Boston student apartments are hot in the summer—rare is the window-unit AC offered to subletters; infinite are the fourth-floor walk-ups. Summer nights are best spent out—listening to a free concert at the Hatch Shell along the river, or something on the Commons. But if there’s nothing to do or see, no rooftop parties to attend, an evening can be whiled away on the phone with a friend while alternately drinking an ice water and allowing the sweating glass to drip down on your own sweating arms for a moment of relief.
I learned these things about Boston in the summer months before I turned twenty. Armed with an internship at our local NPR affiliate and a part-time job in retail, I lived in an apartment, on my own, for the first time ever. I loved it, despite the heat. On one such sultry night a friend from high school called with a question. We hadn’t spoken in ages, hadn’t been close in years. She called for advice. “Should I sleep with my boyfriend?”
I was surprised by her question. Surprised she was asking, surprised she was asking me. I thought this was a pretty personal question, and one she could probably answer better for herself than I could.
We talked for a bit. How long have you been together? Do you want to? Do you love him?
Finally she made it clear why I was being asked. I was a Christian, as was she, and she wanted my opinion as such. I’m also a preacher’s kid, and presumably had some insider authority on how to make such decisions faithfully.
I don’t know if our surprise was mutual when she realized that neither I nor my very marvelous, very faithful parents were particularly opposed to sex outside of marriage. Sex among young teenagers, sex with inappropriate or nonconsenting partners, sex had by me—those were things my parents were not wild about, even against. But sex—even if it happened between people who weren’t married—that wasn’t such a terrible thing. We had family friends who were gay and partnered, and we had known couples who had lived together before marrying. These things happened, and they were not at the center of our moral concern as a family.
That’s not to say that we didn’t have moral concerns as a family. My parents are politically engaged, care passionately about poverty and peace and women’s rights, about equality and freedom and justice. I was probably the only kid in my third-grade class who could explicate the reasons why Michael Dukakis was the better candidate for president, the only one with opinions (however borrowed) about the arms race and the death penalty.
We went to church and I heard the gospel proclaimed week in and week out, and I heard that institutionalized gambling overburdens the poor, and that in some parts of the country people don’t have access to clean drinking water and garbage pickup, much less good schools and health care, and that guns are, in the words of the grandfather in Witness, “for the taking of human life,” and thus to be despised.
I heard about Jesus and Paul and Abraham and Sarah and Mary and John and Peter. I heard about John Wesley and Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Phyllis Trible and Peter Berger (and his A Rumor of Angels). I learned the stories and the songs of the faith. I learned that our Christology was high and our God was good. I learned that we are called to grow ever more perfect in love, but that sin is real, in individuals and in society, and our hope is eschatological. I learned that holiness is both personal and social.
But I very rarely learned about sex or romantic love in the context of church, or God. Agape, yes. But eros? Not on your life.
My parents were not too prudish or too proper to speak of such things. Or, at least, they were not too prudish or too proper to hand me books about such things.
We had several “how babies are made” books available on our bookshelves at home, including one with the most amazing color photography of fetal development. As I got a little older, I was offered a copy of Joanna Cole’s Asking About Sex and Growing Up—the text was enthralling enough, but the book also featured illustrations by the same guy who’d done all the drawing for my beloved editions of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. While it was a bit odd to see a character resembling Ramona’s friend Howie nude and gradually maturing, the familiar illustrations led to my dawning understanding of human sexual development as just a normal everyday part of life.
A normal everyday part of life that wasn’t coming my way anytime soon. I was a late bloomer, straight up and down for years, with my still-tiny features dwarfed by a series of huge, brightly colored pairs of glasses. My failure to fill out anything, even the most modest of training bras, rendered “sex and growing up” an unattainable and thus deeply alluring goal.
Maybe my parents didn’t push the sex talk with me because I was so obviously awkward for so very long. All I know is that my mother handed me this wonderful, nurturing, factual book, with the vague instruction to “just read what applies to you.” She probably meant “just do the chapters about menstruation and breasts,” but I’d been a reader for years by then and devoured the whole thing. I read the chapters about girls and boys and crushes and secondary sex characteristics, but also about masturbation and birth control and “going all the way.”
Shortly thereafter, on the endlessly long ride from our hometown in suburban Chicago to Washington, DC, to visit my grandparents, I’d finished all the books I’d brought along, worn out the batteries on my Walkman, and was bored, bored, bored. I could feel the whine rising in my chest, when my mom told me to reach into the backseat and dig out something from the big bag of novels she’d brought along.
