So much for the “frozen chosen….”

A British historian is researching sexual misbehavior among Presbyterians in Ireland and North America in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Her research “asks what Presbyterian women and men in past centuries got up under the sheets (or, in many cases outside in fields, barns, up against a tree or on the roadside).” She writes:

As a historian of Presbyterian sexuality, I want to assure you all that these Presbyterian folk far from deserve this prudish reputation. A scroll through the records of the Presbyterian church courts brings to light a whole range of naughty goings-on. Stolen trysts in fields and forests; heavy petting and dry-humping on the roadside; misbehaving ministers riding drunk on horseback, seducing the wives of their church members; runaway wives and bigamous husbands; and enough baby-mama drama to rival any soap opera abound in the records.

According to the Westminster Confession, one of the purposes of marriage is the “preventing of Uncleanness.” “Unmarried (and married) persons who engaged in illicit sexual activity were labelled as fornicators and subjected to discipline by Presbyterian church courts.” Discipline generally consisted of a “public rebuke,” in which the offender acknowledged his transgression before the whole congregation and without which the sacraments were withheld. Public shaming served to uphold communal standards of behavior. “Historians of Presbyterianism, in both Ulster and Scotland, have noted that the discipline of sexual misdemeanours accounted for a large proportion of church business.”

A social media feed recounts some of her findings:

Perhaps a historian will next examine licentious Lutherans.

A local nondenominational church has opened a coffeehouse/bookstore near my residence. It serves a nice vanilla latte and sells a copy of the ESV Bible with Creeds and Confessions. It provides a pleasant setting to do some writing.

The comely barista is a distraction, however. She engaged me in a brief conversation. She’s a student at a local college and a worshipper at the church that operates the coffee shop. Her blond hair and noticeable bosom were appealing. As I settled in front of my laptop, my eyes were repeatedly diverted by her presence. I imagined peeling off her blouse and capris pants and exploring her nubile body.

One of the books I browsed was a book researching why young Christians leave the church. Familiar complaints from those who had departed included a wariness of ecclesiastical authority and the supposed conflict between science and religion.

And sex.

Perceived sexual repression is a major catalyst for exiting the church. One young Catholic said, “No one leaves the church because of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. They leave for pelvic reasons.”

Sociologist Mark Regnerus described young Christians as being caught in a “clash of cultures”: the “pleasure ethic” and sexual freedom extolled by secular culture collides with the conservative sexual ethic demanded by most churches. The book labels this ethic “sexual traditionalism,” which restricts the range of sexual expression and clouds it in shame. Many young Christians, according to the research, still believe in the tenets of sexual traditionalism. The crisis of faith comes when their behavior can no longer comport to this standard. One young man who was interviewed was a worship leader at his church while he indulged his obsession with pornography and engaged in numerous hookups. He said, “I just literally led a double life, between church and sex.”

As I write this, my eye still catches the figure of the barista. Unlike the days of my innocent youth in which I affirmed the verities of the purity culture, I know the pleasures her body could produce. Another law waged war in my members against my mind (cf. Rom 7:23), which made me ripe for sexual exploration. The moment I knew sin, I fucked.

As a means of combating this trend, the author advocates a more “relational” approach to sexuality which replaces a rigid adherence to rules in guiding sexual conduct. Perhaps. I’ve personally experienced sexuality as a driving, relentless force that obliterates deeply held beliefs. There’s nothing like the sight of a naked woman awaiting you in the bed she shares with her husband to weaken one’s adherence to the Sixth Commandment. The substance of sexual traditionalism, not just its presentation, has come into doubt.

Meanwhile, I continue to lust after that barista.

“But of all pleasures sex is the one which the civilized man pursues with the greatest anxiety.”

