The Bible Never Condemns Homosexuality
Evangelical Christians often say that they oppose homosexuality because it is contrary to the Bible. This is a deeply ironic statement given that the Bible doesn’t say anything about homosexuality. In fact, it doesn’t say anything about sexuality at all. Both sexuality, as a stable natural disposition of sexual attraction, and homosexuality, as a stable natural disposition of sexual attraction to people of the same sex, are concepts that did not exist at the time that the various pieces of the Bible were being written. There were many other ways of thinking about sex, but sexuality wasn’t one of them.
We can see this by looking at the handful of verses that are frequently, but wrongly, taken to be about homosexuality in the Bible and breaking them down. Let’s go one by one.
Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:1-25). Perhaps no story is more associated with homosexuality in modernity than the story of Sodom. And yet, it has nothing to do with the topic. In the story, two angels come to the town of Sodom, and a crowd asks for the angels to be handed over to them, so that they can gang-rape them. It takes a mind fascinatingly fixated on same-sex issues to think that this is a story where the problem is that the crowd and the angels are both ostensibly male (if we should even be in the business of sexing angels). This is a tale about hospitality and it’s complete opposite. In the story, Lot has welcomed the Angels into his home and offered them security. He is a symbol of hospitality. The men of the city represent not only the absence of hospitality, but the unbridled force of hostility. That the angels might be sexed male is really irrelevant. And this should be obvious. Who, if they witnessed a gang-rape would first judge those involved because of whom they chose to rape?
Leviticus 18:22, 20:13. Often taken as a direct judgment against homosexuality, these verses are not only irrelevant to any contemporary consideration of homosexuality, they are not even the kind of law that Christians pay attention to in any other context. First, what is condemned is certainly not “homosexuality.” It is playing the active (penetrating) role in an act of male/male anal sex. No other form of sexual interaction is in view. Not male/male oral sex. Not male/male manual genital manipulation. Not friction-based male/male relations, which were common at points in the ancient world. Nor is there any condemnation of any kind of sexual interaction between women. This should be enough to get even the most homophobic reader to wonder what is going on here, because it is clearly not a condemnation of “homosexual sex.” Too many versions are left out. What is happening is most likely a concern about sexual purity. Jewish law was often concerned about the mixing of things across boundaries. The mixing of different kinds of seeds is condemned, as is the mixture of different kinds of cloth in a garment (See Leviticus 19:19). What is at stake in Leviticus 18 and 20 then is the crossing of a purity boundary. This is, of course, exactly the kind of concern that Christianity has relegated to the dustbin of pre-Christ law in every other context. Anyone who insists on both enforcing it in the present, and broadening the condemnation to cover a range of activities never pictured in the original can hardly be said to be following the Bible. Quite the opposite, they are manipulating the Bible to get it to follow them.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11. In these verses, Paul condemns two groups that some wrongly think are relevant to discussions of homosexuality: the μαλακοὶ (literally “soft ones”) and the ἀρσενοκοῖται (something like “male-bed-layers”). Both terms are chronically mistranslated, and unsurprisingly so. Our culture has no parallel categories. That’s because none of us live in ancient Greece or Rome. In those cultures, there were a set of assumptions around sex that just don’t make sense to us anymore. It was assumed that sex was always between one powerful party and one submissive party. The act was for the pleasure, or sheer joy of dominance experienced by the powerful party. The powerful partner was the one who penetrated the other, thus manifesting his (it was always his) freedom from penetration and domination. The submissive was the penetrated. This arrangement was not primarily about what we would consider sexual pleasure. At times, a conquering army would penetrate those they had defeated simply to show their dominance. It was a common slur to claim that some powerful politician (like Julius Caesar) was on the receiving end of his relations. This act was a relationship that was primarily about power.
The “soft ones” to whom Paul refers are likely pubescent males who were penetrated by more powerful members of society. In ancient Greece this took the form of pederasty, and could be advantageous to both parties. The older, more powerful male would mentor the younger, less powerful. But the Roman’s came to see this as problematic, as it suggested that the noble male citizens of their empire might properly be seen as the less powerful, penetrated parties in some relationship. So, the Romans largely left the role of the penetrated to slaves and male prostitutes. It is participation in male/male sexual relations in these contexts that Paul condemns with his complaints about the “soft ones.”
But if this is his complaint about the soft ones, his reservations about the “male-bed-layers” must be understood in a similar context. The word itself is certainly an homage to the condemnation pictured in Leviticus 18 and 20, but the context is no longer that of the purity laws. Paul is condemning those males who penetrate others as a sign of their power over the other. Certainly, this contains no direct commentary on sex in an equal and loving partnership, such as we might find in contemporary homosexual pairings.
Romans 1:26-27. The final verse often used to try to clobber homosexuals is found in Romans. But again, it is utterly clear that Paul has nothing like homosexuality in view. Here is (what at first appears to be) the relevant passage:
“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”
If taken out of context in this way, the passage could look like a condemnation of having passions for others of the same sex, and thus of something like homosexuality.
Of course, the problem is that one shouldn’t take parts of a text out of context. As anyone who is capable of reading critically will note, the passage begins with “For this reason …” This should lead the reader to go back to find the reason.
It turns out that the passage isn’t actually about condemning anything having to do with sex or sexuality. It is a passage about what happens to people who worship idols. And we aren’t being metaphorical here, Paul is thinking of gentiles who literally worship statues: “they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” (Romans 1:23).
In verses 26-27 Paul is claiming that there were people who naturally desired people of the opposite sex, had then worshiped idols, and then God handed them over to unnatural desires for people of the same sex as a punishment for their idolatry. That is not what anyone means by homosexuality today. Absent is the unnaturalness of the desire, the idea that it is a punishment, and, oh yeah, the worship of reptile statues.
To make this into a condemnation of homosexuality or homosexual relationships in the present is to violently rip the passage from its actual context and pretend that you were its new author. That’s what we call eisegesis, reading your own views into the text.
Of course, this is what evangelicals have to do in order to claim the Bible condemns homosexuality. And the only reason that its not obvious to them that this is what they have to do is that they are so well practiced in doing it. Reading the Bible out of context is necessary for anyone who takes the Bible to be infallible, literal, and univocal.
But all of this is just to say that the kind of delusions that lead to the conclusion that “the Bible condemns homosexuality” are built into evangelicalism. It is not to say that their reading gains any more plausibility for the fact that it is built into a broader set of wrongheaded presuppositions that lead them to distort all of scripture.
So, no, the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. Saying that it does so is kind of like saying it diagnoses autism. The Bible doesn’t even know anything about homosexuality. The claim isn’t even about something that the Bible could have done. So you don’t need to know much to know that it does not, in fact, do it.
Get em!