Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig I was fascinated by Episcopal priest Tom Ehrich’s recent piece for Religion News, “Sex and the Never-Ending Christian Adolescence.” Given the title I thought this piece might be about a sort of immature sexuality that’s propagated by misconstrual and misapplication of Christian doctrine on sex. This isn’t an insignificant problem; recall that a good number of experts and generally smart people have suggested psychosexual immaturity is in part to blame for the sex crimes perpetrated against children in the Catholic Church. When you’ve got a religion whose principle figures are thought to be in many traditions lifelong virgins (Jesus and his mother Mary) you’re bound to run into some difficulty emphasizing and detailing a morally good sexual maturity — of course, I think the pre-fallen Adam and Eve are great exemplars here, what with the friendship and companionship and shared responsibilities and sexual intimacy and model marriage.
But that wasn’t the point Ehrich was going for. In his piece, ‘never-ending adolescence’ is used pejoratively rather than descriptively to refer to what he calls an “obsession” with sexual ethics among Christians. According to Ehrich, Christians have failed in that our public political agenda has been reduced to little more than electing politicians who will deal correctly with homosexuality and abortion. This is a failure because Christianity of course contains a much broader ethical message, and by focusing on these principles in isolation we run the risk of making the moral life out to be about individual sexual choices rather than a more general ethic of charity and love.
You know me. If Ehrich had stopped right there, I’d be writing an article in praise of his wisdom. It’s true there’s more — much more — to the Christian ethical life than sexual ethics. It’s doubly true that sexual ethics are so titillating and polarizing that their presence in the media often acts as the sole representative of all Christian ethics, and that Christians often wind up in uncomfortable political alliances because they have to choose between scoring on the murkier stuff of fiscal policy or the more clear-cut stuff of sexual ethics, and they wind up going with the latter. This is because, in the USA at least, our political system is bifurcated roughly into the [anti-poor/pro-sex ethics] side and the [pro-poor/anti-sex ethics] side. I hasten to add that neither side actually envisions itself anti-poor or anti-sex ethics, they both think they’re libertarian (e.g. you figure out you own wealth/your own sexual ethics on your own) on those issues.
Where Ehrich fails first is in submitting to that poisonously silly division. It simply, flatly, plainly is not the case that you must submit to a libertine approach to sexuality because you want the poor to be healthily supported and are willing to legislate toward that end. But this is more or less the case Ehrich makes, because he spends the remainder of his article taking a decidedly libertarian and un-Christian approach to sexual ethics, evidently as part of a gameplan aimed at establishing a more soundly Christian political agenda re: poverty and inequality.Here are problems I have with his claims:
1.) Ehrich says Jesus ignored sex.
“We obsess about sex, a topic that Jesus himself ignored.”
Jesus didn’t ignore sexual ethics. That’s just a fact. Second, even if he’d never said anything applicable to sexual ethics, it wouldn’t mean sexual ethics are de-facto dismissed; Jesus never said anything about pedophilia, for example, and we don’t tend to presume having sex with children was just something he had ambiguous feelings about. But anyway, the notion that Jesus “ignored” sexual ethics is just nonsense flat out on its face. Take it away, Rob Gagnon:
“Fourth, it is time to deconstruct the myth of a sexually tolerant Jesus. Three sets of Jesus sayings make clear that, far from loosening the law’s stance on sex, Jesus intensified the ethical demand in this area: (a) Jesus´ stance on divorce and remarriage (Mark 10:1-12; also Matthew 5:32 and the parallel in Luke 16:18; and Paul’s citation of Jesus´ position in 1 Corinthians 7:10-11); (b) Jesus´ remark about adultery of the heart (Matthew 5:27-28); and (c) Jesus´ statement about removing body parts as preferable to being thrown into hell (Matthew 5:29-30 and Mark 9:43-48) which, based on the context in Matthew as well as rabbinic parallels, primarily has to do with sexual immorality.
Simply put, sex mattered to Jesus. Jesus did not broaden the range of acceptable sexual expression; he narrowed it. And he thought that unrepentant, repetitive deviation from this norm could get a person thrown into hell.”
2.) Ehrich says opposition to abortion is unrelated to concern for life.
“We claim to care about life, but our views on abortion aren’t about life; they are about women’s freedom to have sex or to be independent. Proof: We ignore other assaults on life, such as warfare, profit-seeking obesity, addictions and destroying our planet.”
