A Return to Another Theology of the Body, Part 6--More on Purity Culture

The former is a recent, largely white, evangelical, American phenomenon with a dose of fundamentalism & a lot of weird cultural stuff & marketing thrown in.

— Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) July 22, 2019

Of course, you can hate and reject both. That's cool. Just don't conflate them or write about them as the same thing. Or think they are theologically the same phenomena.

— Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) July 22, 2019

I have seen a couple of people make a variation of Rev. Harrison Warren's argument on the Interwebs in the last couple of days.  It is prompted, in large measure, by the announcement that Joshua Harris, author of the evangelical purity culture ur-text I Kissed Dating Goodbye, is getting a divorce from his wife.  This is seen, not unreasonably, as symbolic of the moral and conceptual failure of the purity culture project, at least in its late 90s/early 00s presentation--the whole point of going through all of this purity culture stuff was that you would end up in a happy, blessed marriage.  So, folks of a traditional bent (either in terms of moral positions on sex, ecclesiastical temperament, or both) have rushed to kick Harris-style purity culture off the boat in order to shore up their own position and its claims.

Before getting to whether this works or makes sense, two preliminary points.  First, I have no direct experience with evangelical purity culture of the Harris variety.  I do, however, have experience with the Theology of the Body.  I believe that Theology of the Body is "purity culture in a Roman Catholic key," for reasons I will get to in more detail later in this post.  But, in grouping the two together, I recognize that (1) the specific elements of evangelical purity culture and the Theology of the Body are different; and (2) evangelical purity culture was and is, on balance, more damaging and has left behind more wreckage in its wake than Theology of the Body.  As to the second, I think there is a strong argument that Theology of the Body was less destructive because Roman Catholics took it far less seriously in the aggregate than evangelicals took purity culture.  But, at the end of the day that's a counter-factual, and so all we can do is recognize that the harm levels here are not the same.

Second, some would like to raise objections to the vagueness of formulations like "historical Christian sexual ethics" and the idea that this represents a monolithic, historically consistent set of principles.  Without disregarding the nuances and distinctions that exist in various historical periods, and especially without ignoring the fact that the gap between de jure ethics and de facto ethics was often vast, I think we can talk a fairly consistent ethos that runs through formal presentations of Christian ethics regarding sex--far more consistent, it should be said, than topics like money or warfare.  So, I'm fine with the framing of "historical Christian sexual ethics" or "traditional Christian sex ethics," even if it elides over some nuance.

With that out of the way, the first question to ask is "is Rev. Harrison Warren right that purity culture is different from the traditional Christian position on sex?"  I think the answer is clear--yes, it is.  But that's not the interesting question; the really interesting question is how is it different.  Because most of the defenders of the traditional sexual ethic don't actually point to specific differences between their view and the purity culture view.  Instead, they tend to gesture toward the bad stuff of purity culture and say "that's not us."  But that's not particularly helpful or analytically useful.

So, what are the differences?  Well, purity culture sexuality is, at least on the margins, more permissive with regard to the "rules" regarding what sorts of sexual activity are permitted.  In the traditional formulation, the only sort of sexual activity that is acceptable is penis-in-vagina intercourse between people of opposite genders who are married to each other.  While the "between people of opposite genders who are married to each other part" is kept fixed in the purity culture model, the "penis-in-vagina intercourse only" part is in most presentations loosened or discarded.  If we go to the Wayback Machine on this blog, we find our old friend Dr. Popcak endorsing oral sex between married couples, so long as the sessions ends with the husband ejaculating in his wife.  Whatever one thinks of (or however one interprets) Popcak's "One Rule," it is clearly not consistent with the traditional formulations of sexuality, which were unambiguous in prohibiting all forms of oral sex (lumping them in with "sodomy").  It represents a liberalization as compared to the traditional model, for whatever it is worth.

But there is a much more fundamental difference between purity culture and the traditional model.  Purity culture, in either its evangelical or Roman Catholic forms, is all about the carrot and the stick.  Yes, you may not under any set of circumstances have sexual contact outside of the approved form (the stick), but this is because doing so takes away from the amazing sexual experiences you will have if you do stay within the lines (the carrot).  The engine that drives purity culture is the notion that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because the wonders of married sexuality conducted under the approved formula, and fear of ruining that possibility, is proffered as the reason you should keep yourself "pure."  Katelyn Beaty, writer of the article I mentioned in the last post, recently called purity culture the "sexual prosperity gospel," and that's right.  If you do the right thing, you will be rewarded, and by rewarded I mean fulfilled sexually.  The promise of sexual fulfillment is central to the entire project.

