Love is simple, says Reverend Paul Anthony Daniels, because “in its most visceral form,” it boils down to three things: spit, semen, and sweat. Ok, maybe four. Sometimes there is blood. “To share love in that way is so visceral.”
I have a confession, I tell Daniels. I have never been in love—not in the Hallmark movie kind of way, at least—but find myself craving it the older I get, so I’m a little stunned to hear him describe it with such candor. You know, being a priest and all. God is in people, he says. Which means, God is also in sex.
Daniels loves love. He seeks it in everything he does, he tells me, but especially in people. It’s part of his job as an Episcopal priest and a “mediator of Christ’s love in the world.” Ceremonially, he is “a steward of the sacraments—the Eucharist, baptism, marriage, confirmation. I invite people into a relationship with God through those sacred ritual acts. But it’s also more than that.”
Rev. Paul Anthony DanielsPhotograph: Carianne Older
It’s the more part that’s got me in Los Angeles’ Koreatown sitting across from him in his apartment as he sips from a whiskey glass, going on about desire, salvation, and all the irresistible ways people come together. A graduate of Morehouse College and Yale Divinity School, Daniels, 34, is not your average Episcopal priest. He’s something of a trailblazer. A rogue in a clerical collar.
Although faith has been central to Daniels’ identity since his boyhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, he also grew up with an abiding appreciation for music—Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, John Mayer. In 2007, he auditioned for season 7 of American Idol and made it all the way to Hollywood Week. “As soon as I walked to the hotel in Pasadena I knew that I was not slated to be one of the young people that they were going to pay attention to,” he says. “All the producers had their eyes on David Archuleta.”
He returned to Raleigh and dug deeper into what eventually became his calling. Being openly gay and Christian meant he had the capacity to “say and do things that could open doors of possibility for people.” Daniels has since made that into his life’s work. Hence the whole spit, semen, sweat thing. There’s a bigger context to all of this, he wants me to know. It also helps that he often gives lectures on these very topics—“sexual socialities as theological questions”—in addition to being a PhD candidate at Fordham University.
Most people today have what Daniels calls a “consumerist devotion built around the consumption of material things—bodies, clothes, objects.” The worst instances of that are on social media. He encounters it on Instagram (his favorite dating platform) and the various hookup apps he frequents. Social media, he says, has become a “site of worship—pun intended.”
Jason Parham: As a priest who uses dating and hookup apps, how do you navigate your relationship to desire?
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