We Who Must Die Demand a Miracle

In the 1980s and 1990s, gay religious leaders and communities faced a challenge that stretched their physical, emotional, spiritual, and theological resources past their limits. The emergence of AIDS forced them to address the familiar challenges of integrating sexuality and faith in a new—life or death—context. It would prove a critical testing ground for whether and how the radical experiment of explicitly gay religiosity could sustain people and communities “in trouble.” This chapter tells the story of how one gay-identified congregation, Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco, and its pastor drew on a combination of liberation theology, LGBT literature, and what David Halperin calls a “queer sensibility” to forge gay religious life in a time of both immense possibility and immense suffering and loss. It does so by looking at one moment in the church’s life—the sermon given by the congregation’s minister on Christmas Eve of 1989—and using it as a lens to examine how liberation theology and LGBT literature were brought to bear on this particular moment in the AIDS crisis in order to make gay Christianity a usable tradition in a time of crisis and change.

Founding New Sodom

This essay looks at the worldview of gay male communalists across the United States in the mid-1970s as seen in the rural gay magazine Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the critical years from 1973 to 1976 as well as in other extant archival sources related to gay communalism. As a clearinghouse for gay men involved in radical, back-to-the-land ventures, RFD provides a complex view of the creation of a largely white, gay male counterculture spirituality that fused the sexual politics of early gay liberationists with ecofeminist, animist, New Age understandings of sexuality, the natural world, and spirit. Gay men who were or who wanted to live in communal spaces nationwide sent letters and stories into RFD, which was published in a variety of gay male communal spaces during these years.

From Women’s Rights to Religious Freedom

This essay traces the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism’s engagement in the issue of reproductive rights during the 1970s and early 1980s. Members of the Women’s League first championed legal abortion in 1970, defending their position through expressly feminist arguments supporting women’s reproductive autonomy. While they never backed down from their endorsement of legal abortion, the political shifts of the late 1970s and early 1980s compelled them to develop a new language through which to discuss the issue. Reframing access to abortion as a matter of religious freedom offered Women’s League members a way to articulate their support for the procedure without publicly endorsing the principle of women’s reproductive autonomy, an idea that had become increasingly controversial over the course of the 1970s. As much of the American public began to view a particularly right-wing, Christian opposition to abortion as a universal religious principle, the leaders of the Women’s League struggled to show that their backing of legal abortion did not conflict with their religious commitments. Framing access to abortion as a religious right enabled them to present their stance on abortion as a component of their spiritual worldview rather than as a capitulation to secular, feminist ideals.

Real True Buds

This essay focuses on the Philadelphia-based Peace Mission Movement, led by the African American religious figure known as Father Divine and centered on the belief that he was God in a body. The movement, in which committed followers lived celibate lives in sex-segregated communal residences meant to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, saw its peak of membership and influence during the 1930s and early 1940s. Observers frequently painted Divine as a charismatic manipulator who demanded celibacy of his mostly African American female followers, but took a wife in what he described as a spiritual marriage. Such criticism resonated with American Protestant discourses about papal control of Roman Catholics and the sexual deviance and social dangers of celibacy. The essay turns attention from outsiders’ preoccupation with Divine to ask questions about religion and sexuality among his followers. It examines the case of a group of women in the movement who embraced Divine’s requirement to reject all human relationships and mortal desire, yet expressed connection to and longing for one another through the Peace Mission’s theological language. This case of relationships within the Peace Mission underscores for historians of sexuality and of religion the need to understand religious celibacy as a complex practice and identity, shaped and inflected by the particular theological frameworks and institutions that support it as well as by the broader social context in which its practitioners are located.

Introduction

The lines seem so clearly drawn: A white evangelical minister stands in front of his California congregation on a Sunday morning. In one hand he holds a Bible. In the other is the text of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges extending civil marriage rights to same-sex couples throughout the country. “It’s time to choose,” he thunders to thousands of believers in the stadium-style worship center. “Will we follow the Word of God or the tyrannical dictates of government?” His declaration “This is who I stand with” is met with applause from the faithful as he dramatically flings the Court’s decision to the ground and tramples on it, waving the Bible in his upraised hand....

The Making of Gay and Lesbian Rabbis in Reconstructionist Judaism, 1979–1992

This chapter tells how one Jewish denomination, the Reconstructionists, came to accept gay men and lesbians in their school for training rabbis in 1984, making Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) the first school for training rabbis to admit and ordain openly gay and lesbian students and only the second denomination in the United States to formally allow gay and lesbian religious leadership. This move was particularly bold at a time when other religious organizations, even liberal ones, were actively barring gay men and lesbians from the clergy. The story of RRC’s shift in policy between 1979 and 1992 reveals the tangled and uneven nature of institutional and ideological change in sexual and religious mores. At first glance, much about the shifts in RCC’s processes and practices does not seem “religious”—if by that term we mean formal teaching, ritual practice, or textual interpretation. But institutional practices and decisions about policy were also deeply tied to, shaped by, and productive of religious meanings. The story of how RRC came to accept the ordination of gays and lesbians as rabbis highlights the complicated relationship between policy and practice.

