Revolution

“The Sexual Revolution brought the fresh air of honesty into religious communities and laid an axe to the root of the tree of medieval sexual values,” writes Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr. in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. The Sexual Revolution was a revolution in the truest sense, in that the social order was completely upended. It was a backlash against the sexual restrictions of the Christian church, both Catholic and Protestant. Other than the abolition of clerical celibacy, Protestantism largely continued the aversion to sex that characterized medieval Catholicism. The liberalizing attitudes of the Anabaptists (i.e. free love) were were crushed along with the Anabaptists themselves. The Pietists of the 18th century ignored Luther’s progressive legacy by discounting any compatibility between holiness and sexual pleasure. (John Wesley’s sad sexual life typified Pietistic attitudes.) Actually, Catholic cultures were less sexually repressed than Protestant ones. Prostitution has historically been tolerated in Catholic countries, as opposed to Protestant lands that outlaw the practice. Extramarital sex is also more accepted in cultures marked by Catholicism. (Lawrence attributes this to Catholicism’s hierarchical structure. Sexual probity was the special concern of clergy and religious. Protestantism’s “priesthood of all believers” imposed a uniform standard of conduct.) Sexual repression reached its apex in the Victorian era, when sexual desire was divorced from marital affection. (Not susrprisingly, prostitution flourished.) Convinced that a whole-grain diet could tame the sexual impulse, Rev. Sylvester Graham invented a cracker to depress carnal cravings.

There were exceptions. The Oneida Community in upstate New York in the mid-19th century practiced “complex marriage,” a form of free love. Everyone in the community was considered to be married to everyone else. Mormonism in its infancy famously practiced polygamy. But they were anomalies. “From Luther to 1950, nothing much changed.”

The Sexual Revolution changed everything, tearing asunder the bond between sex and heterosexual monogamy.  The forces behind the Sexual Revolution were varied and complex. Alfred Kinsey’s work played a role, as most certainly did the advent of “the pill.” (Lawrence goes so far as to assert that “the sex life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King helped push the sexual freedom movement forward.”) The churches? Not so much. “The leaders of the various Protestant churches had to be dragged, for the most part, kicking and screaming into the Sexual Revolution.” Unlike Catholicism’s hierarchical system, Protestantism’s more democratic structures had to account for the sweeping changes in attitudes and behaviors. Catholic dissent has tended to be suppressed by the Vatican. A French Dominican priest named Jacques Pohier was one such dissenter. “An increasing number of priests and religious of both sexes no longer feel that to abstain from all affective and sexual life, or repress it, is a privileged means of achieving the goal,” Pohier said regarding the backlash against the discipline of celibacy. He advocated for sex education that promoted the pleasures of sex. He accused the Church of stealing sexual pleasure from the faithful. He even proposed that open marriage was not incompatible for believers. This was too much for the Vatican. Pohier was the first theologian disciplined by Pope John Paul II.

Among Protestants, special note should be made of the “clinical pastoral movement,” which began in the 1920’s, which dramatically altered how religious leadership was trained. The good of the person, as opposed to doctrine, was emphasized. It took into account the insights of psychology, especially Freud. Practically, this meant more tolerance for forms of sexual behavior previously deemed aberrant. Anton Boisen’s contributions to this movement deserve particular attention. Lawrence warns that the achievements advanced by the clinical pastoral movement in the realm of sexuality need to be formalized, otherwise “Protestantism will remain in danger of reverting, if only by implication, to the safe harbor of sex-phobic medieval teaching.”