y’all to read. I have permission from Sojourners and each interviewee to do so. As another disclosure, my publication of their views doesn’t mean I endorse all of them. These are discussions, not debates.
My second interviewee is Jenna DeWitt: an aromantic and asexual Methodist, writer, and copyeditor. Here is my conversation with her …
JOEY THURMOND: How would you describe asexuality to somebody who isn't familiar with it? How about aromanticism?
Jenna DeWitt: You've probably seen the LGBTQIA+ acronym and that seems like a lot of letters to you; that might be really confusing. But that final A just stands for asexual, aromantic, and agender. As a prefix, the letter ‘A’ signifies “without,” so asexual people experience little to no sexual attraction. Aromantic people experience little to no romantic attraction, and agender people experience little to no gender alignment.
Each has a spectrum attached. An aromantic or asexual person — aro and ace for short – might rarely experience those attractions or only under certain circumstances, but there are other attractions to consider as well besides romantic and sexual. That might be aesthetic attraction, platonic attraction, sensual, and so on. For example, I use the sapphic label [Writer’s note: This is similar to “lesbian” but, to put it simply, more expansive.] in addition to aro and ace, because that's attraction I do experience that’s oriented toward women in significant ways. So, somebody could be aro, ace, and bi, or asexual and homoromantic. There's all sorts of combinations of these things. If you're not aromantic or asexual, we use the term allo. So an alloromantic person would experience typical levels of romantic attraction, and an allosexual person would experience typical levels of sexual attraction.
This is getting into the split attraction model, and it gives more complexity to how we experience sex, libido, romance, and more. How would you say Christians define things like these? How do they view them?
You can have all sorts of behavior and differences in libido and attraction, and those aren't necessarily the same thing. You might have a gay ace person who does have sex. You might have an aromantic person who is in a romantic relationship [with a partner who is romantic]. Sometimes, we have queerplatonic partners. [Writer’s note: “Queerplatonic” describes partners who live together but their relationship doesn’t fit the mold of a friendship or marriage — it’s something in between or outside of those models.] So, just because someone is aro/ace does not mean that they are single or celibate.
Purity culture has told us not only that you need to wait to have sex for marriage, but that you’re waiting for marriage. It’s expected that Christians struggle to not have sex or even date in the “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” era. One would think aro/ace people have it much easier in the church than others in this area. But “amatonormativity” explains how they still have it difficult. This term was coined by Elizabeth Brake to show that being amorous and romantic and finding a partner is the highest goal in life; it's the center of adulthood and a foundation of society, especially in a reproductive sense.
The church is all about that. The church really wants these amatonormative, reproductive, heterosexual relationships. So, what ends up happening is the other relationships take a hit. Your church family and friendships are deprioritized. Queer relationships are seen as deviant. Extended family is relegated to supporting roles in the lives of the central characters: the married parent couple. Churches that are family focused emphasize weddings [and a] reproductive relationship to secure the future of the church. These institutions rely on perpetuating their existence, but it ends up really harming society and the couple. So much emphasis is on individuals to have their entire worth and identity around maintaining a facade that they can do it all alone. They’re coming to church, unable to be authentic that marriage isn't everything; it’s not perfect.
Sex doesn't go from being “Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it,” to “Yay! It's the best thing ever.” That's not the reality that women are facing in particular. We face a lot of gynecological problems. We face a lot of psychological problems and trauma in these relationships in purity culture. Even if you live up to it, you're also still being harmed by it. Not to mention queer relationships or the people who are single (celibate or not). But what if we had a better way of viewing our relationships? What if we had love for ourselves and our neighbors for their mutual care and flourishing? No matter what you're called to, and no matter what your orientation is? That's the vision I wanna bring forth into the church.
You’re saying that when it comes to asexual people's experience, that can help inform everyone's experiences with sexuality as a whole?
When the church pays attention to asexual and aromantic people, everyone will benefit. Everyone will flourish because we are seeing a more holistic vision of the creation and the creativity that God has made in the imago Dei.
True, the imago Dei is expressed in all sorts of different ways in people's lives. What do asexuals tell us about what a full and faithful life can look like?
We have a very clear model in the Bible of what an asexual-like life would look like. Jesus is God. We can't necessarily put human terms on Jesus [or assume his experience], but he lived a very aromantic, asexual life. People will laugh and say, “Do you really think Jesus went 33 years without having sex?” Well, I've gone 34. Not having sex didn’t make him any less human. People will say “Oh, of course Jesus was tempted in all ways, including sexual because he was tempted in ways that are common to humans.” And I will say, “Asexual people aren't necessarily tempted sexually in that way. So, are we less than human? It doesn’t take away from Jesus' humanity to say that he didn't have sex — or wasn't even sexually attracted or tempted to have sex.
Queer theology might try to “queer” the relationship between Naomi and Ruth, or Jonathan and David, or the Centurion and his servant. It’s a sort of “head canon” over what’s going on in the text. I think we can do that with aromantic and asexual relationships, especially in the New Testament with the early church focusing on the coming of Christ. They there were so focused on getting the Word out that a lot of things got deprioritized, and it might have been easier, as Paul says, for some of those early Christians than for others.
I think we can see ourselves reflected in scripture. We should bring that to the church to say, “We have value.” We can be volunteers focused on the gospel because we're not distracted by a relationship, as Paul would say. However, [for those who are orphaned or widows, they can get] disconnected in society because [our livelihoods and survival are shaped by] amatonormativity. We're built around these relationship structures that presuppose you have a partner to take care of you, or a partner to drive you to the hospital if you're sick. For singles, for aromantic people, for asexual people, for celibate people — the church can be family in a very literal way.
You’re talking about how asexual people can challenge the church and create community and family beyond marriage. How else can asexuality contribute to our theology and sexual ethics? Our understanding of family?
As I raise awareness for asexuality and aromanticism, and the harm of amatonormativity, I speak from a fully affirming point of view for all queer relationships. Equal inclusion in the church and equality among leadership. Our liberating frameworks can’t take in the same flaws of heteronormativity and expand them to gay inclusion. Christians can’t only include aros and aces as the “good queers” without affirming other queer relationships and sexualities. That's an anemic vision starved of the fullness that God would have for our lives. We must pursue the whole of liberation, which is so much bigger than binaries, and so much bigger than purity culture and unnecessary moral requirements we’ve placed on ourselves.
The key word for me here is collective liberation. Liberation isn’t just the choice to do something. It's also the choice not to do something. In order for it to truly be a choice, it has to include the consensual foundation of being able to say no — as well as the full awareness that there's no shame around saying yes. You don't have to want sex, but if you do, that's liberating for you! Pursue liberation. Liberation must be liberating for everybody and for those who choose something different than you. If you're asexual and walking around talking about this purity culture because it's easy for you or because it fits your mindset, you have to have the empathy to know that's not liberating for everybody. A huge relief for another person might feel like a heavy burden for another. Even if ace people are sex-repulsed or sex-averse, we can still be sex-positive, which is about how we view sex for society. We don't think that it's morally evil or dirty. We're just choosing what is best in line with what is liberating.
And that makes sense with the big God that we've been given, because God is the God of the tiniest particle farther down than we can see — these quirks, and farther down than that. But God is also the God of expanding universes. There are wildflowers growing out by a highway or a dumpster that no one will ever see. We've only explored something like a quarter of the life under the ocean. There are planets out there we'll never get to. You think of a God with that much creativity and variety … and then you're gonna try to tell me that there’s a binary of only men and women, only gay and straight? Only you can either have sex within a traditional romantic relationship, or you have to say, be celibate your whole life? We don't serve a small God. We serve a creative, ever-expanse, literally expansive God.
When Americans talk about freedom, the image that always comes to mind is a lone ranger. This hyper-independent, strong hero who’s free and doesn't need anyone or anything. But true freedom in the kingdom of God and the family of God, the body of Christ, and all this generational liberation — from the civil rights era to women's liberation to queer liberation — shows that true freedom is interconnected. It’s collective. When I speak about this, I think about it as a home: a place of authentic belonging, not forced fitting in.
How might asexuality inform how people understand consent within sexual relationships?
Asexuality is such a huge spectrum. Gray asexuality means rare attraction. Demisexuality is a strong bond with somebody before you feel any sort of attraction toward them. There's this huge, fluid spectrum. Certain people can make you feel certain things differently, so as a relationship changes, so does your place on that spectrum and what you are personally favorable toward. I think Emily Nagoski really nailed it when she said how consent can't always be enthusiastic. When we've raised this bar so high that you have to be super confident about your consent before you enter into an action, you may not be able to say yes — or you may say yes and regret it, but feel like you couldn’t have taken it back. When you're talking about asexuality and consent, sometimes we may not be able to give it enthusiastically, but we can give it tentatively.
