Reforming sodom protestants and the rise of gay rights

Her first book, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights, is newly available from UNC Press. She is also a co-editor (with Bethany Moreton and Gill Frank) of a forthcoming anthology, tentatively titled Devotions and Desires: Religion and Sexuality in the Twentieth Century United States. Reforming Sodom Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights By Heather R.

White With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R.

White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries w. Abstract With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, this book challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past.

White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy.

"Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights" by Heather White and David K. Johnson

On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity. And many of those groups began meeting in churches or other kinds of Christian offices.

Clergy Members of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, Home Close. HRW: The tricky thing about Stonewall is that no scholar in the field of queer history would say that Stonewall itself had the cultural reforming sodom protestants and the rise of gay rights that most people think it had. What did you find particularly challenging in that process? Samira K. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement.

SKM: That leads me to another hot-button issue: Stonewall. SKM: More seriously, I know that this book had roots in your dissertation. You make an interesting case in the last chapter about how to think of the Stonewall riots as an event with religious--and even Christian--meaning. But I show that Christians since the s, roughly speaking, have interpreted their past prohibitions and the meanings of biblical texts through a medical lens that retroactively reconfigured sodomy.

By the s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. Perhaps that too can help us confront the challenges that face us still. We could say that sodomy and Christian sodomy are the same thing. Follow the Author on Twitter. The United Church of Christ, in Decemberpublished an issue of Social Action that urged support for homosexual rights.

Religion: US. Chapel Hill:. American Studies. This seems to be another controversial aspect to your book--after all, those liberals are the set of progressive Mainline churches that now march in Pride parades. This is really interesting because we think of Christian traditions--and especially the bible--as the source for the medicalized category of homosexuality. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality.

A must read for understanding how a lot of change happened in a relatively short time. What I found, in brief, was that American liberal Protestants, in the first half of the 20th century, played a key role in synthesizing interpreted biblical meanings with the insights of what was then the new medical fields of psychology and psychoanalysis.

White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. White, visit the Author Page. Sodomy and the various biblical texts that are today associated with homosexuality actually had different common sense meanings. And I also connected to scholars in queer studies and the history of sexuality, which helped sharpen my understanding of how my work contributed to fields outside of American religions.