Modernizing Decency

Charles Keating, an ambitious young Cincinnati lawyer, founded Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL) in 1955. Though the social origins of CDL were rooted in Cincinnati’s conservative Catholic politics, Keating was able to recast antipornography politics for a national audience. CDL despised the influx of pornography washing over American society in the 1960s. This emphatic proclamation bespoke a comfort with modernity jarringly at odds with midcentury public perceptions of antismut activists—a very productive modernism that CDL harnessed to great effect over the course of the late 1950s and 1960s. Even as CDL pioneered new discursive formations, which often emanated directly out of obsolete earlier movements, it adopted the tropes and trappings of evolving social mores to reposition activism against obscenity and pornography not as retrograde but rather as an integral part of red-blooded, decent American citizenship. While the group faded from view during the 1970s, CDL set an important precedent for conservative groups in forwarding a sexually conservative, religiously motivated politics through modern, secular language. It also provided a model for future religious efforts at mainstreaming activism, such as the antiabortion movement, over a decade before abortion became a fulcrum for the hybrid movement known as the religious (or Christian) right.

Sex Is Holy and Mysterious

Historians of sexuality have consistently portrayed U.S. Catholics as agents of denunciation and repression, intransigently opposed to the advance of “modern” sexual values and practices. The result of such portrayals is to make Catholics into ahistorical actors, entering the narrative only to give voice to their church’s purportedly unchanging views on sexual morality. This chapter focuses on the early twentieth century reform efforts by a vanguard of Catholic educators, who argued for a new regime of forthright instruction about sexuality. The story of these educators highlights how their approach was shaped by multiple contingencies, from the lingering effects of Catholics’ long-standing status as a religious minority to changing patterns of formal education to shifting ideas about human development. Though they advocated views distinct from those of non-Catholic counterparts, these educators were far from simple reactionaries intent upon prohibiting access to sexual knowledge. Instead, they were reformers who, in the words of Matthew Michel, aimed to overcome the “bane of absolute silence” about sex in Catholic schools and promote in their students “respect for self and high reverence for others” as cornerstones of sexual morality.5 The movement for Catholic sex education thus highlights how a careful investigation that integrates religious history and the history of sexuality has the potential to bring to light new narratives and uncover rich—even surprising—possibilities within two historical subfields that, until now, have seldom intersected in more than a cursory fashion.

Family Planning Is a Christian Duty

Throughout the 1960s, the Protestant mainline developed a theology of “responsible parenthood,” grounded in scripture and Christian thought that turned the use of contraception within marriage into a site of Christian moral agency. Responsible parenthood language offered religious responses to scientific advances and scientifically articulated social problems like population explosion. Protestant clergy, nationally and locally, deployed it to encourage birth control among married couples. These leaders were often members of what is called “mainline” Protestantism, encompassing such moderate, non-evangelical denominations such as the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the American Baptist Church, and the Episcopal Church. They eschewed fundamentalism and valued ecumenical cooperation, particularly among liberal white Protestants, building alliances through groups such as the National Council of Churches (NCC). While the number of mainline Protestants has declined since the middle of the twentieth century, in the 1960s mainline Protestants constituted a prominent voice in public conversations. Their influence was so great that much of what historians tend to see as secular was actually deeply inflected with liberal Protestant values.

Subversive Spiritualities

This chapter features influential figures of American yoga, whose life and work illustrate the re-reaction of “exotic” Indian devotions into idiosyncratic forms of American yoga. Those responsible for appropriating and re-creating yoga as a mode of subversive spirituality varied as widely as the turn-of-the-century sex reformer Ida C. Craddock (1857–1902), the Hindu-Indian nationalist Vivekananda (1863–1902), the tantric guru Swami Muktananda (1908–82), and the devotional guru Daya Mata (1914–2010). The architects of this spiritual practice of modern yoga blurred religious boundaries and challenged mainstream Christianity as they also subverted sexual norms. However, this decidedly countercultural image shifted markedly by the end of the twentieth century. For this reason, yoga provides a unique exemplar of the intertwined transformations of twentieth-century religion and sexuality. Initially largely perceived as a perverse and heathen challenge to the Protestant moral establishment, yoga by the century’s end typified ascendant cultural ideals of bodily and spiritual health.