What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality: Romans 1
What If Paul Was Wrong About Why People Are Gay?
By: Dr. Gregory S. Neal
Whenever the subject of homosexuality comes up, Romans 1:26–27 is almost certain to appear sooner or later. For many conservative Christians, it functions as “the definitive word” in such discussions. While multiple arguments may surround the Sodom and Gomorrah story, the two verses in Leviticus, and the 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1 references, Paul’s words in Romans 1 appear to be much more straightforward. The Apostle speaks about women exchanging what he calls “natural” sexual relations and men abandoning sexual relations with women and becoming consumed with passion for one another. To many, it seems like a slam-dunk.
For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. (Romans 1:26-27)
This reference is different from some of the other biblical passages commonly cited against homosexuality because Paul really does appear to be talking about sexual activity between people of the same sex. Responsible interpretation requires us to admit that, and we don’t gain anything by trying to make Paul say something he plainly doesn't say. Paul clearly disapproves of the sexual behavior he describes in Romans 1:26–27. Whatever else we may eventually conclude about the passage, we should begin by acknowledging that.
But acknowledging that Paul disapproved of same-sex sexual behavior isn’t the same thing as concluding that Paul understood homosexuality as we understand it today, that he was describing gay and lesbian people as a distinct class of human beings, or that he had in view faithful, mutual, covenantal relationships between people whose enduring sexual orientation is toward members of the same sex. Those conclusions require additional interpretive steps, and those steps become especially difficult when we stop isolating two verses from Romans 1 and begin reading Paul's entire argument.
More importantly, Paul isn’t simply telling us in Romans 1 that he disapproves of certain sexual behavior, he’s also telling us why he believes that behavior exists. That part of the passage receives far less attention, but it may be the most important part of all.
Reading the Passage Paul Actually Wrote
Paul’s argument doesn’t begin with Romans 1:26-27; it starts several verses earlier, and not with sex but with idolatry. Paul describes human beings who knew something of God through creation but refused to honor God. Instead of worshiping the Creator, they turned toward created things, fashioning images and worshiping them. Paul repeatedly describes this movement in terms of an “exchange.” Humanity exchanged the glory of God for images, exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped the creation rather than the Creator. Only after describing this religious rebellion does Paul address sexual desire, and even then he connects the two through another repeated phrase: “God gave them over.”
Humanity rejects God, therefore God gives them over to their desires. Humanity exchanges the truth of God for a lie, therefore God gives them over to what Paul calls dishonorable passions. Women then exchange what Paul regards as natural sexual relations, and men abandon sexual relations with women and become inflamed with desire for one another. This sequence of exchanges is important because Paul isn’t merely producing a list of forbidden sexual acts, he’s constructing a causal narrative in which idolatry produces disorder. Humanity’s relationship with God becomes disordered, human desire consequently becomes disordered, and same-sex sexual passion is understood as one of the results.
Paul didn’t invent this way of understanding Gentile sexuality. His argument closely resembles an already established Jewish critique of pagan idolatry found in the Wisdom of Solomon 13–15, where the rejection of the true God likewise results in moral and sexual corruption. Scholars have debated whether Paul is drawing directly from the Wisdom of Solomon itself or is instead reflecting the broader Jewish tradition that it represents, but the conceptual parallels are striking. More importantly, they help us see that Paul is interpreting same-sex desire through a theological framework that he had inherited from his cultural and religious world. He’s not delivering a timeless revelation, or a “word of the Lord,” about why people experience same-sex attraction. He’s offering his theological opinion.
The point is clear: in Romans 1, same-sex desire isn’t presented as something that merely exists alongside idolatry; it’s understood as being a direct result of idolatry. This observation raises a question that conservative Christians rarely ask when citing this passage: what if Paul, and the cultural-religious framework he inherited, was wrong about why people are gay?
Paul's Explanation of Same-Sex Desire
That question will undoubtedly make some Christians uncomfortable because they’ve been taught to assume that asking whether a biblical writer could be mistaken about anything threatens the authority of Scripture itself. Yet before we decide that the question is illegitimate, we should first recognize exactly what Paul's argument requires us to believe.
Paul lived in a world without our modern understanding of sexual orientation. He knew that men sometimes had sex with men and that women sometimes engaged sexually with women. Same-sex behavior wasn't invisible in the Greco-Roman world; it was woven into various cultural and social structures, sometimes associated with pagan religious practices, and often embedded within the socio-economic systems of slavery, prostitution, and age- or status-structured relationships. What Paul didn't possess was our modern conceptual framework for understanding an enduring pattern of romantic and sexual attraction toward people of the same sex as one dimension of human sexuality. His categories were those available to a first-century Jewish man living within a Greco-Roman cultural world, and he is interpreting same-sex desire through ancient Jewish theological categories rather than anything resembling a modern understanding of sexual orientation. Indeed, modern research into human sexuality gives us no reason to accept Paul’s causal explanation for why homosexual orientation exists.