Don’t just live up to society's expectations of you or what your relationship is supposed to look like. You should be constantly checking in with yourself and your partner to see what feels good and what doesn't with intimacy. What you're okay with, what isn't okay. Maybe you feel shame about something and need to work through it in therapy or with your partner. This idea of consent on a continually evolving gradient along with better communication can be extremely helpful for everyone. We can have stronger relationships; we wouldn't have as much shame and guilt; we'd be able to express our desires to each other more fully and more accurately. This happens when we’re aware. Just because someone said yes once does not mean you have said yes forever or for everything.
I'm thinking about these sex therapists in the last few decades who have had these male-centered and sexist ideas about consent. It loops back to purity culture. What is that in your words?
Purity culture is the expectation that you will live up to a certain morality to preserve the amatonormative ideal. It is deeply rooted in patriarchal views of (often, not always) the man being the head of the relationship that provides a hierarchical structure in your relationship; the man pursues the woman. There's a very gender role-specific dynamic to the way that purity culture plays out, even in an egalitarian framework.
When you are living in a world of queerness with non-binary genders, trans genders, same-sex relationships, asexual relationships, aromantic relationships — these doesn't fit into this purity culture model, so we have to break it down and get rid of the shame it induces. There's nothing about queerness that works within this purity culture framework because we are so far outside the bounds of patriarchy and gender roles that it cannot exist, unless you're really trying to shoehorn it in there, and that's not liberating for anybody.
What was your initial understanding of marriage and sex growing up in a faith community?
I grew up in a liberal mainline Protestant church. While it was very much not affirming of queerness, the framework was very feminist. Of course women could be pastors. I didn't know that complementarians existed until I was 18! It shocked me that there was feminism that existed outside of the church because I thought it was a very Christian movement. That's how I had been raised as a United Methodist kid. And it's disappointing to me where the UMC is currently because we are spending so much time and money and hatred on dividing over this issue. It's a very long and messy divorce, which is heartbreaking for me as a born-and-bred Methodist. I want to see my Methodist family see and value me and my queer brethren as worth fighting for and fully integrating into Methodist faith, into Wesleyan faith.
I was not necessarily raised within a strict purity culture. “No kissing until you're married” — that wasn't what my framework was. My framework was very much that “It's just normal. Of course. Everybody gets married, everybody does it.” I had this impression of “You have to get married, and you have to pay your taxes, and you have to have sex, and you have to own a house.” And that was just kinda like everybody has to do these things as a part of growing up.
I started to think in my teens, “What if I didn't do this? What if I am not somebody's future spouse? What if I don't need to wear a purity ring?” A lot of the influence of evangelicalism for me was through music. And so I got really into the music of BarlowGirl and Rebecca St. James. And I really wanted to go out there and do something exciting and passionate, and I saw it through this abstinence movement, which felt really comfortable for me as an asexual person (without a label for that at the time) because it felt like a relief. I would tell people, “If you got into purity culture as a teenager, or if you were hearing this now and saying you feel like not having sex is a relief, you may not actually be in purity culture. You may be asexual.”
Purity culture demands that you struggle with sex and that you want it and that you are eventually going to get married. But what if we didn't have to? That's the question that bugged me first. I really wasn't attracted to men. I had some great guys in my life who would've been a perfect match for me. That's when I had to reconcile the fact that I had no feelings for them whatsoever in that way.
Have you seen any tension or a lack of welcome with asexuals embracing celibacy or saying no to sex in progressive spaces?
I've not experienced anybody in an affirming framework that is asking me to have sex. No one has said I'm too traditional for them or I'm not allowed to be here. There are people on the internet who say asexuality does not belong under the queerness umbrella, but I have not had that experience in Christian queer groups. There’s talk out there that celibacy is unwelcome within a progressive framework, and that is absolutely not true. What is unwelcome is a non-affirming stance. If you make clear that your values are for choice within collective liberation, you'll be fine.
In fact, there's a lot of people who have found celibacy helpful because they discovered they're on the asexuality spectrum themselves before coming into an affirming viewpoint. It’s also helpful in feeling more free to have seasons of celibacy, even if it's not a calling as a lifelong vocation. It's okay to stay single. It's okay to be celibate. It's okay to take your time in a relationship. It all brings a more holistic view of what liberation is, and celibacy can also be freeing for people who are allosexual within queer communities.
