A Return to Another Theology of the Body, Part 5--Breaking Things Apart
The word "analysis" derives from the Greek roots "ana" meaning "up" and "luein" meaning "loosen." To analyze something then, in a sense, is to loosen up the parts that make it up in order to see how they work. If you don't pull the pieces apart, it becomes hard to see how the thing you are looking at works. Something that looks like a single, unbroken thing may be made of up components, and those components are may be different, but you won't know that until you "loosen up" the connections between the components. That's what analysis is.
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend from a writer with whom I had not been previously familiar, Katelyn Beaty. As Beaty recounts it, she was raised deep in American conservative Protestantism's "purity culture" of the 1990s, with its hyper (and, perhaps, monomaniacal) emphasis on women and girls refraining from sex until marriage, and thus remaining "pure." Beaty has moved on from this framework for thinking about sex and marriage, but:
. . . I find myself left with a sense of loss. For amid the horrible teachings about women’s bodies and God’s anger over an exposed bra strap, the proponents of purity — or the best of them at least — were trying to offer us the gift of sex within marriage. As Christianity teaches that marriage is not simply a legal bind but a spiritual covenant, so married sex is a bodily expression that two people will be for each other, through all seasons.
More specifically, Beaty seems to be reacting to a recent book by a well-known author and speaker in progressive Christian spaces, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, entitled Shameless. While such a book should be for Beaty "a tall glass of water for a grace-parched soul," she characterized the "progressive" Christian approach embodied by Pastor Bolz-Weber as "baptiz[ing] casual sex in the name of self-expression and divorc[ing] sex from covenant faithfulness and self-sacrificial love."
A number of commentators have criticized the article as unfairly representing the progressive Christian position on sex, and I think those criticisms are mostly fair. But there is something more fundamental, I think, at work in this piece, and that is a profound confusion as to what exactly the author is looking for from a moral or ethical schema. Is she looking for a set of guidelines around sex itself? Around relationships that have a sexual component? Around marriages? Around relationships in general? Because it seems to me that at various places in the article she treats these as interchangeable questions, when I think they are manifestly distinct. Indeed, I think one of the core problems with most of the moral and ethical systems that float around in the Christian space--particularly the conservative ones but not just them--is the failure to draw these distinctions, to define clearly what circumstances we are trying to address.
Consider this paragraph:
As I continue to date with hopes of meeting a partner, I yearn for guidance on how to integrate faith and sexuality in ways that honor more than my own desires in a given moment. Here, the Christian teaching on sacramentality is helpful. All creation, including human bodies, by grace reveals deeper spiritual truth. In other words, matter matters. So when a person engages another person sexually, Christians would say, it’s not “just” bodies enacting natural evolutionary urges but also an encounter with another soul.
I agree that when a person engages with another person sexually, it is an encounter with another soul. But the unspoken but clear implication here is that an interaction with another person is sacramental only when they are having sex. And that's wrong--all interactions between people are sacramental. When you comfort a child, or a grieving friend or loved one, with an embrace, that's also a physical encounter that communicates or transmits a spiritual reality, and thus is sacramental. When you tell someone the thing they needed to hear and lifts them out of the funk they have been in and couldn't get out of, that's sacramental, too. Those other human interactions, while perhaps having different levels of intensity or different dimensions to them, are important and relevant encounters that should be taken seriously. It is a mistake to limit our conception of intra-personal sacramentality to sex, because it walls off sex into this special box that must be treated in a way that is divorced from all other human interactions. (It also, it should be said, divinizes sex, the problems of which I have discussed extensively before).
So, are we asking questions about (1) some distinctive sacramentality of sex; (2) the sacramentality of close, committed relationships (which may or may not have a sexual component); (3) of relationships that fall under the formal umbrella of marriage; or (4) the sacramentality of human interactions generally? Purity culture, of both its evangelical Protestant and Theology of the Body Roman Catholic permutations, asserts that #1 and #3 are the same thing, that #2 only exists as a discrete category if we are talking about "the family," and that #4 can be subsumed under generalized ethical guidelines. Challenging the way those things are grouped and organized in the conservative discourse is not the same thing at all as rejecting sacramentality, even if the particular progressive Christian author doesn't use the terminology of "sacrament."
As a result of conservative fixation on the sex-marriage duality, category #4 and especially #2 are in my view wholly under-developed and under-theologized (if that is a word). Beaty challenges "a sexual ethic centered on consent" because "it doesn’t necessarily protect against people using one another in quieter ways." That's true about consent, but the kind of systemic, pervasive manipulation and exploitation that she seems to be gesturing toward is much more about committed relationship dynamics than it is about sex qua sex. A parent who manipulates a child through strategic withholding of affection and a spouse who manipulates a partner through the same strategy should be evaluated and understood together; the fact that intercourse occurs in one relationship and not the other (let's stipulate) is not necessarily relevant to the analysis. Complaining that there are not enough ethical tools in sex ethics to address this problem confuses the issue, because it is not at its heart a question of sex ethics, or marriage ethics, but of close relationship ethics. And if by "consent" in this context we mean an ironclad rule that no person should be forced or coerced to engage in erotic activities or bodily touching without their endorsement of that engagement, objecting that such a rule doesn't address some other scenario in which one person abuses another is like complaining that a fire extinguisher can't cure a viral infection.
Once you break the question into its component parts, you can now ask what I think is the really interesting and important question facing progressive Christians in the 21st Century in this sphere, which is what is or should be the relationship between (1) sex, defined either narrowly as contact between two people's genitals or broadly as eroticism generally; (2) close relationships of a significant permanence; and (3) the institution of marriage. As Beaty acknowledges in her piece, if sexual ethics is all about whether or not you are married, which I have called the "Golden Ticket" model of marriage, then there is not much in the way to restrain how people behave in the context of the marriage. Those sorts of things, including Beaty's name-check of "self sacrificing love," in my mind are best addressed under category #2, or at least category #3. To what extent sex plays into that can only be sorted out once we decide how sex relates to marriages and/or close committed relationships.
To be fair to Beaty, I think there is no question that there is a lot of work to be done in this area. Rev. Bromleigh McCleneghan's book Good Christian Sex, which I have reviewed before and which I recommend without reservation, is primarily interested with the relationship between prong #1 and #2, between sex and loving, mutually-supporting relationships (as well as the relationship between sex and our own self-image and understanding, which is important, too). It doesn't really do much with marriage, in the sense that it doesn't try to drawn distinctions between marriages and other sorts of close relationships, and it doesn't set forth any particular role or understanding for marriage with regard to sex. That's not a criticism of Rev. McCleneghan or her book--no book can cover every possible topic--but it shows that this is currently an underdeveloped area of reflection. Beaty is right to want more "meat on the bones."
In fact, one of the stranger parts of Beaty's piece for me is that she seems to have a clear understanding in her mind that the "progressive Christian" sexual ethic can be reduced to questions of consent, which implies that the "progressive Christian" sexual ethic is set forth in some clear form. Whereas I find much of the discussion around sexual ethics in progressive Christian spaces to be annoyingly vague, to the point of deliberately dissembling. I have not read Shameless, so perhaps Pastor Bolz-Weber lays out her views clearly, but what I see is a whole bunch of folks trying very hard to avoid these discussions altogether (except to assert that same-sex marriages that are presumptively sexual are OK), and other folks making statements that seem designed to allow people to interpret how they choose. To take a very basic example, I find an enormous amount of bobbing-and-weaving around the question of whether pre-marital sexual activity is ever OK. I understand, and agree, that we can't reduce the discussion around sex to this issue alone, but at the end of the day this is a yes or no question, and a foundational one. You get the vibe that most people in progressive Christian spaces believe the answer is "yes," but then when it is rhetorically convenient to fend off conservative objections, you get statements that can be interpreted to suggest that the answer is "no" (such as, for example, when defending the idea of marriage for same-sex couples by reference to classical framings like "avoiding fornication"). Straight-forward, declarative sentences setting forth positions on these questions would be helpful; indeed, one of the many virtues of McCleneghan's book is her willingness to take clear positions on these questions. I kinda wish it was as clear where everyone stands as Beaty makes it out to be.
In any event, I come back to the question of what exactly is Beaty after. Is she seeking an ethical framework that is predicated on the unbreakable linkage between sex and marriage, but without the shame and misogyny of purity culture? Because I suspect she is not going to get a lot of traction in progressive Christian spaces, because there is just a fundamental difference of opinion about the relationship between sex and marriage at work here. However vague some of this discussion can be, it is clear that the critique offered by progressive Christian thinkers of the inherited conservative model goes further than that. Or is she looking for an ethical system that preserves a transcendent dimension to human relationships, especially ones with deep roots and profound mutuality, while expanding its reach beyond just who can put what into whom? If so, I think she has sold the progressive Christian project short; for whatever gaps and blind spots there are, it is a project heading toward that vision. But that vision is easier to see, and is in fact based on, breaking apart some of the realities that the conservative vision insists are inevitably linked.
