The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

In 1846, Simon Greenleaf wrote a learned tract, “The Testimony of the Evangelists,” that proved the truth of Gospels by applying the rules of evidence that govern common law trials. Greenleaf’s “Testimony” enjoys a lively internet presence among evangelical Christians today, despite Greenleaf’s nearly forgotten status among the legal profession and academics. This chapter describes Greenleaf’s manifold contributions as a founding faculty member of Harvard Law School, a rigorous law teacher, and an influential scholar whose treatise on evidence shaped nineteenth-century law. Historians, however, have mostly ignored Greenleaf’s deep commitment to evangelical Christianity. The oversight is unfortunate because Greenleaf consciously wove his evangelical beliefs into his teachings and writings, including his evidence treatise and his “Testimony,” by drawing from the core principles of the Common Sense Tradition, an evangelical mainstay. It is argued that Greenleaf’s Common Sense assumptions greatly influence current law even if their origins are unrecognized.