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Trigger Warning: This article and comic contain stories and images of racism, non-consensual harm and violence done to women and LGBTQ people.
Welcome back to A History of Incompatibility. We’re exploring the historical origins of the controversial language over homosexuality in The United Methodist Book of Discipline. This is Part 7, so if you’d like to start from the beginning, go to Part 1. In the first act, we explored the events of the 1972 General Conference, where The United Methodist Church introduced the Incompatibility Clause, stating: “We do not condone the practice of homosexuality, and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.”
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This week, we’re exploring the intersections that contributed to the modern Western ideas about human sexuality. European colonial expansion contributed to certain biases in the scientific community: namely the inherent belief that some people were evolutionarily superior to others. “Scientific racism” served to uphold racist structures in society by categorically dehumanizing black and brown people (AND white immigrants from certain countries). The quest for racial purity and a better society included the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of men and women whom scientists deemed unfit to continue their family line. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, psychologists popularized the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” as ways to categorize orientation and behavior that was either normal or a deviance. Starting with the bias that heterosexuality was normal and homosexuality was either pathological or the result of some sort of permanently stunted sexual development. Following a colonial mindset of racial superiority, it was assumed that black and native people were less-evolved and more prone to homosexual behavior, and that white homosexuals were somehow regressing to a sort of tribalistic de-evolution.
But perhaps the biggest impact on modern ideas around homosexuality is the growing social and religious acceptance of contraceptives and family planning. After the American Civil War, the national structure changed significantly, and having a large family was becoming more of a detriment than a help to the family or national economy. As women’s rights activists pushed for the right to vote, there was also a significant push to educate women and families on methods of birth control. Catholics stood by their long history with Augustine and Aquinas that sex was only meant for procreation, and stood adamantly opposed to any form of birth control. Protestants, however, started to see the benefits for families and society, and began rethinking their age-old beliefs about the purpose of sexual intimacy. Protestants could draw on Martin Luther, who viewed sex as “necessary” to human nature “as sleeping and waking, eating and drinking…” And new psychological studies into human sexuality was convincing that sex for pleasure, without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy, could be incredibly beneficial for couples. Of course there was a strong conservative push back, fearing the social acceptance of contraceptives would lead to widespread moral laxity and extra-marital sex. The argument was also made that superior white people should not hinder their breeding while the black and brown populations continued to grow.
But slowly, Protestant American Christianity began to widely accept non-procreative sex between a husband and wife as a gift of God. Today, it is common to find evangelical churches that celebrate, even idolize, the beauty and gift of intimacy and pleasure between a husband and wife. But this belief is really only a recent development in the long history of Christian belief. And it came with a price for LGBTQ people.
With the growing normalization of the small, well-to-do white heterosexual family, previous taboos around sexuality landed hard on the homosexual community. Both science and religion saw it as a problem to be fixed, and because homosexuals were considered inherently inferior, many were put through incredibly unethical testing methods to search for a “cure.” One scientist practiced testicle transplants from straight men into gay men. Even though it never resulted in success, aversion therapy was practiced for decades, giving homosexuals electroshocks or inducing vomiting while showing them gay pornography. Perhaps the most horrific practice was “corrective rape,” where patients were forced to have sex against their wills as an attempt to turn off their same-sex attraction. By and large, there was no “cure” to be found.
Before we close out this week’s portion of the story, I wanted to highlight one tiny, crucial decision that has significantly informed the modern anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. In 1946, the Revised Standard Version New Testament was released. Recent English translations had used the word “sodomites” to interpret a challenging Greek word in 1 Corinthians 6:9, a term that was historically believed to include ALL people who engaged in ANY sexual activity that could not result in pregnancy. The RSV translation team decided that this word no longer reflected a growing worldview that accepted non-procreative sexual intimacy between a husband and wife. So they translated the word as “homosexuals,” a word designating a person’s sexual orientation, separate from any actual sexual action that person may ever engage in. As Christians were embracing a new sexual ethic for heterosexual couples, they codified in scripture the inherent exclusion of homosexual people from the kingdom of God.
That’s just 76 years ago, friends, within some of our lifetimes. Join us next week as we learn how modern Evangelicals developed an entire anti-gay apologetic and made the eradication of homosexuality and abortion their top priorities.