The sixty years of debate from the first Kinsey Report (1948) to ex-gay programs for newly out teens have seen dramatic changes in Christian talk about same-sex desire. Whether liberal or conservative, American churches now use vocabularies, models, and assumptions about sex that would have been unrecognizable to earlier generations of believers. More importantly, contemporary Christians talk about homosexuality frequently, publicly, and in ways that would have caused scandal sixty years ago.

Through all this rhetorical flux, one thing that hasn't changed is anxiety around the figure of the adolescent. The preoccupation takes many forms, implicit and explicit, but at certain moments it stands out plainly. It is nowhere more obvious than in Anita Bryant's 1967 campaign against a non-discrimination ordinance in Miami. Jordan focuses on how Bryant uses concern for the threatened and threatening young to appropriate, to 'naturalize' the character of the homosexual for conservative Christian use.

Mark Jordan is on the faculty of Harvard Divinity School. He taught previously at the University of Notre Dame and at Emory University, where he was Candler Professor of Religion. His interests include Christian ethics of sex and gender, the limits of religious language, the rhetoric of theology, and the ritual creation of religious identities. His books include The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1997), winner of the 1999 John Boswell Prize for lesbian and gay history; The Ethics of Sex (2002); Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (2003); Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers (2006); and, with Virginia Burrus and Karmen MacKendrick, Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (2010). A new book on the rhetoric of American church controversies over homosexuality will appear early this year.