Alan Watts

Rummaging recently through a box of old books, I discovered a copy of Alan Watts’ Nature, Man and Woman. Rhonda gave it to me. She was a fan of Watts, who was a former Anglican priest who explored Eastern thought and religion. (He was especially popular among many in the counterculture of the 1960s.) In a chapter entitled “Spirituality and Sexuality,” Watts examines the Christian tradition’s “radically dualistic” split between spirit and nature, which is nowhere more evident than in the realm of sexuality. This dichotomy “abstracts sexuality from the rest of life.” Sexual abstinence is prized because it represents the triumph of the conscious will over nature, which resists control. (Augustine is quoted as attributing “shameful” involuntary arousal to the Fall.) The Church Fathers subsumed all sexual desire into the sin of “demonic” lust. The notion of “holy sex” is almost entirely absent, “save that it must be reserved to a single life partner and consummated for the purpose of procreation.” Abstinence becomes confused with holiness. “The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman.” The controlling ego, however, only alienates man from himself. “But the sexual act remains the one easy outlet from his predicament, the one brief interval in which he transcends himself and yields consciously to the spontaneity of his organism.” Sex becomes “the great delight.” (I’m reminded of Rhonda’s astute observation that I tend to “intellectualize” my reality, which probably partly explains my attraction to sex as an escape from the conscious will.)

Only in a non-dualistic religious philosophy is sex understood for what it is. The unity which underlies all reality is enacted, almost sacramentally, when the polarities of male and female are bodily united in sexual intercourse. This has profound spiritual implications. Watts writes, “The most intimate of the relationships of the self with another would naturally become one of the chief spheres of spiritual insight and growth.” Rather than a mere escape from the ego, Watts understands the sexual act as a form of self-transcendence in which one enters into communion with the cosmos. This unfolds when one is detached from the established boundaries of the self and the power of the will. “For pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands of the will.” Sexual pleasure has religious significance. Tantric sexual practice is motivated by the belief that it is “a transmutation of the sexual energy which it arouses” so that “sexual love may be transformed into a type of worship.” The ananda (Sanskrit, “ecstasy of bliss”) which accompanies sexual passion is rightly understood as “mystical ecstasy.” Having transcended themselves, what the lovers experience is truly “adoration in its religious sense.” Sex can be a spiritual practice in which the sacred, unitive nature of reality is experienced.

Watts promoted and practiced an “erotic spirituality” (which was the title of one of his works). He elsewhere confessed, “I am an immoderate lover of women and the delights of sexuality.” His religious philosophy reflected his sensuality. “Watts’ main problem with Christianity is that it chafed against his emerging sexual libertinism,” one critic noted. Watts came to believe that sexual activity was “requisite and necessary, as well for the body as for the soul.” Sexual control adheres not in “mere limitations of the frequency of intercourse or the number of his partners” but by exercising “control within the act of sex, and as this will require practice the act cannot be too infrequent (emphasis added).” Sex “culminates in an ecstasy in which there is neither past nor future nor separation between self and other.”

Watts proper Anglican upbringing may explain his sexual infatuation. In Beyond Theology, Watts writes, “For there is a sense in which Christianity is the religion about sex, and in which sex plays a more important role even than in Priapism or Tantric Yoga.” Even today, “the churches function mainly as societies for regulating…sexual mores.” (“Living in sin” does not refer to “ownership of slums or of shares in shady loan companies.”) The glories of sexuality find no representation or expression in ecclesial life. “But what if the Christian poet should have something to say about the revelation of divine glory in the image of a naked girl…? Imagine the screens and niches of St. Peter’s adorned with Baroque equivalents of the tantric sculptures that embellish Hindu temples!” Watts’s suggestion that First Presbyterian Church could offer “the sacrament of ‘prayer through sex'” on Wednesday nights sounds absurd because the church’s reticence on sex precludes even imagining it.

This reticence, Watts continues, reveals that sex “is the principal Christian taboo,” which, in turn, reveals that sex is the “mysterium tremendum, the inner and esoteric core of the religion.” The taboo not only delineates what is prohibited; the taboo contains within it the sacred. The Christian attitude of sex has not truly been disgust but “negative fascination,” for, as Watts archly notes, “those who make much of their distaste for sex lose few opportunities for exercising it.” The taboo attracts as much as it repels. “It is thus that the Church’s intensely negative fascination with sexuality acts as the context and stimulus for a prolific erotic life.” It provokes “those who resist temptation to the point where they are at last compelled to give in.” This is not mere hypocrisy, but “sexual ambivalence” which stimulates both lust and guilt. It explains the “double life” of the prelate who “really believes in all that he preaches, but finds that it is overwhelmingly impossible to practice because the legs of one of his secretaries” proves irresistible.

“The religions of the world either worship sex or repress it; both attitudes proclaim its centrality,” Watts writes. For Christianity, “the resolution of the problem must be the divinization of sexuality.” Beneath the veil of the church’s prudishness we glimpse what it strains to conceal: that sexual intercourse is “a direct way of realizing the mystical union.” Freud interpreted religion as a sublimation of the libido. But what if the sexual impulse is the religious impulse? This has theological implications, for “it should follow that human generation has its archetypal pattern in the divine act of creation. The Hindus portray this quite openly in images of Shiva or Krishna with his śakti or feminine aspect, embracing him with her legs around his loins.” In the end, sex should evoke “cosmic wonder.”

In Nature, Man and Woman Watts writes:

“Without–in its true sense–the lustiness of sex, religion is joyless and abstract.”

The lustiness of sex. This stuck with me because Rhonda was a lusty gal. A shelf full of books on sacred sexuality on her bookcase testified to her interest in the intersection of spirituality and sexuality. “For the spiritual practitioner, sexual intercourse is an opportunity to encounter the sacred dimension,” Georg Feuerstein writes in Sacred Sexuality: The Erotic Spirit in the World’s Great Religions. (Rhonda gave me a copy of that book, as well.) Sacred sex is “about communing or identifying with the ultimate Reality, the Divine.” Yet sacred sex can be cast in such an ethereal light that the carnal, bestial impulses that drive most sexual activity can be obscured. The lustiness of sex. When we were frantically fucking in the back of Rhonda’s car after class, “the sacred dimension” of what we were doing wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my mind.

I recall one encounter with Rhonda in which I caught glimpse of us in flagrante delicto in her bedroom mirror. Even with my poor eyesight, I saw myself plowing Rhonda doggy style on her bed. Yet it was as if I was watching another person. My mind could not accommodate an image of me having sex. Having been taught to despise the sinful flesh, visual evidence of my carnal indulgence contradicted my self-concept. I struggled to accept that I am a sexual being.

Rhonda noticed my tendency to intellectualize, which has shaped my understanding of religion. This probably explains why I’ve gravitated to the study of theology. “In the Christian West, theology has too often been a disembodied enterprise,” writes James B. Nelson. “It has been understood preeminently as a rational discipline, a matter of the head.” Academic theology, still in thrall to the Cartesian reduction of the self to the mind, gives short shrift to personal religious experience. I’ve tended to reduce religion to a matter of belief. Belief is understood as a cognitive assent to a proposition. To the extent that belief outwardly expresses itself, it does so in the form of rules that are to be followed. Sex is understood within a matrix of rules, which entails prohibitions against an array of behaviors.

And yet so much in Christian spirituality and Christian life is flesh-denying, flesh-despising, flesh-devaluing. It is head-centred, ponderous, life-extinguishing, devoid of passion. . . . It is disturbing to see how Christian history and Christian spirituality has been so marred by a highly ambivalent tradition which, while officially rejecting gnostic denials of the goodness of the flesh, has nevertheless been affected to a great extent by those gnostic tendencies….

