If sexual pleasure is a good, and God desires for us to live an abundant, joy-filled life in our divinely crafted bodies, what’s to keep us from banging everyone we possibly can from the moment puberty starts to rear its ugly head?
I spent my freshman year of college single, having heeded the advice of countless teen movies and cast off the shackles of my last high school romance. Oh, sure, I made out with each of my high school boyfriends when they came to visit, but it wasn’t serious. I was shy, and have never been the sort of person to successfully pick up partners at parties or bars.1 The boys in my small academic program were all in relationships (many of which lasted past Thanksgiving!), and the wider university pool was terrifyingly huge. This year of undesired singleness was actually fantastic—I made friends I loved dearly, fell in love with Boston and academia, and found I had very little passion left for the roller coaster of late-adolescent dating.
By the next fall, though, I was ready for some companionship. As often happens at the beginning of a new school year, our circle of friends expanded. I hit it off with one of the new members. Our politics were just different enough that we flirtatiously sparred over ideologies; we liked similar music. We were both big-time nerds, who wanted to talk about course readings and papers we were writing. We went out on a single date, but it was weird. Like, super weird. He tried to hold my hand in the cab; I was embarrassed in the restaurant. I felt awkward in my skin, awkward with him. I liked him, but there wasn’t that mysterious spark, that comforting electricity, I’d come to expect with boys I dated. I liked him enough to be friends, but not enough to date him, not enough to call him my boyfriend.
The problem—the sin—came a bit later. I knew after that disastrously awkward date that we were not going to be a couple, but at some point during an evening spent flirting with him at an alcohol-fueled gathering in our dorm, he kissed me. And I kissed him back.
My friends advised against this, when one or another of them encountered us in a clinch in the hallway near the bathroom. You don’t like him like that!
I didn’t like him like that, but I liked kissing him. There was a certain chemistry in our banter that got me charged up, and he was always willing. Week after week, we’d end up in some deserted hallway, or my room, getting as close as we could in the semi-privacy of communal living. He was tender, appreciative. I was respected and attended to, and when I was feeling lonely or lame or concupiscent,2 I always had someone to make me feel pretty and desired.
But I didn’t offer that assurance, that pleasure, in return. Oh, sure, I was as handsy as he was, a sexual agent as much as a recipient. But sexual sin is less about particular acts or the way they’re carried out than the way partners treat each other; sexual sin is about a lack of mutuality, reciprocity, and love.
Our sexuality is a part of us—a part of who we are, something to be cherished and attended to, something for which we need never feel ashamed. Sexuality is a part of human life—the way we inhabit our bodies, the way we express ourselves, the way we grow into our relationships—and Christians are called upon to be reflective about the ways in which we live out our sexuality, just as we are called upon to be reflective on the rest of our identities and practices. In many ways, the same rules apply in the bedroom as anywhere else: love God, love your neighbor as yourself. Those are the sexual ethics—or, more simply, the principles that guide how we practice our sexuality—that we’ll explore further in this chapter. Let’s take a look at how Christians can faithfully engage the Bible as a source of those ethics, but also look to other sources for our norms—those baseline principles. These are age-old discussions, but we’ll consider some contemporary language and thinkers, focusing on respect, autonomy, and consent as means of loving your neighbor.
The love of neighbor is a deceptively difficult thing, especially in regards to sexual relationships, because just as in the rest of our lives, sin prevents us from doing this fully, unambiguously. So, as we begin to examine Christian sexual ethics—the systems of just love and just sex—we have to start with sin.
WHEN IT COMES to sexuality and sin, the questions are many, and often loaded:
What counts as sexual sin?
Is it anything you wouldn’t want to do in front of your parents or pastor?
Is it anything illegal?
Does it have something to do with consent? Or marriage?
There is certainly a strain of American Christianity that suggests that any sexual thought or contact outside of marriage is sinful. That God made sex for marriage, and thus (heterosexual) marriage is the only place in which that pleasure can be fully and rightly enjoyed in a way that honors God and the desire to honor God in your partner. Sin, in some definitions, is to counter biblical commandments and thus offend the will and holiness of God. Which is why some have taken verses from the Bible about sexuality and said that to live counter to them is to sin.
