Apocalypse Now, Part 5--"I'm Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy. . ."
"After all . . . I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her."
- Anna Scott [played by Julia Roberts], Notting Hill
There is a story out there, widely believed by many folks, that goes something like this. Once we had a society (either broader political society, church society, or both) that had a very clear set of rules about how men and women were supposed to interact. These rules were good, because sexuality is powerful and dangerous and at least a little bit evil and shameful, and the rules worked to control those instincts in socially constructive ways. We need clear structures, defined rules, a rather rigid superstructure to contain all of this stuff. And, if you add in the religious dimension, this structure is ordained by God, so there is really no reason to question or even think too hard about any of it. Yes, sure, isolated people violated these norms from time to time, but there were wise (if, perhaps, harsh) measures in place to punish line-steppers and to encourage folks from staying within the lines. For their own good, of course.
Then came the 1960s (or, if you were older, the 1920s, but no one remembers that, so let's move on). People, primarily women and secondarily opportunists and other ne'er-do-wells, decided that they didn't want to follow those rules any more. They wanted to break free of the constraints of our safe, stable system, for what are essentially hedonistic reasons. Sure, sure, those hedonistic reasons are cloaked in various artifices--"rights," "self-expression," "equality," etc.--but at the end of the day people just want to get their freak on without any limitation, and especially without the social penalties that used to come with the old regime. And, because of a generalized degeneration of society, these folks were allowed to implement their hedonic agenda. And, true to form, it has caused untold (if, at times, inchoate) chaos and disorder on society, leading to the break down of not just the actual structures of sex and gender, but most facets of social life. Thus, healing can only come if we return to the old regime, with its clear lines and penal structures of various sorts.
This story, which Frank Strong memorably called THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION (it's in all caps, so you know it is a serious idea), is at the heart of conservative politico/religious thought, cutting across traditional theological and philosophical lines. It's treated as an article of faith. And it is an article of faith, literally. It is a foundational story that structures the way people interpret the world, understand its meaning, and function on a day-to-day basis within its confines.
This story, I am convinced, a manifestation of what Rene Girard calls the Sacred. The story I have sketched out above has all of the characteristics of the Sacred. It is a system that works to regulate social interactions. It is predicated on the idea that, but for the Sacred system, our social life will spiral into uncontrolled chaos and disorder. It is presented not as a set of choices that we can evaluate on their merits, but as merely an embodiment of objective facts about the way the world "really is." And, no matter how much this fact is camouflaged, it runs on scapegoated victims.
Let's talk for a little bit about victims. Who are the victims of the "good old days" that our conservative brothers and sisters so long to return to? Who was/is being sacrificed to the great machine of the Sacred?
Maybe you've seen the movie Notting Hill, or maybe you're a liar. But for those who genuinely have not seen the movie, the basic plot is that William Thacker (High Grant) is the owner of an eclectic book shop in London who meets a famous American actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts). Sparks fly, but then the relationship on the rocks, before being rehabilitated in the end in classic romantic comedy fashion.
That's the plot. But what the movie is really about is fame. The romantic obstacle, and really the only romantic obstacle, is the fact that Anna Scott is a famous actress. This status affects both of them--William struggles with the idea of being famous-by-extension via being with Anna, Anna struggles with what it means to be in a relationship with a "normal" person like William and what that might mean for her career. The quote above (surely the most memorable quote in the film) is a plea by Anna to William (but also, I think, to herself) to cut through the weight of the significance both sides have placed on Anna's status as a famous person, in order to have an interaction of two people as two people. We don't have to be beholden to this meta-context, Anna is saying.
Placing a meta-context onto human interactions that isn't intrinsic to the interaction is a good definition of The Sacred. A key thing to understand about The Sacred, and I think the #1 place where people get tripped up, is that there is a fundamental difference between saying that something is "not intrinsic" and saying something is "not real." The message of Notting Hill is not that there aren't any problems that are caused by this Sacred structure we call fame, or that any such problems are "all in your head" (which must be the dumbest of all cliche phrases--where else would ideas be found?). No, the Anna quote is about pointing to a reality beyond the nevertheless very real experience of fame and its effect on a romantic relationship. It is a claim that it is possible for these two people to live and interact in a manner that is not defined by the structure of fame, notwithstanding the difficulties of getting to that point. There is a reality of relationship that is beyond the Sacred. Or, at least, so Anna is asserting.
The trick here is to separate the intrinsic properties of a thing from the things that can be overcome and eliminated, if through a lot of work and struggle. The question the movie poses, and then provides a tentative answer, is whether fame and the difficulties of fame on relationships are intrinsic to a relationship with a famous person. Or can you just have a girl standing in front of a boy, even if one of them is famous?
- Anna Scott [played by Julia Roberts], Notting Hill
1.