Kenneth Leech

I’ve also inherited the body/spirit dualism that has marked Christianity since the early church. “Much of early Christianity is a sustained polemic against bodily instincts [and] sexual desire,” notes Mark I. Wallace. (“It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” 1 Cor 7:1.) Paul’s opposition of “flesh” and “the Spirit” implicitly disparages sex and the body. Augustine made this critique explicit by attributing carnal desire to the Fall. Elaine Pagels writes, “Ever since Eden…spontaneous sexual desire is, Augustine contends, the clearest evidence of the effect of original sin.” Inheriting the Platonic elevation of the mind over the body, Christian thought emphasized the weakness of the body and the need to exercise control over it, lest the soul be endangered by the lustful flesh. (The obliteration of reason during sexual passion was a big reason why Augustine was so suspicious of it: “So intense is the pleasure that when it reaches its climax there is an almost extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.”) “Man became like the beasts when he came to practice sexual intercourse,” lamented Clement of Alexandria. Early Christian communities exalted virginity and celibacy, marking the victory of the soul over the body. The church, according to historian and sexologist Vern L. Bullough, “continually emphasised that the sexually active person was a sinner.” One scholar summed up this tradition as “erotophobic.”

I became estranged from my own body. Displays of affection have always been uncomfortable for me. (I’m not a hugger.) As I strove for purity, I tried to exercise self-control and master bodily passions. But lust is not so easily tamed. When Summer in her cheerleader uniform triggered an erection, I learned, in Augustine’s words, that “the genital organs have become as it were the private property of lust, which has brought them so completely under its sway.” Although I struggled to exercise reason and spiritual self-discipline, my body rebelled against my efforts to subdue it. “He could not obey himself.” As my disobedience accelerated, I disassociated my “real” self from my corporeal self. That’s why I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. It had a feeling of unreality to it. I was performing sexually without being fully present in the act. This discrepancy of selves is so discordant that I have trouble making sense of it.

All of which helps to explain how I’ve come to depersonalize sex. This doesn’t mean that my sexual encounters, even paid sex, has been devoid of elements of affection. The experience of sex for me, however, is centered on the pleasure inherent in the act itself. Sex is reduced to fucking. My early experiences with call girls were instructive. Prostitution exposes with blatant honesty the romantic fictions artificially attached to sex. The zipless fuck without pretensions of intimacy or attachment appeals to me.

“I began to associate sex with sin, and I imagine that it had to do with being surrounded in a conservative religion in my home, church, and school. My attitude about sex and sexuality was that it was something that only married or sinful people engaged in.”

– A young Christian woman

In Sex, God, and the Conservative Church, Tina Schermer Sellers diagnoses conservative Christianity as an incubator of sexual shame and dysfunction. Based in large part on her experience as a therapist treating clients struggling to reconcile their faith and their sexuality, Schermer Sellers explores the church’s “sex negative” ethic, which she attributes to “two millennia of sexual baggage.” (She deems the purity culture “one of the more ascetic and toxic eras in sexual ethics in the last 100 years.”)

A dualism which tore asunder soul and body is largely to blame. This attitude owes more to Greco-Roman culture than the teachings of Jesus. Plato idealized the world of the forms, disparaging the material. Sex was to be transcended through self-discipline. Later philosophers deemed sexual pleasure as inferior to other human pleasures. Stoicism subordinated bodily passion to reason, which was supposed to guide human behavior. As Christianity emerged in this milieu, it absorbed these philosophies, stamping its ethics with a perspective far removed from its semitic Palestinian roots. Early Christian ascetical practices such as fasting and the exaltation of virginity reflected this mindset and were later institutionalized in monasticism. St. Paul was certainly a formative figure in this tradition. Paul’s apocalyptic expectation gave preference to celibacy and colored his view on marriage as a means of fighting temptation (“For it is better to marry than to burn with passion” [1 Cor 7:9]). His ethics focused on the avoidance of porneia, the immorality born out of sexual frustration.