The definition of sin, however, has not been always and everywhere agreed upon. Biblical scholar Paula Fredriksen opens her book on sin with a discussion of just this. Even in the earliest years of the Jesus movement, as the canon of scripture was being set, even in the first several centuries of the church, there was an incredible diversity of views about what constituted the good life and what sorts of activity could or would keep you from it.3
The party line that dominates much Christian conversation around sexuality is that sex is best in marriage, or (in more progressive circles) marriage-like relationships. Much like definitions of sin, however, understandings of the nature of sexuality and marriage have not remained static over time, and those varied understandings have had an ambiguous legacy.4
When it comes to living out our sexuality, finding a sexual ethic that helps order our lives and relationships, while being flexible enough to respond to a variety of unforeseen situations, seems more important to this Christian leader than simply trying to get people to be able to repeat the rules of their community’s moral code. Sure, we can insist that one remain a “virgin” until marriage, for example, but what does “virginity” entail? As we saw in chapter two, the word means different things to different people. Sexual intimacy is not easily classified or parsed into distinct categories.
In the last chapter, I suggested that the Christian life is less about protecting ourselves from being profaned and more about learning to risk ourselves in love. This is a developmental task as well: as human beings grow and rely less and less on their parents’ protection, they must learn to navigate the risks of increasing involvement in the world.
But if so much of our understanding of morality is shifting and changing, if Christians in particular want to draw lines of holiness in new places, we need to spend some time articulating what, in fact, it might mean for us to “play fair” or engage in “just love” or even “sacred sex.” If the norm isn’t going to be “don’t have sex until you’re married to someone of the opposite sex,” what is going to replace it?
THE FIRST STEP toward answering all those questions is to explore how it is that we know whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. What sources of authority or wisdom can Christians look to?
Maybe it’s too obvious to say that we can, and should, look to the Bible. That’s what I did in the first chapters (Genesis, Song of Songs) and in this one (Romans, Matthew) and in most subsequent ones as well. There’s a good deal of diversity in how Christians interpret the Bible and understand its authority, but just about everybody believes it’s of critical importance for Christian life. The Protestant tradition I am a part of, so-called mainline Protestantism, has some ways of talking about the Bible that are like a lot of other Christian churches, but unlike others. For example, mainline Christians tend not to talk about the infallibility of scripture. We don’t say it’s the inerrant Word of God. We talk more about the divine inspiration of its human authors. We talk about it as a record of God’s relationship with humanity, about its continuing influence on and power in our lives, and about its depths and breadths. We talk about the Bible as the Word of God, but acknowledge that God continues to speak through the presence and work of the Spirit.5
That seems like a simple enough statement once it’s broken down, but there’s one more complicating factor: the Bible has a whole mess of human authors, who wrote over a period of hundreds of years, and these diverse folks sometimes had different interpretations of similar topics.6 Finally, the Bible was written a really long time ago, in societies that were vastly different from ours. Its great age is no reason to discount the biblical witness—I tend rather to think the fact that this ancient text continues to speak to the heart of little old twenty-first-century North American me is pretty miraculous—but I mention it because there are things we know or understand differently now.
The Bible is such a rich resource—a treasure trove of insight and poetry, of inspiration and critique. Because of its richness, its complexity, it calls to Christians of many stripes to take it seriously, refusing to oversimplify its meanings or to proof-text7 to get the answers we want to see. It’s a complicated resource for reflection on sexuality, in particular, but there’s no way around it: Christians have to engage the biblical text in constructing our ethics.
When Christians are trying to figure out what a sexual ethic might look like, then, it’s important to place the Bible in conversation with other sources. The most reputable ones among Christians tend to be reason or knowledge, tradition or collected wisdom, and experience, both personal and of others.
In other words: What makes sense? What has the church said over time? What about theologians or philosophers or secular academic disciplines? What’s true to my experience, or that of my community, or my friends? Christians can locate their ethical norms within the intersection of all these sources, though even in the intersection there can be varying interpretations. Christian ethics are tricky—but we hope that with these varied sources, and a commitment to scripture, we can find enough that holds us together while also leaving room for difference and the change the Spirit often brings.
AFTER CONSIDERING WHAT sources Christians might rightly use in the work of determining sexual ethics, we can turn to the content of those norms. Indeed, some might wonder at this point why we need sexual ethics in the first place. If there’s no such thing as “normal,” why bother with “norms”?
For Christians, there’s a pretty simple answer: sin.
Now, sin as I understand it is not about breaking rules or offending God’s delicate sensibilities, but is rather that force within us and in our communities and world that pulls us to do, as Paul puts it so beautifully in Romans, “the evil I do not want.” Instead of always being smart and kind, of doing what is in our own best interest or the caring or respectful thing toward others, we do something stupid, or callous, or cruel. We do things, all of us, that evidence how far apart we sometimes feel—and sometimes are!—from what God hopes for us and for the world. Sin hurts people, and thus it’s important to name it, stop it, and work for healing and justice.
Some sin is obvious to name: sexual exploitation and abuse. Some types of sin are harder to see: passively allowing the vulnerable to be abused, turning a blind eye or a hard heart toward those who are suffering, or denying one’s own complicity in systems of injustice. A few years ago, a report came out about the failure of a number of U.S. universities to support their students who have been victims of sexual assault. Those administrators aren’t raping anyone, but they’re not exactly free from sin when they shrug their shoulders and suggest that the perpetrators don’t need punishment or consequences for their violent acts.
Sometimes, though, sin is banal: the kind of thing that gains somebody a reputation as being a jerk, but would never be brought up in a court of law. Sin isn’t always, or usually, criminal, after all. This sin is the sort that manifests our failure to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. It’s the kind of sin that stays with you long after you’ve stopped committing it, that drags you into moments of self-loathing and regret.
I didn’t realize at the time that when I was fooling around with my college friend, I was actually sinning. This would come to mind as I later read twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
Buber argued in his most famous work, I and Thou, that human life is structured around two different word-pairs, “I-It” and “I-Thou,” which is to say that we have two ways of being in the world. The first is the way we experience objects, things, the world. It’s a one-way relationship, in which the individual subject “I” experiences or uses things: trees, the breeze, a ball, a spoon. The latter is a relationship, in which there are two subjects, two people, who can never fully or really “experience” or “use” or “know” the totality of each other, but can only be in living (moving, changing) relationship.8
One of the groundbreaking things about Buber’s work was the way he described God as the “Eternal Thou.” God is not an object—a fixed thing—that we can grasp, or use, or explain completely. Rather we are in relationship with a living God. That’s an important insight to bear in mind when Christians or other religious leaders start wagging fingers about the clear and knowable will of God. When Moses demands to know the name of God before venturing off to liberate the enslaved Israelites, the Lord answers that the closest approximation of a name might be “YHWH,” four Hebrew letters we tend to transliterate into English as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah,” but which really make an odd statement: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:13–14). God will not be pinned down. The only way we can know God is through an ongoing relationship, through the revelation of God’s presence and self over time.
Christians can see the truth of this insight reflected in the prelude to the Gospel of John.
No one has ever seen God.
It is God the only Son,
who is close to the Father’s heart,
who has made God known.
(JOHN 1:18)
No one has ever seen God, but Jesus, the Word, makes God known to us. How does this Word become known to us? In one sermon? In one list of commandments? In one healing? Nope. The totality of God is known only through the fullness of a life, from birth to death (and on to resurrection and eternity).
Like any good philosopher, Buber is concerned not merely with questions of metaphysics, but also with those of ethics. What does this “I-Thou” business have to do with late adolescent make-outs of questionable prudence? If God is the “Eternal Thou,” all our partners, parents, neighbors are regular, everyday “Thous” to whom we are related in innumerable varied ways.9
If I use a spoon to eat my cereal and then cast it aside on the counter when I no longer need it, there’s no harm no foul. A spoon is made to be used. An earnest young poli-sci major, however, is not.10
When another earnest young poli-sci major, back in Jesus’s day, approached the great Teacher, he asked, “What must I do to gain eternal life?” What’s good? What’s good enough to put me in the company of God forever?
