What We Got Wrong about Sodom and Gomorrah

Hint: It isn't a story about God's punishment of the LGBTQ+ community

Public Theology is based on the work of Zach W. Lambert, Pastor of Restore, an inclusive church in Austin, Texas. He and his wife, Amy Lambert, contribute to and moderate this account. All of the content available at Public Theology is for those who identify as Christian, as well as those who might be interested in learning about a more inclusive, kind, thoughtful Christianity.

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It’s no surprise that I’m fairly active on social media. I talk about a number of different topics, but they all center around what it looks like to follow Jesus in today’s world. What I do could be called “public theology” (hence the name of our Substack), which is essentially the practice of cultivating conversation about who God is and what God requires of those who attempt to follow him in public spaces.

I’ve been doing this for over a decade with predictable pushback. However, in 2020, with the upcoming election and the COVID pandemic, there was a shift in how people began interacting with my content. More and more people started joining these conversations at the intersection of God and our world. To put it another way, my “public theology” started to be very public. The increase in engagement has been really fun in some ways and really not fun in other ways.

Pros: I’ve been able to connect with thousands of folks who still love Jesus but really struggle with what much of Christianity has become in America (like many of you). I get to DM with these folks and hear their stories. I don’t have all the answers, but getting to talk and pray with people who are looking to connect with a pastor who sees things a little bit differently has been such a gift.

Cons: I get a lot of death threats. The vast majority are just anonymous accounts pretending to be big and bad behind a keyboard, but a few have been scary. I had to remove all pictures of my kids from my socials because people started downloading them and manipulating them in some horrible ways. We also took steps to implement security measures at church and at home. My socials remained public, but much less personal.

This is what it looks like to be a public, inclusive, justice-focused Christian in 2025. It’s mostly people calling me names and telling me I’m going to hell, which actually happens every day now with the change in social media algorithms inciting even more outrage. But there are other things, too.

If I post the most innocuous Bible verse, angry people turn up to yell at me. If I call for empathy, Christians threaten violence.

But there is one subject that transcends all the rest— one topic that brings out the angriest, most vile, and most intense vitriol imaginable.

It’s not heaven and hell.
I’s not atonement theory or original sin or any other theology.
It’s not even racism or sexism, although those get pretty nasty too.

Any guesses?

It’s LGBTQ+ inclusion.

When I talk about how God fully loves and includes LGBTQ+ people in his family and that the church should do the same, people lose their minds.

What I find most interesting about this is that it hasn’t always been this way. When I would talk about the same things a few years ago, people would ask mostly sincere questions like:

What do you do with the verses that condemn homosexuality in Scripture?

What about church history?

When the questions came, I would explain my interpretation of the verses, talk about passages that promote inclusion, and make the point that church history has been wrong about a lot of things. Sometimes people would be convinced, sometimes they wouldn’t, and occasionally I would be called a heretic, but it always ended there.

But as we have seen a sharp rise in homophobia and transphobia in our culture in recent years, the responses from Christians have changed, too. Instead of questions or concerns, people began claiming the Bible teaches that LGBTQ+ folks deserve death. These proclamations are almost always accompanied by a reference to one particular Bible story: Sodom and Gomorrah.

They believe that God considers homosexuality such an abomination that he destroyed two entire cities with fire in order to punish homosexuals. I sincerely hope most people don’t believe LGBTQ+ folks deserve to die, but I would bet that almost everyone who grew up in church has heard that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of the same-sex activity that took place there.

But is that what really happened in the story?

So many bible stories have been weaponized in ways that have not only really hurt people, but have also driven folks away from the church, many of them choosing to leave Christianity altogether.

I believe that Sodom and Gomorrah is one of a handful of stories that has been weaponized more often and more harmfully than the others.

I want to illustrate just how important this is with a few statistics. These are from the American Psychological Association, The Trevor Project, UCLA, and The Marin Foundation.

83% of LGBTQ+ folks were raised in a Christian church. That’s actually higher than the national average.

At least once in their lives, 96% of LGBTQ+ folks have prayed that God would make them straight.

In 2019, the president of what was the leading conversion therapy organization worldwide, Exodus International, said:

No one changes their orientation; it doesn’t happen. No therapy, no ministry, no prayer meeting, no nothing — you cannot change your sexual orientation.

Alan Chambers

Many LGBTQ+ tried or were forced to try orientation change through something called conversion therapy, a practice that is now illegal in 26 states and the District of Columbia. Why is it illegal? Because LGBTQ+ people who have gone through conversion therapy are more likely to use illicit drugs, twice as likely to experience depression, two and a half times more likely to die by suicide, and three times as likely to die by suicide if encouraged to go to conversion therapy by a religious leader.

1.8 million LGBTQ youth seriously consider suicide each year and at least one attempts suicide every 45 seconds.

When families reject their LGBTQ children, their children are 8.4 times more likely to attempt suicide, 5.9 times more likely to have high levels of depression, and 3.4 times more likely to use illegal drugs than LGBTQ children who have supportive families.

In fact, having just one accepting adult reduces the risk of a suicide attempt among LGBTQ young people by 40%.

A survey of LGBTQ+ young adults ages 18–24 found that parents’ negative religious beliefs about homosexuality were associated with double the risk of attempting suicide.

Considering how often anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and conversation therapy are undergirded by Christianity, it’s not at all surprising that 54% of LGBTQ+ folks leave their religious community after the age of 18. 27% of the general population of Americans leave as adults. That means LGBTQ+ people are leaving the church at double the rate of everyone else.

Here is my point:
The way we interpret stories like Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as the handful of other verses in Scripture that seemingly address LGBTQ+ people, is a matter of life and death. It’s also responsible for a huge group of people being completely done with faith and faith communities. And it’s a matter of the church missing out on the unique ways in which queer people bear God’s image and express the fruit of the Spirit.

We need to get this right, y’all. Or more to the point, we have gotten it wrong for so long that we need to make it right.

We need to replace a very harmful biblical interpretation with a healthy one. My goal in this is much bigger than one story: it is to help equip us as the body of Christ, whether we are LGBTQ+ or not, to embody Christlikeness in such a way that the deep trauma caused by toxic interpretations of this story can be healed.

The (actual) story of Sodom and Gomorrah