That doesn’t mean science has discovered a single “gay gene,” because it hasn’t; human sexuality is considerably more complicated than that. The largest genome-wide study of same-sex behavior found that many genetic variants appear to contribute small effects across the genome, rather than there being a single genetic switch that determines whether someone is gay or straight. These polygenic influences account for part of the variation in same-sex behavior, but they don’t provide a complete explanation and can’t be used to predict an individual’s sexual orientation. Research into prenatal development likewise suggests that biological influences before birth, including prenatal hormonal factors, may contribute to sexual orientation for at least some people, although researchers continue to investigate how genetic, endocrine, developmental, and other influences interact.
In other words, we don't yet know precisely why one person develops a heterosexual orientation while another develops a homosexual or bisexual orientation, and pretending that science has provided a simple answer would be every bit as irresponsible as pretending the Bible has provided one. What we do know is that sexual orientation isn’t a conscious decision to reject heterosexuality, and most people report little or no sense that they chose the basic pattern of their sexual attraction.
More importantly for Romans 1, there is absolutely no credible reason to believe that people become homosexual because they begin worshiping idols. Men don't become gay because they worship Zeus, and women don’t become lesbians because they bow before Artemis. We don't exchange heterosexual attraction for homosexual attraction because we’ve rejected the Creator and become devoted to created things. Yet some version of that sequence lies underneath Paul’s argument.
Someone may object that Paul isn’t necessarily claiming that every individual homosexual person first worshiped an idol and then became gay. Perhaps Paul is describing humanity collectively, presenting same-sex desire as one manifestation of the larger disorder introduced into human life through rebellion against God. That’s a more sophisticated reading, but it doesn’t really solve the problem. It still locates homosexual desire itself within a degeneration narrative, making it evidence that human sexuality has become disordered through humanity’s rejection of God. That assumption is precisely what must be examined rather than simply repeated.
What Does It Mean to “Exchange” What Is Natural?
This is where Paul's repeated language of “exchange” becomes particularly important. The Apostle says that humanity exchanged God’s glory for images; humanity exchanged the truth of God for a lie; women exchanged what he considered natural sexual relations for other relations, and likewise men abandoned sexual relationships with women and became consumed with desire for one another. The movement is consistent throughout the passage: something previously experienced is relinquished for something else.
That may have made sense within Paul’s understanding of sexuality, but it doesn’t describe the experience of most gay and lesbian people today. Ordinarily, a gay man doesn’t experience heterosexual attraction as his natural sexual state and then decide to abandon it in favor of homosexuality. Likewise, a lesbian woman doesn’t ordinarily begin with a natural sexual attraction toward men only to exchange it for attraction toward women because she wanted something more exotic, excessive, or rebellious. Human sexuality is considerably more complicated than Paul’s account allows, particularly when we recognize that people may experience, recognize, suppress, interpret, or come to understand their sexual attractions in very different ways over the course of their lives. Paul offers a remarkably simple progression from idolatry to disordered passion to sexual “exchange,” but the actual development of human sexuality stubbornly refuses to fit neatly into that sequence.
Indeed, Paul’s sequence of experience and exchange of sexuality doesn’t at all describe my own life. I never rejected faith in, or love of, God. I never worshiped other deities, or no deity at all. When I passed through puberty, my very first realization of sexual identity began with wondering why I found other boys interesting, attractive, and appealing, while girls grew increasingly strange and distant. Far from embracing same-sex attractions because I wanted to rebel against God, I spent decades resisting them precisely because I loved God. I committed myself to celibacy because I had been taught that faithfulness required it, and for years I prayed, struggled, surrendered, repented, and did everything Christians told me a faithful gay person was supposed to do. Only, the attraction didn't disappear. If anything, my experience presents an almost perfect inversion of Paul’s causal sequence. I wasn’t abandoning God in order to pursue homosexuality, I was clinging desperately to God, in terror of hell, while begging Jesus to make me heterosexual.
My journey doesn’t reflect how every gay person experiences sexuality, and personal testimony should never substitute for careful interpretation or scientific research. It does, however, expose a serious problem with treating Paul’s explanation as a universally accurate description of homosexual orientation. There are millions of gay and lesbian people whose lives simply don't fit the story Romans 1 tells about the origins of same-sex attraction. And, at some point, theology has to reckon with reality.
