Deconstructing Fundamentalism
Homosexuality & the Bible: The New Testament Passages
This is week 6 of a series I will do every Wednesday called “Deconstructing Fundamentalism”. This won’t be an exhaustive approach to deconstructing these harmful teachings. Instead they are my reflections on the things that cracked my cognitive dissonance and helped lead me to a healthier Christian spirituality.
In the previous piece we looked at two passages that are often brought into conversations about homosexuality: the story of Sodom and the laws in Leviticus.
Once those are discussed, the conversation usually moves to the New Testament. And that’s where things often become more complicated, because the passages people point to were written into a very specific cultural world — one that looked very different from the way modern people understand sexuality.
But before we even open those texts, there’s something important we should understand about the societies the New Testament writers were living in.
Because the kinds of same-sex behavior that were common in the ancient world are not the same thing most people mean today when they talk about gay relationships.
To see why that matters, we have to spend a moment looking at the cultural landscape of the Greco-Roman world.
The World the New Testament Writers Lived In
In the ancient Mediterranean world, sexuality was not primarily understood in terms of orientation or identity.
Those categories simply didn’t exist yet.
People did not divide society into “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” Instead, sexuality was understood through the lens of status, power, and social roles.
And within that world, one particular practice was especially common: pederasty.
Pederasty referred to relationships between adult men and adolescent boys. These arrangements appeared across Greek and Roman society in various forms. Sometimes they were framed as mentorships. Sometimes they were tied to systems of education and social advancement. But they also involved a sexual dimension that today we would recognize as deeply exploitative.
The key thing to understand is that these relationships were not seen as two equal partners forming a mutual bond. They were structured around hierarchy.
The adult male held the power. The younger boy occupied a subordinate role.
And that dynamic mattered because sexual roles in the ancient world were deeply tied to ideas about honor and status.
The dominant partner maintained his masculinity and social standing. The passive partner, by contrast, occupied a role associated with youth, dependency, or even humiliation.
This was the cultural environment surrounding the early Christian movement.
Alongside pederasty, there were also other forms of same-sex behavior common in the Roman world: relationships between masters and enslaved people, temple prostitution connected to certain religious cults, and various forms of sexual excess tied to elite displays of power.
What you do not see clearly described in the ancient literature is the modern concept most people have in mind today: two adults of the same sex forming a mutual, lifelong partnership rooted in love and commitment.
That idea simply did not exist as a social category in the same way.
Which means when the New Testament writers talk about sexual behavior, they are addressing a cultural world where power, hierarchy, and exploitation were often baked into these practices.
Keeping that context in mind becomes especially important when we turn to the passages themselves.
Because without it, it’s very easy to assume they are addressing the same questions people are asking today.
Romans 1
The passage most often cited in these discussions comes from Romans 1.
In this section of the letter, Paul is describing the moral and spiritual collapse of the pagan world. He paints a picture of humanity turning away from God and becoming consumed by idolatry, excess, and destructive behavior.
As part of that description, he writes:
“For this reason God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.”
Romans 1:26–27
For many readers, this appears to be the clearest statement in the New Testament condemning same-sex behavior. But when we slow down and read the passage in its broader context, several things become worth noticing.
First, Paul is not writing a systematic sexual ethic here. He is constructing a rhetorical argument about idolatry. The entire section is framed around humanity abandoning the worship of God and exchanging it for the worship of created things. Three times Paul uses the language of exchange. Humanity exchanged the glory of God for idols. They exchanged truth for lies. And then, as part of that larger picture, they exchanged what he describes as natural relations.
In other words, the behavior he describes appears inside a much larger critique of pagan religious culture.
Which matters because many sexual practices in the Greco-Roman world were closely tied to idolatrous religious systems and displays of excess. Roman writers themselves frequently criticized the moral decadence of the empire’s upper classes: wealthy men who pursued increasingly extravagant forms of pleasure, often involving enslaved people, prostitutes, or younger partners. Sexuality in that world was often wrapped up with status, domination, and appetite.
So when Paul describes people being consumed with passion, he is not describing two people quietly building a life together in love and mutual commitment. He is describing a world of excess. A world where desire had become detached from covenant, restraint, and mutuality and had instead become one more expression of power and indulgence.
And the passage itself supports that reading, because Paul places this behavior inside a whole catalog of destructive patterns: greed, envy, violence, deceit, strife, arrogance, and ruthlessness. The point he is making is not simply about one isolated sexual act. He is describing a society unraveling under the weight of idolatry and exploitation.
