Did Dietrich Bonhoeffer have a secret? — In 1945, a German pastor was executed after trying to assassinate Hitler. In the next years, his letters from prison became a Christian classic. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was particularly revered in American Evangelicalism, called the “patron saint” of the faith. He’d never married, but was seen as heterosexual. Aren’t all Christians? By the mid-1980s, however, scholars had begun to wonder.

A new memoir asks tough questions about religion and mental illness — I’m reading an amazing new book. A man who grew up an Evangelical pastor’s kid writes about his history of crippling anxiety attacks. But this is Charles Marsh, the well-known religion scholar and professor at the University of Virginia. In Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir, he thinks back to a day in 1981 when he was a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. …

A look back at—me! — Back in 2019, I started writing on Medium about religion and sex. How does one do that? I’d never known of Christians to have anything useful to say about sex. In my experience, they seemed to be unable to think through sexual situations—which is to say, life on earth. I went into it, though, doing one post after another. Kind reader Richard Barham has a list of “Poletti favorites.”

They like to celebrate the ‘normal’, i.e. the heterosexual and married. But to look at right-wing leaders, they’re often not very ‘normal’ at all. They’d say they are. But look close up, into the shadows and secrets…and it’s another story. Was Winston Churchill gay? The British Prime Minister is hard to pin downmedium.com ‘Cuckolding’ and the Republicans who love it Jack Murphy made their sex secrets publicmedium.com

The Republican activist was often read as closeted — He was the activist who launched the conservative movement in America. He was a new image for the right-wing—intellectual, and fun? And gay? There was always talk about William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in 2008, but Republicans haven’t forgotten. The journalist Darren J. Beattie tweeted: “What’s disgraceful is that Willam F. …

A great American writer kept secrets — He was the American writer who lived from 1817 to 1862, whose poetic spirit and searching intelligence deeply imprinted on the world. But Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” seemed not to have experienced ‘sexuality’, or so people thought. As a friend noted, his “interest in the sex opposite his own, was almost nil.” He’s an odd figure, little remembered anymore.

Jeff Chandler had a secret — He was one of the top Hollywood stars of the 1950s, and the image of ‘manliness’ for the decade. But Jeff Chandler saw himself as a woman. I’m thinking back to an eerie episode in 1999, when the tall, hunky actor who’d died in 1961 was back in the headlines. His former co-star, Esther Williams, published a memoir with a startling scene. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.

The most famous Christian singer in history has been in the news lately, chosen as a Kennedy Center honoree, as a fall off her bike caused her to cancel some upcoming concerts. As her mortality comes in view and her career is assessed, I’ve wondered if Evangelicals will take Amy…

The religion didn’t like Epiphanes — When I set out to learn more about Christianity, I wondered if it was possible that all the leaders were sex-maddened puritans. But I noticed a lurking legend of the religion: a teenager around 150 A.D. who said the teachings of Jesus were communism and ‘free love’. I went to learn more about that. In ‘official’ Christian sources, Epiphanes is dismissed, or attacked.