religion gets sexier

I feel that in the past week I’ve seen a surprising number of articles about religious perspectives on dating and sex pop up in the mainstream media. The New York Times today reports on the “marriage banquet” (aka ’speed dating for Muslims’) that happened at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention recently here in Chicago. The Society sees it as a solution for providing choice to young Muslims in a controlled atmosphere with parents nearby, without the risks of typical unsupervised dating. “Basically, for conservative Muslims, dating is a euphemism for premarital sex,” the author of the Times article notes. Hence the name “marriage banquet” rather than actual “speed dating.”

Far from avoiding euphemisms, it would seem that evangelical Christians are working towards becoming much more straightforward about their sex lives, or at least two different stories in The Revealer seem to indicate so. The first, “Jelly Finger Fundamentalism,” points to a Mother Jones‘ article titled “The Way of All Flesh” reviewing a Christian sex site called The Marriage Bed. JoAnn Wypijewski, author of the Mother Jones article, does a good job, I think, of analyzing some issues that are definitely raised but which the writers of The Marriage Bed don’t seem to address. Notably, by simply pouring more ‘allowables’ on those who are married, it doesn’t deal with the real issue that many who are unmarried, including a large number of teens not only raised in the church but who have participated in abstinence programs such as True Love Waits still tend to have sex before marriage, or that keeping yourself from all sexual thoughts until one particular day and then suddenly going wild with them is, in many ways, a pretty strange thing to do. Or that, as Wypijewski points out, this notion of Christian sex seems to reap the benefits of the discoveries of gay culture while completely denying homosexuals any sort of sex life whatsoever. Summing it up she says, “Religion having conceded to them [the married] a little piece of that power [in sex], it patrols the ramparts of right loving the way it always has, comforting an elect by damning all others.”

I think it important to note that I think The Revealer article actually makes a pretty basic mistake in titling their piece “Jelly Finger Fundamentalism.”  I think this is revealed (pardon the pun) if one compares The Marriage Bed authors (husband and wife Paul and Lori Byerly) to the next Christian sex expert they highlight, Minister Joe Beam, profiled in this MSNBC story.  Beam runs a seminar called “Love, Sex, and Marriage” for Christian couples in which he encourages them to have ‘hotter sex.’  Beam, like the Byerlys, has a set of sexual behaviors that he says are okay, and some which he says aren’t.  But what these are come directly from the difference in hermeneutical method used by each.  In this, the Byerlys are merely evangelical, while Beam is a fundamentalist.  Interestingly, MSNBC also does not make a distinction here.  They report:

There are rules many in the secular world reject. You have to be married. You have to be heterosexual. Other prohibitions include no sex with animals, no incest, no lust for people other than your spouse, no adultery (and that includes consensual threesomes and group sex) and no porn, rape or prostitution. You can’t harm the body. And you can’t have sex during a woman’s menstrual period.

If that last one seems like an outlier — there is no particular health reason to avoid sex during menstruation among monogamous, disease-free couples — you don’t understand Beam’s world view.

Scripture is his authority. Like other evangelicals, he believes the New Testament is the literal and infallible word of God. So when the book of Acts says, “You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality,” that’s all he needs to know.

The Byerlys also discuss the sex during menstruation issue.  Their take is this:

The Old Testament law had many rules about “body fluids,” including not having sex during menstruation. Because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, we are no longer under the Law, and we do not have to avoid eating pork, avoid clothes made of two materials, or avoid marital relations during menstruation. Some suggest abstaining from sex during menstruation is a part of the Law we are supposed to still keep, but these same people ignore all the other restrictions given for a menstruating woman; among other things menstruating women were not allowed to cook or share a bed with their husband. There is no Biblically-valid way to separate the Old Testament instructions regarding menstruation into two categories, so we must either follow all of them or be free from all of them. To go deeper into this, we have a great general teaching on the Law of Moses by Bro. Buddy Martin.

It seems to me that it’s important to note the differences in these approaches.  The first takes a verse, and says, I’m going to base a moral rule on what this verse says alone, in its immediate context.  The second approach says that although we depend on the Bible for instruction, we have to place our reading of it in a much more informed context, and this could alter the literal understanding of the verse.  The first is fundamentalist; the second is more generally evangelical.  I wonder if the common failure to distinguish between these results from a more general mixture of fundamentalism and evangelicalism these days than previously, or if it just speaks of a lack of subtlety in reporting.  But it is important, because it can impact so much of a Christian’s thought and practice; from their understanding of gender and other social roles to, apparently, when one can have sex even inside marriage.

All that aside, it is interesting that the press has taken a sudden interest in the romantic/sex lives of believers of all sorts, and perhaps more notably, that these new institutions and practices are being created right now.  I think it really speaks to the way allegedly secular cultural changes impact both the beliefs and practices of religion.  Rather than strictly traditional arranged marriages, we have speed dating; rather than guilt-filled discussions of sex, we have encouragement to engage in a variety of sexual practices.  (And who knows what will be next?  Concern is voiced on the Byerly’s site over the inability to find sex toys without encountering pornographic images – will we soon see Christian ‘adult’ stores, with a variety of items packaged with labels reading “pleasure your spouse”?)