Why is Wikipedia "Queering" Jesus?

Was Jesus gay? Wikipedia seems to think so.

Was Jesus gay? This is not a question that had ever crossed my mind—not, that is, until I stumbled across numerous Wikipedia entries exploring this idea. I’m not a Christian. Yet, as I read, I found myself both shocked and offended.

You can read the full story about this in my recent article for Fox News, but here’s a summary:

• The article on Sexuality and marital status of Jesus includes a disquisition into the idea that Christ and John the Baptist were lovers. The entry cites a fringe scholar who argues that theirs is “a pederastic relationship between an older man and a younger man.”

• Search “Gay Jesus” (why is this a search term at all?) and Wikipedia will take you to the entry on Homosexuality, where, again, readers are presented with the idea that the connection between Christ and John is “used by those who implied a homosocial or homoerotic reading of the relationship.”

• A section of the article Homoeroticism includes the claim that some “speculate that John the Baptist had homosocial or homoerotic behavior.” There is a whole standalone entry titled List of works depicting Jesus as LGBT.

(Read the full piece at Fox News.)

There’s an argument out there that these theories do exist, they’re out there, and Wikipedia is merely presenting them to the world. However, I strongly challenge this read.

What we see with the “Jesus was gay” narrative is Wikipedia elevating a specific intellectual and cultural orientation. The site treats Christianity as a subject for transgressive play, not just despite but perhaps also because it’s offensive to billions of people, who reject the idea that its most sacred figure should be fair game for ideological reinterpretation.

But the real question is why these particular theories receive such prominence on Wikipedia, and why they rise on this subject when they rarely do elsewhere. The answer has almost nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the culture that governs the encyclopedia.

In many cases, these articles were written or shaped by a single editor who identifies as “nonbinary” and “trans” and rejects the notion of gender entirely. One editor created the entry List of works depicting Jesus as LGBT and wrote it almost in its entirety. The same editor created and wrote 97% of the text for an entry titled F*cking Trans Women, about a 2010 zine that published a single issue.

User boxes by the editor who created “List of works depicting Jesus as LGBT.”

Every day, Wikipedia removes dozens of entries for not meeting its “Notability” threshold, one of the site’s cornerstone policies. Yet, with the zine, we have an article on the most arcane, un-notable of topics that is allowed to stand. (An easy experiment in this regard would be to dig up a single-issue publication about a right-coded hero, create an article about it, and see if it remains on the site for more than 10 minutes.)

That a small handful of editors openly pushing a narrative that, applied in any other religious or cultural context, would be considered intellectually inadmissible tells you all you need to know.

The editors pushing these don’t face a torrent of challenges by other editors. There has been no RfC (Request for comment) to have admins adjudicate disputes about these claims. Unlike virtually every other topic of any cultural or political significance, editors who created these entries and sections haven’t been topic banned, or site-banned, or even pressured. In fact, they haven’t faced any resistance whatsoever.

The asymmetry tells you something about Wikipedia. Over the past decade, the platform has been reshaped by a corps of editors and administrators aligned with the dominant Wikipedia worldview, which co-founder Larry Sanger describes as GASP—Global Academic Secular Progressive. You can see this in political coverage, where editors built a lattice of articles declaring Donald Trump an authoritarian. You can see it in the treatment of Charlie Kirk, whose page was rewritten to cast him as an antisemitic conspiracist. And you can see it in religion, where the boundaries of what counts as legitimate commentary shift dramatically depending on the target.

There is no single commander issuing orders. What exists is a shared outlook, reinforced through source guidelines, editorial hierarchies, and unwritten norms about which sensibilities deserve deference. Within that system, Christianity stands out as a subject that can be dissected and (in the eyes of its believers) desecrated with a freedom rarely granted to others.

It’s here that the mainstream narrative about Wikipedia becomes strangely inverted. In its recent interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, the New York Times opined that “the culture wars came for Wikipedia,” suggesting a neutral institution is being drawn into the conflicts intentionally created by others—i.e. the right—to grab power.

But the evidence points in the opposite direction. Wikipedia has spent years absorbing the assumptions of the contemporary academy and indexing them across millions of pages. What looks like neutrality is, in many areas, simply the triumph of one worldview over all others.

The theological material is only the most striking example because the stakes are ancient and the offense so obvious. But the deeper issue is structural. Wikipedia has no mechanism to balance competing perspectives when its core editorial class shares a broadly uniform set of ideological instincts. There is no counterweight. And the site’s initiatives—like “Queering Wikipedia,” which receives enthusiastic support—move in only one direction.

Meanwhile, the encyclopedia’s traffic is slipping. Its reputation is thinning. It now has direct (and massive) competition in the form of Grokipedia. And readers who once treated it as a default authority increasingly treat it as a starting point that requires verification elsewhere.

Wikipedia could confront this by widening its editorial base, recruiting conservatives, religious editors, and non-ideological scholars. It hasn’t. Instead, it continues to cultivate a cultural posture that narrows the range of permissible views while presenting the result as consensus.

This is where the work of NPOV begins: not in trying to police Wikipedia’s theology, but in mapping the entire ecosystem that produces outcomes like these. The goal isn’t to demand new orthodoxies or to trade one ideology for another. It’s to make the process visible, to show how an institution that once promised neutrality became a vehicle for a particular way of seeing the world, and how that shift now shapes what billions of people encounter as “fact.”

The “Jesus is gay” story stands as one concrete instance of a much larger pattern. Wikipedia did not stumble into the culture war. It built a road straight through it—and then declared itself both victim and referee.

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