I’m a prude.
Let’s just get that out there right now. I blame my Southern Baptist upbringing for my prudishness. I was taught that the body was inherently shameful, the earthen vessel we had been given to inhabit until we were called to our eternal heavenly home with God. Oddly enough—in a complete contradiction—I also was taught that cremation was a sin because on the day of the rapture, we had to have a body that God could resurrect and reanimate to call into heaven.
Perhaps all this contradiction is why I found pornography fascinating as a kid. What was so wrong with the body, I wondered, and what was so nasty (or so sacred) about sex that it was something you could only do with one person for the rest of your life?
I remember tagging along with my older brother and delving into my aunt and uncle’s dirty magazines. It was titillating to young eyes to take in all those naked bodies doing God-knows-what to each other. It made you tingle in places that you didn’t yet know the words for—but you knew enough religion to know that the sensation was the devil’s pitchfork poking you from the bowels of hell.
Certainly not every Christian kid got the memo that the body and sex were irredeemable. But for most of us, and those who still need convincing, there has been a proliferation of websites aimed at helping Christians enjoy godly sex. Some, such as Intimacy in Marriage, are aimed at giving advice to Christian women, while others, like Hot, Holy and Humorous, give lighthearted advice intended to “reclaim sexuality for our marriages as God intended.”
There’s sex-positive, though, and then there’s…pornography. Restoring Christian Sexuality, (definitely NSFW, by the way, so don’t follow that link just now) contains a defense of pornography from a Christian perspective as well as explicit images of men and women engaged in sexual activity.
The owner of the site is anonymous and wishes to remain that way. He agreed to be interviewed, but only by email—which made it difficult for me to challenge him on some points of his theology, not to mention his misogyny and other harmful beliefs.
Still, I promised to give him and his project a fair hearing. I want to keep my word to him, but I don’t feel that means handing him an open mic. What follows are excerpts from our conversation, as well as my own reflections.
As it turns out, I have a lot in common with the owner of this site—whom I’ll call Mr. X, for the purposes of this piece. We were both raised in fundamentalist Christian religions that taught, as he says,
that sex was reserved for marriage . . . but even sexual thoughts were reserved for marriage and basically that we as young people (or unmarried people) needed to suppress our sexual thoughts until we were married. To dwell on a sexual thought in their teaching was sinful—it was lust. Masturbation was taught as sinful because even if it did not start with lustful thoughts it would lead to lustful thoughts or so they taught us. Also they taught us we were not allowed to enjoy the sexual pleasure of our body apart from our spouse in marriage.
All familiar doctrine to a recovering Southern Baptist like me—but what I found most disturbing about the interview was the way his justification for starting the site mirrors the reasons I used back in 1996 when I began my own online magazine, Whosoever, for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians.
I don’t think my site was on the web for five minutes before I started receiving hate mail demanding that I take the site down because it was an affront to God. I was told then, and many still say even today, that there’s no such thing as a “gay Christian” because the two are mutually exclusive.
I developed a fairly deep and sophisticated theology around why being gay (or lesbian, or bi, or transgender) and a Christian were completely compatible. Loving, monogamous same-sex relationships are never condemned in the Bible, and maybe even approved of in examples like Jonathan and David, and Ruth and Naomi (whose pledge to one another is still used in many marriage ceremonies, both straight and gay). Backed up by many other biblical scholars, I arrived at the conclusion that being LGB or T was not a sin in God’s eyes.
So, imagine my shock—and perhaps a bit of revulsion—when Mr. X laid out how he had come to the realization that porn is not a sin:
A few years ago I came to realize that the traditional church teachings on what constitutes lust and lasciviousness (sensuality) do not match up with what the Bible says about these things. It was then after years of condemning my sexual nature that I realized my sexuality was not a burden to be suppressed as sin, but rather it was a gift from God to be embraced and enjoyed. Specifically the fact that most men (and some women) are visually aroused by the female form or images of sex and are drawn to erotic images whether they be drawings, paintings or photographs and movies is not a part our sinful nature but rather it is a gift from God to be experienced and enjoyed both before marriage and after marriage.
His sexual nature, his need for porn, is “a gift from God,” which is, of course, the same thing I said all those years ago about my sexual orientation.
Like me, he has developed a fairly sophisticated take on how the Bible views such things as lust, writing:
I came to realize that lust biblically speaking is not sexual desire, sexual arousal or even sexual fantasy. Lust from a Biblical perspective is covetousness. . . . Lust is the desire to possess something or someone that we are not meant to have. In the context of sex it is the desire to unlawfully have sex with someone outside of marriage.
This is similar to an argument I’ve made in the past that there’s no condemnation in the Bible for sex in the context of loving, committed relationships. The only sexual practices specifically condemned in the Bible are those that use or abuse another person—relations governed by a spirit of possession, objectification, and control—and this would be a sin for both straight and LGBT people.
However, here our agreement frays. As someone who says he believes that “the Bible is the inerrant Word of God,” Mr. X is quick to point out that his site is godly precisely because it does not include “wicked” things like homosexual acts. In fact, homosexuality is lumped in with rape, pedophilia, incest and orgies as what he defines as “wicked imaginations,” and he condemns pornography that depicts such “wicked acts” as sinful.
In response to a question about how our journeys and justifications have been similar as we both navigate choppy theological waters, he replied with the usual list of scriptures most often used against homosexuality—and a final thought: “I have seen some Christian theologians try to explain away these passages but I find their explanations lacking and they do not fit with a literal view of the Scriptures.”
Not only does he remain tone deaf to the reasons why his own views may also “not fit with a literal view of the Scriptures,” he also appears heedless of the ways his site and beliefs may, in fact, perpetuate bigotry, misogyny, dehumanization and yes, lust, even as he has defined it.
His general overview of sex is frankly sexist, and Mr. X admits he designed his site with men in mind.
“I believe that both men and women desire sex,” he writes. “But generally speaking, men are more physically and visually oriented in their sexual desire and women are generally more emotionally and relationally oriented in their sexual desire. . . . Men don’t typically care about the relational context of sex as much as they care about the physical side of sex.”
Men, he says, have “polygynous nature,” and sites like his can help them “virtually” experience their natural polygynous nature without them going out and sinfully having sex with other women outside of marriage.
He readily admits that the images he posts are not heavily vetted. Some are sent to him by users of the site, but others, he says are simply pictures he found on the web and if “she appears be 18 years or older I will use on the site.”
Which means, of course, that we have no way of proving that the couples he encourages his audience of pious men to enjoy are actually engaging in godly, married sex.
“My response to them,” he writes, “is that these are images and it is not the same as if this couple were in my living room having sex in front of me and I knew they were not married. They are pixels arranged in a file no different than paint on a canvas—it is the image of a man and woman having sex.”
Which, of course, begs the larger question of the “morality” of the porn industry itself and how easy it is to forget that there are real people in front of the camera—not just pixels after all—who present their bodies engaged in sex for the viewer’s pleasure.
Within his own logic, shouldn’t it matter whether these men and women are married or not?
But more to the point, the porn industry objectifies women. And in my view as a married person, it commodifies sex by making it an act devoid of love, fueled by power over another human being. How is this not “lust,” in Mr. X’s definition? How is it not the assertion of ownership?
And here is where any resonance between my reasoning in starting an LGBT Christian site and Mr. X’s pro-porn logic ends. Researchers have discovered both physical and psychological benefits for LGBT people who come out of the closet and live fully into their sexual orientation or gender identity. I would say, simply from my experience, that their spirituality improves as well, if they are given to pursuing such a path.
Some may, of course, make the argument that porn-loving Christians—such as Mr. X—might also thrive if they could also come out of the closet like LGBT people. But the difference is stark. The fight for LGBT justice has focused on marriage equality—the right to enter into monogamous, loving and committed relationships.
That’s not the same as fighting for your right to participate in an unethical industry.
In the end, while I appreciate that Mr. X is trying, in good faith, to help his biblical-literalist brethren, I can’t see his site as a true contribution to the sex-positive Christian movement. Restoring Christian Sexuality is just another porn site, parading in its Sunday best.
