“The proof that sex is a very crucial point in the spirituality of sinful man is that shame is so universally attached to the performance of the sexual function.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man
Sometimes I feel guilty about not feeling guilty enough.
Growing up in a conservative religious environment, sex became associated with sin. I was taught about the “dark side” of sex. Anything outside of the biblically defined parameters of marriage (fornication, sodomy, pornography, masturbation, immodesty, lust) was sinful. Sexual sins were different. Sexual sins were committed against our own bodies, which were not our own, but temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:18-20). Sexual sin corrupted body, mind and soul. I inferred that my sexuality was inherently sinful and that my desires must be overcome.
I was condemned by my own sex drive.
When I could no longer conform my behavior to my beliefs, I felt guilt and deep shame. I suspect that guilt and shame, to some degree, will always be inseparable from sex for me.
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
Genesis 3:7
Augustine linked the Fall to sexual sin. Modern biblical scholars and theologians dismiss this, but what if he was on to something? Reinhold Niebuhr concedes that puritanism and Christian asceticism have contributed to this sense of shame. He also discounts the Freudian analysis that the sense of guilt surrounding sex is due to the repressiveness of civilization’s conventions. Shame, according to Niebuhr, antedates these conventions. It’s primordial, inherent in the act itself. “Man, granted his ‘fallen’ nature, sins in his sex life.”
Think about the sexual act itself. We use those parts of our anatomy we keep most hidden, commit acts we usually use euphemisms or vulgarities to describe, abandon our rational selves to flights of senseless passion, all in a process designed to propagate the species but rarely engaged in to do so. I can see why shame arises.
Sex is explosive. It blows up our moral imagination and leaves our prudential judgment in tatters. When I do experience pangs of guilt, memories of her scent or the curvature of her body banish them from my mind.
Lutheran Guilt 