The Bible Is Not Anti-Gay. The Institution Is.
The Closet Series — Behan
The Bible is full of profound same-sex relationships that the institution of the Church has worked very hard to desexualize. The work of desexualization is itself a political act, not a theological one.
David and Jonathan
In 1 Samuel, Jonathan’s soul is knit to David’s soul. The text uses the Hebrew word ahav — love — the same word used for romantic love elsewhere in scripture. When Jonathan dies, David mourns: your love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women. That sentence is in the text. It has always been in the text. The tradition has read it as brotherly devotion. That reading is a choice, not a certainty. None of us were there.
Ruth and Naomi
Ruth says to Naomi: where you go I will go. Where you die I will die. There I will be buried. It is one of the most complete declarations of devotion in all of scripture. The tradition reads it as loyalty between women. That reading is a choice, not a certainty. None of us were there.
Jesus and the Beloved Disciple
In the Gospel of John, one disciple is identified repeatedly as the one Jesus loved. At the Last Supper he reclines against Jesus. At the crucifixion, when every other male disciple has fled, he remains. Jesus from the cross entrusts his mother to this man’s care. The tradition has worked carefully to keep this relationship fraternal. That work is a choice, not a certainty. None of us were there.
These three relationships share something important. They are not incidental to their texts. They are central to them. The authors of scripture chose to place same-sex love — sexual or not — at the heart of the narrative. The institution chose to read that love as something other than what the language describes.
Both readings are interpretive. Only one claims to be definitive.
The political nature of that claim becomes visible when you ask a simple question: who benefits from the desexualization? Not the text. Not the theology. Not the figures themselves. The institution benefits. The institution that has built its authority in part on the regulation of sexual behavior requires that the sacred figures of its own tradition be unambiguously heterosexual — or unambiguously celibate — or unambiguously beyond the question entirely.
What has been applied to these relationships across centuries is a veneer of heteronormative context. And that veneer has a problem.
Gay people existed in first century Palestine.
They existed in ancient Israel.
They existed wherever and whenever human beings have existed. The murals of Pompeii conclusively prove that fact. To suggest otherwise is not theology. It is erasure. The figures in these stories could have been a part of the queer community. That is not a claim. That is simply the acknowledgment that it is not possible to say they were not there.
The problem is that the text keeps raising the question. The text keeps placing men who love men and women who love women at the center of the story. The institution keeps answering a question the text refuses to close.
And that’s not nothing.