But Doesn't Paul Call It “Against Nature”?
This is usually where Paul’s phrase para physin, commonly translated “against nature” or “contrary to nature,” enters the discussion. For many readers, those words appear definitive. Paul regards same-sex relations as contrary to nature, and therefore they are assumed to violate God’s universal moral order.
The problem is that Paul’s interpretation depends upon an assumption about what is “natural.” He assumes that men are naturally attracted to women and women are naturally attracted to men, so same-sex attraction represents a departure from that so-called “natural” pattern. Within the conceptual world Paul inherited, that assumption would have made sense, but given what we now know about human sexuality, the picture is considerably more complicated. For gay men and lesbian women, same-sex attraction ordinarily isn’t experienced as something chosen in place of an underlying heterosexual orientation; rather, it’s an enduring pattern of romantic and sexual attraction that develops naturally within us. Some recognize it very early, others only after years of trying to conform to heterosexual expectations, while still others experience sexuality in more fluid or complicated ways. What these experiences do not support, however, is Paul’s assumption that same-sex desire necessarily represents a departure from an otherwise “natural” heterosexual state.
Indeed, this creates something of an irony in the traditional Christian application of Romans 1. Gay and lesbian people are often told that faithfulness requires them to suppress their actual pattern of attraction, to cultivate heterosexual desire if possible, or at the very least to structure their lives according to a heterosexual norm that doesn’t correspond to their own sexuality. In other words, they are being asked to live contrary to the pattern of sexual attraction that is natural to them.
That doesn’t mean Paul himself would have defined “nature” in terms of sexual orientation; given that he didn’t possess our modern conceptual category of sexual orientation in the first place, he almost certainly wouldn’t have. And that’s precisely the problem. While Paul understood same-sex desire through an ancient framework that treated heterosexuality as universally natural, the lived experience of gay and lesbian people, together with modern research into human sexuality, gives us strong reason to reject that understanding.
So the question isn’t whether Paul regarded same-sex relations as para physin. He did. The question is whether Paul was correct about what was natural for the people he was describing. If same-sex attraction is an enduring and naturally developing sexual orientation, as it is for gay and lesbian people, then demanding that we become heterosexual, or live as though we were, in order to be Christian runs contrary to the gospel of grace and its call to faith rather than mere external conformity to “the law.” Indeed, such a requirement may come far closer to demanding that we live “against our nature” than allowing us to live by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, fully as ourselves and within the sexuality we actually possess, which is precisely the freedom heterosexual Christians ordinarily take for granted.
Was Paul Talking About Pederasty, Prostitution, and Exploitation?
Same-sex behavior in the Greco-Roman world wasn’t simply an ancient version of what we now associate with gay and lesbian relationships. Particularly among men, much of the sexual activity most visible in that society was characterized by differences in age, status, freedom, and power. Pederasty was well known, enslaved boys and youths could be sexually used by socially powerful men, prostitution was commonplace, and Roman sexual culture placed enormous importance upon social rank and sexual role. Mutually affectionate relationships between adults of the same sex were certainly known, but they existed within a social system profoundly different from ours today. We understand gay and lesbian people as possessing an enduring sexual orientation and capable of forming relationships as social equals; that conceptual framework wasn’t available within Paul’s cultural-religious world.
This helps explain why Hellenistic Jewish writers connected same-sex behavior with idolatry. That connection doesn’t require us to imagine that such activity normally occurred inside pagan temples or constituted an act of pagan worship. In the framework reflected in the Wisdom of Solomon and inherited by Paul, idolatry corrupted Gentile society itself, so the sexual practices of pagan culture were interpreted as manifestations of its larger moral disorder. Paul wasn’t objectively examining the full range of same-sex relationships in the Roman world; he was interpreting pagan sexuality from the outside through this inherited Jewish theological framework.
While I don’t think we can reasonably argue that Paul “only condemned pederasty” or “only condemned prostitution,” neither should we pretend that he was considering the phenomenon we now understand as homosexuality. Paul disapproved of same-sex behavior as he understood it within the Hellenistic-Jewish world, but Romans 1 never considers the ethical question of whether people of the same sex can form faithful, mutual, loving, and covenantal relationships. Those are different questions.
Was Paul Wrong?
Yes. Paul believed that same-sex desire arose because human beings rejected God, practiced idolatry, and were consequently handed over to passions contrary to what he understood as their natural heterosexual desires. To be blunt, Paul was wrong about the origins of homosexual orientation.
