Heather R. White, "Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights" (UNC Press, 2015)

UNC Press Presents Podcast · May 14, 2019 · 32m

With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. In her new book Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated…