More Sex and the Secular

Yet more thoughts on the relationship between sex and secularism….

“I used to be a born-again Christian.”

“You were?”

“But I gave that up a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

“I wanted to have sex.”

– A 46-year old woman on her loss of faith

In his essay on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault associates our cultural obsession with sex with the “death of God” and the decline of traditional religious belief. Personal liberation is sought not through participation in religious institutions but through sexual experience. In his book Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion, Phil Zuckerman wrote a chapter entitled “Sex and Secularity.” Based on numerous interviews he conducted, Zuckerman determined that sex (or rather the traditional religious strictures surrounding sex) makes “apostates” out of a lot of former believers. The “ultimate spiritual battle,” as one woman described it, between faith and sexual desire often results in the loss of the former.

“I couldn’t be a good Christian and have sex. And I guess my hormones took over and that became more important.”

– A twentysomething woman, formerly Pentecostal

The internal struggle between religious ideals and sexual urges summons contradictory impulses. “Oh, I’m not supposed to be doing this but I want to do this,” a woman remembers thinking in high school. Sexual desire itself was seemingly condemned. Many were burdened by the guilt that accompanied sexual exploration. A woman who recalls wearing a “love waits” ring in high school said, “Oral sex was all over tenth grade and — we knew we weren’t having sex — so technically we weren’t doing anything wrong that way. But we would feel guilty and cry about it…and just feel really bad.” Zuckerman concludes that suppressing one’s sex drive in accordance with traditional religious teachings can be emotionally damaging and result in a loss of faith.

“That was the first time I ever went down on a guy. And I remember being SO guilty about it…it was, like, such a deep guilt — like I had let down my future husband, I had let down God….I would just cry and cry and cry.”

– A 20-year old female college student, a former nondenominational Christian

Dr. Laura Schlesinger succinctly summarized the sexual ethics of most religions: “Holy sex is between a husband and a wife…. Unholy sex is everything else.” When the desire for greater sexual expression conflicts with this narrow definition of what’s permissible, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that many reject the worldview that produced it. Such a restrictive view of sex is, in fact, unnatural. “If there is any one form of human interaction that is ‘natural,’ surely it is sex,” Zuckerman writes. “We are neurologically wired for it, emotionally dependent on it, and physiologically designed for it.” There is evidence that secularism leads to better sex. According to multiple studies, avowedly secular people report experiencing less guilt and fear surrounding sex, as well as engaging in more sex with more sexual partners in a wider range of sexual practices, including oral and anal sex.

Sex and the Secular

Mark Regnarus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, has penned an op-ed piece in The Washington Post with a blunt thesis: “It’s not science that’s secularizing Americans — it’s sex.” The sexual revolution has engulfed the church. Changing mating patterns (which include fewer and later marriages) have had an impact, all of which are due to the ready availability of sex. “Sex has become cheap — that is, not hard to get — because it’s much less risky and consequential in the era of birth control.” For evangelicals, it has become harder to recruit new members from the unchurched because traditional sexual ethics “are making less and less sense.”

As someone who thinks a lot about religion and sex, and has uneasily accommodated them through dual identities, the article piqued my interest. Millennials have abandoned the church en masse, largely due to the incompatibility between traditional sexual ethics and their own sexual behavior. Forced to choose between the two, they unsurprisingly choose sex. Sex is understood solely in the terminology of medical science and psychology, outside (in Peter Berger’s words) the “sacred canopy.” Religion seemingly has nothing to say to their sexual experience.

As one in ministry in the church, I am bound to publicly uphold my church’s teachings on sexuality, which largely accord with the traditional ethic. My intense erotic desire has made me incapable of living out that ethic. The dissonance between my putative beliefs and my behavior, that “dance of dichotomies,” fuels much of the drama of my life.

Adapting sexual ethics to sexual reality appears, at first glance, to be a remedy. A number of theologians and ethicists have made that their project (culminating in some queer theologians finding spiritual value in anonymous gay sex). Difficulties arise, though. In Protestantism, the Bible has been the primary source of reflection for ethical deliberation. It takes some creative exegesis to explain away certain texts that seem to have clear implications for sexual ethics. The hermeneutical challenge is greater then first imagined. Historical-critical contextualization can only go so far. An integral progressive sexual ethics can be developed without much of a biblical foundation, but it then ceases to be distinctively Christian. It’s also hard to believe that theologically conservative churches will suddenly accede to this effort. (Interestingly, those churches in liberal mainline Protestantism that have accommodated themselves to the sexual zeitgeist are in steeper decline than their more conservative counterparts.) Traditional sexual ethics will remain within Christianity in some form or another.