Jesus, in that lovely Jesus way he has, answers the question with a question: What’s written in the law? How do you interpret it?
“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
(LUKE 10:25–27, CEB)
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is asked point-blank the greatest of the commandments, and he says the same thing.11
He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
(MATTHEW 22:37–40)
Loving God, the Eternal Thou, requires all our heart, all our being, all our mind. Loving our neighbors—Samaritans, girls next door, boys down the hall—requires that we value and understand them as we would ourselves: as subjects, as actors and agents; people, complicated, living people, just like us.
There’s a third part of that, too: we’re commanded to love ourselves. If earnest poli-sci majors deserve to have the sanctity of their lives as created by God recognized by others, so do all of us. If my friend-to-whom-I-was-a-lousy-friend had any sin in our ongoing relationship it was in not loving himself enough to quit putting up with my nonsense and poor behavior.
In this way, in this Jesus-said-we-should-do-it-this-way approach, Christian sexual ethics are like any other Christian ethics. This ethic arises out of a singular norm: love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself.
SHOULD OUR SEXUAL ethics be more complicated than that? Or more specific? We can read Martin Buber all we want, but what should it look like practically in our lives? One of my survey respondents, a religious woman who is still unmarried in her thirties but has had several sexual relationships, wonders if there’s something she’s missing in her attempts to order her sex life by the precepts that order the rest of her life. She grew up in a church culture that very much suggested that sex was for marriage and marriage alone, and that homosexuality was not condoned by God, but as she’s grown in faith, and as she’s seen what I’d call the “varieties of human experience,” she’s not convinced those convictions reflect the will and intent of God.
But she also wonders if in leaving those convictions behind, she’s developing an anything-goes practice that allows her to do what she wants without feeling guilty, instead of an ethic that challenges her to live as a faithful disciple.
A college student in a group I spoke with recently made a wonderful observation: So much of Christian talk about sexuality focuses on what acts are okay—can unmarried people hold hands? Kiss? Share a bed? Touch each other? Bring each other to orgasm? Engage in varied acts of stimulation or penetration? One survey respondent, a young lesbian, heard routinely that heterosexual intercourse was off-limits for the unmarried, but didn’t know how to set boundaries for her own romantic relationships. Given that she was always with women, there was no temptation to engage in “penis-in-vagina” sex or “p-i-v” sex (as the kids are calling it these days). Did that mean, she wondered, that she was free to add anything else she pleased to her sexual repertoire? (She doubted it, but used the example to point out the limitations of sexual moralities that focus exclusively on “virginity.”)
Different communities have different understandings of what constitutes sexual morality, and as Christians, many of ours have had quite a lot to do with marriage and love. Imagine, if you will, a Venn diagram with circles for love, sex, and marriage. Those three things are each complex in and of themselves, as hugely important parts of human experience, and in relation to one another. But too often, people conflate them in various ways, collapsing each into a single type of experience with only one just or holy purpose.
When Christians speak now of why marriage is the best and proper (and only) context for godly sex, there are good arguments to be made, but it is worth noting that Christians have not said the same thing about sex and marriage since the days when the biblical writers first took stylus to papyrus. Neither does the Bible offer a consistent or systematic approach to the subject matter. As ethicist Margaret Farley writes, we find rather “only occasional responses to particular questions in particular situations,” and “a serious exegetical and interpretive task” should we want to glean answers to our questions about what is right and good and loving.12 Which is to say: it’s not a good idea to proof-text with the Bible, especially around love, marriage, and sexuality.
These days, when Christians speak of marriage as the context for sex, when they claim that “God created sex for marriage,” they may mean several things: that sex can lead to the conception of children, who require years of care and tons of material resources most easily provided by a stable couple; that the commitment of marriage can help us to let go of our fears and to feel safe in the emotional and physical vulnerability that sexual relations entail. Monogamy between healthy partners is the best way to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases. There’s something wonderful about sex in the context of covenant love.
All our sources of collected wisdom, however, suggest that simply because sex exists within marriage does not make it holy or just or loving. Spouses are perfectly capable of treating each other badly, and even, in some situations, abusively. Marriage, to use the language of ethics, is not a sufficient norm. It is not a sufficient condition for just love or just sex.
A woman I know, Annie, got married when she was just out of college, to the Christian boyfriend with whom she’d crossed her own boundaries for premarital intimacy but had not had intercourse. He intimated before their wedding that now that she’d compromised her virtue with him, she was no longer pure and they were bound together, if for no other reason than that no one else would ever want what he had already had. They married, and he was verbally and emotionally abusive. She left him within a few years, which infuriated her in-laws and took all her courage, but was absolutely necessary for her health. After the divorce, she began dating an old friend, and in the course of that relationship, they had sex. It was fun, loving, and pleasurable, and though they ultimately broke up, she was glad she had slept with him. “For me, it reclaimed sex, after it had been something harmful in my marriage. It was good to be reminded of what sex is supposed to be like.”
What is sex supposed to be like? What are the conditions that make for “just sex”?
MARGARET FARLEY, WHOM I cited above, published Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics in 2006, as a culminating work near the end of her time on the ethics faculty at Yale Divinity School. A member of the Mercy Sisters, an order of Roman Catholic women, Farley became a bestselling writer on Christian sexual ethics when the Vatican issued a statement in 2012 criticizing the book for a host of “general problems,” as well as its deviation from Catholic theology on questions of, among other things, homosexuality and masturbation.13
After the statement came out, you couldn’t get a copy of Farley’s book on Amazon. It sold out. And rightly. Just Love is brilliant, and faithful; it also offers two important insights to our discussion here: an imagining of what constitutes just love and/or sex, and an exploration of what sources Christians can rightly use in reaching ethical decisions.
Farley cites the good work of a number of ethicists, and suggests that their criteria are all well and good, but wants to make justice an underlying principle for both love and sex. A just love, she argues, will have certain characteristics, regardless of the type of love relationship, and just sex ought to manifest them, too:
1. “Respect for the autonomy and relationality that characterize persons as ends in themselves, and hence respect for their well-being”: Poli-sci majors are neither toys nor spoons, and must not be treated as such, even if they did just try to argue that Reagan had an effective tax policy.
2. “Respect for autonomy”: Partners have to be able to give consent, and give it freely and enthusiastically.
3. “Respect for relationality”: Are we in this together as equal partners? Are we committed to this relationship in some way, and to playing fair within its boundaries? Is this relationship obnoxious or is it adding some good to the world?
4. “Respect for persons as sexual beings in society”: Does this interaction reflect the freedoms and affirmations we want all people to have? What does this hookup add to conversations about and understandings of social justice?14
Maybe these seem too obvious; maybe “love your neighbor” seems a given. I’m surprised, though, by how often I find the insistence on consent and autonomy questioned in Christian circles. Melanie Springer Mock has noticed it, too, and said as much in her brilliant article for her.meneutics, the women’s blog of Christianity Today, written for a primarily evangelical audience:
We may assume that Christian teaching on sex and sexuality inures us from having such discussions about affirmative consent: because abstinence education teaches young people to avoid situations where consent might be needed; because Christian youth will not be incapacitated by substances that often complicate questions about consent; and because talking about “yes means yes” promotes sexual activity outside of marriage. (Never mind that that affirmative consent needs to occur within marriage as well.)15
Springer Mock writes as a mother of adolescent boys, but also as a professor who teaches undergrads, keenly aware of the national scourge of sexual assault on campuses and beyond. She knows that community norms for premarital abstinence do not guarantee abstinence, or a lack of nonconsensual sex. She continues:
Helping young people understand affirmative consent might be difficult given Christian teaching about abstinence, but such conversations are imperative. Fundamentally, the Christian faith relies on outdoing each other in showing honor (Rom. 12:10), and on loving one another as Christ loved us (John 13:34). Affirmative consent challenges us to honor the worth of each person. Nonconsensual activity challenges this notion, suggesting that a person is worthy as an object for our own pleasure. Surely we can see the problems in this kind of coercion, whether it happens within or outside the bounds of marriage.16
Some Christians write about consent as if it is not a necessary conversation, as if Christian faith somehow cancels out the need to know and ensure, in each and every encounter, that it is mutually desired. Or, more frequently, we hear that an ethic of consent is insufficient. Insufficient to capture the fullness of freedom in Christ and God’s plan for sexuality,17 insufficient to prevent rape.18 Conor Friedersdorf, writing at The Atlantic, suggests that “individual consent has replaced all other moral considerations,” as if that’s a bad thing. In Farley’s work, consent is only one of several baseline ethical norms, but none of the others work without it. Friedersdorf, having dismissed the usefulness of an ethic of consent, goes on to propose something else: What if Christians reminded people of Jesus’s call to “be good to one another” and suggested that they apply that call to their sexual lives? Consent isn’t enough to meet that standard. Say, he muses, there’s a girl you like and she’d like you to kiss her and you’d like to kiss her, but she’s had a bit to drink and you know that you don’t actually like her all that much, and that kissing her might be leading her on. “Be good to her.” Don’t kiss her.
