“A Matter of Moral Understanding”: The Shifting Place of Medicine in Baha’i Discourses on Sexuality

The Baha’i relationship to science is usually presented, in both primary and secondary literature, as straightforwardly positive: Baha’is are said to embrace the “harmony of science and religion,” in which science and religion are two separate but complementary systems that reveal greater knowledge about the world. However, looking at authoritative Baha’i writings on same-gender relationships demonstrates that this is too simple a picture. As the dominant medical views on sexual diversity have shifted, Baha’i authorities have gone from embracing the idea that being gay or lesbian was a medical condition subject to cure, thus treating religion and science as partners in making moral claims, to disputing the scientific findings on sexual orientation, then finally downplaying the relevance of medicine to understandings of sexual morality. This pattern suggests that the ways in which Baha’i institutions use the language and authority of scientific findings is dependent on the content of those findings.