Hugo Schwyzer

This is part two of a four-part series on Christian sexual ethics. Part One is here.

In that first post, I touched a bit on the subject of justice and the importance of reconciling our Christian obligation to “do justice” with our own understanding and practice of sexuality. I’d like to expand a bit on that here.

We’re all aware that there’s more to justice than the law. Many folks — perhaps, particularly, the poor and the marginalized — are keenly aware that legal systems the world over, even the best ones, are frequently unfair in both theory and practice. (Anecdotally, my mother spent one year in law school, at Boalt Hall. In a first-year torts class, she became so upset by something the professor said that she blurted out, to the entire room, “But that’s not just!” The professor smiled and replied, “Miss Moore, justice has nothing to do with the law.” Many of her classmates — including future California governor Pete Wilson — chuckled. My mom was so incensed she left law school, and went on to earn a Ph.D in political philosophy at Cal.) It’s clear, in any case, from both a religious and a secular perspective, that there’s far more to doing justice than remaining scruplously obedient to the law.

Someone who, for example, observes all tax and traffic regulations cannot be said to be “just” for that reason alone. Justice is less about what one fails to do and more about the positive actions one takes. Similarly, someone who — in keeping with what is still a majority position among traditionalist Christians –waits until marriage to have sex cannot be said to be “doing justice” through their private restriction, no matter how laudable it might seem to others. If justice is giving to others what is truly their due, then perhaps it is a form of justice to be obedient to what you perceive to be God’s commands. But in and of itself, it’s woefully insufficient. What makes a sexual relationship just has less to do with whether a couple is heterosexually wed and more to do with the degree of reverence they have for each other. At its core, sexual justice is linked to the recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of the other. “Good sex”, to repeat what I said in my last post, is worshipful sex: it honors the gift of pleasure, but also the spark of God inside each of us. To make love to (and with) a partner, in other words, is to honor the aspect of God within them. That can happen inside or outside of marriage.

But there’s another aspect of sexual justice that’s important. Even if we are the most adoring and worshipful of lovers, practicing the sort of idealized “mutual submission” that would make the saints weep with joy, we’re not doing enough. I’ve become convinced that sexuality has many purposes, but one of its chief “goods” is to fill our lives with light and energy so that we can be more effective agents of justice in the outside world. Last year, in this post, I quoted Robert Jensen:

But we should take note of a phrase commonly used to describe an argument that is intense but which doesn’t really advance our understanding; we say that such an engagement produces “more heat than light.”… So what if our sexual activity — our embodied connections –could be less about heat and more about light? What if instead of desperately seeking hot sex, we searched for a way to produce light when we touch? What if such touch were about finding a way to create light between people so that we could see ourselves and each other better? If the goal is knowing ourselves and each other like that, then what we need is not really heat but light to illuminate the path.

Jensen, whose feminism is informed by his Christianity, is on to something very important here. Justice-centered sexuality is about creating light so that, even though we are embodied people who peer “through a glass darkly”, as a result of our lovemaking we see each other more clearly. And there’s still more to it: the light that we create (or reveal, as it’s not entirely clear from a Christian perspective whether we ourselves create light) shouldn’t just help us to see our partners better, it should help us to see our world more clearly. Rather than anesthetizing us to the suffering of the world, good sex should energize us to be ever more proactive in bringing an end to global pain.

God did not create me for the purpose of being great in bed. He didn’t create me for the purpose of breeding still more consumers. He didn’t create me so that I could put my penis inside of my wife’s vagina in the smug certainty that ours was the “right” kind of sex. From the Christian perspective, He created me, and my wife, and you who are reading this for the purpose of Tikkun Olam: healing the world. None of us is insignificant, none of us is without a potentially vital role to play in redeeming the world. And from that standpoint, the most important ethical question we can ask about sex is a simple one: how is this helping me to be a more effective agent of justice in the world?

Christians can disagree about what the redemption of the world looks like, of course. Some of my more fundamentalist friends insist that redemption is simply a matter of getting a critical mass of human beings to believe in Christ. Others of us believe that God calls us to do the hard work of building His Kingdom of justice, and that redemption will come as a result of our willing cooperation wth God’s plan for transforming the world. But regardless of our differing eschatologies, all Christians believe their lives have a purpose, and that purpose extends far beyond the dutiful fulfillment of familial obligations.

Unethical sex, seen in this light, is sex that turns us inward, concerned only with our own needs without any regard for the sake of others. That doesn’t mean that pleasure is a bad thing, or that masturbation (which is generally a solitary practice) is a vice. Pleasure is an inherently good thing, assuming that that pleasure doesn’t come at the expense of another. If pleasure brings release, and if masturbation brings relief, and if that release and relief results in greater energy with which to face the world, then who can speak against it? But if the pursuit of sexual fulfillment becomes, as it so often does, a preoccupying concern to the exclusion of other commitments, then there’s a problem. If our sexual relationships sap our energy and diminish our spirit, leaving us obsessed or depressed, then something is seriously out of balance.

We all know married couples who seem miserable together. They create no energy together, and indeed, what energy they have often seems to be squandered on quarrels. We also know married couples who seem to “take on the world” as a team, and while we may not know the particulars of what does or doesn’t happen in their bedroom, we sense that each empowers the other for service. Of course, the same is true of unmarried couples, both gay and straight — and the same is often true of the single, both the celibate and the, well, not-celibate. Marital status is no guarantor of “just sex”, nor is the absence of that status a guarantor of “unjust sex.” The proof is in the degree to which, in any of our lives, sex brings light and joy to ourselves and to our partners — and the degree to which we then take that light and joy and use it for the healing of the world.

Sex is an important human concern. It’s exciting to talk about, and (one hopes) more exciting to engage in. But it is not the most important concern, not by a long shot. I’m presumably about half-way through my incarnation in the body of he who is called Hugo Schwyzer. I’ve got a finite (though hopefully, substantial) number of years still left to me to do important work. I have students to teach. I have young people to mentor. I have ideas to share, animals to rescue, money to raise and dispense for the causes I believe in so passionately. I’ve got so much to do, and so does everyone. If I deny my sexuality out of shame, then I rob myself of an opportunity for joy and energy that could give me more strength to do the work I have been called to do. If I focus obsessively on my sexuality, on my entitlement to pleasure, or on whether or not I’m having the “right kind” of sex “often enough”, then I’m allowing myself to be distracted from the Great Work that is the reason for my existence.

Good sex is sex that does justice to the people having it: it is mutual, it is enthusiastic, it is pleasurable, and, perhaps, worshipful. Good sex is sex that recharges rather than drains the battery that powers our lives. And that “good sex” can happen in many ways.