That alone should make us a little more careful about how quickly we move from Paul’s world to our own.
But there is another layer here that matters too, and it has to do with Paul’s use of the word natural.
In Romans 1, Paul says these people exchanged what was natural for what was unnatural. For many Christians, that word natural does a tremendous amount of work. It gets treated as if Paul has just handed us a timeless, universal rule embedded into creation itself. The assumption is that once Paul uses that word, the whole matter is settled.
Except Paul uses that same kind of language in other places too, and modern Christians do not always treat it the same way.
For example, in 1 Corinthians 11:14 Paul argues about head coverings and hair length, and in the middle of that discussion he asks, “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?” That’s the same basic appeal. Paul points to what he considers natural and uses it to make a moral argument.
But very few Christians today treat hair length with the same seriousness they bring to Romans 1.
Most churches do not discipline men for having long hair. They do not preach sermon series about the created order of hair length. They do not tell teenage boys they are in rebellion against God if their hair touches their shoulders. In fact, many Christians read 1 Corinthians 11 and immediately recognize that Paul is speaking from within the cultural assumptions of his own time — a world where hair, dress, gender presentation, and public honor carried meanings that are very different from ours.
And that is exactly the point.
When Paul uses the word natural, he is not necessarily making the kind of modern biological argument people often assume he is making. More often, he is talking about what was considered fitting, customary, socially recognizable, or in keeping with the assumptions of his world.
That doesn’t make the word meaningless. But it does mean we should be careful. Christians already know how to do this kind of contextual reading when it comes to other issues. We already recognize that some of Paul’s appeals to “nature” are tangled up with ancient cultural expectations that we no longer share.
Which raises an honest question: why do we suddenly stop doing that here? Why does “nature” become flexible when Paul is talking about hair, but absolute when people want to use Romans 1 against queer people?
That inconsistency reveals that interpretation is never quite as simple as people pretend it is.
There’s something else here that is easy to miss. Paul’s wording in Romans 1 does not sound like he is describing people whose deepest orientation is toward the same sex and who are seeking loving, mutual partnership. He describes people being inflamed with lust, swept up in excess, and caught in the fallout of idolatrous culture. The entire tone of the passage is about disordered desire spilling outward in destructive ways.
That is a very different picture from what most people mean today when they talk about a gay couple in a faithful, committed relationship. Which means we have to ask, as honestly as we can, whether Romans 1 is actually addressing the modern question people keep trying to make it answer.
Or whether Paul is describing the kinds of exploitative, excessive, and status-driven behaviors that were common in the pagan world around him.
Once we recognize the cultural landscape Paul was writing into, that question becomes much harder to avoid. And once that question is on the table, the certainty many people bring to this passage starts to feel a lot less certain than they were taught.
1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy
Two other passages often appear in this conversation. Both involve lists of behaviors Paul says are inconsistent with the life of the Christian community.
In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul writes:
“Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral… nor idolaters… nor adulterers… nor men who have sex with men…” (1 Corinthians 6:9)
A similar phrase appears in 1 Timothy 1:10.
In English translations these verses are often presented as clear references to homosexuality. But when you look at the original Greek, the situation becomes more complicated.
The translation “men who have sex with men” actually represents two separate Greek words: malakoi and arsenokoitai.
The word malakoi literally means “soft.” In various ancient writings it was used to describe men who were seen as lacking self-control, men who were morally weak, or men who were perceived as effeminate. In some contexts it could refer to male prostitutes or younger men involved in exploitative sexual arrangements.
The second word, arsenokoitai, is even more difficult to interpret. It is extremely rare in ancient literature, and Paul may have actually coined the term himself.
Because it appears so infrequently, scholars debate exactly what behaviors it refers to. Many researchers believe it is connected to economic or exploitative sexual practices. Such as men using their power to take advantage of others sexually, particularly enslaved people or younger males.
What’s important to notice is that neither of these words clearly maps onto the modern category of a gay person. They emerge from a world where sexual behavior was deeply tied to power dynamics, social hierarchy, and exploitation.
Which means that once again, we have to ask whether these texts are addressing the same reality people are debating today. Or whether they are speaking into a very different cultural context.
If you would like to dig even deeper, I highly suggest 1946 The Movie.
A Question That Changed the Way I Read These Passages
For a long time I approached these texts the way many people do. I assumed the question was simply whether the Bible prohibited same-sex relationships. The whole conversation seemed to revolve around a handful of verses and what they meant.
