An astonishing story was reported in the New York Times on Monday. An evangelical Baptist megachurch in Grapevine, Texas—20,000 souls strong, with satellites in Dallas and Miami—has been admonished to start having more sex. Marital sex, that is.
The Reverend Ed Young, aged 47, has proposed what he coyly refers to as a “sexperiment,” challenging his married congregants to have sex every day over the course of a single week. His single congregants presented a distinct problem to the proposal, of course: “I dunno, try eating chocolate cake,” the righteous reverend opined.
Yup, you heard him right: “Let them eat cake.”
Some of the pithy pronouncements designed to sell this wild-sounding Grapevine version of Christian sexology are revealing:
We need to “move from whining about the economy to whoopee!” Intimacy is not “holding hands in the park or a back rub.” “If you’ve said ‘I do,’ do it.”
“Kids” is really a codeword that means “keeping intimacy at a distance.”
If some of this sounds eerily close to a Viagra or Cialis advertisement, and I for one think that it does, then this points to the many ways in which evangelical Christianity is not driving policy or cultural criticism, but rather is being driven by these larger cultural trends. And increasingly, evangelical Christianity is struggling to seem relevant.
Indeed, Reverend Young’s pithy pronouncements intended to sell the program are heavy on the language of self-help. Having sex when you don’t feel like it is a lot like forcing yourself to smile when you’re unhappy: you just feel better. And when a couple’s sex life hits the skids because the husband has admitted to an extramarital affair, well, one week of daily sexual activity should bring you back together, “physically and emotionally.” Imagine being ordered to have sex with your cheating spouse, as the alleged road to marital recovery.
If this sounds almost magical, and too good to be true, then it probably is. Reverend Young gestures to Genesis, oddly enough, as a way to make his case. There is no shame in marital sex, he says; “God thought it up, it was his idea.”
These are theological howlers that simply cannot be allowed to pass. Adam and Eve weren’t married, for starters. And in Eden, there is no clear reference to their sexuality at all. Neither marriage nor marital sex “was God’s idea,” at least not there, in the beginning. In point of fact, God’s ideas had little to do with what transpired in the Garden of Eden. What happened there was a rebellion, and then expulsion from the Paradise-Garden. Shame was actually born there. And “the Woman” did not even receive her name until after the expulsion, when Adam gave her one. The name he gave her—Hava, or “Life-giver”—indicated that now they were going to have sex, and children… in the face of their own incipient and tragic mortality.
If Reverend Young is bad on his Old Testament exegesis, then he is utterly silent on the New Testament. Jesus did not offer many pronouncements about marriage or marital sex. According to Mark, he forbade divorce under any circumstances. According to Matthew, he allowed one out—for adultery. And according to John, when he forgave a woman caught in an adulterous liaison, he told her to “go and sin no more.” Curiously, John does not say whether Jesus told her to “go” back to her marriage. But these are human imponderables lost on Reverend Young.
If he is relatively poor in his gospel exegesis, then it is stunning how far Young’s theology is from Paul’s. Paul makes quite clear that he is suspicious of sexual desire in all forms. When he counsels marital sex, it is as a stopgap measure, to assure that sexual desire won’t enter the picture. Celibacy is best, Paul opines. For those too weak–willed to take up such a life, marriage is a next-best alternative. Get to orgasm before you start to feel devilish desire. For desire is disordered, and it has been since Eden.
This all assumes the point of view of the man in the relationship, of course; so do Reverend Young’s dismissive allusions to back rubs and walks in the park. Feminist theologians have done a great to walk us through the complexity of bringing such ancient texts and ancient theologies up-to-date in the face of our own very different gender norms and marital values. What is curious is to see Reverend Young offering interpretations as modern and at odds with Pauline Christianity as some of theirs. Rest assured, for the Pauline Christian, marital sex is not something God thought up, not exactly, and it is not shameless either. Sexual desire is disordered and it is indeed shameful; that is one, and likely the most salient, feature of the fallout from the Fall.
To be sure, this is a news story in part because it links two phenomena we do not normally think together: evangelical Christianity, and the embrace of a shame-free sexual life.
But the astonishing and utterly unreflective modernness of some of what Young proposes, coupled with the sheer vacuousness of the theology lying behind his “sexperiment,” should give evangelicals greater pause.
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For more on evangelicals and sex, see Amanda Marcotte’s post on RH Reality Check.