In this bag was probably a wide assortment of paperback editions of literary fiction. My mother’s affinity for the “Books” section of the Sunday paper predates most of her other loves, and it was through her that I was introduced to great contemporary authors, especially great women writers, in my early teens. I read Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich.
That day, though, I homed in on a trashy romance novel—the sort with a virginal woman busting out of a ripped petticoat or bustier, swooning in the arms of a muscular man with equally long, flowing hair. It was most likely a castoff from my paternal grandmother, something she’d picked up in the thrift shop where she volunteered. At that age—late elementary school or early junior high—I wasn’t really ready for Atwood or Erdrich. Their vocabularies were beyond me. The content of the cheesy paperback was risqué, but the reading level was closer to my own.
I held it up to show to my mom. “Can I read this one?”
“I guess. Just make sure you skip any parts you don’t think you should be reading.”
And that is how, in the back of my parents’ minivan, with my parents and sisters on a family trek across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I came to be acquainted with oral sex.
I will tell you: it sounded awesome, and made the deciphering of the increasingly obscure euphemisms for human anatomy well worth the effort.
Now, I don’t know if this is a particularly common experience, or that I’d recommend this strategy of sex education—the “take and read” approach—to just anyone. I was shy and awkward, flat-chested and bespectacled, and had largely internalized the Dorothy Parker adage that “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” years before I first encountered her work as a freshman in high school. I was also generally supervised; I was either babysitting or being actively parented, so there was no opportunity for me to get “into trouble.” Knowing about the existence of sex acts was simply that; I was in no danger of getting any hands-on (ahem) experience.
And that time of waiting and wondering proved critically important: I had the opportunity to reflect on what I wanted and what I dreamed of—from sex and from relationships. Thus, what my reading taught me, I wouldn’t trade for the world. From Asking About Sex and Growing Up, I gleaned that we all go through the joys and pains of growing up, that our bodies can be sources of pain and pleasure, that boys and girls and men and women have desires, that sex can have consequences, but that there are also ways to mitigate at least some of those consequences through, for example, the proper and regular use of condoms.
From the trashy romance novels, I learned that sex was supposed to be mutually pleasurable, and something that grew out of a relationship of love. I also learned the somewhat misleading (who would have thought?) lesson that sex was always both culmination and beginning, a moment of vulnerability that changed everything, irrevocably for both partners, from that point onward. Sometimes sex is not both those things; sometimes it changes very little.
The literary fiction served as an important corrective as I got older and got to be a better reader. Sex was complicated, and so were human relationships. Sometimes marriages were awful; sometimes sex was about power and not love; sometimes the sex was the best part of a relationship; sometimes things went well and love grew and grew.
And then, in the middle of all of that reading, I fell in love. We’ll have more on first loves later, but in those late adolescent years, I learned that all three of the “texts” I’d been basing my assumptions on proclaimed some measure of truth.
Where, though, was my faith in all of this?
My family and I were mainline Protestants, and as with many mainline Protestants, even good, highly churched ones, human sexuality wasn’t tied to my nascent theology and ethics. I know this isn’t the case for every tradition or denomination, and that there are many Christians who handle the topic differently than we did. I knew my parents weren’t keen on my sleeping with anyone—and I wasn’t ready to for quite a while—but I assumed that had more to do with their being my parents and icked out about my sexual maturation than anything in particular to do with God. My dad got mad when I was late for curfew; my mom recommended that I think long and hard about sex with my high school boyfriend, because it would make it harder to break up when the time came. The theological import of all this for my pastor father was never particularly explicit.
But if absolute abstinence outside of marriage wasn’t exactly a pressing question or concern for my sisters and me, other things were. If we were going to have sex, were we going to practice safer sex? Were we going to be faithful within the contexts of our relationships? Were we going to be good friends? Were we going to be honest and loving and gracious and kind? Did we have the resources—the self-knowledge and resilience—we needed to guard against being bullied or guilted into doing something we didn’t want to do or weren’t ready for?
