I commented on a New York Times headline one week ago, one that highlighted the novel marital rejuvenation proposed by one evangelical church in Grapevine, Texas: namely, daily coitus for a week. I concluded by saying that this proposal should give evangelicals pause. I worried that it relied on a suspicious reading of the early chapters of Genesis, a complete ignoring of Jesus’s pronouncements as reported in the gospels, and a virtual disavowal of Pauline views on sexuality, fallen-ness and what he took to be the foundational events in Eden.
I may have been taken to be suggesting that Christianity is a sex-hostile and marriage-suspicious religion, and it’s a shame when evangelical Christians forget those facts. That wasn’t really what I wanted to suggest at all.
To be sure, there are many contemporary Christian theologians who rightly remind us that singleness was deemed a significant vocation in the early church, and this did have something to do with the more extreme form of ascetic values across several eastern Mediterranean cultures in the early centuries of Christian formation. Sexual desire was a source of enormous social and ethical concern, and marriage was envisioned as a sort of bulwark erected in the face of such tsunami-like desire.
But I do not want to suggest that Christianity is, or must be, a religion that is grounded in the suspicion of bodily appetite and bodily desire. Not at all. For starters Martin Luther’s rejection of the necessity of celibate and unmarried clergy took away the logical foundation for claiming singleness as a Christian vocation. While he worried deeply about the bodiliness of certain church practices, religious iconography, and the language of “the body of Christ” in relation to the Eucharist, Luther could be almost cavalier about bodily functions, sexual functions among them.
That said, Luther never wavered in his polemical resistance to any cultural accommodation of the church to the world. What I was suggesting was that careful attention to the rhetoric deployed by Reverend Young to sell his Christian “sexperiment” illustrates just how far evangelical Christianity has moved in its accommodation to modern American culture. The logic expressed in Young’s pronouncements owes far more to the culture of self-help than it does to the language of the New Testament or to Orthodox Christian theology. And that is what I thought should give evangelicals pause. But we need to be biblically and theologically literate to be so concerned.
Marriage had always been the most secular of Christian sacraments. And marriage can mean many different things in contemporary American life. Marriage is a very big and very expensive business. It is a foundational personal aspiration for many, from adolescence on. It is a rite of passage. It is the stuff of popular music, film, and more.
The same may be said of sex, intriguingly enough. Sex, too, is a very big business. It too has become an adolescent aspiration, a rite of passage, the source of much that is most popular in our popular culture. The two ideas—concerning marriage and concerning sex—have been linked in various ethical and political debates that currently divide citizens of the United States.
That linkage is deceptively simple in Texas. Being a Christian is supposed to matter, and it is supposed to matter inevery arena of one’s life. Christian belief is supposed to matter in forming how one views marriage, how one imagines fidelity, how one makes and keeps marital commitments, and finally, how one expresses such commitments sexually. Traditionally, the essence of the Christian difference had been that expressions of sexual desire and care are oriented primarily toward the possibility of producing children. Non-procreative sexual expression was sinful, in such a world. I welcome the work of those Christian theologians who are trying to articulate other ways of expressing an ideal Christian conceptimore difficult still, of desire.
But one approach that does not advance or enhance the discussion is the kind of media-grabbing theology currently being expounded in Texas. Christians sex in the context of marriage is not at all equivalent to smiling when you do not feel happy. And it is a trivialization of both sex and of marriage—not to mention of Christianity itself—when a pastor suggests such a connection.
