Can religiosity lead to sexual obsession?
Perhaps religion and sex aren’t quite that antithetical. Sexologist Dr. Susan Block observes, “Sex and God are quite often at odds, but sexuality and spirituality actually have certain key factors in common. The mystical and the erotic experience are the most intense in human life; both connect desire with awe, love, anguish, ecstasy, terror, pain and extreme logic–defying pleasure.” No wonder during the throes of erotic passion, we cry out the divine name.
The God of monotheistic religion, however, is markedly sex negative. “[T]he Bible contains far too many rules against way too many kinds of sex.” The doctrine of original sin, Dr. Block avers, links sex with sin, historically condemning sexual pleasure as literally damnable. (She predictably attributes this to the sexual dysfunctions of St. Paul and St. Augustine.) Fueled by shame, adherents of traditional religion are taught to abhor their desires.
The irony is that repression can breed obsession. Religions emphasize the restraint of primal impulses, writes psychologist Nigel Barber. Sexual modesty is stressed. Sex outside the parameters of heterosexual marriage is condemned. Sexual expression nevertheless eludes restriction. “If a devout person wants to eliminate all sexual thoughts as potentially sinful, this is much easier said than done.” It’s a basic psychological insight. If you’re told to not think about, let’s say, baseball, you’ll most likely to think about baseball. When told not to think about sex, you’ll think about sex. (This might explain the lure of pornography for sexually frustrated religious believers. Porn star Angela White says a lot of the subscribers to her website come from Utah and the Bible Belt.) “So the research evidence suggests,” Barber continues, “that, contrary to their principles, religious people are unusually bad at restraining their sexual impulses…. Perhaps religious people are poorly equipped to deal with the reality of their own sexuality.”
Excessive religiosity, especially when married to extreme sex negativity, can lead to sexual obsession and a fascination with illicit sex. Religious repression of sex feeds sexual curiosity and breeds taboos. Dr. Block writes, “Of course, the irony of creating a taboo is that, once something is forbidden, it becomes very exciting, kinky and very, very sexy. Everyone knows that naughty sex is hot sex!… So, if, according to your religion, sex is bad (and it usually is), then ‘bad’ becomes very sexy.” The French philosopher Georges Bataille believed that transgression is at the heart of eroticism. Or to put it another way, sex has to be bad to be good. Convinced that sex is bad and dirty, the religious sexual obsessive can only experience arousal if sex is experienced as sinful. The taboo thrill and the guilt, the dread and the desire, the insatiable urge — all are wrapped up in what Hawthorne called “lawless passion.” An example was given of a woman whose attendance at Bible studies and church services coexisted with sexually provocative dress and promiscuity. (Even those who have left intense religious environments report being still marked by those attitudes. An escort brought up as a Pentecostal said, “Religion made me the dirty girl I am!”)
“The secret passion of the erotic is that it puts us in touch with our animal nature,” Block writes. “So, Sex and God are pretty much at odds. An ongoing struggle between organized religion and natural human sexuality pervades civilized history. And though religion is powerful, sometimes seemingly all-powerful, somehow sex always wins.”
Lutheran Guilt 