Sodom in the Old Testament Is No Knock on Gays — and Other Queer Takes on the Bible

For centuries it was conventional wisdom that the Bible condemned homosexuality as sinful, and sanctified marriage between a man and a woman. But queer theologians have been chipping away at this assumption for decades, and today’s acceptance of gay marriage and queer sexuality is in some measure due to their efforts and their success in recasting the Bible as a queer-affirming text.  

In recent decades, progressive theologians have worked out elaborate arguments to demonstrate that what they term the classic “texts of terror” censuring homosexuality are misunderstood today because they would have meant something totally different to their original audiences.  

This critical approach to reassessing Biblical passages, known as “queering” – which stresses Jesus’s role as an anti-colonialist revolutionary who surrounded himself by the sexually marginalized and others rejected by society – can even go even further to suggest that the apostle Paul and Jesus’ disciples may have been gay, or that ancient Bible stories subvert the gender binary and validate queer identities.   

Queer theologians are not positing plausible alternatives to traditional interpretations of the Bible; in the spirit of German theologian Martin Luther and other revisionist scholars, they say they are recovering the original, true meanings of the sacred texts. 

“That is the correct way of reading the Scripture,” said Cheri DiNovo, bisexual minister of Trinity-St.Paul’s United Church & Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts in Toronto, a congregation in the United Church of Canada, the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. “All that we’re doing in all these liberation movements is recovering our biblical basis.” 

DiNovo, who performed Canada’s first legal same-sex marriage in 2001 and authored the 2021 memoir, “The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale,” said that the Bible sanctifies a broad spectrum of human love and family structure, from same-sex attraction to polyamory.  

DiNovo can be viewed on an online video queering various “texts of terror” and interpreting other stories that validate the queer experience. One of the common examples she cites is the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, which purportedly shows that the very first Christian convert was a gender-nonconforming person of color, and indicates that the church was a welcoming queer community at its inception.  

“Now, how did the eunuch convince Philip to baptize them?” DiNovo posits, referring to the first-century eunuch by a nonbinary pronoun. “By knowing their Bible and quoting Scripture at Philip. Lesson for all of us.” 

In the words of queer theologian, author and minister Robert Shore-Goss, the queerness of the Bible is not a social construct or willful interpolation; it comes directly from the divine source.  

“God is more akin to queers, the sexual outlaws who break cultural codes of decency and sexual restrictedness,” Shore-Goss wrote in 2021. “God is a ‘faggot’, for God creatively pursues the conception of Jesus outside the bounds of vanilla religiosity.” 

“The pervert Jesus lacks middle-class respectability, male and heterosexist constructions of authoritarian, patriarchal and heteronormative Christianities,” Goss wrote. 

These arguments make no dent on conservative Christians, who see queer theology as a vain exercise in sophistry to twist sacred writings into saying the opposite of what was intended.

“It’s sowing doubt where there really should not be much doubt,” said Bill Heming, a pastor at Parkway Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Wash. “If there’s anything that’s crystal-clear in the Old Testament and the New Testament, it’s sexual morality.” 

Still, even some queer theologians privately acknowledge that the Bible is not open to gay sex. But the question remains: Are those ancient injunctions relevant today?  

Yale Divinity School theologian Linn Marie Tonstad, whose books include “Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics,” declared in a 2020 podcast, “There are texts in the Bible that condemn a man lying with a man as with a woman. There is no ambiguity around that. There is no real argument to be had about what’s being talked about there.  

“So the question is, what does that mean, what’s the significance of a statement like that?” 

Progressive theologians have dealt with such passages in several ways over many decades. Starting with prohibitions against homosexuality in the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus states that it is an abomination for a man to lie with another man as with a woman. One response from queer theologians is to argue that within the social context of the time, the laws in Leviticus apply only to Israelites and aliens residing in the land of Israel, so it’s not a universal prohibition. Another approach is to class the ban on homosexuality with other bans, such as the prohibition on mixing meat with dairy, or wool with linen, which are not binding on Christians.  

“Mixing cotton and linen doesn’t worry us, so why should lying with a man as if with a woman bother us?” Tonstad wrote, summarizing the case.  

Next comes Paul’s condemnation of lustful relations between men, which he describes as shameful and perverse in the New Testament Book of Romans. Queer theologians  interpret these narrowly, as prohibitions against temple prostitution, bans against pederasty, bans against humiliating enemy soldiers, or bans against raping slaves – essentially bans against sexually exploiting inequitable power dynamics — not bans on consensual same-sex relationships. The queer argument that comes up over and over is that gay relationships and gay identities as we understand them were not known in the first century, so Paul’s prohibition can’t apply. “He simply cannot be thinking about sex between gay men, since such a concept doesn’t exist in his context,” Tonstad writes.  

Queer theologians contend that what appear to be categorical bans must be read in the broader context of social history and thematic unity, which requires aligning supposed bans with Paul’s good news to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 

“Many queer apologists argue that the destruction, or transgression, of binaries is central to the Christian message,” Tonstad wrote. “Heterosexual/homosexual belongs to the list of binaries destroyed or transgressed by Christianity, the argument runs, following the Christian irrelevance of the distinction between male and female.” 

No discussion of homosexuality in the Bible can omit mention of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities that God destroyed with fire and brimstone, traditionally understood as God’s dire warning against sexual perversion. But this interpretation is a Christian myth whose origins date back to the third century, according to “The Queer Bible Commentary,” a 2006 book co-edited by Goss that spans more than 1,000 pages and queers every book in the Old Testament and New Testament.  

Somewhat anticlimactically, this well-known Bible story is reduced to a warning against being unwelcoming towards strangers – it never had anything to do with condemning homosexuality.  

“Sodom is used as an example to illustrate the fate of societies in which queer people are accorded full acceptance and equal rights,” according to “The Queer Bible Commentary.” “In contrast to this Christian myth, Jewish traditions concerning Sodom and Gomorrah highlighted the evils of hostility towards outsiders and unwillingness to share resources compounded with a cruelty towards the poor, as the sins for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.” 

Tonstad concedes that such textual arguments rarely convince anyone. Most of these arguments, she says in her 2018 book, are not “theologically rich, insightful, illuminating.” The most compelling evidence that sways opinions is the personal experience of knowing queer family members or queer friends. 

“That’s one reason I argue in this book that people don’t change their mind on this issue for reasons,” Tonstad said. “They change their mind on this issue and then they find reasons. That’s how it works. And the reason the mind changes is often love, it’s often a beloved person or yourself.”