One of the Bible verses burned into my memory growing up in the “purity culture” was 2 Timothy 2:22: “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness.” With “a pure heart,” we were exhorted to battle lust (which I understood to be synonymous with sexual desire) and guard our chastity. We were not to give in to the desires of the flesh. A single sexual sin could jeopardize our relationship with God. We were encouraged to resist mounting pressure from our peers and the media to have sex. “Holiness” was synonymous with “purity.”
“But I see in my members another law waging war” (Rom 7:23).
My erection betrayed me.
In youth group, when I would shyly interact with “Summer,” I tried to honor her purity. I averted my eyes as best I could from her protruding bust, her round rear. I did my best to banish impure thoughts about her. We always behaved chastely when we were together.
But Summer made me hard.
Philosopher Alain de Botton observes, “[T]he wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.” My erection revealed, to my shame, the true depth of my lust. No matter how hard I tried to take those thoughts captive (cf. 2 Cor 10:5), those unforgivably dirty thoughts I had about Summer always came back. I believed that I was called to be pure in heart. If erections are “particularly true and honest indices of interest,” as Botton suggests, what did every hard-on, every dirty thought, every intense desire to violate my pledge to remain pure reveal about my heart’s intentions?
I had been invited to facilitate a Bible study one night for our parish’s support group for single moms. Somehow the discussion turned to sex. (Awkward. Despite my obsession with the matter, I find it hard to talk about sex in public.) One of the participants (young and pretty, she reminded me of Alexis Bledel) startled her peers by saying, “No normal human being can abstain from sex. And God doesn’t really expect us to. I know God will forgive me for having sex.”
My faith tradition continues to place severe restrictions on sexual expression. As one official Lutheran theological statement bluntly puts it: “Sexual intercourse engaged in outside of marriage is forbidden by the Scriptures and must be condemned by the church.” The New Testament explicitly condemns πορνεία (porneia), commonly translated as “sexual immorality.” Accordingly, I made a commitment to my church that as a single person I would “live a chaste life.”
“It was like entering a time warp back to the 1950’s,” she said, referring to encountering our denomination’s policy mandating celibacy for single persons seeking ordination. “There’s this assumption in the pews that you just don’t have sex.” She thought the prohibition patently unrealistic. “We’re not monks and nuns.”
She had spent time at a Lutheran seminary as well our mainline Protestant school. On each campus, she discovered that most unmarried seminarians are sexually active. Some were in committed relationships. Some were having casual sex. Monastic self-denial clearly was not characteristic of seminary life. “Seminarians have sex, too.”
She didn’t feel comfortable discussing sexual behavior with anyone in the church. In candidacy committee meetings, she dreaded the possibility of being asked if she was living in accord with our church’s teachings. She fantasized about announcing at the next meeting, “I have sex!” and seeing what the reaction would be. (Pastors and church leaders aren’t naive. During a developmental interview, she was advised to exercise “discretion.” In other words, she wouldn’t be pressed on her sexual activity as long as she kept up an appearance of propriety. Don’t ask, don’t tell.)
She wasn’t alone. Apparently a lot of unmarried Christians are, as one commentator tartly puts it, “saved and having sex.” One recent survey determined that among young evangelicals, 80% have had sex, 64% have had sex within the previous year, and 42% are in an ongoing sexual relationship. Adolescents who had made abstinence pledges were five years later no more likely to have refrained from sex than their peers who hadn’t. Anecdotal evidence seems to confirm this. One writer told of a friend who recently ventured into online dating. Apparently the Christian women he’s dated “want to jump right from a very public conversation and a vanilla latte at Starbucks to very private whispers and physical exchanges between the sheets.”
“Kylie” is an evangelical at a secular college. She was raised Lutheran but identifies as a nondenominational Christian. She’s active in her campus’ InterVarsity Fellowship. She enjoys engaging in spiritual conversations with her fellow believers and sharing her faith journey. There’s one thing she doesn’t disclose to her colleagues in InterVarsity, though.