There is a story out there, widely believed by many folks, that goes something like this. Once we had a society (either broader political society, church society, or both) that had a very clear set of rules about how men and women were supposed to interact. These rules were good, because sexuality is powerful and dangerous and at least a little bit evil and shameful, and the rules worked to control those instincts in socially constructive ways. We need clear structures, defined rules, a rather rigid superstructure to contain all of this stuff. And, if you add in the religious dimension, this structure is ordained by God, so there is really no reason to question or even think too hard about any of it. Yes, sure, isolated people violated these norms from time to time, but there were wise (if, perhaps, harsh) measures in place to punish line-steppers and to encourage folks from staying within the lines. For their own good, of course.
Then came the 1960s (or, if you were older, the 1920s, but no one remembers that, so let's move on). People, primarily women and secondarily opportunists and other ne'er-do-wells, decided that they didn't want to follow those rules any more. They wanted to break free of the constraints of our safe, stable system, for what are essentially hedonistic reasons. Sure, sure, those hedonistic reasons are cloaked in various artifices--"rights," "self-expression," "equality," etc.--but at the end of the day people just want to get their freak on without any limitation, and especially without the social penalties that used to come with the old regime. And, because of a generalized degeneration of society, these folks were allowed to implement their hedonic agenda. And, true to form, it has caused untold (if, at times, inchoate) chaos and disorder on society, leading to the break down of not just the actual structures of sex and gender, but most facets of social life. Thus, healing can only come if we return to the old regime, with its clear lines and penal structures of various sorts.
This story, which Frank Strong memorably called THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION (it's in all caps, so you know it is a serious idea), is at the heart of conservative politico/religious thought, cutting across traditional theological and philosophical lines. It's treated as an article of faith. And it is an article of faith, literally. It is a foundational story that structures the way people interpret the world, understand its meaning, and function on a day-to-day basis within its confines.
This story, I am convinced, a manifestation of what Rene Girard calls the Sacred. The story I have sketched out above has all of the characteristics of the Sacred. It is a system that works to regulate social interactions. It is predicated on the idea that, but for the Sacred system, our social life will spiral into uncontrolled chaos and disorder. It is presented not as a set of choices that we can evaluate on their merits, but as merely an embodiment of objective facts about the way the world "really is." And, no matter how much this fact is camouflaged, it runs on scapegoated victims.
Let's talk for a little bit about victims. Who are the victims of the "good old days" that our conservative brothers and sisters so long to return to? Who was/is being sacrificed to the great machine of the Sacred?
2.
That's the plot. But what the movie is really about is fame. The romantic obstacle, and really the only romantic obstacle, is the fact that Anna Scott is a famous actress. This status affects both of them--William struggles with the idea of being famous-by-extension via being with Anna, Anna struggles with what it means to be in a relationship with a "normal" person like William and what that might mean for her career. The quote above (surely the most memorable quote in the film) is a plea by Anna to William (but also, I think, to herself) to cut through the weight of the significance both sides have placed on Anna's status as a famous person, in order to have an interaction of two people as two people. We don't have to be beholden to this meta-context, Anna is saying.
Placing a meta-context onto human interactions that isn't intrinsic to the interaction is a good definition of The Sacred. A key thing to understand about The Sacred, and I think the #1 place where people get tripped up, is that there is a fundamental difference between saying that something is "not intrinsic" and saying something is "not real." The message of Notting Hill is not that there aren't any problems that are caused by this Sacred structure we call fame, or that any such problems are "all in your head" (which must be the dumbest of all cliche phrases--where else would ideas be found?). No, the Anna quote is about pointing to a reality beyond the nevertheless very real experience of fame and its effect on a romantic relationship. It is a claim that it is possible for these two people to live and interact in a manner that is not defined by the structure of fame, notwithstanding the difficulties of getting to that point. There is a reality of relationship that is beyond the Sacred. Or, at least, so Anna is asserting.
The trick here is to separate the intrinsic properties of a thing from the things that can be overcome and eliminated, if through a lot of work and struggle. The question the movie poses, and then provides a tentative answer, is whether fame and the difficulties of fame on relationships are intrinsic to a relationship with a famous person. Or can you just have a girl standing in front of a boy, even if one of them is famous?
3.
A book is going to come out this week about gay priests at the Vatican. It is going to make the case that a large number, probably a majority, of the folks who run the machinery of the Roman Catholic Church are sexually active gay men. This is not a surprise to anyone who has spent time around Roman Catholic priests, especially in "safe" spaces away from the prying eyes of the laity. The author, Frederic Martel, appears not to be interested in coming up with percentages of who is who. For my part, I have settled on what I call the "one-third, one-third, one-third" rule--one-third of Roman Catholic priests are straight, one-third are gay and acknowledge it (at least internally and/or in protected contexts) and one-third are either confused or so broken internally that they don't cleanly line up with either category (though, many of those are gay in an "objective" sense, to the extent that's a meaningful concept).
