For generations, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been weaponized to justify discrimination—particularly against LGBTQ+ people—by those who claim the cities were destroyed due to sexual deviance. But a closer reading of both the Bible and historical religious commentary reveals a different, often overlooked truth: the real sin of Sodom was a brutal inhospitality to strangers, a callousness to the vulnerable, and a prideful rejection of justice.
In the Book of Ezekiel, the charge against Sodom is made clear:
“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49)
The Washington Post
Far from a tale of forbidden desire, the destruction of Sodom was a divine rebuke of cruelty, greed, and a society that violently turned its back on outsiders. The strangers in Genesis 19—angelic visitors whom Lot tried to protect—were targeted by a mob, not because of lust, but because they were foreigners. The story is not about sex. It’s about power, xenophobia, and how a supposedly “righteous” society reacts when people in need show up at their door.
Fast forward several thousand years, and this lesson couldn’t be more relevant to America’s current political climate—especially within the MAGA movement, which has built its identity around walls, bans, and cruelty toward immigrants and refugees.
When Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in 2015 and launched his campaign by branding Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” he declared war not just on immigrants, but on the very values that spiritual and civic traditions hold sacred: welcoming the stranger, sheltering the refugee, showing kindness to the foreigner.
Under Trump’s leadership, we saw immigrant children separated from their parents at the border and placed in cages. We witnessed a Muslim travel ban that stranded families and turned away desperate people seeking safety. We saw cruel reductions in refugee resettlement quotas and an asylum system weaponized to inflict suffering. Today, his administration delights in creating internment camps in the swamp. But this isn’t just bad policy—it’s the very sin that the Bible condemns in the story of Sodom. The inhospitality. The arrogance. The persecution of strangers.
It’s no accident that many of those fleeing to the U.S. today are people the U.S. invited in—either explicitly, through promises of refuge (like Afghan allies and Latin American asylum seekers), or implicitly, through foreign policy decisions that destabilized regions. When MAGA supporters cheer deportations and demand mass removals, they’re cheering for the betrayal of people this nation made commitments to. That isn’t justice. That’s Sodom.
Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible. Pilgrim Press
The hypocrisy of a movement that clings to Biblical moralism while enacting policies that betray its core messages is staggering. Scripture doesn’t warn us about rainbow flags or drag queens. It warns us about arrogant societies who gorge themselves while turning away the hungry. It warns us about mobs who attack the foreigner, not for who they are, but for daring to come.
As Americans—whether Christian, secular, or otherwise—this should give us pause. The lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t a call to judge others. It’s a challenge to look inward and ask: Are we the kind of society that welcomes the stranger, or the kind that chases them out with torches?
If the answer is the latter, then the fires of judgment aren’t something to fear in the distant future. They are already burning—fueled by our cruelty, our silence, and our failure to act.
Because the real sin of Sodom isn’t who people love. It’s who we refuse to care for.