That statement will trouble people who have been taught that biblical authority requires every historical, scientific, cultural, and psychological assumption made by a biblical writer to be permanently and universally correct. But that understanding of inspiration creates far more problems than it solves, because the biblical writers were human beings living within particular cultures and operating with the knowledge available to them in their own time and place. They didn’t possess modern genetics, neuroscience, endocrinology, psychology, geology, astronomy, or medicine. They interpreted the world using the conceptual categories available to them, then, just as we do, today. Recognizing that fact doesn’t require us to dismiss the Bible; it requires us to interpret it.
Christians already do this in countless other areas. We don’t conceptualize the universe, understand the solar system, or comprehend the galaxy beyond it, according to ancient biblical cosmology. We don’t diagnose neurological or psychiatric illness by assuming the presence of demonic activity simply because biblical writers sometimes understood human affliction through those categories. We don’t defend slavery merely because biblical writers lived in societies where slavery was taken for granted. We recognize that divine revelation comes to us through human witnesses who remain historically situated.
Paul can therefore be profoundly right about the theological danger of idolatry, right that human beings have a remarkable capacity to turn created things into gods, right that uncontrolled desire can become destructive, right that we readily judge others while excusing ourselves, and magnificently right that all of us finally stand in need of the grace of Christ, while still being wrong about an ancient cultural explanation of human sexuality. Those propositions aren’t mutually exclusive unless we first impose upon Scripture a doctrine of biblical inerrancy that requires them to be.
And Then Comes Romans 2
There is another problem with the way Romans 1 is routinely used against gay people, and it becomes obvious the moment we keep reading beyond chapter one. Paul spends the closing portion of that chapter describing human beings who have become consumed by every imaginable form of sin. Notice how quickly his catalogue extends far beyond sexuality; the Apostle’s list includes greed, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, arrogance, ruthlessness, disobedience, and a host of other behaviors. Paul is painting an intentionally overwhelming picture of human sin, and it’s easy to imagine a religious reader nodding along: “Yes, Paul, those people are terrible. Look at their idolatry. Look at their sexual immorality. Look at their greed, violence, and disobedience!” And then they turn the page and read on into chapter 2: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others.” I can almost visualize them sitting up in shock. It’s a brilliant “bait-and-switch” rhetorical argument that is almost universally lost on most judgmental readers.
Whatever else we may say about the rhetorical structure of Romans, Paul’s movement from his indictment of Gentile wickedness in the first chapter to his confrontation with the judgmental reader in the second is fundamental to the development of his argument. And yet, this movement is almost never acknowledged when critics of LGBTQ people use Romans 1 to attack us. Paul is moving toward the conclusion that neither Gentile nor Jew occupies a place of moral superiority before God, and by the third chapter his argument arrives at the insistence that there is “no distinction,” because all have sinned and are in need of redemption. Unfortunately, Romans 1 has been used in almost exactly the opposite way. A passage intended to begin the dismantlement of religious self-righteousness is turned into a mechanism for identifying and castigating a particularly objectionable class of sinners, while those using the passage as a cudgel simply stop reading precisely where Paul turns the argument back upon the people doing the judging.
To use Romans 1 as a weapon against gay people while resisting the rhetorical turn of Romans 2 and the leveling declaration of Romans 3 is to move in almost exactly the opposite direction from Paul himself. Whatever conclusions Christians reach about the sexual behavior described in Romans 1, Paul’s larger argument should make us extraordinarily cautious about using these verses to establish our own righteousness by identifying someone else as the sinner. And yet, when Romans 1 is used against gay and lesbian people, that caution almost invariably disappears.
The Question Romans 1 Never Asks
Ultimately, I think this is where the contemporary Christian conversation has to become more honest. Romans 1 never asks whether gay people can fall in love with one another, enter into a covenant of lifelong fidelity, practice mutuality and self-giving love, remain sexually faithful to one another, care for each other through sickness and health, build a household together, worship Christ together, receive the sacraments together, serve their neighbors together, and demonstrate through their lives the fruits of the Spirit. Paul doesn't answer that question because Paul doesn't ask it.
The people he describes in Romans 1 are situated within an argument about idolatry, exchanged desires, uncontrolled passions, and humanity's broader descent into sin. To simply point toward Romans 1:26–27 whenever someone mentions a faithful same-sex marriage therefore skips the very interpretive work that Christians insist upon doing everywhere else in Scripture. We have to ask whether the text actually describes the people to whom we are trying to apply it.
If someone rejects God, turns created things into idols, becomes enslaved to uncontrolled sexual desire, uses other human beings for self-gratification while abusing or exploiting them in ways that consume every ethical restraint, I have no interest in defending that behavior. I don’t care whether the people involved are heterosexual or homosexual, Christians have abundant theological reasons to oppose sexual exploitation, infidelity, abuse, objectification, and uncontrolled lust. But that’s an entirely different question from whether a same-sex relationship, like my marriage to my husband, is sinful simply because both of us are men.
