“Sex has become the religion of the Western world.” So says Charles Pickstone in The Divinity of Sex: The Search for Ecstasy in a Secular Age. Pickstone, an English vicar, boldly sets forth his thesis: “namely that sex has taken on many of the functions once performed by religion. In particular, sex has become a path to an encounter with primordial mystery.”
The decline of religion is attributable to secularization. In modern industrial societies, which increased material comfort through the mastery of nature, God no longer seemed so relevant. Darwin demonstrated that humans were the product of an evolutionary process, seemingly in contradiction of the creation account in Genesis. Higher biblical criticism established the complex human origins of biblical texts, weakening the claim that they were the word of God. Knowledge of other religions became more widespread, diminishing the uniqueness of Christianity. To use Peter Berger’s term, the sacred canopy has withered away.
Yet the religious instinct remains. And as Roger Scruton observes, “[E]rotic and religious sentiments show a peculiar isomorphism.” Religious devotion, severed from traditional religious structures, has been transferred to sex. As secularization progressed, Pickstone writes, people “began to turn to the mysterious, forbidden, private, ritualised world of sex both for experience of another world and for the language in which to express that experience.” Foucault wrote, “A great sexual sermon has swept through our societies over the last decades.” Whereas religion was once seen as the product of the sublimation of the libido, sex is now the outlet for the spiritualities diverted from organized religion.
I read this with interest because of the considerable energy I expend on sex. I really don’t have any hobbies or recreational avocations. My friendships are few. When I’m not at church or immersed in my studies, I’m often pursuing sex in its various forms–escorts, porn, phone sex.
My spiritual life is dry. Prayer and worship fail to spark my soul. I experience transcendence only during sex, especially when I orgasm. Sex has become, in Tillich’s famous words, my ultimate concern. After years of abstinence, I’ve embraced sex with the zeal of a convert. When I penetrate a woman, I feel like I’m penetrating a mystery.
Is my spiritual dryness a product of the guilt my sexual activities generate? Or rather does my obsession with sex come from religious dissatisfaction?
Lutheran Guilt 