Say, Friedersdorf muses again, you are dating someone with whom you would like to have sex. She enthusiastically consents. But you feel, somehow, that she is not ready for the emotional import of sex. Best to hold off. “Be good to her.”19
On its surface, there is much to recommend Friedersdorf’s approach. Erring on the side of caution is generally good advice, though not one likely to be heeded by college students. (I’m not throwing shade, either. There are times in one’s life during which one is more likely to privilege caution. The time when one is eighteen to twenty-four is not one of them.) But what irks me, other than the denigrating of the value of consent, is that his suggestion does not take seriously what your desired partner is telling you. It’s paternalistic, and it errs on the side of assuming you know what is best for someone else. That does not meet Farley’s criteria for respecting another’s autonomy, nor even those offered by Springer Mock. It does not honor a person to assume you know them better than they know themselves.
Consent, autonomy—this is tricky business, and we can often be blind to the complexity of navigating relationships in ways that are holy and life-giving instead of sinful. Loving others, though, requires paying attention to our own motives, and regularly checking in with a partner—current or potential—about their needs, hopes, desires.
Growing up, I’d read the Bible and I could have told you about the Sermon on the Mount, and the “greatest commandment,” and I probably held those teachings of Jesus at the center of my faith and ethics, such as they were. But as an undergrad, I generally thought the Bible’s most relevant contemporary application was around poverty policy.
That ongoing bias (coupled, to be fair, with the obliviousness of youth) was just one of the things that blinded me to how poorly I was treating my college friend, and, awesomely, contributed to my ridiculous hypocrisy. This boy and I would debate welfare policy and I’d cite that commandment and the commitment to neighbor love, and then I’d go upstairs and treat him like, well, not much like a good neighbor.
I didn’t see that I was hurting him, that while we were both consenting, all the other norms of mutuality and respecting his full personhood and particularity were being neglected. I told him casually about other boys I liked; he was not my boyfriend, I did not think it would bother him. I assumed he liked other people and was simply messing around with me while he bided his time waiting for something else to come along. Alas, I was projecting.
I’m still not convinced varying levels of physical intimacy are rendered appropriate and holy only within the bounds of marriage, but when we both returned after summer vacation, and I nonchalantly mentioned that I’d fallen in love, I saw in his crestfallen face, from my perch on our dorm washing machine, the consequence of my sin. He wrote me an impassioned letter, far more than I deserved, hoping that my new beau fully appreciated me—with my freckles and political passion. I finally realized that something can be more demeaning than messing around in a college basement hallway. I’d never worried much about how letting a boy touch me under my clothes compromised my virtue; it didn’t even occur to me that mistreating a friend, or anyone, was a greater threat.
Farley muses that her insistence on justice might be perceived as stripping the joy from love and the fun from sex,20 but that insistence on justice is so critical, not simply for keeping things consensual and legal, but because it is so, so easy to close our eyes to the ways we objectify others, to the ways we put our own needs and desires first, to the ways we fail to consider the feelings of others. Playing fair, engaging in just and ethical, but no less hot, make-outs, requires paying attention to the complexity of human relationships, needs, and desires. It would almost be easier to have a simple list of dos and don’ts . . . but think of all the mutual, creative, committed, and relational fun we’d miss out on.