(2-minute read)

On a recent road trip exploring around the beautiful State of Kansas, I passed through Topeka. There, I stopped to see a house, defiantly painted rainbow colors, situated across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church hate group. My impromptu visit felt timely [around the 20^th anniversary of 9/11], given that the Westboro cult is infamous for—among other ugliness—expressing satisfaction over American military casualties in the post-9/11 wars.

I noticed that the church had included Biblical “citations” on its banners—in a simplistic attempt to lend ancient scriptural authority to contemporary hate. (Lots of Christian and Islamic denominations engage in the same kind of nonsense on this topic, only escaping being also classified as hate groups along with Westboro Baptist because they stop short of printing their beliefs on obscene public banners.)

Let us examine the validity of those citations on the Westboro Baptist banners:

“Genesis 19”

This passage in the Book of Genesis tells of God destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as punishment for violating the desert law of hospitality to strangers.

Quick recap: A man named Lot takes in two angels who are disguised as traveling foreigners. An angry mob then arrives at his home and demands that Lot release the men to be gang raped. Instead, Lot offers up his two married daughters to the mob (falsely claiming they are virgins, to make his substitution offer more appealing to the would-be rapists). As a reward to Lot for his hospitality, the angels facilitate the escape of Lot, his daughters, and the rest of his family. Then, God destroys the city.

Like much of the Hebrew Bible, this story (thought to have been written in ~700 BCE) is pretty darn weird. And it is also pretty vague—especially if read out of context and in translation and by non-specialists. Nonetheless, we do know how the Sodom story was originally intended to be understood:

1. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Ezekiel (thought to have been written in the 6th c BCE) states: “Behold this was the sin of Sodom…She and her daughters had pride, excess bread, and peaceful serenity, but she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.”
2. The Sodom tale is referenced eight times in the New Testament. None of these instances present the attempted same-sex gang rape as the reason that Sodom gets punished.
3. Church father Origen made this understanding explicitly clear (3rd c CE): “hear these words, you who avoid a guest as an enemy… [Lot] escapes the conflagration for this reason alone: because he opened his house to strangers. Angels entered the hospitable house; fire entered those closed to strangers.”
4. And, perhaps most importantly, the Talmud (200-700 CE) confirms this same understanding by Jewish rabbis about their own scriptural tradition: Sodom’s moral depravity was its selfish inhospitality.

Therefore, it seems to me that it is the rainbow house—not the church—who should be using Genesis 19 to support its position! It would be Biblically accurate to cite “Genesis 19” at the bottom of the rainbow house’s banners proclaiming “Peace” and “Black Lives Matter” . . . because Genesis 19 teaches us to open our houses to strangers and to strengthen the hand of poor and the needy—i.e., to seek peace and to actively value the lives of all people.

“Jude 7”

The New Testament’s Book of Jude (written ~100 CE, in Greek, by an unknown author) is a polemical condemnation of certain Christians with whom the author disagrees; the author dramatically paints as immoral the theological idea that faith without works is enough for salvation (thus espousing what has become the Roman Catholic position, as opposed to the Protestant position of “faith alone”).

Chapter 7 mentions the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah having pursued “strange flesh” (sarkos heteros). The term sarkos heteros in Jude 7 is a reference to the angry mob’s demand to rape the visiting angels in Genesis 19—a slightly oblique reference to Hebrew scripture that is reinforced by Jude 6’s explicit reference to the Genesis 6 legend of angels displeasing God by mating with human women.

Now, I suppose that, if were true that (a) the Hebrew Bible text specified that the Sodomite mob contained only men, and (b) angelic beings somehow counted as human men, and (c) rape were the same thing as sex, then a reader could say that the mob in the story demonstrates a desire for homosexual sex. However, (a), (b), and (c) are not true; so, a reader cannot logically say that.

Regardless, even if one were to insist on projecting homosexual desire into the Sodom story, one simply cannot argue that the incidental literary detail about the mob’s demands was the intended point of the Biblical story. Indeed, as evidenced above in bullet points, a logical and fact-equipped reader cannot maintain that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for anything other than the sin of inhospitality.

— September 2021