The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, 1997

I had the pleasure of being taught by Mark Jordan my senior year of college at Emory University. I'm not a particularly emotional person when I'm not supposed to be, but one of the lectures he gave in class about this very topic made me teary. I would say that any piece of academic work that you can get your hands on by Dr. Jordan is a must-have.

at the start of the second millennium of Christianity.Looking at the preceding "review" that ignores the subject of the book (what Christian theologians of roughly a millennium ago wrote about "sodomy") and seems to have been written by someone who did not read the book but substituted his own condemnations of homosexuality, I was astounded to read that Romans 1 is clear. The "reviewer" also must not have read that, because the syntax (in the original, which the reviewer probably does not know was not English) is VERY convoluted. There are no condemnations of "sodomy" (by any name) in the Gospels that allegedly report the words of the Christ, and Mark Jordan's book does not deal with the Hebrew background or the first millennium of Christianity. (An earlier reviewer must not have seen the blurb FROM Michel Foucault for John Boswell's book, one that is considerably less sound than Jordan's.)

The writing and reasoning in this history of the medieval formation of Christian condemnation of the "nefarious sin" of "sodomy" are very crisp. My only complaint is that the book is too short (not examining the condemnation of "sodomites" in the first Christian millennium, or in Jewish or Islamic theology). Jordan shows how one after another Church Father produced incoherent condemnations of sodomy--monastic, clerical, and layman--in part out of concern for suggesting such a sin to those not aware of its possibility, in part not wanting to reveal the extent of its prevalence within the priesthood and monasteries. One striking feature is that this tradition/discourse only began more than a thousand years after Christ, who is not recorded as having condemned sodomy or sodomites.

This book addresses some of the same terrain as John Boswell's 1980 book CHRISTIANITY, SOCIAL TOLERANCE, AND HOMOSEXUALITY, but with important points of contrast, one of which is it's half the earlier book's length in pages. Jordan takes a Christianized, quasi-Foucauldian approach to the subject, whereas Boswell's approach was essentialist, stressing historical continuities which Jordan opposes. Boswell equated the modern concept of homosexuality with the medieval concept of sodomy, whereas Jordan does not. Instead, Jordan argues that the term "sodomy," as used by early church fathers and pre-Renaissance theologians, was a usefully vague invective, employed not altogether differently from the ways "philistinism" was used later or, for that matter, the way "homophobia" is used in some circles today. But parallel to what Jordan says about the term "homophobia," "sodomy," too, has been used politically not as a precise explanation for human behavior, but as "a placeholder for an explanation yet to be provided" (167-68). [Arguably, as philosopher Judith Butler does argue elsewhere (cogently), the same could be said for the current uses of "gay," "homosexual," "queer," etc., or for that matter, "sex."] Jordan's book is an important one for people who identify themselves as either Christian or gay (--or both) because it addresses issues underlying the clash of values and "culture wars" being played out in society now. If indeed, as Jordan suggests, "sodomy" was invented to fill a gap left by Christendom's refusal of the "erotic"--even between two sexes, perhaps progress lies in our seeking a place for the erotic INSIDE the moral, instead of persisting in (often hypocritically) dichotomizing the two--something, in response to a previous reader's comments, Plato did NOT do (though the later Platonists did).