Kylie has sex.
She’s sleeping with her boyfriend. She doesn’t see anything wrong with it. “I started to question a lot of the teachings of my church specifically about sexual impurity including sex before marriage and homosexuality,” she wrote in her journal. She dismisses the notion that “a line in the Bible” should determine her sexual conduct. Having sex doesn’t affect her relationship with God, she believes. Her religious life and her sex life are separate. Kylie’s double life, according to Donna Frietas in Sex and the Soul, is not uncommon “even within evangelical subcultures.” Frietas writes, “Because of the strong hold of purity culture, many students learn to practice sexual secrecy, professing chastity in public while keeping their honest feelings and often their actual experiences hidden.”
I used to know a girl from a church young adults group named “Rebecca.” I recall she used to sanctimoniously condemn premarital sex. I later heard whispered rumors that she had slept with other guys in the young adults group. It would be easy to judge Rebecca a pious fraud, a hypocrite. Viewed more sympathetically, Rebecca simply couldn’t live up to her ideals. A primitive impulse had seized her body and compelled her to violate her values.
The incongruence between my religious beliefs and my sexual behavior has been a source of anguish. There is a cost to violating deeply ingrained values. As a young Christian, I adopted a set of strict morals regarding sexual behavior (i.e. the only acceptable sexual expression is confined within the context of heterosexual marriage). Eventually my behavior could no longer align with that code. “The moment I knew sin, I fucked.” At the heart of my spiritual struggle was this dissonance between my religious commitments and my sexual sin. My lofty aspirations couldn’t overcome my carnal desires. Once while dating a “respectable” girl from the church who (because True Love Waits®) refrained from all sexual expression (we didn’t even kiss), I hooked up with some other girl from my “Old Testament Method” course and visited escorts because I just couldn’t help myself. As a spiritual leader, I feel pressured to be above temptation. But in the midst of moans and cries of pleasure, as I was overpowered by the sinful flesh, the truth was revealed: I was incapable of chastity.
Veritas in coitu. Foucault said, “At the bottom of sex, there is truth.” Sex is self-revelatory. In bed we expose our true selves. There is a raw honesty in the sexual act itself. Literally stripped naked, we abandon any pretensions when we fuck. Author John Hubner writes, “Sex strips away identities it takes a lifetime to build. A naked aroused man is not a brain surgeon or a university president or a Methodist bishop. He is an animal with an erection.”
An animal with an erection. When I stand naked before a woman, my hard-on blazing, it’s a moment of confession. Regardless of my efforts to control my sensuality, my sexual appetite has confounded my attempts at mastery of the flesh. My arousal deconstructs my personality. My other attributes and commitments wither away. The shy, quiet seminarian becomes uninhibited during sexual passion. (As Stephanie teased, “You’re not reserved during sex!”) My pledge to purity could not withstand the white heat of lust. And so I kissed purity goodbye.
According to one psychologist, sex is daimonic. That is, sex has the power to seize control of the individual, overwhelming one’s rational faculties and obliterating consciousness. Freud observed that we were compelled by subconscious primitive, irrational forces. Lust exposes the primal self beneath our civilized facades. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh.” He meant that our instincts contain a primordial truth obscured by he called “cerebral consciousness.” The strongest natural impulse is the sexual instinct. “In sex we have our basic, most elemental being.” This instinct is not abstract. It seeks consummation in the fleshly union of male and female in the act of sexual intercourse. “Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges,” writes Camille Paglia. Whores, wrote Sade, are the “only authentic philosophers” because they see sexual desire at its rawest, denuded of sentiment and morality. The Dionysian pursuit of sexual satisfaction brooks no restraint.
“Sex is as important as eating or drinking, and we ought to allow the appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.”
Marquis de Sade
I’ve lost the battle for purity. I haven’t been able to navigate between my sexuality and my faith. I haven’t fled youthful passions; I’ve succumbed to them.
Lutheran Guilt 