Sodom and Gomorrah

The narrative of the Bible has a dream-like quality — one scene moves to the next without explanation. To a modern person it feels like a radical surrealistic poem or a dark psychedelic trip. Genesis 19, the story Lot and his family and the demise of Sodom and Gomorrah has everything: incest, gang rape, sodomy, fire and brimstone—It’s like Blade Runner on steroids. Obviously, today’s edgy dystopian fantasies owe a great debt to the epic dramas of the old testament.

As Jordan Peterson has pointed out in his biblical lecture series, Sodom and Gomorrah or the doomed ‘cities on the plain’ have very little to do with homosexuality. We should instead think of Sodom and Gomorra as dens of total and systematic corruption, where citizens are permanently distracted by mindless copulation and violence. The Bible goes way beyond a simplistic ‘moral condemnation’ of whatever acts.

Gay communities today, who are largely non-violent, have nothing to do with the men and boys of Sodom, who attempt to ‘have their way’ with the angels in the story. Buggering God’s angels is to act, symbolically speaking, from blind aggression and dehumanized…