But somewhere along the way another question started to sit quietly in the back of my mind. It came from something Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. He’s talking about discernment, about how we recognize what is healthy and what isn’t and he gives a surprisingly simple test.
“You will know them by their fruit.” (Matthew 7:16–20)
Good trees produce good fruit.
Bad trees produce bad fruit.
In other words, pay attention to what grows in people’s lives.
When we look honestly at the fruit of how the church has handled these passages when it comes to LGBTQ people, the results are hard to ignore.
Right now the data around LGBTQ mental health is pretty sobering. According to the 2024 Trevor Project national survey of more than 18,000 LGBTQ young people, about 39% said they had seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, and 12% reported actually attempting suicide. The numbers are even higher for transgender and nonbinary youth.
Other research consistently shows that LGBTQ youth are several times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers, not because of who they are, but because of the rejection, stigma, and hostility they often experience from families, communities, and institutions.
Those are big numbers. But behind those numbers are real people. Kids sitting alone in bedrooms wondering if God is disappointed in them. Teenagers praying night after night for something about themselves to change. Young adults trying to build a life while carrying the quiet belief that something about them is fundamentally wrong.
And many of those stories intersect directly with church spaces.
I’ve talked with people who were told they could stay in their church as long as they promised never to fall in love. I’ve listened to parents wrestle with whether they should choose their child or their theology. I’ve heard people describe years of trying to pray, fast, or counsel their way out of something that simply never changed.
If the way we are using these verses consistently leads people toward despair… if the outcome of our theology is that people feel like their life is something God regrets then something about the way we are reading these passages deserves another look.
Because whatever Romans 1 or Corinthians or Timothy are doing, the fruit of how they’ve been used in modern church culture has not been life.
Jesus said good trees produce good fruit. And the fruit he talks about always looks like life. Not shame or isolation. And definitely not the quiet belief that the world might actually be better off without you.
At some point I had to ask myself a very honest question. If the way we are applying these passages is producing death in people’s lives… is it possible that we are using them wrong?
Or at the very least, that we may need to do the same thing Christians have done with so many other passages throughout history — go back, wrestle with them again, and renegotiate what faithfulness looks like in light of what we now understand about human lives and human flourishing.
Because if Jesus is right about the fruit test… then the outcome matters.
And these outcomes should shake us to our core.
The Question Jesus Raises in Luke 4
There is another moment in the gospels that stayed with me as I was working through all of this. It’s one of those stories I had read many times before, but at some point it started landing differently. It’s early in Jesus’ ministry, right after he returns to his hometown of Nazareth. Luke tells us that, as was his custom, Jesus goes into the synagogue on the Sabbath. They hand him the scroll of Isaiah, and he stands up to read.
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
It’s a beautiful passage. It speaks about good news for the poor, freedom for captives, sight for the blind, and release for those who are oppressed. In other words, it describes the kind of world people in that room had been longing for. After Jesus reads it, Luke says he rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, and sits down. Everyone in the synagogue is watching him, waiting to hear what he will say next.
21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
At first, the response seems positive. Luke says the people speak well of him. They’re impressed. Proud, even. This is Joseph’s son, after all. The boy they watched grow up is standing there claiming that this ancient promise is beginning to unfold right in front of them.
But then Jesus keeps talking, and the tone in the room begins to shift. He reminds them of two stories from their own scriptures—stories they would have known well. In the days of the prophet Elijah, he says, there were many widows suffering in Israel during a terrible famine. But Elijah wasn’t sent to any of them. Instead, God sent him to a widow in Sidon, a foreigner.
25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
Then Jesus tells another story. In the time of the prophet Elisha, there were many people in Israel who had leprosy. But the one who was healed wasn’t one of them. It was Naaman the Syrian, not just another outsider but an enemy.
27 There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”
And that’s the moment everything turns. Luke says the people in the synagogue become furious. The same crowd that had just been speaking well of Jesus suddenly erupts in anger. They drag him out of town and take him to the edge of a cliff with the intention of throwing him off.
28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.
For a long time that reaction puzzled me. It seems extreme. One minute they’re listening to him read scripture in church. The next minute they’re trying to kill him. But when you sit with the story long enough, the reason becomes clearer. Jesus didn’t insult them. He didn’t dismiss their scriptures or attack their traditions. What he did was remind them that God has always had a habit of crossing the boundaries people draw.
