The most striking achievement of White's nuanced retrospective is to correct a common, if understandable, assumption derived from the past forty years: that conservative evangelical Christians—as the nation's most vocal advocates of legal discrimination, simultaneous peddlers of injurious “cures” and demonizing stereotypes—are religious homophobia's most logical originators in the twentieth-century sectarian landscape. Reforming Sodom complicates this origin story by unearthing a forgotten, no doubt surprising, missing link. It was not evangelical but mainline Protestants who first placed homosexuality in the crosshairs of American religious discourse with the 1946 Revised Standard Version (the first-ever translation to literalize disputed terms such as “sodomite” or “effeminate” as “homosexual”), and with the invention of pastoral counseling (whose “therapeutic orthodoxy” drew from psychiatry's view of homosexuality as a morally neutral pathology rather than a moral defect) (13). Proceeding chronologically from the 1940s to the 1970s, White surveys the complex repercussions—positive and transformative as well as negative and damaging—of what one could call American Protestantism's turn toward homosexuality: spurring an emergent gay identity movement; inspiring nonjudgmental attitudes and commitment to gay social justice and religious inclusion among liberal Protestants; fostering productive alliances between West Coast clergy and gay activists preceding the watershed Stonewall Riots; and spawning internal battles that polarized many mainline denominations and, to a great extent, handicapped their progressive leadership on the issue. As mainline consensus on homosexuality foundered, evangelical Protestants began to gain cultural and political traction. By adapting mainline Protestant innovations to their own claims of moral ascendancy as sole defenders of “sanctified heterosexuality,” it was soon evangelicals, not mainliners, dictating the terms of the national religious conversation about homosexuality.

White's history usefully troubles other narratives as well, frequent assumptions that cross religious and social divides. Reforming Sodom questions the cultural binary that views secularism and modernity solely as the vanguard of liberation and religion as the uniformly benighted opponent of progress. Further, White challenges the notion that therapeutic approaches, whether medical or pastoral, are inherently tolerant. (Here—as in her discussion of how developmental psychology's sexual binary allowed American Christians to “prize the wholesome goodness of heterorelationality” [11] by projecting unhealthy sexuality onto nonnormative gays and lesbians—White draws unobtrusively, but rewardingly, from the work of Michel Foucault.) Although wrangling over the accuracy and historicity of biblical injunctions regarding homosexuality has become a commonplace in almost any discussion of the subject, White's intervention is both economical and incisive. Regardless of what biblical references to nonnormative sex “meant” before the “homosexualizing” 1946 Revised Standard Version, the fact is that mid-century psychiatry's model of sexuality, along with the increased currency of what Eve Sedgwick calls the “homo/hetero binary,” precipitated what is frequently viewed as an independent, pre-existing religious development. Cultural attitudes in the present, external to religious tradition, did not just indelibly shape twentieth-century religion's understanding of homosexuality. They created, out of whole cloth, the conviction that a recently “invented” religious tradition descended, fully formed, from the distant past. Of further note is the irony that queer activism and antigay evangelicalism—to obviously quite different outcomes—drew on the same influences: modern psychiatry's therapeutic view of sexuality and the fabricated notion of a longstanding religious interdiction against homosexuality.

Scholars of American religious history and gay rights, as well as general readers interested in their often rancorous interplay, will appreciate White's book for its breadth of research, diverse archival sourcing, and its equally nuanced analysis of church history, intra-sectarian politics, and mid-century gay rights activism's productively complex—that is, collaborative as well as adversarial—relationship to American religion. Readers familiar with iconic gay religious figures like Metropolitan Community Church founder Troy Perry may be surprised to learn the extent of liberal clerical involvement in protesting antigay discrimination and advocating for gay equality. Reforming Sodom is commendably objective on the ambivalent character of liberalizing gestures, as well as on the extent to which progressive clerical pleas for tolerance or homophile advocacy of self-acceptance may embed heteronormative admonitions. The advice to eschew gay “promiscuity and risky behavior” for a “spiritually and sexually meaningful life” preserves an invidious distinction between the moral cachet of heteronormative monogamy and the stigma of homosexuality's stereotypical predisposition to promiscuity (66).

White's history is a valuable supplement to what she reveals as an incomplete picture of American Christianity's not-so-distant past. Strong in methodology and research, accessibly and intelligently written, Reforming Sodom is a necessary and vital work. Some may find a rare moment of interpretive overreach in the claim that the symbolism of gay coming out narratives and pride rituals are uniquely Christian in character. And where readers go from the book's revised origin story of religious homophobia and the “therapeutic orthodoxy” may differ. While the arc of White's primary narrative is inspiringly redemptive (mainline clergy and progressive congregations disown earlier therapeutic and disease models, criticize antigay discrimination, and lobby for gay social and religious inclusion), a broader question might be the extent to which it matters who first let the religious homophobia genie out of the bottle (evangelicals or mainliners) or who first crafted the bottle (the Bible or psychiatry). Arguing that religious homophobia has been projected onto Biblical texts can be a bid to redeem tradition from the vagaries of unflattering cultural moments or ideological incarnations. Yet, for some, the flaws of that endeavor may not absolve individuals or institutions from the blemish of attitudes that hover outside of or antedate texts or policies that later come to epitomize or embody them. More disheartening may be the fact that liberal and moderate Protestants, in the face of continued evangelical vitriol toward the LGBT community—vitriol with political ambitions and, in some cases, legal teeth—are, if not silent, outshouted by their conservative counterparts. Rather than loath to wrest control of national religious discourse about homosexuality back from evangelicals, mainline Protestantism may simply be outclassed by the strength or tenure of the former's grip on the conversation.