Patristic theology sought to marry Platonist thought with Christian revelation. Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Dionysius were notable in this regard. But it is Augustine, who Schermer Sellers calls a “sexually troubled soul,” who is most responsible for the spirit/body dualism at the heart of traditional Christian sexual ethics. Before becoming a Christian, Augustine had been a Manichaean, a Gnostic, ascetical sect which sharply divided the spiritual from the material. Peter Brown in Body and Society writes, “For Augustine the Manichaean auditor, sexuality and society were antithetical…. Intercourse, and especially intercourse undertaken to produce children, collaborated with the headlong expansion of the Kingdom of Darkness at the expense of the spiritual purity associated with the Kingdom of Light.” Not only was sexual activity abhorred; even sexual thoughts were verboten. Augustine later renounced and condemned the Manichaeans, but he retained a deep-rooted suspicion of sexuality. Augustine believed sexual “desire was the result of human sinfulness and disobedience to God,” according to Merry Wiesner-Hanks in Christianity and Sexuality in the early Modern World. Augustine’s profound pessimism about human nature was at the heart of his doctrine of original sin. “In his view, no other after Adam and Eve had free will; original sin was transmitted to all humans through semen emitted in sexual acts motivated by desire, and was thus inescapable.” Sexual pleasure itself was a product of concupiscence.

Augustine cast a long shadow. “His legacy of shame, fear of the body, and suspicion of its desires is with us today,” laments Schermer Sellers. Eventually it was institutionalized. The Penitentials, guidebooks for confessors assigning penances, contained, according to Margaret Farley, “detailed prohibitions against adultery, fornication, oral and anal sex, masturbation, and even certain positions for sexual intercourse if they were thought to be departures from the procreative norm.” Gratian’s Decretum, a compilation of canon law, in Farley’s words, “contained regulations based on the persistently held principle that all sexual activity is evil unless it is between husband and wife and for the sake of procreation.” The Reformation, spearheaded by the Augustinian Martin Luther, retained a negative judgement on sexual desire. Descartes’ reduction of knowledge to deductive reasoning and being to cognition can also be seen as a philosophical outgrowth of this attitude.

“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.”

The Dark Ages were especially dark for sex, according to Raymond J. Lawrence in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. Pope Gregory the Great’s (reigned 590-604) vision of sexuality was even more austere than Augustine’s. A protégé of Benedict of Nursia, he condemned the pursuit of sexual pleasure even within the bounds of marriage (“…the pleasure itself can by no means be without sin”). Sex outside marriage warranted eternal damnation. Clergy in the West should be monasticized, he maintained, although it took until the Gregorian Reform of the 11th century for celibacy to be canonically imposed. The Venerable Bede agreed with Gregory that pleasure accompanying procreation was sinful. He maintained that persons should refrain from entering a church until having washed and waited a certain interval of time since intercourse. The “Penitentials,” manuals used for assigning penances during confession, were filled with sexual proscriptions. Sex was intended only for procreation. Even various sexual positions, such as retroposition (man behind woman) and the dorsal position (woman on top), were condemned.

In comparison, Muslim scholars were relatively liberated about sex as opposed to their Christian counterparts. By the second millennium, “the claim that the best people have the least amount of sexual pleasure, was fixed and remained dominant even into modern times, in both Catholic and Protestant cultures.” The Cathars took this obsession with sexual purity to extremes, forbidding intercourse even among married couples. (They denigrated the lax medieval church as ecclesia carnalis, “the church of the flesh.”) Crushed by church authorities, they bequeathed a legacy of spiritual otherworldliness and the notion of romantic love untainted by sexual desire (including the rituals surrounding weddings that persist to this day). The medieval mindset persisted to the time of the Reformation. Thomas More’s hairshirt, worn to quell the concupiscence of the flesh, is a fitting metaphor for the epoch.

Constantine’s cooptation of Christianity marked a turning point in the church’s view of sex, a definitive rejection of a Semitic appreciation for sexuality. Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr. makes this claim in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. Uniformity in belief and practice was imposed. Proponents of a more liberated perspective, such as Theodore of Mopsuestia, were condemned as heretics and silenced after the Council of Nicea in 325.

Before Constantine, the sin of idolatry–in particular offering sacrifice to the imperial cult–was the primary concern of Christian morality. After Constantine, Christian morality became obsessed with sexual purity. Lawrence attributes this to the Stoicism and Neoplatonism, which viewed sexual pleasure with suspicion, that dominated Roman thought at the time.