Likewise, we had a big expose in the New York Times about the lives of gay priests. What strikes me about both of these stories is the comparison between these priests and the gay men and lesbian women I know in other contexts. There is a certain kind of, for lack of a better term, "energy" around the question of their sexuality that oozes off the page with regard to these priests, an energy that I don't generally experience talking to gay and lesbian folks. Yes, they are gay or lesbian, and they live accordingly and are happy to discuss the matter if there is context to do so, but it comes across as a practicality, a simple statement of how things are. Whereas these stories represent that sexuality and sexual orientation as something (in the strict sense of the word) awesome, having enormous personal and even ontological significance. My gay and lesbian friends don't project that; they just are.
But I don't blame priests for acting that way or projecting that energy. The Roman Catholic Church has invested an enormous amount of theological and psychic energy on sexuality. We have people like Rod Dreher telling us that the Christian project is entirely subsumed in the effort to police sexuality and maintain a set of iron-clad rules about sex. John Paul II's most lasting theological legacy, especially according to his most zealous defenders, is a complex, holistic account of the human person which is designed to shore up a set of rules about sex and sexuality. Even in the supposedly more enlightened Pope Francis pontificate, we have official publications going on about the "Objectively Transcendent Significance of My Penis" and whatnot. Sexuality is presented as not only complex and fraught, but of fundamental and manifest importance. No wonder these guys have a lot of energy about their sexual orientation.
And this whole thing is in no way limited to the LGBT crowd. Going to the wayback machine, our ol' buddy Dr. Greg's Holy Sex! might be the most neurotic book I have ever read. But what strikes me in going back in reading my posts is how unfazed I was by how crazy that book was. Yeah, yeah, I pointed out the problems and weirdness with the concrete ideas that he has. But only at the end, in the final post, that I really honed on the problem with the book. It is, again, about that weird energy. Saying that something is the greatest thing ever that will revolutionize your life and make you experience God anew is not all that different from saying that it is life-destroyingly terrible. Which is why it is so easy to kinda do both, as Dr. Greg does in Holy Sex! Whether it is amazing or terrible or both, the key point is that sex and sexuality are IMPORTANT and AWESOME. This area of life, somewhat uniquely, is filled in with meaning and power.
Because, as much as Roman Catholicism imparts its energy to gay and lesbian people in an especially aggressive way, it does the same to straight people as well. You take it as a given that all of this is incredibly important and filled in with significance. It's certainly the message I took away from my formation in the Roman Catholic Church. It made me afraid to engage with other people, afraid to stretch myself and take the risk of failure or mistake, because all of this seemed so fraught, so significant, so tied into the fundamentals of who I was (or, more accurately, who I was supposed to be). And, in talking to folks coming out of evangelical backgrounds, it's the same deal over there, if not worse.
Nor should we let "secular" culture off the hook, either. Saying that your fulfillment as a person is predicated on how many of your preferred sex you can get to sleep with you is to invest sex in the same energy that the religious conservatives invest in it. The Pick-Up Artist is really the other side of the coin from Dr. Popcak--they both promise transcendence through boning, they just have different rules. The point is that sexuality is still the locus of meaning and significance as a person, one that is the primary carrier of identity and value.
By contrast, a year-and-a-half ago or so, I reviewed a book called Good Christian Sex. I thought at the time it was a very good book, and I still do. But the more I think about the book, the more I lock in on the best part of it, the important part of it. The best part about the book is not anything Rev. McCleneghan says about sex and sexuality, but what she doesn't say. Good Christian Sex is the first Christian presentation of sex that I have encountered that doesn't begin from the baseline position that your sexuality is a hand grenade, something that threatens to go off at any moment and wreck destruction on those around you. It lacks the IMPORTANCE and AWESOMENESS of most Christian presentations of sex. It's a book that talks about an area of life that is complex and challenging, and offers some practical reflections on how to approach it.
There is a casualness to the book, and that casualness is probably its greatest strength. Maybe we should all calm down a bit and relax about sex. Maybe it just doesn't matter as much as we think.
So, who are the victims of the Sacred narrative around sexuality, in either its conservative or "progressive" forms? All of us. We take a human interaction, one that should be a place of refuge and connection, a moment of intimacy that is hard to find otherwise, and turn it into this grand and terrible thing, one that we must be constantly fearful of and beholden to.
4.