What’s your theology on celibacy?
I think your theology matters. Side A and Side B are not about behavior, they're about theology, so neither signify personal preference; it's not about whether you're celibate or not. It's about “What do you believe the Bible says about sex, romance, and queer people’s roles in the church?” If you talk to somebody who says they felt unwelcome in Side A spaces, I would say, “Did you make it clear that you are inclusive of all same-sex weddings, relationships, sexuality, and leadership roles within the church?" I think that is such a key framework within egalitarianism. We still have to uphold the same regulations as men — being a woman doesn't keep you from a leadership role.
Now, do I think that all allosexual queer people need to get married? Not necessarily. There’s still wisdom. There's discernment. There are the fruits of the spirit — self-control. But it doesn't matter what kind of orientations are involved in a relationship. You know, if we are being empathetic, loving our neighbor, and truly committing to and loving each other — all of those things don't have anything to do with the genders of the people in relationships. I'm not saying you can just go do whatever you want, like abuse people. We're talking about doing away with the gender roles that limit our relationships. Personal behavior almost has nothing to do with your own inclusion or exclusion. It's all about what theology you hold and which camp you feel welcome in.
If gender doesn’t impact the essence of a relationship, what is their unifying purpose from a Christian perspective?
Love is the really obvious Sunday School answer. You have at the heart of the gospel: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. If we have a full love of ourselves as God made us, and we are truly living into that authenticity and integrity as our focus, I think these fruits of the spirit can become a guiding thing for us. What are we trying to exemplify in these relationships? What kind of love does my relationship point to? You look throughout the Bible and these definitions of what love is … patient and kind and good. Christ-like love isn’t constrained by gender.
How have other minority voices influenced your perspective on queerness and sexuality?
From the very beginnings of the American queer movement, there have been vital Black and Latino/a people. We just erase these voices amid white assimilation, which goes like this: “If we can be good enough, or pure enough, or normal enough, we’ll be accepted by mainstream society.” But queerness inherently means that we are never going to be accepted into a patriarchal framework. We have to be listening to these other movements like the civil rights movement, of the women's liberation movement — along with us knowing the very roots of our queer history. It is so key to understand the pioneering work that people from other marginalized identities besides our own have done in order to know where we have to go in the future.
You've mentioned Angela Chen's work. I love learning from Ellen Huang. I've done things with Justin Ancheta. There’s Sherronda J. Brown's incredible work on compulsory sexuality and how different cultures are forced into this framework of sexuality that rejects people who back away from it. We're missing out on a huge variety of voices, perspectives, and other cultures.
We have been very US and western centric in the ways with asexuality and queerness. Learning from other cultures that have histories of colonization from the US and European nations. Christianity has played a horrible role in that by enforcing gender binaries and gendering language that weren’t there previously, while pushing queerness into the background or out of society completely. As a white American asexual woman, I have the opportunity to say, “Men can be asexual. BIPOC people can be asexual.” Other people in other countries are currently suffering because they do not have acceptance of queerness. We can't just focus on our own movement and think we've got it all figured out because there are so many wonderful ace organizations all over the world in India, Philippines, Asia, and beyond.
The concept of intersectionality is incredibly important when we're talking about asexuality. Because not everybody comes from that purity culture/evangelical background. Not everybody comes from an able-bodied background. There is a complex identity around disability and asexuality, or neurodivergence in asexuality, or trans identity and asexuality. About a third of asexual people, the last I've heard, are identifying as somewhere in the trans and non-binary spectrum. We have all these overlaps from race and culture and gender and all of these things that come together to influence our expectations of what asexuality looks like and should look like.
Have you experienced any assumptions about your asexuality related to your gender? Where have you seen that with other genders? I learned recently that men are the smallest group in the asexual community.
Canton Winer's doing incredible work on asexuality and gender right now. What he's finding in his research is that asexual men often have a hard time identifying either with manhood or asexuality because the definition of masculinity is sexualized; to have sex is to be a man. Whereas, for women, until you have been embraced and loved in a romantic way, that's how you become a woman. You can see this in evangelical resources going back to Captivating by Stasi Eldridge. You can see this in resources produced by her husband. Or even more recently, we have this new book by Joshua Butler that's talking about how it is a man serving as Christ served the church to have sex with his wife. There's a whole book around it and a workshop.
