That’s a rather rude question, and I cannot imagine asking anyone that question with any seriousness. I pose it here to make this observation: while that question has always been rude, it has not always been rude for the same reasons.
The word itself is derived, of course, from the ancient biblical city called “Sodom,” which was (as the story goes in Genesis 19) destroyed by “fire and brimstone” (and yes, that’s really the language used in the King James Version of the story). That event of divine destruction fell on that ancient city as divine punishment for “wickedness.” Ah! But what kind of wickedness is the key issue.
Interpreting ancient texts for a modern context is always challenging, a process that also exhibits a rich and complex history. An entire field of academic study emerged for that kind of analysis in the late twentieth century when scholars devoted deliberate attention to what came to be known as the “reception history of the Bible.” This field of study investigates and analyzes how particular passages of the Bible have been received in a particular community or society, and how those understandings shaped social trends and cultural artifacts.
Studying how the Bible has been “received” over time and in different places is not only multidisciplinary (involving sociology, economics, philosophy, and art, among many others), it also traces the legacy of a certain strand of biblical interpretation in one context and how it makes an impact in others, even those far removed in place and time. I appreciate that kind of historical analysis as a way to inspire my own proactive reading of the Bible—there isn’t just one meaning for a given passage that waits our discovery; people of faith are invited to make meaning from these texts for our own distinctive purposes in our own day.
So, are you a sodomite?
Don’t be too quick to answer that question without first consulting the ancient Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. Modern Western society has shaped most of us to assume that “sodomy” refers to a particular kind of sexual act—usually between men. But Ezekiel insists instead on a significantly different interpretation. Ezekiel portrays that ancient city as rife with social and economic injustice. “This,” he writes, “was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (16:49).
That one verse should make quite a few of us a bit squirmy and uncomfortable. After all, anyone who has indulged in arrogant posturing or refused to help the financially impoverished qualifies, in Ezekiel’s view, as a sodomite. As one scholar has noted, rather than imagining a relatively small percentage of the population engaged in unusual or exotic sexual acts—indeed, rather than thinking of sex at all—we should probably admit that modern Western economic policies make most of us guilty of sodomy.
Most of us are sodomites, and sex has nothing to do with it.
The focus in Ezekiel on economics faded over time in Christian history (not coincidentally when the story was interpreted by affluent people). Justin Martyr in the second century used the story for anti-Jewish polemic. In the sixth century, Gregory the Great rather vaguely named Sodom’s flaw as “sins of the flesh.” And then finally, but not until the eleventh century, Peter Damian defined “sodomy” exclusively as same-sex sexual acts—and that definition reshaped the history of Western jurisprudence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 when the court deliberated over whether state “sodomy laws” were constitutional (they determined that such laws were not and overturned the remaining state statues to that effect).
This coming Sunday, the lectionary includes a Gospel passage in which Matthew’s Jesus makes a reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (9:35-10:23). As it sometimes happens every three years, the lectionary has assigned this passage during LGBTQ Pride Month. I can all but guarantee that every LGBT person in the country who hears this passage on Sunday will cringe, and for some, it will trigger a history of religious trauma.
The story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah has been weaponized—especially in the modern West—in some painful and heartbreaking ways to condemn gay and lesbian people, and sometimes violently. It wasn’t that terribly long ago—in 1895—that Oscar Wilde was accused of being a “sodomite,” which led to his trial for “gross indecency.” He was convicted and sentenced to prison with hard labor; Wilde’s two sons were raised to forget him, and he died within three years of his release from prison, never to see his family again. All this based, not on “gross indecency” but on a gross misinterpretation of an ancient biblical story. (Wilde’s only grandson, Merlin Holland, has just published a memoir on the legacy of that tragic story.)
I did a deep dive into some of this history for an essay that was later published in the Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2011). I chose to focus my attention on how the story in Genesis 19 has been read in the worldwide Anglican Communion and the way it has been received rather relentlessly through the lens of gender dominance. The modern world, in other words, prefers to treat “sodomy” as a violation of gender roles for physical intimacy. Let’s be clear about this: what I’m describing reflects a long (patriarchal) history of defining “proper” sex as a bodily act in which a man is penetrating a woman, who is by virtue of being a woman, always and only penetrated; sodomy violates that natural order by “treating a man like a woman.”
In short, misogyny is always at the root of homophobia. We need look no further than the Bible itself for evidence: the story of Sodom’s destruction in Genesis 19 has a heartbreaking parallel in Judges 19, where we read about exactly the same threat of violent inhospitality (basically gang rape). But unlike the threat againts the male figures in Genesis, the story in Judges features a threat against a woman—and no divine intervention saves her.
It matters to take note of how this gendered “reception” of biblical texts unfolds in a multi-national religious network, like the Anglican Communion. Rather than staying put in debates about sexual ethics, the contestation over gay men ripples out to a whole range of issues at stake in the maintenance of patriarchal religious structures. Objecting to the betrayal of gender in “same-sex” relationships simply fortifies the objection to the ordination of women as priests; women are designed to receive the Gospel (“penetrated” by the divine Word), not sow its seeds—to ordain a woman, in other words, is in effect “religious sodomy.” (I’m really not making this up; this online essay is a classic articulation of the argument against ordaining women—just note that male “headship” in this essay is the slightly more polite way of referring to male “penetration.”)
I, for one, will not be preaching about penetration this Sunday (my parish is rightfully relieved). But all this backstory for the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah in this week’s Gospel reading actually does matter for a richer and more robust appreciation of that passage: Jesus is sending his disciples out into the world on a shared and dangerous mission. The “sending” and the “mission” create the link to the story in Genesis19 in which God sent angels to Sodom for a divine mission.
There are several hair-raising components of this week’s Gospel passage (some aspects are downright dystopian), but the overall sense of urgency of the mission on which Jesus sends his friends ought to get our attention, especially since Matthew underscores that urgency by evoking the dramatic story of destruction in Genesis.
The world is on fire, right now, and no less severely than if heavenly brimstone were igniting our cities and forests. I honestly don’t know what it will take to wake more of us up to the societal collapse and environmental catastrophe unfolding on our little electronic screens in real time. At the very least, I pray (I might even beg) that preachers this Sunday don’t just casually dismiss the ancient urgency Matthew infused into the Good News.
Can any of us change the whole world? Of course not. But everyone can do something. As for me, as my little parish gathers on the second Sunday of Pride Month, I will urge this resort-town congregation to do all we can to ensure that we are creating a community of genuine and believable hospitality for LGBTQ people, especially those who have been traumatized by religion, and to consider carefully what role we can play in changing a social order that continues to terrorize not only “queer” folk but also women more generally—this is a modest but important part of the healing mission on which God sends us. (And I would say, in contrast to the fire of Sodom’s destruction, we might embrace the image of the Pentecostal breath of God for the world’s healing and renewal…)
I’m not sure how yet, but I’ll offer that exhortation with the kind of urgency Matthew believed was necessary for effective Gospel proclamation—the kind of “fire and brimstone urgency” only Sodom and Gomorrah can inspire. The Church, generally and broadly, is way overdue for a heaping dose of that world-changing energy—that’s the Gospel mission to which God calls every generation of God’s people and for which God is sending us, right now.
