Unholy Sex
In her May 22 post, Love, Joy, Feminism blogger Libby Anne reiterates the important truth that evangelical Christianity “approaches sex in a strongly dichotomous way.”
In the post, titled “Evangelicals’ Double Bind,” she notes that the faithful who lean toward biblical literalism and uber-focus on Jesus portray sex outside of marriage as “bad, sinful … sick and corrupting” but “good, godly and mind-blowingly pleasurable” after tying the knot. The upshot, she correctly points out, is that many heavily invested Christian virgins, particularly women, find it difficult to “flip the switch” after marriage and copulate like (they can only imagine) professional lotharios and harlots must. After decades of “being shamed for their sexual thoughts or desires,” she explains, they find it ain’t easy to quiet those internal clarions of dishonor, even when the taboos are ostensibly lifted.
I would add that this Jeckyll and Hyde view of sexuality is not just espoused by evangelicals but the Christian faith as a whole. It’s a sad legacy.
It began with early medieval Catholics, the first Christian sect to dominate the European landscape after the Roman Empire’s devastating collapse in the fifth century. The faith flourished in a dangerous, unstable environment as existential fear gripped ordinary, ill-equipped citizens who remained after the elite immigrated to other lands. With the exodus of philosophers, teachers and intellectuals who were the keepers of essential and classical knowledge, clergy became in coming centuries the main go-to guys for fundamental information and ideas in the imploded empire. Radical clerics like sex-traumatized priest Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) emerged to fill the gap, inventing a new intellectual normal steeped in faith. And an essential element of the new paradigm was sexual chastity and demonization of extra-marital intercourse or, heaven forbid, any same-sex couplings. Of course, relevant language in scripture was found to corroborate these ideas and cement them into common life.
So-called Church “fathers” like Augustine insisted that, while God was always gently loving and never wrathful in dispensing necessary moral justice, he could paradoxically get very cross about sexual transgressions. Augustine popularized and embedded the notion that the root and branch of sexual sin is the willful, innate seductiveness of women, proven—if only metaphorically—by Eve’s fateful corruption of Adam in the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, Augustine believed any man’s lustful erection was technically sinful but always forgivable because almost certainly involuntary and coerced. His solution to this dilemma was to propose social control of women to limit their opportunity to arouse men. Augustine believed that even married men should never copulate with their wives lustfully—“possessed in the disease of carnal concupiscence”—but with a chaste, pious reserve, motivated only by disembodied love and a self-contained desire only to procreate.
Pope Innocent III (1198-1216 AD) later seconded that. In On the Misery of the Human Condition, he wrote: “Man has been formed of dust, clay, ashes and, a thing far more vile, of the filthy sperm. Man has been conceived in the desire of the flesh, in the heat of sensual lust, in the foul stench of wantonness. … His evil doings offend God, offend his neighbor, offend himself.”
But women were, of course, the principal evil. Medieval churchmen’s mysogeny was drenched in disgust, including Augustine’s successors Jerome and Tertullian. The latter holy man, in On the Apparel of Women, characterized women’s sexuality as “the devil’s gateway” and the principle reason Jesus had to die.
This ancient Christian impulse to control women sadly remains thoroughly contemporary. For example, ultra-conservative contemporary American televangelist Pat Robertson, who was a candidate for U.S. president in 1988, once said, “I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.”
No wonder Americans remain so deeply conflicted about sex. We are wary of it—just try to find a horror film where sex doesn’t foretell looming terror—yet, due to abundant cultural realities, we are chronically aroused by it as well.
We have Christianity to thank for this.
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