Perhaps there’s something more fundamental going on. Is the nature of sexual desire so antithetical to normative religious practice that it’s impossible to reconcile one to the other? Most religions have adopted an ascetical approach to some degree when it comes to governing sexual behavior. Sex is seen to be potentially dangerous if not hostile to religious observance. Placing limitations on sex (whether it be monogamy, celibacy, heterosexual exclusivity) is considered vital for religious practice and spiritual development. But sexual desire is not so easily tamed, as evidenced by how frequently those limitations are transgressed. Even the threat of divine wrath cannot deter it. The church fathers condemned sexual passion because of its inherent unruliness. According to Augustine, its insidiousness comes from its irrationality, its inability to be controlled by the will.

It was Freud who famously observed that the libido is the primal energy that animates human life. It cannot be repressed. We are swayed by passion, propelled by a primitive, irrational force. Raw sexual desire arises out of the chthonic depths, evading mastery and mocking our pretensions to civilized conduct. Think of orgasm. During orgasm, one completely surrenders to passion and loses control, possessed by the sexual spasm. Eros’ dark power subverts our ideals, even our spiritual aspirations, drawing us into its vortex.

Eros and agape do not easily coexist. In Agape and Eros, Anders Nygren calls the latter the “most dangerous rival” to Christian faith. Eros promises a form of salvation that doesn’t rely on divine initiative. It seduces the soul, “terrible as an enchanter,” according to Plato. Eros is compared with raging flood waters that sweep away everything in its path. “Eros and Agape belong originally to two entirely separate spiritual worlds,” Nygren concluded. Karl Barth agreed, depicting eros as a ravenous desire at odds with Christian charity.

I’ve managed to maintain my religious identity only by compartmentalizing my life. Others have succumbed to sex, leaving the pews conspicuously empty.

The Loophole

At my evangelical college I recall hearing rumors about girls who were technically virgins but had not refrained from entertaining other orifices. The letter of the law and not its spirit, I suppose.

giphy

Revolution

“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.”

Theology in the Bedroom

Can sex be a source for theological reflection? Not the phenomenon of “sexuality,” understood in its broadest sense, but actual sexual experience?

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is a methodology that recognizes four sources for theological reflection: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Pastoral theological reflection treats lived human experience as the key source. Any authentic examination of human experience cannot exclude sexual experience. Nor does our subjectivity, our capacity for religious experience, cease when we take our clothes off.

Sex doesn’t easily lend itself to discursive analysis. “There is something about sexual passion that language cannot comprehend or represent and at best there is no reason to try…,” writes Sara Maitland. Any understanding of sex starts with having sex. And sex itself is a form of knowing. (The Hebrew understanding of the term is quite illuminating.) A female Unitarian Universalist seminarian — who brags, “I love God and I love fucking” — engages in casual sex as a way to widen her perspective: “God is important to me and I believe that if I wish to know God, I need to really know myself and know other people in a variety of contexts…. Each partner is a new perspective, a new approach to connection….” Encountering another person sexually allows access to a dimension of personally that’s undisclosed in a non-sexual context. Embodiment also means that we encounter in the flesh the creative force she calls God. Even casual sex, suggests Rowan Williams, provides access to “the body’s grace.” This grace extends beyond the boundaries of heterosexual monogamy, according to some theologians. Promiscuity provides an opportunity to extend and enjoy, in Nancy Wilson’s words, “bodily hospitality.” Some queer theologians in particular have identified sex as an inherently religious experience which illuminates the mystery of God. Patrick Cheng describes the trinity as an orgy. Agape can be understood through eros. Sex, “the smell of our bodies when making love, our fluids and excretions, the hardening of muscles and the erectness of nipples,” in Marcella Althaus-Reed’s words, is a privileged mode of experience.