And this whole thing is in no way limited to the LGBT crowd. Going to the wayback machine, our ol' buddy Dr. Greg's Holy Sex! might be the most neurotic book I have ever read. But what strikes me in going back in reading my posts is how unfazed I was by how crazy that book was. Yeah, yeah, I pointed out the problems and weirdness with the concrete ideas that he has. But only at the end, in the final post, that I really honed on the problem with the book. It is, again, about that weird energy. Saying that something is the greatest thing ever that will revolutionize your life and make you experience God anew is not all that different from saying that it is life-destroyingly terrible. Which is why it is so easy to kinda do both, as Dr. Greg does in Holy Sex! Whether it is amazing or terrible or both, the key point is that sex and sexuality are IMPORTANT and AWESOME. This area of life, somewhat uniquely, is filled in with meaning and power.
Because, as much as Roman Catholicism imparts its energy to gay and lesbian people in an especially aggressive way, it does the same to straight people as well. You take it as a given that all of this is incredibly important and filled in with significance. It's certainly the message I took away from my formation in the Roman Catholic Church. It made me afraid to engage with other people, afraid to stretch myself and take the risk of failure or mistake, because all of this seemed so fraught, so significant, so tied into the fundamentals of who I was (or, more accurately, who I was supposed to be). And, in talking to folks coming out of evangelical backgrounds, it's the same deal over there, if not worse.
Nor should we let "secular" culture off the hook, either. Saying that your fulfillment as a person is predicated on how many of your preferred sex you can get to sleep with you is to invest sex in the same energy that the religious conservatives invest in it. The Pick-Up Artist is really the other side of the coin from Dr. Popcak--they both promise transcendence through boning, they just have different rules. The point is that sexuality is still the locus of meaning and significance as a person, one that is the primary carrier of identity and value.
By contrast, a year-and-a-half ago or so, I reviewed a book called Good Christian Sex. I thought at the time it was a very good book, and I still do. But the more I think about the book, the more I lock in on the best part of it, the important part of it. The best part about the book is not anything Rev. McCleneghan says about sex and sexuality, but what she doesn't say. Good Christian Sex is the first Christian presentation of sex that I have encountered that doesn't begin from the baseline position that your sexuality is a hand grenade, something that threatens to go off at any moment and wreck destruction on those around you. It lacks the IMPORTANCE and AWESOMENESS of most Christian presentations of sex. It's a book that talks about an area of life that is complex and challenging, and offers some practical reflections on how to approach it.
There is a casualness to the book, and that casualness is probably its greatest strength. Maybe we should all calm down a bit and relax about sex. Maybe it just doesn't matter as much as we think.
5.
Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. So science teaches us.
This energy that is invested in sexuality, which is then transmitted to us by conduction, has to go somewhere. It is either turned inward, or it is transmitted outward. Neither of these are particularly good solutions. Yes, of course, some people find ways to make it work--either use that energy as fuel to work for or on behalf of others, or channel it into other personal pursuits. But most people struggle mightily with this project, and the energy often comes out in deeply unhealthy ways. Turning it inward can come out as anger or bitterness or resentment--just take a look at Jordan Peterson and the "incels." It can also go outward, where you insist from a person you love (or just the person you happen to be with) some level of personal fulfillment and completeness that no person can possibly provide.
So, who are the victims of the Sacred narrative around sexuality, in either its conservative or "progressive" forms? All of us. We take a human interaction, one that should be a place of refuge and connection, a moment of intimacy that is hard to find otherwise, and turn it into this grand and terrible thing, one that we must be constantly fearful of and beholden to.
This is not to say that sexuality has no meaning or significance--that's just not true. It means a lot to each individual person, and it means a lot to the people that are sharing it. But maybe it doesn't have all this other stuff that we have loaded it down with. Maybe my penis doesn't have transcendent significance and maybe our society will not collapse if we let gay people express their love, and maybe it can't make us completely fulfilled. Maybe it's just a small part of what humans do, on par with the whole host of other things humans do.
Separating out what are essential elements (and difficulties) of two people coming together from all of this excess of meaning we invest in those elements is a complex task. It is hard for us to step out of our own context to parse the fundamental from the excess. And, again, saying that something is not fundamental is not the same thing as saying it's not real--we deal with the consequences of the weight of meaning that has been attached to sexuality, whether we recognize it or not. But we have to try, I think. And that trying begins with striking back on this Sacred narrative around sex--the conservative form, but also the related progressive forms, too. Relationships are relationships, and some of them involve sex and some do not. Sex is a good thing but not a world-historical or necessarily life-changing thing. It is just one part of being human.
Being a girl standing in front of a boy (or a boy standing in front of a girl, or a boy standing in front of a boy, or a non-binary person . . .) is always going to be scary and anxiety-producing. But it doesn't have to be as scary or as anxiety-producing as we have made it. And the extra anxiety we have tacked on is keeping us from sharing a simple human connection. The energy is cooking us from the inside.
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