A
History of Fire:
The
Sin of Sodom and an Exploration of Goodness
The first time I heard the story of Sodom and
Gomorrah I was sitting on a wooden chair in the primary room of a chapel in
St. George, Utah. One of my friends had been asked to prepare a brief talk that week
to share with the primary and had brought an illustrated book of the story of
Lot and his family to read out loud to the rest of us, showing us the colorful
pictures inside as he did. The part that struck me most was the very end when
Lot’s wife, overcome with sorrow, looks back at the city and is transformed
into a pillar of salt. In the book there was a picture of a family on a hill
walking away from the city in the background, leaving behind what looked like a
mound of white sand.
Whenever I heard about Sodom and Gomorrah I couldn’t help picturing Lot’s
wife turning back to look at the burning city; the illustration of its flames
from my friend’s book burned in my mind. It wasn’t until a few years later I
learned that the great sin that had incurred the fires of heaven to reign mercilessly
on the two cities was the sin of homosexuality, one which had been known for
hundreds of years as the sin of Sodom, or “sodomy.” In fact, it was encased in
this parlance that homosexuality was first mentioned in an LDS General
Conference in 1897 when George Q. Cannon asked of sodomy,
How can this be stopped? Not while those who have
knowledge of these filthy crimes exist. The only way, according to all that I
can understand as the word of God, is for the Lord to wipe them out, that there
will be none left to perpetuate the knowledge of these dreadful practices among
the children of men.[1]
Reading this, one cannot help but feel that Elder Cannon was
unacquainted with the history of the fire of Sodom. He couldn’t have known of
history’s brutalities towards gay men, how many times those in power had tried to “wipe them out,” or how
many more times they would.
In his essay “Self-reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “he who
would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but
must explore if it be goodness.” The story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the
history of its use to justify atrocities against gay people forces us to do
just what Emerson advocates—to truly question our definitions of good and evil
and be sure to assign the right labels to the right actions. We too often allow
attitudes formed by cultural history and institutionalized prejudices to shape
our definitions of good and evil rather than engaging in a true exploration of
goodness.
“Sodomy” first gained popularity as a word to exclusively describe
homosexual acts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,[2]
but the growing condemnation of homosexual relationships began nearly a
thousand years earlier in the fourth and fifth centuries AD as the first laws
prohibiting homosexual acts were enacted in the Roman Empire.[3]
Despite these laws and a growing cultural distaste for homosexuality, gay
literature and homosexual relationships continued in Medieval Europe. In times
of difficulty, however, gay people were rounded up with Jews as the scapegoats
for disaster, and were often burned or driven out. (To apply the term “gay” to
people of the past is perhaps an anachronism, but I use it for conversational
convenience as well as modern applicability.)
During the Inquisition the story of Sodom began to be used in more
abundance as justification for the harsh treatment of gay people. Peter Canisius,
a leading Jesuit intellectual of the late 16th century updated
Aquinas’s teachings on the morality of homosexuality in his Catechism with an inclusion of the story
of Sodom and Gomorrah, warning that men “should not deal carnally” with each
other “because it was an abomination” that would be met with the same fate as
the men of Sodom.[4] Tragically,
in the absence of God’s punishments, the men of the Inquisition seemed to be
determined to enact this fiery fate themselves. It was as “sodomites” that gay
Chinese couples were rounded up by Jesuit priests in the Philippines in 1588
and put to death for practicing marriage among gay men. These executions, to
the Chinese, were an attack on the traditional family. The inhabitants of the
Fujian Province area in China who made up the primary Chinese population in the
Philippines at the time had long practiced gay marriage, and gay couples would
often together raise children of their own.[5]
During his 1581 visit to Rome, Montaigne noted that a few years previously
several marriages had been celebrated between men in the church of St. John and
that the couples “went to bed and lived together” for quite a while before
being burned at the stake.[6]
Jesuit fathers leading missions in China and Japan repeatedly condemned those
kingdoms for their open acceptance of the “sin of Sodom,” and men were burned
as “sodomizers” throughout Christendom.[7]
And so with that same fate of the vivid fire painted on the pages of my
friend’s book, the lives of countless gay men were brought, burning, to a
brutal end, and as Lot’s wife was turned to salt when she looked back to mourn
Sodom’s fate, so the sympathizers of “sodomizers” were equally condemned.[8]
The sin of Sodom also began to be used as an explanation for the downfall
of past empires. The fires of Pompeii
were said to be a punishment for rampant homosexuality, and Rome itself was
said to have fallen because of its lax moral attitudes and open acceptance of
gay relationships. This same argument was echoed by George Q. Cannon in his
1897 conference address when he said that the “crime” of sodomy “was practiced
by the nations of old, and caused God to command their destruction and
extirpation.” This argument has continually been mentioned by LDS church
leaders in the last century, and survives to this day. In fact, an article was just
published on October 15, 2012 in the USU Statesman in which the author once
again repeated the age-old and still-ridiculous claim that the Roman Empire
fell because of its open acceptance of homosexual relationships.
