Introduction

Why Is Sex So Fascinating? God and Sex

Why is sex so fascinating? That’s one question. But why pay any attention to what Christians believe about sex? That’s quite another. And yet the very fascination of sex is a pointer to a religious dimension. Every time a lover “worships” his beloved, every time a woman says it will be “hell” to live without her man, whenever someone says to a lover, “take me to heaven,” or describes a woman as a “goddess,” they use religious language.

Ian McEwan’s haunting novel Atonement is better known because of the movie. In the novel, when the lovers Robbie and Cecilia first begin to make love, both in the modern sense of sexual union and in the older sense of a declaration by word (“I love you”), McEwan comments that Robbie “had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”¹ In some way, “it was impossible not to think” that something transcendent was happening. The psychotherapist Carl Jung is said to have commented that when people brought sexual questions to him, they always turned out to be religious, and when people brought religious questions to him, they invariably turned out to have their roots in sex. Sex and religion have always been hard to separate—from the gods and goddesses of the religions of the Ancient Near East onwards. At the end of his comprehensive study of the goddess Asherah, Walter Maier concludes how impressed he has been by the geographical diffusion of her worship (from Hierapolis in the Near East to Spain in the West) and by its long endurance (from the second millennium before Christ to the Christian era).²

Sex and religion are hard to disassociate for long. So when Christians speak on the subject, this is not religion muscling in on a subject where religion has no place; rather it is a conversation about a subject where religion has always belonged.

Culture Wars

Christian voices about sexuality struggle to make themselves heard in the midst of heated culture wars. For example, the USA seems to be moving away gradually from cultural conservatism (with its social or religious permissions and prohibitions) to a growing acceptance that sexuality is a personal lifestyle-choice. The most controversial issue tends to be “gay marriage,” but statistically, the most widespread manifestation of this attitudinal change is the growth of unmarried cohabitation either as a trial period before possible marriage or as an alternative to marriage. More than half of married Americans below the age of fifty lived together with their current spouse before they were married. Does cohabitation make later divorce more or less likely? Does it make any difference for children to have cohabiting but unmarried parents? Societal attitudes are roughly evenly divided, but in general, the younger a person is, the more likely they are to regard unmarried cohabitation as a good trial for marriage, or even a good long-term arrangement outside of marriage.³

Recognizing Prejudice

Because I write in the midst of culture wars, it is especially important to recognize that we all come to this question of sexuality carrying prejudices. We have vested interests in the answers to moral questions because these answers judge us. This includes me as the author. The philosopher Roger Scruton claims “to look on the human condition with the uncommitted gaze of the philosophical anthropologist,”⁴ but there is no such thing as “uncommitted gaze.” However open-minded we may pride ourselves on being, each of us brings prior commitments to our consideration of the subject. Our prejudices are shaped partly by the society to which we belong and partly by our own personal histories. Our society shapes our beliefs as to what behaviors are normal, acceptable, and tolerable. It does this more powerfully when its assumptions are unexamined. Soap operas, movies, novels, magazines, blogs, and radio stations all tell stories of people’s lives, and in the telling they convey values, sometimes by explicit approval or disapproval, more often by a silence that just assumes a behavior is acceptable.

But our personal histories also powerfully condition our response to thinking about sexuality. Each of us comes to this question carrying a history of experience or inexperience, of delight or disappointment, of thanksgiving or regrets. That is to say, we come to the subject as participants in the subject, not as objective observers. What we know about sexuality we know from within sexuality, as sexual beings, and therefore our knowledge is at least in part an existential knowledge by subjects who participate in what we know. Therefore we want a worldview and ethic that in some way affirms who we are and how we have behaved. We naturally want to justify ourselves and are prejudiced in favor of worldviews that enable us to do that. By contrast, the worldview I commend here does not affirm me, my thoughts, my attitudes, or my behavior; on the contrary, a Christian worldview by definition challenges me and calls me to change my mind and my behavior. We need to expect this to be uncomfortable if it is true. But that is the question: Is the Christian view of sexuality true?