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Abstract

In this article, we make the case for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between sexuality and religion and offer strategies to advance the sociology of the sexualities subfield. We challenge the dichotomy often posed by sociologists of sexualities who implicitly or explicitly cast moral judgment on both sexuality and religion: Sexuality, as far as it represents queer possibilities and sexual freedom, is good. Religion, assumed to be restrictive and conservative, is bad. Instead, we argue that to fully understand the social and power dynamics of sexuality, religion, and their overlap, we must recognize the complex webs of meaning that allow sexuality and religion to produce great harm and destruction, but also to validate and uplift. We then explain how two bodies of scholarship offer productive approaches to move the study of religious sexualities forward: the sociology of emotions and postcolonial and decolonizing scholarship. Sociology must recognize the multiple ways in which religion and sexuality constitute a powerful combination in social life.

Keywords

religion sexuality emotions postcolonial theory

Before Michael Warner was a preeminent queer theorist, he was immersed in conservative Protestant evangelicalism, a broad umbrella term for mostly white faith groups who share conservative theological beliefs, especially related to gender and sexuality.¹ Warner is the grandson of a Southern Baptist preacher who traveled across the mountains of North Carolina to serve the small congregations of rural communities. His parents, fans of televangelist Pat Robertson, moved his family to Virginia, where they left the Baptist faith for Pentecostalism. As a teen, Warner attended a charismatic Bible study every Wednesday and debated with his mother about Robertson’s emphatic predictions about the Imminent Rapture (Warner 1997).

In our unofficial estimate, plenty of sociologists of sexuality have similar early biographies, growing up in religious families and communities before becoming, in Warner’s (1997:215) words, “roughly, a queer, atheist intellectual.” We have both written elsewhere about how this typical narrative—the story of those of us “who were once found and now are lost” as Warner (1997:216) quips—presents a superficial dichotomy between sexuality and religion (Burke 2022, 2023; Burke, Moon, and Tobin 2020; Moon 2014). In this article, we make the case for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between sexuality and religion and offer strategies to advance the sociology of the sexualities subfield.

Setting aside the problems with dichotomous thinking for a moment, we can recognize the real conflict experienced by Warner and others who faced what he describes as the agony of needing to choose between queer sexuality or religious faith. Warner (1997:221) felt forced to choose “between religion or orgasm,” and the latter won out. The sociology of sexualities subfield often reinforces this divide, casting moral judgment on both sexuality and religion: Sexuality, as far as it represents queer possibilities and sexual freedom, is good. Religion, thought to be restrictive, is bad. It is true that Christianity provided much of the ideological justification for colonization, genocide, and enslavement around the world, with gender and sexuality among the driving rationales. The Vatican’s 1493 Doctrine of Discovery asserted that those who did not understand sex and sexuality the way Catholic leadership did were less-than-human and had no rights to the lands they inhabited (Goldberg 1992; Picq 2018; Schneider 2004; Smith 2004). Christian thought has long presented sexual sins as exceptional relative to other transgressions, revealing a person’s overall morality (or rather, immorality) more clearly than other indicators (Jordan 2011).

Despite this historical context, religion in the day-to-day, what scholars have called “lived religion” (see Ammerman 2021 for an overview), is multidimensional and not synonymous with its institutions and leaders. In other words, religion is what people make of it and, thus, should not be understood as solely oppressive. Christianity and other faiths have provided sustenance, inspiration, and hope to those living under oppression (Brown Douglas 1999, Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). These details, however, may be overlooked by scholars beyond those most deeply immersed in qualitative accounts of religious communities. Even if most of us have read Foucault’s ([1978] 1990) History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, we still seem to fall for the “repressive hypothesis,” and see religion as the most “repressive” force of all.

In hindsight, Warner rejects this type of binary thinking. He acknowledges that, “religion makes available a language of ecstasy, a horizon of significance within which transgressions against the normal order of the world and the boundaries of self can be seen as good things” (Warner 1997:221, emphasis in original). These functions of Pentecostalism—transgressing the normal order and challenging the boundaries of the self—can sound a lot like queer projects. Indeed, Warner uses this understanding of charismatic religious life to observe a truth that has become even more relevant in the quarter of a century since he wrote these words:

What queers often forget, jeopardized as we are by resurgent fundamentalism in the United States, is that fundamentalists themselves are not persuaded by “moral majority” or “mainstream values” rhetoric; they too consider themselves an oppressed minority. In their view the dominant culture is one of a worldliness they have rejected, and bucking that trend comes, in some very real ways, with social stigmatization (Warner 1997:222).

When Warner suggests that fundamentalist Christians may feel more like queer people than we would like to admit, when he uses words like “ecstasy” to describe the experiences of his former Christian faith and community, he is challenging the value judgment so often cast by academics to divide queerness from conservative religion.

In this article, we argue that to fully understand the social and power dynamics of sexuality, religion, and their overlap, we must recognize the complex webs of meaning that allow sexuality and religion to produce great harm and destruction, but also to validate and uplift. Vance ([1984] 2013:335) famously theorized sexuality as “simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency.” Extending this observation to the relationship between sexuality and religion, we examine how power dynamics reproduce themselves as they produce identities and communities, suffering, and pleasure. After making the case for a more complex and nuanced approach to understanding religion and sexualities, we turn to strategies to advance scholarship by incorporating lessons from the sociology of emotion, postcolonial theory, and decolonizing scholarship/activism.

The Repressive Hypothesis Redux

Though Warner’s above observation notes some peculiar similarities between queer people and fundamentalist Christians, the differences between these groups are stark, so obvious to the readers of Sex and Sexualities that they barely need stating. One key difference is that while both groups are a numeric minority within broader society (notably, national surveys suggest the number of white evangelicals is shrinking, while the number of self-identified queers is on the rise), conservative Protestant ideology holds significant power in contexts such as the United States, especially when it comes to social institutions and the law (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2003).²

As Rubin ([1984] 1999:150) summarizes in “Thinking Sex,” the United States, seeped in Christianity’s influence, “always treats sex with suspicion. It construes and judges almost any sexual practice in terms of its worst possible expression. Sex is presumed guilty until proven innocent.” Rubin calls this “sex negativity,” which is rooted in religious teachings but no longer requires religion to manifest itself because conservative Protestant beliefs have become nearly synonymous with what is thought of as “traditional American values.” Protestantism has worked to normalize and reify the gender binary, heterosexuality, monogamy, and marriage. Thus, even those who do not adhere to strict religious beliefs are affected by the force of conservative Protestant ideology.

In the U.S., white Christian Nationalism, or the belief that white Christians founded and should lead the United States, blends religion, conservative politics, and sexuality more explicitly and boldly. For example, in a 2023 national survey, the Public Religion Research Institute found that Americans who adhere to Christian Nationalism are the only group across all religious and political affiliations in which a majority oppose nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBT people.³ Historians and social scientists have argued that evangelicals’ belief in the doctrine of gender complementarity, the idea that God created men and women to be fundamentally different and fulfill distinct roles, has propelled their conservative activist politics by justifying the pursuit of power on behalf of white Christian men (Bjork-James 2021). Indeed, in this view, the proper sexual order involves women being controlled by men, not just within family life but in broader social life as well (Whitehead and Perry 2020).

There is a robust and essential literature on the powerful role religion plays in controlling sexuality to the point of harming people both within and outside of religious boundaries. Between the two of us, we have spent decades studying how sexuality operates within a variety of Christian communities. Dawne has compared how Protestant congregations talk about (and avoid talking about) gay and lesbian identities and relationships (Moon 2004) and more recently, how race, gender, and sexuality interact in the lives of conservative Protestant LGBTQ+ people (Moon and Tobin 2025). Kelsy has examined the evangelical Christian sex advice industry from the 1970s to the present (Burke 2016) as well as the construction of “pornography addiction” within conservative Christian communities (Burke 2023).

Another vein of research explores how racism has been justified with claims about the supposedly “deviant” gender and sexuality of racial “others”—claims that have created additional difficulties for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color whose gender and sexuality are not aligned with white, Christian standards (Brown Douglas 1999; Ferguson 2004; Higginbotham 1993; Hill Collins 2004; McQueeney 2009; Pitt 2010; Smith 2004; Snorton 2014). As a whole, this literature reveals the ways in which sexuality and religion intersect in a broader “matrix of domination” (Hill Collins 1990), and indeed the ways in which these categories are paramount to the social order, even if overshadowed by sociologists who study oppression related to race, class, or gender as single variables (Schnabel et al. 2022).

If people are interested in the dynamics that promote oppression, it helps to understand the institutions and cultures that make that oppression seem sacred. Like sociological studies of elites that reveal the myth of meritocracy by showing how economic and cultural capital is controlled and concentrated (Khan 2012), scholarship on dominant religions (i.e., Christianity) can illuminate the myth of normativity and its operations. Key contemporary concerns within conservative Christian communities—heterosexual marriage and procreation, purity culture, “addiction” to pornography—exemplify Rubin’s ([1984] 1999) notion of sex negativity. In this view, sex is dangerous when uncontrolled, spreading like wildfire. Thus, issues around sexuality that may appear to be confined to Christian circles involve stigmatizing sexual others: LGBTQ+ people, those who have sex outside of marriage, and those whose understandings of sexual activity and gender don’t map onto Western ideas, which many Western religions regard as sacred truths rather than cultural constructs (Ferguson 2004; Goldberg 1992; Hill Collins 2004; Schneider 2004; Smith 2004; Sumerau, Mathers and Lampe 2019; Tobin and Moon 2020). The resulting stigmas can be toxic, leading to mental health struggles such as addiction, depression, and suicidality, and sometimes extreme physical symptoms as well. Moon and Tobin’s (2018, 2025) respondents included a healthy young person who was hospitalized for a week with heart failure, and another who experienced uncontrollable asthma attacks, for which doctors could find no cause except the stress of trying to conform to the demands of their religious beliefs.

We contend that sociologists of sexuality cannot fully understand how sexuality is used to create distinct classes of legitimate and illegitimate, favored and feared or hated, without fully understanding the role that religion has played. Further, it is not enough to simply identify religion as a key force in the matrix of oppression because doing so can perpetuate the myth that if religion is the primary driver of an anti-sex ethos, then secularism or nonreligion is a path to sexual freedom. This is a dangerous and inaccurate reduction. As Jakobsen (2020:7) writes, “The epistemological framework that separates religion from secularism allows religion to serve as an explanation for anything (and everything), particularly anything that seems irrational and beyond the bounds of science.” According to Jakobsen, neither religion nor secularism should be seen as the “devil or hero” on the path toward sexual and social justice.

By pushing past the assumption that conservative religious traditions inevitably and only repress sexuality, scholars have found strains within these traditions that accept or inadvertently promote queerness in some ways. Kelsy found that on Christian sex advice websites, evangelicals (especially men) openly explored sexual desires and fantasies that conservative Christian leaders would almost certainly condemn. These website users invoked a core tenet of their evangelical faith—that they were in direct relationship and communication with God—to insist that God celebrated their sexual desires so long as they remained within the context of heterosexual marriage (Burke 2016). This is how some website uses justified such practices as “pegging,” or the anal penetration of a man by a woman (Burke 2013). Others, like Gerber (2015), Petro (2015a), and Creek (2013), have explored the queerness, and sometimes strangely empowering nature of celibacy—including its challenge to the widespread assumption that marriage, as it is generally imagined, is the only way for sexual desire to be harnessed to the divine.

Importantly, not all religious people believe that their religion is at odds with sexual diversity. Prioritizing inductive approaches and learning from research participants offers an avenue for sociologists of sexuality to treat religion with nuance. One illuminating example is the Roman Catholic Womenpriest movement. Peterfeso (2020) uses ethnography to examine how this movement, which has been formally rejected by the Roman Catholic Church, ordains women as “valid but illegal” priests. These women priests engage in Roman Catholic sacraments, rituals, and ministerial practices and also reject clerical celibacy and embrace gay marriage, thereby simultaneously defying Catholicism and embodying it. Others have studied how gay and lesbian Catholics have similarly found ways for the Church to accommodate them, or have found inspiration in their faith to challenge the Church’s disregard for LGBTQ+ life (Dillon 1999; Petro 2015b).

For some who have been profoundly, or even violently, stigmatized within religious and broader communities, religion can be both the cause of harm and an avenue for healing. Avishai (2023) examined how Israeli LGBT religious Zionists (a branch of orthodox Judaism) have developed the religious language to quietly demand inclusion in religious life, giving meaning to their existence as LGBT and orthodox. Golriz (2021) has studied LGBTQ Muslims in Toronto, whose faith provides strength and community in the face of rejection from non-Muslim LGBTQ people and many (but not all) cisgender/heterosexual Muslims. Lewin (2018) explores the predominantly Black Fellowship of Affirming Ministries and its radically empowering message of love and acceptance. Moon and Tobin’s (2025) study of LGBTQ+ evangelicals describes the ways that conservative Christians’ own techniques of Biblical interpretation can lead to conclusions that differ significantly from what are traditionally considered Christian teachings, recognizing that a genderless God created tremendous variation in nature and thought it all good, especially the natural human drive for intimacy, connection, and relationship in a variety of sexual and nonsexual forms (see also Moon, Tobin and Sumerau 2019). These examples show how religious groups and traditions have empowered people to accept their own differences and those of others and to challenge the oppressive teachings of religious institutions (see also Coley 2018).

The Path Forward: Challenging Normative Assumptions

We believe that two bodies of scholarship offer productive approaches to move the study of religious sexualities forward: the sociology of emotions and postcolonial and decolonizing sociology.

Sociology of Emotions

One dominant strand of literature on sexualities and religion treats religious beliefs as rational cognitive structures; this literature includes, for instance, quantitative studies that measure religious people’s attitudes about sexuality issues (see Burke and Woodell 2020 for an overview). At the same time, one of the contributions of lived religion scholarship is to note the ways in which religious experiences and beliefs are embodied—the ways they affect practitioners physically and viscerally: the laying of hands among the Pentecostal community of Michael Warner’s adolescence, the Salah practice or the month of Ramadan fasting for Muslims, the scent of incense during Hindu rituals, or praying the rosary among Catholics. This work shows that religion is felt as much as it is believed.

We have written previously about how conservative Protestants’ experiences of sexual shame are shaped by the intersection of race, sexuality, and gender (Burke, Moon, and Tobin 2020). We analyzed recent shifts in American evangelicalism—including a growing internal LGBTQ+ movement and a flourishing marital sex advice industry—to argue that changing sexual norms rely on the interaction between white entitlement to self-expression and the persistent sexual shame confronted by racial and queer others within evangelical Christianity. Christians tend to see shame as potentially redeeming; the traditional salvation narrative arc requires the shame of sin before accepting the grace of Jesus. Yet for LGBTQ+ people who cannot force their sexual or gender identities to change, this shame becomes perpetual. This experience is especially acute for LGBTQ+ Christians of color who often confront religious communities often rely on “respectability politics” and sanction those who do not conform to gender and sexuality norms (Higginbotham 1993, Hill Collins 2004). Straight white evangelicals, on the other hand, experience entitlement to sexual pleasure and fulfillment precisely because their racialized perspective and the privileges commonly granted to whites give them more space to experience, and experiment with, their sexual lives.

By bringing pleasure and shame to the fore of sociological analyses, we can add dimension to experiences of racism, heterosexism, and transphobia within religion. We can also account for how and why queer people stay, leave, and transform religious communities. In this first issue of Sex and Sexualities, both Jones (2025) and Robinson (2025) make the case that pleasure is a powerful analytical lens through which we can understand broad sociological phenomena. When sociologists cede feelings—rapturous feelings, comforting feelings, the pit of despair, and everything in between—to other fields, we cede our unique ability to examine how those feelings are produced by and shape interactions and institutions.

The goal of sociology should not be to scrutinize only the small and manageable, but rather to help people make sense of the social and power dynamics of the large and seemingly uncontrollable—including big feelings. A whole field of the sociology of emotions (see e.g., Bericat 2016; Creek 2013; Gould 2009; Thoits 1989) is fertile ground for research on the social and power dynamics of sexuality, religion, and their overlap. To offer a complete account, we must be willing to confront big feelings such as love, rage, belonging, passion, and transcendence.

Postcolonial and Decolonial Sociology

There is ample room for sociologists working in a postcolonial or decolonial context to contribute to sociological understanding of the overlap between religion and sexuality. Understanding religions that are not centered in the West helps us to understand the Western religious roots of dominant gender and sexual ideologies (Schneider 2004). Further, those interested in religion and sexuality may find inspiration in critiques of the sociology of religion. Some have critiqued the subfield for its disproportionately U.S. Christian focus and assumptions, its concentration on institutions marked as religious, and its normative assumptions (either that religion is false or that it is inherently good; Bender, Cadge, Levitt, and Smilde 2012). Focusing beyond the “West”—outside Christianity, outside the U.S. and Europe, and outside monotheism—using decolonizing and postcolonial approaches can illuminate the breadth of human possibilities and help decenter European and North American conservative Christianity from understandings of religion and power. Postcolonial scholarship examines the ongoing effects of colonialism, including on sexuality and gender (see, for instance Patil 2018). Decolonization is the more “internal” work of using, researching, reviving, and/or maintaining Indigenous concepts in the face of colonizers’ cultural assaults (Thiong’o 2005 [1986]). In addition to restoring wholeness to those who have been attacked by colonizers, this body of scholarship and activism helps to dismantle Western cultural hegemony and identify the cultural and historical particularity of Western concepts, including Western concepts of sexuality and gender.

Historians and anthropologists have engaged for decades in the decolonizing work of recovering what was lost at the hands of violent colonizers who saw Indigenous understandings of the world, including sex, marriage, kinship, and gender, as sinful errors needing correction and erasure. Scholars such as Miranda (2010), Nzegwu (2006), Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí (1997), and Smithers (2022) have explored gender, marriage, and sex before colonization to uncover what was obscured and to aid in the process of decolonizing thought. Ethnographers such as Mirandé (2017), Tikuna and Picq (2016), Aspin and Hutchings (2007), Gilley (2006), and Vidal-Ortiz (2006) have explored how people carry out that decolonizing work for themselves in the Americas and Pacific Islands. This work involves people decolonizing their minds and spirits by rediscovering what it can mean to be themselves, at times reading colonizers’ own words through the lens of indigenous understanding to uncover what was forcibly taken away in the course of colonization. This scholarship is an important part of the resistance to Western, Christian hegemony, recognizing the particularity of this perspective despite its claims to universal truth.

Religions that view divinity and creation as a spectrum that includes queerness, nonbinariness, and transness can add complexity and context to a worldview that equates religion with conservative Christianity (Moon, Tobin, and Sumerau 2019). When we start from the point of view of societies that allow children to tell people their gender from an early age rather than being assigned, those that treat rarer ways of being as special gifts rather than frightening aberrations, those that embrace gender and sexual variation as among the many spectrums of nature, we open our minds. Epistemologies that differ from our “common sense” open us to questioning assumptions that lead many in our own society to treat some people as less-than-human on the basis of sexuality (Picq 2018).

Conclusion

In their landmark ruling, Bostock v. Clayton County, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII protections against nondiscrimination include sexual orientation and gender identity. That decision pointedly avoided the issue of religion. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion that freedom from discrimination is not absolute. Religion, according to Gorsuch, may be legally able to upend gender identity and sexuality protections given the Constitution’s commitment to the free exercise of religion. Thus far, the high court has not set a wide precedent to this effect, although it has consistently sided with religious plaintiffs—in cases orchestrated by conservative evangelical legal organizations—when they have challenged LGBT people (Kazyak et al. 2023; Wuest and Last 2024).

For those who have paid attention to the U.S. news in recent years, it is obvious how much religion and sexuality have to do with each other: claims of “religious freedom” are used to justify controlling women and erasing LGBTQ+ people and other sex/gender outsiders, as if religion only counts as a religion if it enforces one particular social order. Yet somewhat surprisingly, if you were to read everything published in the sociology of sexualities since the 1960s, you might get the sense that sexuality has nothing to do with religion. The reverse would be true if you did a similar review of the sociology of religion literature. Avishai and Irby (2017) empirically measured this bifurcation of the sociology of gender and the sociology of religion, noting institutional disincentives to engage in cross-subfield dialogue (e.g., the learning curve of differing expertise and time and productivity costs). Similarly, scholars who work at the intersection of sexuality and religion may appear to be an insular and relatively small community.

Perhaps the avoidance of religion by many sociologists of sexuality should make it a compelling topic for future research. Given the overwhelming evidence in daily life that religion and sexuality constitute a powerful combination, this avoidance should make us curious. As Michael Warner reminds us, religion can bring both “agony” and “ecstasy.” Sociologists of sexuality must be willing to traverse both extremes and everything in between.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Kelsy Burke

Dawne Moon

Statements and Declarations

Notes

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The Pleasure and Danger of Religious Sexualities

Abstract

Keywords

The Repressive Hypothesis Redux

The Path Forward: Challenging Normative Assumptions

Sociology of Emotions

Postcolonial and Decolonial Sociology

Conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Statements and Declarations

Notes

References