Heather R. White. Reforming Sodom

In her thoroughly researched book Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights, Heather R. White argues that liberal Protestants shaped the history and politics of pro-LGBTQ movements in the U.S. Contrary to most historical scholarship about the gay rights movement, White turns her attention away from conservative Christian opposition. Instead, she focuses on the role of mainline Protestants in supporting early homophile organizations through institutional projects such as urban ministries, social justice networks, and clergy alliance groups. White connects what have (until now) seemed to be marginal clergy and religious groups in order to draw out a significant, yet overlooked, network of influence. Her bold argument will lead readers to reconsider how the history of sexuality in the U.S. is written and to ask why religious actors and movements have been at best over simplified and at worst ignored entirely. The book begins with a surprise. In the introduction, “How the Bible Came to Speak about Homosexuality,” White recounts the first time the word “homosexual” appeared in an English translation of the Bible. In 1946, Bible scholars who gathered to produce the Revised Standard Version (RSV) translated Greek words in new ways. What in the King James Bible had been translated as “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves” became simply “homosexuals.” White explains that liberal Protestants, influenced by the growing authority of psychology and psychiatry in the field of sexuality studies, changed the meaning of words in 1 Corinthians 6:9, and as a result, marked homosexuals as sinners. Writing homosexual acts as “sins” into the Bible allowed for an interpretation that emphasized a condition that could be alleviated through religious and therapeutic intervention. The surprise is that the 1946 liberal interpretation of the Bible is the source for later conservative Christian claims that the Bible has always condemned homosexuality. Or, as White states it so succinctly, “the broad common sense about the Bible’s specifically same-sex meaning was an invention of the twentieth century” (3).

Alliance · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies