This dissertation examines mainline Protestants' discussions about homosexuality from the postwar era through the mid-1970s, as clergy began to address the issue publicly but before their opinions became a matter of prolonged, church-wide debate. During this time period, the dominant societal frameworks for understanding and categorizing homosexuality—medical research that classified homosexual behavior as an illness, legal codes that criminalized it, and religious teachings that unquestionably declared it a sin—came under increasing scrutiny and debate. According to existing historical accounts of the mainline Protestant debates over homosexuality, the church-wide disagreements were a response to broad societal changes, which came to the fore with the rise of the modern gay rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This dissertation, in contrast, argues that discussions about the meaning of homosexual sinfulness provided the very arena in which other questions about the status of homosexuality were first contested. The discussions by church leaders registered and at times even anticipated the broader societal debates. Rather than merely responding to a changed social context, the church-wide debates that arose in the late 1970s grew out of church leaders' earlier discussions about homosexuality and their ongoing efforts to challenge social and legal penalties that targeted homosexuals. The received shifts in church leaders' approaches to homosexuality influenced positions on all sides of the churches' debates over homosexuality, including both those who pressed for change and those who adamantly defended a return to tradition.

Using an array of archival sources, church publications, newspapers, and oral history interviews, this project situates church leaders' ongoing formulations of Christian teachings about homosexuality in dynamic relationship with the emerging gay rights movement. This narrative also recovers an image of the religious strands within the gay rights movement. Like other social and political movements during this time period, the gay rights movement included a number of prominent religious leaders and a variety of active religious communities. In charting an intertwined history of American churches and gay and lesbian communities, this project illuminates the interactions between religion and gay rights and provides a more accurate picture of the events precipitating the contemporary church debates over homosexuality.