The traditional model, by contrast, is all stick.  In no way does it promise any sort of sexual fulfillment.  Quite the opposite--it takes the position that sexual fulfillment is itself a bad, ungodly thing.  Sexual activity is, at best, a necessarily evil, something that one engages in either for the purely utilitarian good of making babies, or as a kind of methodone to the addiction of sexual lust, a grudging concession to our demented nature.  The idea that sex qua sex is a good thing is wholly absent from the traditional formulation.  All of this "I love having sex with my super-hot wife" discourse would never have been seen as A-OK under the old model, because it would be seen as indulging in lust.  Likewise, Popcak's "Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving," tagline would be understood as deeply sacrilegious circa 1960, let alone 1560 or 560.

Purity culture, at the end of the day, is an attempt to construct a sexual regime that (1) puts forward a positive vision of sexuality, in direct contrast to the traditional formulation, while (2) preserving the heart of the prohibitions around sexual activity in the traditional model, which is no sex outside of a man/woman marriage.  Here we see the real commonality between Theology of the Body and evangelical purity culture--it's all about finding a way to keep the old rules in place while giving people some positive reason, intrinsic to the realm of sexuality, to follow those rules beyond "because you must."

Rev. Harrison Warren is right that in many ways purity culture is a marketing project, but that raises the question of why such a marketing move was necessary in the first place.  Why did the people behind Theology of the Body and evangelical purity culture feel the need to "repackage" the old rules?  The assumption behind purity culture (implicit in many cases, but all but explicit with someone like Popcak) is that simply telling people to follow the rules and shut up about it is not going to work.  Along those lines, one of the most interesting chapters of Popcak's book in retrospect is the first one, where he goes out of his way to throw dirt on Jansenist-inspired "Anglo-Irish" sexual mores, mores with were the dominant model for talking about sexuality in the Roman Catholic Church for 400 years.  Popcak explicitly states that getting away from the "sex negative" formulations of the past is necessary to have any sort of compelling sexual ethic, at least in 2019.   

If you believe that the purity culture project failed, which I do and it seems Rev. Harrison Warren does as well, the obvious follow-on question is "which part of that two-pronged project is the source of the failure?"  And if you are endorsing the traditional position, then your answer has to be that the problem is part #1.  Indeed, Beaty seems to heading in that direction.  And if the solution being offered is "just say sex is bad and only for making babies and we'll be fine," then OK.  But I think the concerns of people like Popcak, however flawed their solutions may be, have to be reckoned with.

Or, alternatively, if the goal is to endorse a sex-positive vision that maintains all of the old restrictions, then the burden is on you to articulate how you are going to do that without falling prey to all of the problems to which purity culture falls victim.  Because it's not like shame around sexuality and purity was invented by Harris or Popcak or John Paul II.  As someone pointed out in one of the Twitter threads I saw, Maria Goretti is often presented as the embodiment of the idea that it is better to die than to give up one's "purity" (though, one should read the outstanding, thoughtful piece on Goretti by B.D. McClay in Commonweal), and she lived and died well before our modern purity culture.  There is almost a kind of willful amnesia about these erstwhile advocates of the traditional Christian sexual ethic--they choose not to see any of the problems it brought with it, problems not all that different from those stemming from the purity culture from which they are so eager to distance themselves.

The most straight-forward diagnosis of purity culture is that it failed, not because it went too far as Rev. Harrison Warren seems to think, but because it didn't go far enough.  Being "sex positive" as an aspiration and a tone doesn't do much of anything, and in fact can create unreachable expectations, if you don't also reconsider the fundamentally sex negative rules that come to us from the much lauded "historical Christian sexual ethics."  At the end of the day, it really does come down to the fact that the rules themselves are the locus of the problem, because the rules constrain the degree to which you can actually affirm the goodness of sexuality without loading it up with an oppressive laundry list of provisos and qualifications.  Purity culture fails because it promises something, to liberate sex from the cone of shame imposed by traditional Christian sexual ethics, that it can't actually deliver.

I suppose you could say that the traditional ethic in its unadulterated form is better because it lacks the bait-and-switch quality of purity culture regarding sex.  But that brings us what I think is the final question--can we, as people living in 2019, really accept a vision of humanity which describes the entirety of the sexual dimension of our lives in the manner that "historical Christian sexual ethics" does?  Is that going to work, given what we know about the development of culture, what we know about the diversity about human sexual response, and perhaps most importantly what we now (or, at least most of us) believe about gender and the equality of men and women?

I genuinely wonder how Rev. Harrison Warren would answer that question.  For my part, when I look at "historical Christian sexual ethics" in light of what we know in those other areas, I don't think it makes any sense at all.  Which is not to say it contains nothing of value, but as a system, as something to rely on as a unit when making decisions in our time and place, I don't think it holds up.  And, yes, I know that creates theological problems, but I'd rather grapple with my theology then try to shoe-horn my life and the lives of others into a collapsing box.

Purity culture is not an affirmation of the the traditional Christian sexual ethic, but the last gasp of its failure.