It's so common in our culture to assume these gender roles that even a popular Christian leader is quoted as saying that men don't have romance. Men use romance to get sex, and that women don't have sexual desires. They have romance, and they use sex to get romance to be loved. There are asexual men, and it doesn't make them less of a man. Romance really queers my gender as a woman as well, even though I identify as cisgender. I am very comfortable identifying as a woman or with girly things now. That's just what I happen to align with — a label that culture has put on me. But I don't often align with women's ministries or women's groups or other types of women's liberation. And that's where a lot of this came out of. The early asexual movement was born out of feminism because there were these women who were saying, “I don't feel like my gender is defined by my romantic relationships,” or whether they're gay or straight. So much of our definition of gender identity is tied up in our roles within romantic and sexual relationships.
People have told me they don’t believe me when I say I don’t experience romance. I was told that my standards were too high — too much of a romantic because I wasn't feeling anything for these really good guys. You're expecting fireworks and Prince Charming to come and save you? That's not what love really is. What makes you like look at a lineup of equally good men, and you say, “That one.” I had to get on the same page with romance when I’ve talked to allosexual women. It creates this misconception that our standards are too high, or that ace/aro people are afraid of commitment. Neither of those is true. We're not afraid of commitment to our families, churches, friends, neighbors, dogs, nieces and nephews. Being aromantic or asexual doesn't mean that you can't love or that you don't experience love in any sort of way. It just means our love looks different.
I'm gonna start quoting bell hooks if we keep talking longer. In All About Love, she's talking about all these different types of love, but then later in her work, she says that queerness isn't about who we're sleeping with. Queerness is a way of being in the world. I think using queerness as a verb, and bringing more love into the world, can sound really woo-woo, but I think it sounds a lot like Jesus.
How do you think asexuality can bring about social justice?
I firmly believe that doing asexual advocacy is social justice work. When you are raising awareness about something that people have not even known existed about their own identities, that is a justice issue. For generations, people have been getting into relationships simply because it is what is expected of them. It’s the norm, or it’s something some have to do for financial reasons.
Within the feminist movement, a lot of this comes out from women being allowed to have jobs and financial independence; we have the luxury of identifying as asexual or aromantic — queering our relationships in all sorts of ways within those structures. Men are not limited to having a wife in order to be a man. I get back to consent — when it's your choice whether you can get into a sexual relationship or not. That's liberation. It’s about choosing how you approach the world, and then sharing that with other people so that goes on and on and on for others, past my reach to all the people I will never talk to. I didn't have that experience of growing up knowing I was asexual, but maybe somebody else will. Maybe I can make things better for the next generation simply by having the vocabulary, and by setting up a community within the church to know that you do not have to give up your faith to be queer — to be asexual. You don't have to choose between God's design for your life and your own authentic asexuality. Those are one and the same. It’s is a justice issue to go out and build better communities in the world. Creating a better family of God more inclusive of all this queerness, and all these platonic or romantic or sexual relationships. Everybody gets what they need to live into the life that they have been called toward.
For me, liberation means rejecting amatonormativity by leaning into the family of God so everyone's needs are met. That means everyone's correct name and pronouns are used. Every kid gets to be themselves at school. Everyone gets to breathe freely and hold their partner's hand in public. Dress how they're comfortable. Everyone has accessible buildings and transportation. Everyone has enough to share. Everyone's seen and valued for who they are.
It takes the work of mutual allyship across all identities. That means learning the right terms and not dismissing them as too difficult. Maybe for you, it's showing up at your city council meetings, or at school boards, or at libraries. Maybe opening up your church building or parking lot as a safe space where queer groups of people can meet and organize. It takes confronting our own grief and vulnerability for when we've been complicit in queerphobia. Being flexible and willing to listen and evolve. Knowing our history and the context for why things are the way they are today. Working toward a better future in which we all thrive. Even if that means helping decorate the church for weddings that look different than how your wedding looked. Even if it's teaching Sunday school to children being raised differently than you raised your children. Even befriending people who are making different choices for their lives and relationships than you feel are right for you personally. It goes beyond tolerance and openness into fighting for each other's flourishing.
Nothing is impossible with God. When we pursue people's well-being and flourishing, that sounds like it’s of God.
That's the kingdom of heaven come to earth. That's what it's all about.
You can find Jenna DeWitt on Twitter, but also her blog The Invisible Cake Society. She has written and compiled a lot of resources on asexuality that I highly endorse.