Noli Irritare Leones

OK, here’s the Christian half of my thoughts on Hugo’s very thoughtful series of posts on discussing sex with the teenagers in his church youth group. In Feeding the Lambs at Laodicea, Hugo shares his wavering about the question of waiting for marriage:

I wonder: if I could have the “best” for them, the complete and utter best, if I could have them “hit the mark” directly, would I want them to wait to become sexually active until they were older? Yes, I would. Would I want them to wait until marriage? In all honesty, I’m not sure. Despite the fact that I have dear friends of mine today who did “wait” for marriage, my own background and life experience still tells me that for most people, that’s an impossibly lofty goal that isn’t even worth shooting for. I wonder if my theology of sex isn’t being informed by my own sense of frailty.

Amy Welborn has been exploring the question of reconciling experience and Christian tradition from a perspective of more adherence to traditional Catholic teaching on sex, as she asks how the Church can speak to people like Andrew Sullivan:

Sullivan’s basic question then and now was, “This is the experience of my life. It is not consistent with what the Church tells me it should be. Who’s right? My experience or the Church’s abstractions?”

As I pointed out at the time, and as those of you who were around discussed, that’s not such a rare question, and it’s not’s limited to the experience of homosexuality. There are, believe it or not, Catholic couples who have used contraception, and are happily married, and have a hard time meshing their experience with the contention that their actions are sinful. People who build up wealth and are content in that life rationalize the words of Jesus in the Gospel about the limits of that kind of happiness. And so on. Many people experience this kind of apparent dissonance between their own lives and the teaching of the Church as it’s presented to them.

The dissonance between what I observe in my own life and traditional Christian sexual morality is way sharper when it comes to homosexuality than when it comes to premarital sex – indeed, in some ways I find Catholic teaching on birth control less of a stumbling block than Catholic teaching on homosexuality (weird though that must seem to conservative Protestants, who firmly reject Catholic teaching on birth control while adamantly agreeing with the Catholic Church on homosexuality). But today’s topic is premarital sex. Christian tradition has been pretty clear on this point: We’re supposed to be against it.

At the same time, like Hugo, though I’ve known a few people who have waited for marriage, I live in a time and place where almost no one actually does this, where asking this almost seems like demanding heroic virtue. Where you take for granted that if teenagers are asked to make public promises to wait for marriage, those promises will eventually be broken. So, how is a Christian to approach this dissonance?

One approach is shown by a site recommended by one of Hugo’s commenters. It turns out to be part of a larger site called Liberated Christians.

Promoting Positive Intimacy and Sexuality Including Responsible Nonmonogamy or Polyamory as a legitimate CHOICE for Christians and others / Exposing false traditions of sexual repression that have no biblical basis. Promoting Intimacy & Other-Centered, Loving Sexuality
Sybian for Maximum G-spot orgasms for women’s pleasure and therapy

Um, OK. Through this site I learn that

Before the middle ages it was allowable for Catholic priests to have multiple wives and mistresses (concubines).

Not bloody likely. The Church was promoting monogamy at least as far back as Tertullian. The fact that, if you look, you can find an occasional person making an exception for marriages in which one partner is completely incapable of having sex can’t be stretched to say that there was ever a time when Christianity as a whole was polyamory-friendly. And there was never a time when it was accepted Church teaching to allow Catholic priests to have harems. Their reading of the Bible looks similarly strained to me. Look, I know some of these Greek words may be difficult to interpret, centuries later. I’ll buy the possibility that some passages may not have had the cast we give them now – work like Boswell’s interpretation of the (relatively few) passages on homosexuality seems plausible to me. And there’s even parts of the Bible – notably the Song of Solomon – which fit just fine in a modern “sex-positive” context. But I’m just not buying that the Bible as a whole is pro-free-sex.

Another approach is to skip the reinterpreting the Bible business, but to agree that traditional Christian sexual morality is simply wrong, repressed, something like the mistaken approval of slavery, that we’ve since moved away from. To tell the truth, I have trouble with this approach, as well. It’s not as if modern sexual morality is so obviously great in its consequences. And it’s not as if, once you’ve conceded that it does make sense to draw some lines, and that, for many people, sex works best when combined with commitment and love, marriage is all that unreasonable a choice as to where to draw the line. At least not intrinsically.