Two figures that stand out in the post-Constantinian church were Jerome and Augustine. Lawrence writes, “Among all the great personages of early Christendom few exerted as much influence and none is more fascinatingly kinky than Jerome.” Jerome believed sex was intrinsically impure; the only good to come out of marital intercourse was the birth of virgins. (He disapproved of baths for virgins lest they kindle lust in the bather.) Virginity and sexual abstinence were the hallmarks of Christian life. He condemned Clement of Alexandria for espousing the notion that Paul was married. “His dark, sex-phobic shadow casts itself across the church right into the present generation,” Lawrence concludes.

Augustine led a sexually licentious life during his youth. After his conversion to the “Catholic” faction, he became an obsessive celibate. His formulation of the doctrine of original sin, in which the human will is ineluctably tainted by dark impulses, can be interpreted as a psychological reaction to his former life. Original sin, as Augustine understood it, was inextricably linked to sex. “Ecce unde,” he wrote. “There it is.” The libido’s inability to be mastered by the will made it demonic. Arguably this derived from his philosophical training than biblical reflection. As Peter Brown wrote, “The loving cleaving of Israel to God would never be reenacted in the marriage beds of Western Christendom, only the sad shadow of Adam’s estrangement from the will of God.”

By happenstance, last year I discovered Raymond J. Lawrence’s Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. The title captures the book’s thesis. “Christianity…is the most sex-negative of all the major world religions,” Lawrence contends. A historical account of the relationship between Christianity and sexuality, Sexual Liberation sets forth a vision of Christianity that is “sex positive.” To remain viable as a religion, Lawrence maintains, adherents of traditional sexual ethics must stop “continuing Christianity’s long campaign to inhibit its adherents from experiencing the best of God’s gift to humankind, the pleasure of sex.” My curiosity still piqued, I decided to revisit the book. (I earlier summarized his chapter on Luther, sexuality and the Reformation.)

Judaism at the time of Jesus had a far more positive view of sexual pleasure. The Song of Songs “is unambiguously pornographic”:

O kiss me with the kisses of your mouth.
His left hand is under my head;
His right hand clasps me. (2:5)
Let my love enter his garden;
Let him eat its delectable fruit. (4:16)
Under the apple tree I aroused you.
There your mother conceived you. (8:5)
My love thrust his hand [a euphemism for penis] into the hole
And my inwards seethed for him. (5:4)
Your curving thighs are like ornaments crafted by artist’s hands;
Your vulva a round crater. (7:2)
The scent of your vulva like apples,
Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my perfect one! (7:8)
Your valley [a euphemism for the female pudendum], a rounded bowl
That is not to lack mixed wine. (7:3)

Renowned Old Testament scholar and Catholic priest Roland E. Murphy noted the Song’s depiction of “human sexual fulfillment, fervently sought and consummated in reciprocal love between a woman and a man.” Its provenance may be Babylonian orgiastic rites. First century rabbi Akiba ben Joseph sought to preserve its inclusion in the canon and proclaimed, “The whole world, is not worth the day on which the Song was given to Israel.” This was in stark opposition to the Stoics and Platonists in the Hellenistic world who divorced sexual pleasure from religion. Later traditions obscured its literal sexual meaning through allegorical readings. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, sexual intimacy serves as a metaphor for the covenant relationship between God and Israel.

The Pharisees sought to regulate sexual activity while not denying sexual pleasure. Polygamy was permitted (even occasionally required). Sexual intercourse constituted a de facto marriage. Levirate marriage is contrasted with the Christian understanding of marriage. One of the results of Christian monogamy was the creation of the categories of mistresses and illegitimate children, both of which were unknown in ancient Israel. Prostitution was tolerated. (Rahab is considered an exemplar of faith in the New Testament.) According to the Talmud, we can look forward to sex in heaven. “Of the three Abrahamic faiths, only Christianity has no tradition of sex in heaven.” Novelist Herman Wouk summed up Judaism’s sexual heritage: “What in other cultures has been a deed of shame…has been in Judaism one of the main things God wants man to do. If it turns out to be the keenest pleasure in life, that is no surprise to a people eternally sure God is good.”