The first question concerns the moral character of a relationship: whether it’s faithful or exploitative, loving or abusive, mutual or coercive, self-giving or self-serving. The second assumes that the sex of the people involved determines the moral answer before anything about the character of their relationship has even been considered. Romans 1 doesn’t bridge that gap for us; it simply assumes the very conclusion that needs to be demonstrated. And no, the other biblical passages commonly cited against homosexuality don’t provide that missing bridge either; they address practices, assumptions, and social realities that are not the same thing as homosexual orientation or faithful, covenantal same-sex relationships as we understand them today.
Taking Paul Seriously Enough to Disagree With Him
For some Christians, the greatest obstacle to this interpretation may not finally be homosexuality at all. It may be the fear that acknowledging Paul's human limitations somehow diminishes Scripture.
I understand that fear, but I think it arises from an unnecessarily fragile doctrine of biblical authority. Taking Paul seriously doesn't require pretending Paul knew things he couldn’t possibly have known. In fact, I would argue that doing so prevents us from taking him seriously because it forces us to transform a first-century Jewish apostle into something he never claimed to be. Paul wasn't writing a textbook on genetics or human sexual development, he was proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ and interpreting the human condition using the theological and cultural categories available to him.
We can therefore say that Paul correctly observed that same-sex sexual activity existed while also concluding that his explanation for why people experience same-sex desire was culturally conditioned and empirically mistaken. We can acknowledge that Paul regarded those acts negatively without pretending that he was addressing the modern phenomenon of gay Christians entering covenantal marriages. And we can still hear what I believe is the deeper theological truth moving underneath the entire opening argument of Romans: human beings are astonishingly skilled at creating idols, desire can become profoundly destructive when separated from love and responsibility, religious people are particularly susceptible to condemning the sins of others while remaining blind to their own, and none of us stands before God on the basis of our own moral superiority.
But saying that “all have sinned” doesn’t mean that every human difference is therefore a sin. That conclusion would simply smuggle the very assumption we have spent this entire discussion examining back into the argument at the last moment. If Romans 1 doesn’t adequately describe homosexual orientation, if Paul’s explanation for same-sex desire was rooted in an ancient understanding of idolatry and human sexuality that we now have good reason to reject, and if the passage never considers faithful, mutual, covenantal same-sex relationships, then we can’t simply declare homosexuality sinful and appeal to “all have sinned” as justification. It isn’t.
Nor should Christians confuse moral discernment with visceral reaction. Sometimes the revulsion directed toward homosexuality has less to do with the moral character of a relationship than with a discomfort or disgust at the sexual intimacy people imagine taking place within it. But finding a particular form of sexual intimacy strange, unpleasant, or even repulsive doesn’t make it sinful, nor does our personal reaction tell us what God thinks about it. We should be particularly cautious when we take something that disgusts us personally and assume, without further argument, that it must therefore disgust God. Disgust is an emotion, not a theological argument. Christian ethics has to ask harder questions: Is the relationship faithful? Is it mutual? Is it loving? Does it exploit or abuse? Does it cultivate honesty, responsibility, self-giving, and care for the other? Does it bear good fruit?
There is no distinction. All have sinned. All need grace. But LGBTQ people don’t need grace because they are LGBTQ any more than heterosexual people need grace because they are heterosexual. We all need grace because we are all human, because all of us are capable of selfishness, exploitation, dishonesty, cruelty, lust, idolatry, arrogant pride, and the judgmental self-righteousness that Paul confronts so forcefully when he turns from Romans 1 into Romans 2.
Perhaps, then, the final challenge of Romans 1 isn’t to identify which group of human beings has disgusted us enough to deserve condemnation. Perhaps it’s to recognize how easily we can mistake our own assumptions, cultural inheritance, and emotional reactions for the judgment of God. If Christians followed Paul’s argument beyond the verses that we have so often used against gay people and into Romans 2 and 3, we might discover that the text we thought gave us permission to stand over others in judgment was actually stripping that privilege away.
Grace is where Paul was trying to take us, and grace doesn’t require us to call human differences sinful in order to make everyone equally in need of it. It requires us to surrender the illusion that our own place before God is secured by identifying somebody else as the sinner.
To explore more about the New Testament and Homosexuality, view or listen to our Episode: The Bible and Homosexuality: The New Testament
To explore more about the Old Testament and Homosexuality, view or listen to our Episode: The Bible and Homosexuality: The Old Testament