The widow who received God’s provision wasn’t part of the community they expected. The leper who experienced healing wasn’t someone they thought belonged inside the circle. In both cases, God’s grace showed up somewhere the crowd didn’t think it should.
That realization made me start noticing a pattern that runs all through the gospels. Jesus constantly moves toward people who exist outside the lines respectable religious communities tend to draw. He eats with tax collectors and sinners when everyone else says those people should be avoided. He touches those with leprosy even though the culture had labeled them unclean. He has women that sit among his followers in ways that pushed against the expectations of his world. Over and over again, Jesus seems to drift toward the people who have been pushed to the edges.
And almost every time he does, someone in the crowd gets upset.
That story in Luke 4 started to feel less like an isolated moment and more like a window into something deeper about how people respond when the boundaries of belonging begin to move. The crowd in Nazareth had a choice that day. They could listen and allow their understanding of God’s mercy to stretch a little wider than they were comfortable with, or they could hold tightly to the lines they had always trusted. They chose the second option. They chose the mob.
As I wrestled with the passages we’ve been talking about, that scene kept coming back to me. Because if I’m honest, the question it raises isn’t just about what the people in that synagogue did. It’s about what I do when I encounter the possibility that God might be working among people I was taught were outside the boundaries.
At some point I had to ask myself whether I wanted to stay safely inside the crowd, defending the lines I had inherited, or whether I was willing to step out of that crowd and stand where Jesus so often seems to stand… with the people who have been pushed to the edge of the cliff. Because if the gospels show us anything, it’s that Jesus spends a remarkable amount of time out there, right at the edges of the community, inviting the rest of us to decide whether we want to stay where it feels safe or follow him into the places where grace has a habit of surprising us.
Where This Leaves Me
By this point in the conversation we’ve looked at quite a few passages. We’ve slowed down with Sodom, wrestled with Leviticus, explored the cultural world behind Romans, and looked at the complicated language in Corinthians and Timothy. None of that was about trying to force the Bible to say something it doesn’t say. It was about doing what people of faith have always done—taking the text seriously enough to ask what it meant in its own world before deciding what it might mean in ours.
At the end of the day, this conversation isn’t really about winning an argument. It’s about how we respond when the possibility arises that God’s grace might be working in places we didn’t expect.
It’s about whether we are willing to sit with difficult questions instead of rushing to protect conclusions we inherited.
It’s about whether we care enough about people’s lives to examine the fruit our theology produces.
And if I’m completely honest, it’s also about humility. Every generation of Christians has had to wrestle with parts of the Bible that didn’t fit as neatly into their world as they once assumed. Believers in earlier centuries had to rethink passages about slavery. Others had to reconsider how the Bible had been used to justify the subordination of women. Again and again, the church has discovered that faithful interpretation sometimes requires returning to the text with fresh eyes and asking harder questions than we were originally taught to ask.
That process can feel unsettling. It means admitting we might not have understood everything as clearly as we thought we did. But it also means trusting that truth is strong enough to withstand honest examination.
So if you’ve been reading along and feeling some tension inside you, that’s okay. Questions are often where deeper faith begins.
Maybe the most important thing I can invite you to do is simply this: stay curious. Stay open. Keep asking the hard questions instead of shutting them down too quickly. And most of all, keep paying attention to the lives of the people who are most affected by how these passages are interpreted.
Because sometimes the clearest insights don’t come from arguments. They come from listening.
If you want to explore this conversation more deeply, there are a number of thoughtful books that walk through these passages in far greater detail than I can here. A few that were especially helpful to me along the way include:
Unclobbered by Colby Martin
Walking the Bridgeless Canyon by Kathy Baldock
Changing Our Mind by Dr. David Gushee
Those aren’t the only voices worth hearing, there are many others, but they were meaningful guides for me as I wrestled with these questions.
And wherever your own journey leads, I hope it’s one marked by honesty, compassion, and the willingness to follow Jesus even when that path leads us beyond the boundaries we once thought were fixed.
Thank you. This perspective is helpful for framing such a polarizing topic, especially when recognizing that these passages were not written to answer the kinds of questions modern readers often bring to them. However, in the churches I attended, the verses about “natural hair” were applied very strictly. Men whose hair was considered too long were reprimanded and even prohibited from preaching. Today, however, “floppy hair” among youth is accepted rather nonchalantly, and the former “hair rules” seem to have largely disappeared. At the same time, some practices remain: head-covering expectations are still present, and male churchgoers are typically forbidden from wearing any type of hat (such as a beanie or cap) inside the church building.