The Pleasure and Danger of Religious Sexualities

In this article, we make the case for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between sexuality and religion and offer strategies to advance the sociology of the sexualities subfield. We challenge the dichotomy often posed by sociologists of sexualities who implicitly or explicitly cast moral judgment on both sexuality and religion: Sexuality, as far as it represents queer possibilities and sexual freedom, is good. Religion, assumed to be restrictive and conservative, is bad. Instead, we argue that to fully understand the social and power dynamics of sexuality, religion, and their overlap, we must recognize the complex webs of meaning that allow sexuality and religion to produce great harm and destruction, but also to validate and uplift. We then explain how two bodies of scholarship offer productive approaches to move the study of religious sexualities forward: the sociology of emotions and postcolonial and decolonizing scholarship. Sociology must recognize the multiple ways in which religion and sexuality constitute a powerful combination in social life.