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend from a writer with whom I had not been previously familiar, Katelyn Beaty. As Beaty recounts it, she was raised deep in American conservative Protestantism's "purity culture" of the 1990s, with its hyper (and, perhaps, monomaniacal) emphasis on women and girls refraining from sex until marriage, and thus remaining "pure." Beaty has moved on from this framework for thinking about sex and marriage, but:
. . . I find myself left with a sense of loss. For amid the horrible teachings about women’s bodies and God’s anger over an exposed bra strap, the proponents of purity — or the best of them at least — were trying to offer us the gift of sex within marriage. As Christianity teaches that marriage is not simply a legal bind but a spiritual covenant, so married sex is a bodily expression that two people will be for each other, through all seasons.
More specifically, Beaty seems to be reacting to a recent book by a well-known author and speaker in progressive Christian spaces, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, entitled Shameless. While such a book should be for Beaty "a tall glass of water for a grace-parched soul," she characterized the "progressive" Christian approach embodied by Pastor Bolz-Weber as "baptiz[ing] casual sex in the name of self-expression and divorc[ing] sex from covenant faithfulness and self-sacrificial love."
A number of commentators have criticized the article as unfairly representing the progressive Christian position on sex, and I think those criticisms are mostly fair. But there is something more fundamental, I think, at work in this piece, and that is a profound confusion as to what exactly the author is looking for from a moral or ethical schema. Is she looking for a set of guidelines around sex itself? Around relationships that have a sexual component? Around marriages? Around relationships in general? Because it seems to me that at various places in the article she treats these as interchangeable questions, when I think they are manifestly distinct. Indeed, I think one of the core problems with most of the moral and ethical systems that float around in the Christian space--particularly the conservative ones but not just them--is the failure to draw these distinctions, to define clearly what circumstances we are trying to address.
Consider this paragraph:
As I continue to date with hopes of meeting a partner, I yearn for guidance on how to integrate faith and sexuality in ways that honor more than my own desires in a given moment. Here, the Christian teaching on sacramentality is helpful. All creation, including human bodies, by grace reveals deeper spiritual truth. In other words, matter matters. So when a person engages another person sexually, Christians would say, it’s not “just” bodies enacting natural evolutionary urges but also an encounter with another soul.
I agree that when a person engages with another person sexually, it is an encounter with another soul. But the unspoken but clear implication here is that an interaction with another person is sacramental only when they are having sex. And that's wrong--all interactions between people are sacramental. When you comfort a child, or a grieving friend or loved one, with an embrace, that's also a physical encounter that communicates or transmits a spiritual reality, and thus is sacramental. When you tell someone the thing they needed to hear and lifts them out of the funk they have been in and couldn't get out of, that's sacramental, too. Those other human interactions, while perhaps having different levels of intensity or different dimensions to them, are important and relevant encounters that should be taken seriously. It is a mistake to limit our conception of intra-personal sacramentality to sex, because it walls off sex into this special box that must be treated in a way that is divorced from all other human interactions. (It also, it should be said, divinizes sex, the problems of which I have discussed extensively before).
So, are we asking questions about (1) some distinctive sacramentality of sex; (2) the sacramentality of close, committed relationships (which may or may not have a sexual component); (3) of relationships that fall under the formal umbrella of marriage; or (4) the sacramentality of human interactions generally? Purity culture, of both its evangelical Protestant and Theology of the Body Roman Catholic permutations, asserts that #1 and #3 are the same thing, that #2 only exists as a discrete category if we are talking about "the family," and that #4 can be subsumed under generalized ethical guidelines. Challenging the way those things are grouped and organized in the conservative discourse is not the same thing at all as rejecting sacramentality, even if the particular progressive Christian author doesn't use the terminology of "sacrament."
