While tending to my garden, I watched a small slug slowly make its way toward a freshly sprouted mushroom. The slug’s slick body and intentional, meditative movement struck me as profoundly beautiful. Its biologically intersex identity, alongside the mushroom, an organism whose queer modes of reproduction and capacity to sustain life defy binary categories, the scene felt like an embodiment of the sacred. On the floor of my garden bed, life blossoms, decays, and regenerates. In this quiet communion with nature, I find my faith.
In the fluidity of the rivers and lakes surrounding my home in Trumansburg, New York, I feel the constant presence of the divine. God is always near: in the flowing of a waterfall, in the sweetness of a wild berry, in the sacred cycles of the natural world. At the intersection of nature and queerness dwells my God, benevolent, loving, beautiful, and abundant. When we recognize the divine abundance woven through the natural world, we begin to understand that we are not conquerors of nature, as we are so often taught. We are part of it. Our humanity blooms and flourishes when we cultivate deeper relationships with our plant, fungal, animal, and microbial kin. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), drawing from her Potawatomi heritage and scientific training, reminds us that “all flourishing is mutual.” We are living together on a planet that has been slowly killed by destructive capitalist expansions. If we acknowledge that we have a duty to protect all our earthly kin, especially as social workers, we can create more liberatory bonds between ourselves and our client populations.
Organisms like lichens, moss, and mycorrhizal networks demonstrate that coexistence across profound biological differences is not only possible but essential for survival. These beings challenge the colonial insistence that difference must produce hierarchy. Instead, they remind us that mutuality, across species, identities, and ways of being, is a fundamental structure of life itself. Colonial and capitalist worldviews position humans, especially certain humans, as superior, rational beings set apart from the rest of life. From a young age, we are taught that human intelligence justifies our dominance. But when we slow down and commune intentionally with the beings around us, we begin to witness the intelligence, interdependence, and radiance of nature. We begin to remember our belonging.
Acknowledging our place among other species helps dismantle systems of colonial oppression that have long worked to sever our relationships with nature, with each other, and even with ourselves. As social workers, our role in collective liberation requires us to bridge the divide that oppressive systems have created. Faith, in each other, in the sacredness of difference, and in the possibility of transformation, becomes a tool for healing. Trusting in the messy, miraculous process of loving across difference opens space for authentic, connective, and liberatory care. This is also where queerness becomes central to my praxis. Queerness, for me, is not only an identity but a worldview that rejects rigid boundaries, embraces fluidity, and understands relationships as an ongoing practice of becoming. Queerness reveals that transformation is always possible, that identities are not fixed, and that connection is not constrained by the limits imposed by heteropatriarchal systems. My faith, then, is inseparable from queerness: both call me toward expansiveness, toward love unbound, toward a future where relationality is not policed but nurtured.
Faith can be part of our care mechanisms, but the weaponization of religiosity by colonial and capitalist regimes has turned our inherent search for the divine into a tool of fear and control. As Michel Foucault (1978) argues, systems of power, particularly religious and state institutions, have historically used spiritual discourse to regulate bodies and enforce norms under the guise of morality and salvation. What begins as a personal or communal pursuit of meaning is often co-opted into mechanisms of discipline, producing shame rather than liberation.
The state has created a divinity rooted in individualistic pursuit and constructed the image of a punishing God. The Christian church positions itself as the supreme authority on morality, turning the sacred into horror through the threat of hell. As social workers, we must understand the inherited politicization of the self under heteropatriarchal, colonial, and capitalist systems. One's faith in an all-knowing and punishing God is deeply entangled with the realities of living under Christian neo-fascist rule.
Frederick Streets (2008) warns that many in the social work field fear religion because of its historical use as a mechanism of exclusion and domination. Yet he argues that spirituality, if engaged with care, can be a site of resistance, resilience, and relational repair. Social workers must develop the competence to navigate these tensions, recognizing how faith can be both a source of harm and a powerful force for healing. Edward Canada and Leola Furman (2010) similarly argue for a spiritually sensitive practice that honors client worldviews without imposing one's own, especially when engaging across cultural, racial, and theological differences.
As we engage with clients who hold beliefs different from our own, a queer ecological perspective invites us to root our care in the divinity of difference and the shared longing to understand something beyond ourselves. As mother, warrior, author, socialist, and poet, Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences” (p. 115). Our goal as social workers should be to seek connection in the sacred bonds that can be forged through difference.
Speculative fabulation offers another way to imagine these bonds. Slime molds, as discussed in “Plasmodial Improprieties,” embody a form of existence that resists human classification altogether. They can be singular or plural, collective or dispersed, refusing the rigid boundaries that Western science tries to impose. Dictyostelium, for example, lives most of its life as separate single cells, but when nutrients become scarce, these cells instinctively gather, merging into a multicellular organism that moves as one. As Keller (1983) notes, “when starved, these cells undergo internal changes that lead to their aggregation into clumps which, as they grow bigger, topple over and crawl off as slugs.”
This organism, both one and many, mirrors the queer relationality I understand as sacred: fluid, responsive, interconnected, and devoted to collective survival. Slime molds model a kind of femi-queer commons, an existence where individuality and togetherness do not compete but sustain each other. Their resistance to fixed identity categories reminds us that queerness is not simply a label but a practice of living otherwise. Their capacity to shift form under pressure offers a metaphor for how faith, too, moves: not as doctrine, not as punishment, but as an adaptive, emergent, relational force that grows through connection.
In their refusal to be easily categorized, slime molds echo the larger truth of this piece: that the sacred is found in the spaces where boundaries dissolve; that nature teaches us how to love without domination; that queerness is not just an identity but a commitment to fluidity, relationality, and collective becoming. And in this, I locate my faith.
NOTES:
Canda, E. R., & Furman, L. D. (2010). Spiritual diversity in social work practice: The heart of helping (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction. Pantheon Books.
Huang, M. N. (2020). Plasmodial improprieties: Octavia E. Butler, slime molds, and imagining a femi-queer commons. American Quarterly, 72(4), 781–803. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2020.0061
Keller, E. F. (1983). The physics of slime. Scientific American, 248(3), 132–144.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
Streets, F. J. (2008). Overcoming a fear of religion in social work education and practice. Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought.