Archive for the 'Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series' Category

Of webcams, long-distance relationships, and the misunderstanding of porneia

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 01, 2010
in Long-distance Relationships, Masturbation, Porn and Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series
. 7 Comments

Here’s a new one.

Just before we left for Europe two weeks ago, I got an email from a young man named Josh. Josh is a Christian, and he and I have exchanged emails before about Christianity and a liberal sexual ethic. (See this post and this archive.) Josh and his girlfriend, Ruth, have been separated for the summer, and they’ve been talking on the phone and via webcam. Lately they’ve started having phone sex, and have been incorporating the webcam too, watching each other masturbate.

Josh writes that both he and Ruth like the webcam experience very much, but that they are also troubled. Each has a history of using internet porn, and both have committed to giving it up. (This is the moment to note parenthetically that in my work as a gender studies prof and sex educator I’ve been hearing lately from more and more young women who are troubled by their own porn use as well as that of their male partners. The evidence seems to be that we are moving closer to parity in terms of “consumption” of visual erotica by both sexes. I’m sure that there are studies out there on this. I report only my own “anecdata”.) Josh and Ruth dislike both the addictiveness of internet pornography and the ways in which it teaches the user to objectify and dehumanize the people whose bodies make up the images they view.

Josh and Ruth want to know how their private use of the webcam relates to pornography, as they sense that it is both troublingly similar to and yet in another way clearly distinct from the use of porn. Josh wanted my two cents.

When I first read Josh’s letter, I was reminded of a story I heard from my third ex-wife, Elizabeth, who taught for a while at Fuller Seminary. Elizabeth was mentoring a group of first-years, and leading a class on sexuality. One of the guys in the class confessed that he was having trouble getting lustful thoughts for his own fiancée out of his head. Elizabeth was stunned: the young man had made it all the way through a Christian college, BA in hand, and was now entering a Ph.D. program in psychology, and he didn’t grasp the colossal spiritual difference between lusting for someone with whom you are not in relationship and someone with whom you are. I need to give credit where credit is due; my ex-wife, who had a master’s in divinity, was very helpful to me in clarifying a progressive yet biblical perspective on lust. The tenth commandment (which deals with coveting) and Matthew 5:28 make it clear that lust is chiefly (and, arguably, only) problematic when it violates the bonds of covenant marriage. So when a married man lusts for a woman who is not his wife, or an unmarried man lusts for a married woman (reverse the sexes as you please), that’s a very real form of adultery. But when an unmarried man lusts for his unmarried fiancée, that’s hardly a violation of the covenant. When a single woman aches to be touched sexually by a single man, no adultery is committed.

My ex, whose Greek was better than mine, would at this point launch into an explanation of how porneia (the most commonly used Greek term for sexual immorality in the New Testament) ought never be translated as fornication (meaning pre-marital sex). Rather, she argued, it referred only to sex that was extra-covenantal (like incest as well as adultery). I’m not the NT scholar she was. The point is that her mentee had bought into a common misunderstanding of lust, and had concluded that all sexual desire was bad, even for one’s own girlfriend or boyfriend. Leaving aside the complicated question of the legitimacy of premarital sex, common sense makes it clear that sexual desire for a prospective spouse is a necessary, healthy, and good thing. Only a culture that has deeply distorted sexual values could confuse a prohibition against cheating on someone to whom one had pledged fidelity with lusting for someone with whom one planned to make that pledge! Continue reading ‘Of webcams, long-distance relationships, and the misunderstanding of porneia’

Don’t presume the Designer’s intent from the design: a long post on abortion, sexual ethics, and contraception in response to Jonalyn

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 08, 2010
in Abortion, Birth control and contraception, Christianity, Favorite Posts 2010 and Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series
. 27 Comments

Jonalyn Grace Fincher offers a long and nuanced (though unquestionably pro-life) Christian perspective on abortion and body sovereignty in this post entitled “Listening to Both Sides.” She links to and quotes from the post I wrote one week after Heloise’s birth: Pregnant women, personhood, and paternal reflections. She had some nice things to say about my piece, but took issue with the central thrust of my argument, which revolved around women’s right not to be forced to endure pain.

I wrote: Giving birth — whether by ceserean section or vaginally — hurts. The recovery hurts. That point is being driven home to me daily as I watch my wife recover. She considers the pain well worth it, well worth it because this baby was longed for and wanted. But we both shudder, more than ever now, at the thought of compelling a woman to go through this process against her will.

Jonalyn responds by noting that the real pain isn’t just in pregnancy and childbirth.

During pregnancy I slept long and well. I easily coordinated elaborate outfits with accessories and make-up. I worked out or spend hours reading and writing without leaking milk. Then I had a baby.

It’s not merely the pregnancy that women must count as a cost, it’s the life after the birth.

I believe more women would refuse an abortion if they could serve nine months and be done with it. It’s not the pain of the nine months; it is the idea of a life to be responsible for, to be guilty about, to wonder as to the painful, happy, fruitful or fruitless future of your offspring.

That’s right, I think. It’s certainly not an argument against the legal right to choose an abortion. My point was not that abortion should be legal solely so that women can avoid the discomfort of continuing a pregnancy, nor that it should be legal only so that a woman can avoid the pain of birthing. Indeed, I support abortion rights for precisely the reasons Jonalyn mentions: “the idea of a life to be responsible for, to be guilty about”, and so forth. Whatever moral arguments can be brought to bear on the issue, I believe the state has a clear interest in not compelling women to take up those particular burdens against their will. And while a birth parent can surrender a newborn for adoption, it is simply an unconscionable overask to insist that every pregnant woman unready for motherhood choose adoption.

Jonalyn’s views on sex are deeply traditional; like so much conservative Christian writing on sexuality these days, they resonate with the vocabulary of John Paul II’s odious “theology of the body”, with the insistence that sex be focused on sacrifice and radical openness to new life. Jonalyn writes:

My concern is that pro-choice advocates remain intent upon driving a wedge between procreation and sex. I don’t think this is appropriately human, nor that God created our bodies and souls to permanently cleave sex away from procreation.

For the religious right (a group of which Jonalyn appears to be a member, albeit a winsome and reflective one) sex that isn’t procreative, or sex with the use of contraception, is a rejection of self-evident natural law, a rejection of both the design and the Designer. I come from an alternative Christian tradition, one that honors what Marvin Ellison calls “erotic justice”, something I wrote about at length in this post. I wrote:

Our sexual desires are indeed powerful. They can easily be misdirected or warped. But they can, by God’s common grace, be used as an instrument for justice. More than that, our bodies can be used to worship the aspects of the divine we find in each other. In the old Anglican marriage ceremony, a husband and wife would pledge their lives to each other, saying “with my body I thee worship.” We are called to worship only that which is of God; blessedly, God is found in each of us. When we have sex that is grounded in justice, grounded in enthusiastic and mutual desire, we are engaged in an act of worship. Not every act of sex in marriage is an act of worship, as most married folks can attest. And sex outside of heterosexual marriage, can be deeply worshipful.

The purpose of lovemaking is not to make babies. Pregnancy is simply an ancillary and occasional consequence of one particular kind of sex. Folks who say that procreation and sex can never be separated are like those who say that the primary function of the tongue is to prevent us from choking on our food. It is true that one function of the tongue is to protect large chunks of dinner from being lodged in our throats. But our tongues are there to taste, and we taste both to discern what is rancid and to delight in what is pleasurable. Our tongues are also necessary for speech. And sexually, tongues can bring delight to others. The tongue has many uses, many purposes, all important, all wonderful. We cannot discern a single purpose behind the Designer’s design. It is hubris — poltiicised and pleasure-hating hubris — to suggest that we can.

I know how we made Heloise. I’m fairly certain I remember the specific night she was conceived. After years together as lovers, after still more years of all kinds of sex with all kinds of other people, my wife and I were ready and open to the possibility of conceiving a child. What we had worked assiduously to prevent was now something that we ardently sought. This wasn’t a contradiction, or a sign of hypocrisy. We were at a new season in our lives, emotionally and spiritually and financially equipped to be parents. Was the sex we had when we were trying to conceive different than the sex we had had when we weren’t? Of course it was. But we weren’t magically transformed into better people because after so many years of being sexually active humans, we were finally having intercourse to procreate.

Pleasure still mattered. The opportunity to worship the divine in each other still mattered. The fact that I wasn’t wearing a condom (always, for umpteen reasons, my favorite form of contraception) didn’t mean that I loved my wife anymore than the times I’d been inside her with one on. Sex made the daughter whom I love with all my heart. But as wonderful as she is, as wonderful as all the little darling babes of the world are, they are not the only reason, should not be the only reason, need not have anything to do with the reason why we bring our hands and mouths and genitals together with those of others.

As a husband, a father,a teacher, and a Christian, I know this as I know few other things.

Guest post at Scarleteen

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 09, 2009
in Links and Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series
. 9 Comments

I’m a “guest sexpert” at Scarleteen this week, answering the question: I’m becoming a Christian: How can I reconcile my faith with my sex life? Heather Corinna, America’s premier sex educator and author of the indispensable book on that subject for our times, kindly gave me the opportunity to write a little somethin’-somethin’.

“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear”: of Scripture, the Spirit, and Christian sexual ethics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 23, 2008
in Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series
. 18 Comments

This is the third post in the Christianity and Sexual Ethics series. Part One is here, part Two here. A fourth post will appear in the next week with suggestions for further reading.

I blog as a self-described evangelical Christian feminist. I blog about my relationship with Christ, and I also blog in favor of same-sex unions and, in this series, in favor of a sexual ethic that is justice-centered more than law-centered. This means that I get lots of email from readers, who worry that I apparently haven’t read my bible. At least once a week, and often more frequently when I’ve posted on one of these subjects, I get an email in this vein:

“I enjoy your blog but I think you need to look at Scripture again. The Bible prohibits sexual immorality. You are a teacher and a youth minister and you ought to be teaching young people about the importance of purity instead of encouraging them to defile themselves with sin. Please look at the attached passages and see the error of your ways.”

Back in the early days of my blogging career, I got into email arguments with these folks. And of course, I got sucked into the disastrous “proof-texting wars.” Proof-texting, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the bad habit of taking a single passage of the Bible out of context and citing it as “proof” that your particular position is the only legitimate one that a believing Christian can hold. Whatever the subject: pacifism; dietary laws; abortion; the role of women; the possibility of free will or sexuality itself, “proof-texters” from across the ideological and theological spectrum can find quotes that they imagine will serve as their “gotcha” lines.

I’m not a theologian, of course, though I do have an academic background in Christian philosophy. (Thanks in particular to Marilyn Adams, who was on my dissertation committee and literally and figuratively held my hand while leading me through Duns Scotus.) In this post, I’m not going to marshall a series of passages from the Bible to support my position that God’s intent for human sexuality allows for genital expression outside of heterosexual marriage. I’d be quoting out of context, doing the exact same thing that my theological opponents are apt to do. It’s a fun game, but frankly, I’m getting too old to play that. I will, however, use a single passage to frame a short discussion of how it is I think we ought to see Scripture. Continue reading ‘“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear”: of Scripture, the Spirit, and Christian sexual ethics’

“The battery that powers our lives”: more on sex, faith, justice

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 21, 2008
in Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series
. 4 Comments

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. Continue reading ‘“The battery that powers our lives”: more on sex, faith, justice’

“Do Me, Do Me Right”: part one (very long) of a four-part series on Christianity and sexual ethics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 17, 2008
in Christianity, Favorite Posts 2008, Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 25 Comments

This is part one of a four-part series this summer on Christianity and sex. Part Two will look more closely at issues of sexuality and global justice, part Three will look at how to reconcile contemporary sexual ethics with Scripture and tradition, and part Four will provide a whole bunch of good readin’ for further study.

Christian sexual ethics are much on my mind, on the minds of many of my students and youth group kids, and this summer, very much on the public’s radar as well. Next week, we’ll mark the 40th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s famous Humanae Vitae, the encyclical that declared virtually all forms of contraception to be incompatible with Catholic teaching. In many ways, Humanae Vitae was the first blow struck in the reaction against the liberation movements of the 1960s, and it was the seed for much contemporary conservative thought about the meaning and purpose of our bodies and our lives. From a progressive standpoint, its fortieth anniversary is not cause for celebration. (But in all fairness, if you want to read a fine — but very, very wrong-headed — encomium to Humanae Vitae, visit First Things for this Mary Eberstadt piece.)

And of course, the Anglican Communion is on the verge of major schism this summer over, above all else, the issue of sexuality. A church that survived numerous revisions to the prayer book, a church that bravely embraced contraception way back in the 1930s, a church that largely held together when women began to be ordained in the 1970s, is now at last falling apart over the issue of homosexuality. Tied up in the near-certain schism is the basic disagreement among Christians about what constitutes “ethical sex” in the eyes of God. There seems little chance of a resolution that will both keep the church together and, at the same time, be congruent with how two very different groups of Anglicans see the role of sexuality in our lives.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about (and studying about, and writing about) Christian sexual ethics for many years, since I first took a course on Patristic Theology at Berkeley in 1987. I became a Roman Catholic the following year, and then had a tortuous series of peregrinations that led me to — and through — the Assemblies of God, the Mennonites, and the Episcopalians. (I’m just your average, run of the mill “charismatic Anabaptist Roman Anglican”.) Though I continue to worship at a variety of Christian churches today, I am now involved in the work of the Kabbalah Centre. And of course, I have a Ph.D. in Christian history, though that doctorate focused more on the ethics of war than on the ethics of sex.

I also come to the discussion as a heterosexual man in his forties, four times married, thrice divorced. I come as a college gender studies professor who works closely with Christian and non-Christian students alike, many of whom, I am happy to say, have chosen to see me as their mentor. I come to the discussion as a former Episcopal youth leader, who spent seven years teaching workshops on “Sex, All Saints Style” to high schoolers at the largest Anglican parish west of the Mississippi. So I bring a lot of experience, passion, and yes, baggage, to this subject.

From a theological perspective, though I’ve never been a Methodist, I come to the discussion with a healthy reverence for what’s often known as the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral”: Reason, Experience, Scripture, Tradition. The “Quad” suggests that any understanding of God’s call on our lives needs to rest on those four things. Many Christians from across the theological spectrum have embraced the Quad as a sound method for discerning right thought, right speech, and right action.

So after all that build-up, what am I ready to say about Christianity and sex?

If there’s one core principle I derive from using the “Quad”, it’s this: in the end, God cares more about the content of our sexuality than he does about its form. Traditional Christian sexual ethics are often discussed in the context of what Christians can and can’t do. Modern conservatives will often say things like “the only form of genital contact sanctioned by God is that which happens in a marriage between one husband and one wife.” The implication is clear: if you get the “form” (heterosexual marriage) right, then the sex that follows is licit. If you haven’t got the form right, then sorry, Mabel, sorry, Ernest, you’ve “fallen short of the mark.”

But “form-based” sexual ethics clearly have their problems. For example, it ignores entirely the great likelihood that coercion, disrespect, and force can take place within marriage. The Catholic church did not start condemning marital rape — or even acknowledging that such a concept was possible — until the second half of the twentieth century. Is a situation in which a husband demands sex from his wife against her will somehow more congruent with the spirit of Christ than a situation in which two unmarried people make love with mutual enthusiasm? If you’re a stickler for “form-based ethics”, you bet. For the most traditional of theologians, marital rape is less of a serious sin than homosexuality or pre-marital sex, because form matters more than content. (And when was the last time you heard Focus on the Family put out a series of messages against intra-marital coercion?) Continue reading ‘“Do Me, Do Me Right”: part one (very long) of a four-part series on Christianity and sexual ethics’