Discussing the Sin of Sodom at a Family Dinner
After we left St. Louis, I stopped by to visit family and spent an afternoon at my grandmother’s house having dinner, discussing politics, and Christianity in general. The conversation was great and had many of the same topics that the younger generation of Christians have been discussing on everything from abortion rights to international trade.
One of the things that came up was how often Christians spout scripture that they believe they know, yet have little or no understanding of where it occurs in the Bible, the cultural traditions of the times, or why it’s important in the broader scheme of the historical record. Most Christians don’t even realize that the Catholic Bible used for thousands of years, and the more recent Protestant Bible that became popular after Martin Luther rebelled against Rome, have different books in them! If you need a reference tool, see this site, which lets you look up every translation for any given verse.
Using the Sin of Sodom as a Case Study
A perfect case study is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the often referenced sin of sodom. Please note that before we proceed, this has nothing to do with the current political debate – I’m not even going to go there right now. Instead, it is an easy to understand illustration using a story that everyone who grew up in a Christian environment should know and be able to understand instinctively, making it a perfect tool for explaining our criticism with the state of the collective Church in the United States at this moment in time.
The background: In Hebrew, the word Sodom means “burnt” and the word Gomorrah means “a ruined heap” so the names that we now use to refer to the cities must have been given after the disaster and not the original names used by the people who lived there.We also know that Sodom and Gomorrah were not the only cities God destroyed in this manner – Admah and Zeboiim were also destroyed in judgment (see Deuteronomy 29:23).
For thousands of years, the word “Sodomite” literally meant “someone from Sodom”, just as American means someone from the United States. In fact, the word “Sodomite” didn’t have any sexual connotation until the 13th century when the word came into the English language. Yes, you read that right … the definition didn’t come into existence until 1,300 years after Jesus Christ walked the Earth.
I think the worst part is that most Christians are so uneducated they don’t realize that sodomy includes oral sex, including oral sex among married couples (go pick up a damn dictionary). For centuries, man and wife, in the marriage bed, having oral sex was an unspeakable, filthy, abomination that required total repentance thanks mostly to the preaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that sex should exist only for procreative means. Modern American culture, however, has conveniently forgotten this definition and now the same Christians that hold signs condemning sodomites go home and commit sodomy a few times a week, talking to friends and family about the holiness of their marriage bed. It’s baffling people stake their soul on a book that most of them aren’t even willing to read in its entirety (that’s one of the reasons that my freshman year in college, I worked by way through every word from cover-to-cover over the course of eight or nine months).