So a few years later when my friend called asking for advice, I might have been living on my own for the first time, but the questions I was ready to ask her as we talked through her decision were not contrary to the ethic with which I was raised. Still, despite the ubiquitous influence of the church community on my childhood, I was hard-pressed to think of how this particular decision might be affected by the common faith we professed. Many Christians in this country hear a singular ethic from their faith communities—absolute abstinence outside of marriage, never abortion, no birth control (and no being gay)—and simply disengage, disconnecting their sex lives from their lives of faith.
That wasn’t the ethic with which I was raised, but the mainline churches tend to prioritize privacy and personal discernment around issues about bodies and relationships and instead bring the Bible to bear on broader issues of society, asking questions of faith that are far more abstract than “Should I sleep with my boyfriend?” This may well be because we in the mainline church trust folks to know their own contexts best and we’d rather not even know, lest we judge.
There are some significant limitations to that approach, though. I knew to always use a condom and make sure my partners and I were regularly tested for STIs, but I didn’t always know what other criteria might help me make emotionally or spiritually healthy decisions. These limitations have much broader impact than the ordering of my early relationships. There’s the general way mainline churches can seem out of touch with the personal battles of members’ lives, and there’s also a somewhat irresponsible tendency to leave the discovery of needed resources, emotional and informational, to fate, and to implicitly suggest that those who need help can’t ask for it from the community. So many churches say and do nothing toward helping people form faithful understandings of what it means to be in relationship with others. We did get some sex ed at my church, but it was mostly biology. Thus, I had the logistics, but not the ethics; the information, but not the wisdom. My peers whose parents didn’t have a healthy understanding of sexuality, or the will or wherewithal to communicate one to their kids, were often lost without a guide in the wilderness of adolescence and early adulthood. “Don’t ask / don’t tell” is a lousy strategy for making disciples.
Frederick Buechner, a writer and pastor, has a series of books that read like little dictionaries of the Christian tradition. His definition of sex, in the book Wishful Thinking, begins like this:
Contrary to Mrs. Grundy, sex is not sin. Contrary to Hugh Hefner, it’s not salvation either. Like nitroglycerin, it can be used either to blow up bridges or heal hearts.1
I, like many American teenagers and young adults, took the Hugh Hefner line of thinking for a long time. There are, of course, a whole host of American teenagers and young adults who have taken the former view at the strong urging of their parents and churches. Sex is dangerous and shameful and sinful and a tool of the devil until that day you’re married, at which point it is awesome and a gift from God. Good luck!
What we all tend to miss is Buechner’s point that sex and love are both/and—and they are rightly about bodies and souls, hearts and hormones. And, for Buechner, sex and love are also about sin and salvation, about the nature of God and Christian discipleship. Though my church talked very rarely about human sexuality, I grew up to know that the gospel that was preached calls us to see these paradoxes in our lives—that the best things involve some risk, that love is an easy yoke—and to reach out in faith.
I’ve wanted to have this book in my possession since that sweaty, sultry night in the middle of college, my first summer away from home, when my friend called. Because when she called, I could help her to make a healthy decision, but I couldn’t help her make the connection between her nascent love for this guy and her love for God. I didn’t know how; I didn’t have the theological practice.
I’ve wanted this book for years, to share in conversation with parishioners and friends, to help me sort out how Christians can think about our romantic and sexual lives—which are so very vital—in the light of our faith. I’ve waited, and I’ve read a lot, and finally gave up and am writing it myself.
There are, of course, plenty of Christian books about sex. Some might say there are too many. There are spiritual and theological memoirs, and there are ethics handbooks. There are screeds and polemics and manifestos. There are complex texts, written for academic audiences. The handbooks are often useful, if you can get through them; the theological texts, too. They manage what most of the polemics do not: those who write in ethics almost always tell you what ideas they’re taking as given, or how they’ve decided upon their norms.
In some ways, that’s what this book attempts to do: to lay out some of the theological and ethical questions that arise in your average, everyday experience of adult sexuality, and to walk readers through those discussions in a clear and engaging way.
But boring, technical, humorless writing about sex and love is antithetical to what I think sex is all about. So are esoteric texts on a topic that just about everyone has some experience of; books about love and sex should be accessible, I think.
Many of the memoirs are accessible, but their theological convictions are often idiosyncratic. My hope is to, in the words of my math teacher husband, Josh, “show my [theological] work” in the midst of reflecting on my stories.