In reality, the last few
centuries of the Roman Empire experienced a dramatic decline in the publication
of gay literature, the popularity of gay relationships, and witnessed the Empire’s
first laws passed against gay relationships.[9]
If correlation equates with the will of God, then it could be much more
persuasively argued that the rampant praise of gay relationships in the first
two centuries of the empire’s founding and the repeated occurrence of gay
marriages[10]
caused God to give a long life to the empire until the Romans angered God by
removing legal sanction from the intimate relationship of those of the same
gender.
Clearly Sodom’s sin provides no explanatory power at all to the rise
and fall of nations.
As we know, the Inquisition period did not end the dealing of death to
gay men and women. It is often forgotten that the tradition of a common fate between
gay men and Jews was continued into the twentieth century as over 100,000
homosexuals were imprisoned alongside the countless Jews that met their end in
the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
A history such as this leaves one pondering the true nature of sin and exploring
what it truly means to be good. It seems quite apparent to the modern reader
that the fiery inferno imposed upon “sodomites” in the past millennium is by
far the greater sin. This brings us to the ultimate question we must ask of the
story of Lot’s family and their encounter with angels, fire, and pillars of
salt.
What, exactly, was Sodom’s sin?
The reason that Sodom has so long been associated with homosexuality is
because after the angels came to Lot and his family, the men of Sodom demanded
the strangers to be brought out “that they might know them.” Of the 943 times that this Hebrew verb for “to know” is
used in the Old Testament, only 10 of them are used as a euphemism for physical
intimacy.[11]
None of them refer to homosexual acts. Overwhelming evidence points that the
story of Sodom is not referring to sexuality at all.
There are numerous references to Sodom and its fate later in both the
Old and New Testaments, and not a single of them mentions anything to do with
homosexuality. In fact, only one mentions anything to do with sexuality at all.
Jude teaches that the men of Sodom went “after strange flesh.” The term “strange
flesh,” however, was most often used to refer to prostitutes and was never used
to describe homosexual relationships. The Greek term that would have referred
to homosexuality would have been “alien flesh.”[12]
That Sodom becomes a symbol for abhorrent wickedness is clear,[13]
but both later scriptures and centuries of interpretation preceding the
Inquisition point to an alternative definition of Sodom’s sin, and thus a
different definition of what it is to be wicked.
Christ connected the sin of Sodom with the sin of inhospitality when he
taught that “whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye
depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say
unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the
day of judgment than for that city.”[14]
In the book of Ezekiel the sins of Sodom are listed when God announces that
“Behold, this was the iniquity of… Sodom, pride, fullness of bread… neither did
she strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.”[15]
This proclamation supposedly by God himself concerning the sins of Sodom
written by the hand of an ancient author much more intimately acquainted with
the story than any of us today mentions nothing of homosexuality, but rather
lists sins whose most distinguished attribute seems to be the failure to love.
Centuries of rabbinical tradition and Christian interpretation
preceding the Inquisition labeled the sin of Sodom as its inhospitality to
strangers, its pride, and ignoring the hungry and the needy.[16]
The wickedness of Sodom was its lack
of love, not love between people of the same gender. And so it is with irony
that history’s true sodomites were not the men who married each other in Rome
in the 1580s, and nor were they the gay Chinese men of the Philippines, but rather their persecutors. The true “sodomizers” were those who met
difference with inhospitality.
When I think of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, I feel like Lot’s wife
turning back to gaze upon the burning city. I look back on a history of fire. I
remember who the inhabitants of Sodom really are and the tragedy that occurs
when people misinterpret goodness. The image that burns vividly in my mind is
that of flames falling not from heaven, but from the hand of man out upon his
fellow man, tormenting countless thousands and unjustly ending their lives
because of the way they expressed their love. I remember that there is a “trap of tolerance”[17]
and that we fall for it every time we tolerate hatred and bigotry. We fall for
it when we tolerate definitions of goodness that result in realities of torment
instead of exploring if our definitions of right “really [are] goodness.” We
fall for it when we forget the history of fire.
[1]
See October 1897 General Conference, pg 66
[2]
See John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 4
[3] Ibid.
[4]
See Jonathan Spence, “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,” ch 7
[5]
See Albert Chan, “Chinese-Philippine Relations in the Late Sixteenth Century to
1603,” pg 71
[6]
See Montaigne, “Journal de Voyage,” p. 231 and 481
[7]
Spence, “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,” ch 7
[8] Ibid.
[9]
Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 3
[10] Ibid.
[11]
Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 4
[12] Ibid.
[13]
E.g., Deut. 29:23, 32:32; Isaiah 3:9, 13:19; Jeremiah 23:14, 49:18, 50:40;
Lamentations 4:6; Ezekiel 16: 46-48; Amos 4:11; Zeph. 2:9; Matt. 10:15; Luke
17:29; Roman 9:29; 2 Pet. 2:6; Jude 7. With all of these references to the
wickedness of Sodom, it would make sense for at least one of them to mention
homosexuality as the root of its wickedness if that were indeed the case. In
fact, none of them do.
[14] Matt.
10:14-15, see Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch
4
[15]
Ezekiel 16: 48-49
[16]
See Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 4 for more
information and for analysis of other Biblical teachings on the morality of gay
relationships
[17]
See Boyd K. Packer’s most recent conference address