“Integration of sexuality and spirituality may call for some experimentation,” Daniel Helminiak says, “and along the way one may make some mistakes.” Has my personal sexual experimentation given me insight I would not have attained otherwise? Through the sweat and the groans and the guilt, has my erotic education been, in Tillich’s words, a “way of opening up new human possibilities?” It’s intriguing to consider that my theological formation includes the bedroom as well as the classroom.

“Theology is just like sex, the art of penetrating the mystery.”
Leon Bertoletti

Dark Ages

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.

“The Monk Sleeps with the Wife While the Husband is Praying,” by Unknown

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.

Ecce Unde

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.”

The Scandal of Christendom

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.”

My Nun Story

Speaking of transgressions….

During my first semester in divinity school, “Sister Beatrice” was in my Reformation history class. A Dominican nun who is working on a doctorate in church history, her order permitted her to take the course at the school. (If you want to learn about the Reformation, it makes sense to be taught by Protestants.) She certainly stood out in her white habit. I casually chatted with her on occasion. She was bright, funny, and rather pretty. But I noticed that as the semester went on, I started to get aroused by her. Her young, unblemished, “virginal” body draped in holy attire enticed me, and I derived a sweet thrill from thoughts of corrupting it.

Yes, I fantasized about fucking a nun.

I confess it wasn’t the first time. I had fantasized about corrupting Amy Adams’ naive Sister in Doubt.

Female sexuality is inextricably intertwined with humanity’s fall from grace at the hands of Eve in the Garden of Eden, and woman forever remains on the precipice of impurity. Even a nun can be debauched.

There’s a scene in 3 Needles in which a nun portrayed by Chloe Sevigny sacrifices her chastity. As she lifts up her habit and gives her body over to a man, one senses the exquisite burden of her vows and the cost of betraying them.

I dated two Catholic girls who pursued religious life. One went on to take vows. (I hope it wasn’t because of me.) Another had contemplated becoming a nun and even briefly entered the novitiate of a Dominican order before I met her. (She obviously didn’t stick with it.) The lure of chaste vestals, and defiling their purity, is intensely erotic for me. (That may explain my Catholic school girl fetish. Catholics sure know how to inspire fetishes.) Are such women really chaste? Can they truly give themselves entirely to God, remaining celibate their entire lives? Intimate relations with a “Bride of Christ” is taboo of the highest order. (It was a capital crime in the Middle Ages.) The thought of getting her to betray her vows is hot.

“You’re not a priest, are you?”

She tugged at the waist of her tight pants. “I know you want to see me naked!” she teased.

She advertised herself as “Southern Comfort.” She moved to New York from down South to attend school. She hosted from a basement apartment near Greenwich Village. When we spoke on the phone, she asked me to see her earlier because she had to study. With her dark mop of hair, she looked a bit disheveled. She struck me as a little flaky. She rapidly stripped off her clothes. I followed suit, then nervously lay down on the bed. She crawled on top of me.

“You’re not a priest, are you?”

Startled, I told her I was a volunteer minister at a Lutheran parish.

“You seem like a priest — so nervous and shy.”

She said she had gotten to know a couple of priests, including a couple at St. Patrick’s Cathedral — “know” as in the biblical sense. She had been the covert girlfriend of one for a short time. “They’re just guys,” she said – implying that guys just need to get laid. She had converted to Catholicism against her family’s wishes a few years earlier. She had a devotion to Mary. She showed me a holy card blessed by Pope John Paul II.

“I don’t agree with the Church on sex, though,” she said. She even contemplated becoming a nun, but couldn’t take vows: “I like to fuck too much!”

“Do Lutherans have to be celibate?”

I told her we don’t.

“Good!”

I kissed her tentatively.

“Let me show you how to kiss a girl,” she said. She gave me a wet kiss, thrusting her tongue inside my mouth. We continued to make out.

We had been together over an hour. “I must really like you.” Then she pleaded, “Will you be my boyfriend?” She said I resembled an old flame who had dumped her.

Finally it was time. I lay on top of her. She helped guide me inside her. She squealed with delight as we fucked.

We recollected ourselves. She asked me to call her just to hang out. “I don’t have many friends,” she said. She had some pot we could smoke. I promised I would call her again. Then I headed out into the city night.

I never did call her.