When I think about it, the reasons waiting till marriage is so terribly hard, nowadays, have to do, not so much with the nature of sex and marriage, as with the nature of “nowadays.” We choose our own husbands and wives, and need a long education – thus, we marry relatively late. We’re well nourished; thus we reach puberty relatively early. We mix freely with the opposite sex. We have readily available birth control. All of these are freedoms we welcome, and even the most conservative of us wouldn’t want to live in the opposite of this world – one where we had no say over our spouses, couldn’t move around freely, etc. But they do mean that, if “True Love Waits,” it has to wait rather longer than has been the case in some other cultures.

Which brings me to a third option, what I’d find probably the most plausible really justification for a really lenient Christian sexual morality – take, as your analogy, not slavery, but the taking of interest. The Bible contains a prohibition on taking interest, and, though that provision is in the Old Testament and not the New, it was, for some time, accepted as binding on Christians. This had some unpleasant consequences, due to the peculiar ways in which Jews and Christians interpreted their respective prohibitions – Jews could take interest from Gentiles, and Christians could use Jews by, basically, preventing them from doing much other than lending money, and then condemning them as greedy money-lenders. However, the provision itself was, originally, like other provisions in the Old Testament about things like letting the poor glean in your fields, and forgiving debts in jubilee years, a way of preventing the rich from taking undue advantage of the poor. And, though we now live in a world in which it’s hard not to have some sort of dealing with interest – both paying it and receiving it – the broader principle which the restriction on usury served is still worthwhile. So the third approach would be to say, not that past Christian tradition was bad and repressed, but that it was, perhaps, fitted for a different time – that broader principles need to be lived differently in different times and places. (But then how do you decide what’s still constant, and what’s changing? What actually are the larger values that we still need to hold to, and how do we be sure we’re distinguishing them from our own desires?)

Then there’s the fourth approach, which is, Christian tradition has been right all along, and the modern world is mistaken here. We may not be able to live up to it, but then the flaw is in us, not in what we’re being asked to do. This is not what most liberal Quakers would say – and I am, after all, a member of a liberal Quaker meeting. But, doesn’t it parallel what we would say about war? As Jim Henley put it, in a post about the new Pope:

It’s been tempting to believe the Church would have to change to “stay relevant,” but that’s letting hope do the work of analysis. Consider: many of you opposed the same Iraq War I opposed. During those periods when the polls have run against us, have you felt you needed to drop your opposition to “stay relevant?” No. You cared about the truth as we saw it, that the war was bad for our country and opposition more “relevant” than ever.

Sure, it matters, when advocating a standard, whether people can actually live that standard. At least sometimes, at least when the standard you’re advocating is optional. If it is both true that mandatory celibacy really isn’t that necessary a part of the priesthood, and that priests are much less able to live truly celibate lives than they would be able to live truly faithful married lives, then the Catholic Church would be wise to rethink its position on a married priesthood. But we all have a point where that reasoning stops working, don’t we? A point where we say, OK, this may be hard to live, but it is, in fact, what we ought to be doing. And, as I said above, it’s not as if experience is all that conclusively on the side of the wonderfulness of sexual freedom. So, this fourth approach does actually make some sense.

Finally, one could continue to hold that waiting for marriage is the ideal, what you would want if people “hit the mark” directly, but be very lenient with people missing that mark. This approach makes sense to me, too, if you’re consistent about it. It drives me totally up a wall if you’re really lenient with straight people missing the mark in all kinds of ways, but come down like a ton of bricks on gay people. Via Amy, here’s a nice piece by Ron Belgau on trying to live as a sexually abstinent homosexual – including the difficulties of encountering Christians who attach more stigma to his unacted upon desires than to their own actual sexual acts. But, anyway, mercy is good, if it’s shown to everyone.

I see I haven’t reached any actually useful conclusion, but I’ve blogged quite enough for one day. Maybe more later, or I may turn to other subjects for a while first.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.