I am also quite aware that not everyone in the world is all that interested in my personal life, and there are many aspects about my romantic and sexual history that are decidedly privileged. I’m a straight white woman, born to educated feminist Christians, who worked hard never ever to shame me for becoming the person God is calling me to be. I’m able-bodied and reasonably attractive by society’s current standards, and my fertility is ridiculously, and unusually, responsive to both birth control and the lack thereof.
As someone who’s spent a good number of years talking to parishioners, students, and friends, while I’m aware of the things that make my experience both particular and privileged, I’m also increasingly convinced of the broader resonance of the theological and ethical norms I’ve come to hold. That is to say, while the details are sometimes different, gay or straight, trans-or cisgender, most of us want to love and be loved, to find relationships in which we can be ourselves and also experience the thrill of desire. I know there are those who were taught that “good Christian sex” could only ever be for straight, married people, and it’s my hope that this book, with its rather different argument, will resonate with them as well. As a pastor, as a Christian, I hope the simple acknowledgment that there may be more than one acceptable—holy and just—way to live as sexual beings is a blessing and an invitation to those who have been taught that God’s way is singular and exclusive.
In this book, I draw on my own experience, but also on the experiences of lots of other people. For the truth is, I was a shy late bloomer, and my husband and I got together (also on a sweaty summer night, this time in Chicago) when I was twenty-three, and almost all of the experiences I had in the intervening years were, if not always positive, at least not traumatic. To broaden my knowledge base (and to mask the experiences of those I’ve learned through in confidential pastoral relationships), I posted a survey on Facebook and encouraged friends and colleagues to disseminate it during Lent of 2014. Most of the questions were open-ended, even “What is your gender?” I wanted to hear people’s stories—about first times, about the relationship between love and sex, about the ages of respondents’ sexual debuts. Over 330 people responded. There was so much that amazed me about the stories I heard, but the most amazing thing was that anonymous people shared their intimate thoughts and experiences with me. As each response came in, I felt gratitude.
Some of those people’s stories are present in the following chapters. Because of the narrative nature of the survey, I didn’t even attempt to quantify the results. I simply wanted to know whether or not most of the things that felt true to me felt true to others. I wanted to know what questions people are asking about love, sex, God, and church.
Throughout the book, I attempt to speak to a number of the expressed concerns of my survey respondents. In the first chapter, I try to make theological sense of pleasure, as something that is a part—a wonderful and important part—of being human, and something we encounter from our earliest years. Chapter two chronicles some of my first experiences of desire as good, in conversation with the Bible and some contemporary theologians, and asks that we think about virginity and sexual initiation as complex things. Chapter three looks at norms of sexual ethics, and asks about both the authority of the Bible and what, exactly, was at stake in that sophomore year serial hookup. Chapter four reflects on how God works in the world and whether or not single Christians have to be celibate. Chapter five considers modesty, nudity, and what it means to be vulnerable with other people. Chapter six is about intimacy of a variety of sorts. Chapter seven is about “history”—what we are to do with the great joys and deep injuries of our pasts, especially for those who are survivors of abuse. Chapter eight is about fidelity, and lust, and what makes being faithful worth it, and so hard. Chapter nine, the last one, considers how it is that we know whether it’s time to break it off, or make a go of it, and the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand makes a somewhat unexpected appearance. My hope is that these chapters, while certainly not inclusive of all topics or experiences, will nonetheless cast a broad and deep enough net that many people can locate themselves within its pages, even if they’re dudes, or gay, or what have you.
Writing this book has been an opportunity to reach back through the years and consider what I might have told my friend, not just about sex and relationships, but about God, and the Bible, and how all these things are tied together. This book is an opportunity, I hope, for readers to ask questions about their own relationships and practices, so that maybe, just maybe, they can experience the grace of God, and grow in love of self, God, and other.
For my friend contemplating whether or not to take the next step with her boyfriend, things were relatively straightforward, once we set aside the assumption that she could not, should not, have sex outside of marriage. She loved and trusted him. I don’t know if they had sex for the first time subsequent to that phone call, but they’re married now, and have been for a while, so I’m assuming that they did eventually. My hope is that whenever they had sex for the first time, it was holy, and wonderful, just as my hope for all people is that we know love, joy, holiness, and pleasure in these lives God has given us. I’m hoping this book can help make a difference to that end, even though it’s nonfiction, lacks pictures of Ramona and Howie, and has only a very limited number of ripped bodices and ridiculous euphemisms. It will, to be fair, have a lot more God.