As a result of conservative fixation on the sex-marriage duality, category #4 and especially #2 are in my view wholly under-developed and under-theologized (if that is a word). Beaty challenges "a sexual ethic centered on consent" because "it doesn’t necessarily protect against people using one another in quieter ways." That's true about consent, but the kind of systemic, pervasive manipulation and exploitation that she seems to be gesturing toward is much more about committed relationship dynamics than it is about sex qua sex. A parent who manipulates a child through strategic withholding of affection and a spouse who manipulates a partner through the same strategy should be evaluated and understood together; the fact that intercourse occurs in one relationship and not the other (let's stipulate) is not necessarily relevant to the analysis. Complaining that there are not enough ethical tools in sex ethics to address this problem confuses the issue, because it is not at its heart a question of sex ethics, or marriage ethics, but of close relationship ethics. And if by "consent" in this context we mean an ironclad rule that no person should be forced or coerced to engage in erotic activities or bodily touching without their endorsement of that engagement, objecting that such a rule doesn't address some other scenario in which one person abuses another is like complaining that a fire extinguisher can't cure a viral infection.
Once you break the question into its component parts, you can now ask what I think is the really interesting and important question facing progressive Christians in the 21st Century in this sphere, which is what is or should be the relationship between (1) sex, defined either narrowly as contact between two people's genitals or broadly as eroticism generally; (2) close relationships of a significant permanence; and (3) the institution of marriage. As Beaty acknowledges in her piece, if sexual ethics is all about whether or not you are married, which I have called the "Golden Ticket" model of marriage, then there is not much in the way to restrain how people behave in the context of the marriage. Those sorts of things, including Beaty's name-check of "self sacrificing love," in my mind are best addressed under category #2, or at least category #3. To what extent sex plays into that can only be sorted out once we decide how sex relates to marriages and/or close committed relationships.
To be fair to Beaty, I think there is no question that there is a lot of work to be done in this area. Rev. Bromleigh McCleneghan's book Good Christian Sex, which I have reviewed before and which I recommend without reservation, is primarily interested with the relationship between prong #1 and #2, between sex and loving, mutually-supporting relationships (as well as the relationship between sex and our own self-image and understanding, which is important, too). It doesn't really do much with marriage, in the sense that it doesn't try to drawn distinctions between marriages and other sorts of close relationships, and it doesn't set forth any particular role or understanding for marriage with regard to sex. That's not a criticism of Rev. McCleneghan or her book--no book can cover every possible topic--but it shows that this is currently an underdeveloped area of reflection. Beaty is right to want more "meat on the bones."
In fact, one of the stranger parts of Beaty's piece for me is that she seems to have a clear understanding in her mind that the "progressive Christian" sexual ethic can be reduced to questions of consent, which implies that the "progressive Christian" sexual ethic is set forth in some clear form. Whereas I find much of the discussion around sexual ethics in progressive Christian spaces to be annoyingly vague, to the point of deliberately dissembling. I have not read Shameless, so perhaps Pastor Bolz-Weber lays out her views clearly, but what I see is a whole bunch of folks trying very hard to avoid these discussions altogether (except to assert that same-sex marriages that are presumptively sexual are OK), and other folks making statements that seem designed to allow people to interpret how they choose. To take a very basic example, I find an enormous amount of bobbing-and-weaving around the question of whether pre-marital sexual activity is ever OK. I understand, and agree, that we can't reduce the discussion around sex to this issue alone, but at the end of the day this is a yes or no question, and a foundational one. You get the vibe that most people in progressive Christian spaces believe the answer is "yes," but then when it is rhetorically convenient to fend off conservative objections, you get statements that can be interpreted to suggest that the answer is "no" (such as, for example, when defending the idea of marriage for same-sex couples by reference to classical framings like "avoiding fornication"). Straight-forward, declarative sentences setting forth positions on these questions would be helpful; indeed, one of the many virtues of McCleneghan's book is her willingness to take clear positions on these questions. I kinda wish it was as clear where everyone stands as Beaty makes it out to be.
In any event, I come back to the question of what exactly is Beaty after. Is she seeking an ethical framework that is predicated on the unbreakable linkage between sex and marriage, but without the shame and misogyny of purity culture? Because I suspect she is not going to get a lot of traction in progressive Christian spaces, because there is just a fundamental difference of opinion about the relationship between sex and marriage at work here. However vague some of this discussion can be, it is clear that the critique offered by progressive Christian thinkers of the inherited conservative model goes further than that. Or is she looking for an ethical system that preserves a transcendent dimension to human relationships, especially ones with deep roots and profound mutuality, while expanding its reach beyond just who can put what into whom? If so, I think she has sold the progressive Christian project short; for whatever gaps and blind spots there are, it is a project heading toward that vision. But that vision is easier to see, and is in fact based on, breaking apart some of the realities that the conservative vision insists are inevitably linked.
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