If you take your four-year-old outside and shoot him because he’s throwing off the groove of the orgy you’re trying to host, you have committed two discrete wrongs: you have hosted an orgy and you have killed a person. Abortion is wrong whether the sex was licit (yes, married women have abortions) or illicit. It is very true that a culture of life is about so, so, so much more than reducing or preventing abortion — I’m in total agreement there! But my opposition to abortion is not identical to various sexual ethical principles having to do with fidelity in marriage or monogamy or whatever. Ehrich does enormous damage to any culture of life by suggesting it’s compatible with a licentious, unprincipled sexual ethic, and he also falls into the old, tired “abortion is about keeping women down” canard, which I’ve dismantled about four hundred times.
3.) Ehrich seems to say any scriptural sexual ethic is ‘cherry picked.’ But he’s kinda mealy-mouthed about it.
“We claim to care about Scripture, but our cherry-picking of a few Bible verses about, say, homosexuality, isn’t reverence for Scripture. Proof: We feel free to ignore the rest of what the Bible says.”
I once asked a renowned Biblical scholar how to avoid getting made fun of and harangued in the public sphere for being openly religious and reasoning in a Christian way. He said: “don’t be mealy-mouthed.” When you bob and weave and try to avoid owning up to whatever it is you believe, people smell blood in the water — they sense you’re not secure in what you think and they shred you open from that tiny perforation of doubt. Ehrich’s “say” is just such mealy-mouthedness; I can’t tell if he really does mean to implicate homosexuality alone, or if he’s trying to use it as one example of many Christian ethical proscriptions against sexual behaviors. Either way, he makes the irrecoverable, fatal mistake of suggesting that Christian sexual ethics are not compatible with the ‘rest of what the Bible says’ — as though the total Christian ethic is separable in some way from Christian sexual ethics. This is false. They are not separable. Back me up, Pope Francis:
“Despite the tide of secularism which has swept our societies, in many countries – even those where Christians are a minority – the Catholic Church is considered a credible institution by public opinion, and trusted for her solidarity and concern for those in greatest need. Again and again, the Church has acted as a mediator in finding solutions to problems affecting peace, social harmony, the land, the defence of life, human and civil rights, and so forth. And how much good has been done by Catholic schools and universities around the world! This is a good thing. Yet, we find it difficult to make people see that when we raise other questions less palatable to public opinion, we are doing so out of fidelity to precisely the same convictions about human dignity and the common good.”
Emphasis mine. The Bible’s teaching on sexual ethics arises from the same divine truth as its teaching on poverty and exploitation. The ethics have to do with the intended purpose of humankind and God’s will for our communion with one another. Ehrich errs in suggesting that Scriptural witness to a legitimate sexual life is weak and/or inconsequential and “cherry picked” compared to the encompassing whole of Christian ethics, when in reality that notion itself undermines any possibility of a legitimate encompassing whole. The right position, in my thought, is that sexual ethics are a necessary part of the Christian ethical life. They’re not all you need, but you need them.
Lastly, I caution Ehrich’s rhetorical strategy. It’s as easy to say Christians who are serious about sexual ethics are nothing more than “adolescent boys” dreaming about sex all day as it is to say the poor who cry out for justice are nothing more than greedy, envious wanna-be rich people who didn’t hit it big. In fact, that the poor are merely envious is something trashsacks like Ken Langone say all the time, and it is the direct correlate of the type of charge Ehrich is making. These kinds of bad-faith arguments are as remarkably easy to make as they are wholly non-falsifiable and unproductive. I do not make them. If a hermeneutic is wrong on the merits, it’s wrong on the merits — but for the sake of unity and actual progress, I resist the urge to impute sinful motives into worthy projects.
I understand Christians like Ehrich feel torn. You have a political party offering you a reasonably sound position on sexual ethics and an unconscionable approach to poverty and the environment, and then you have one party offering you a reasonably sound position on poverty and the environment and an unconscionable approach to sexual ethics. But if you give up either half of the equation, you’ve lost something profound. Here is the secret: Christianity is radically countercultural and deeply politically inconvenient. It is no party’s friend because its kingdom is not of this earth. It can seek the good and accomplish good through the work of earthly institutions, but it is our job as Christians to hold the hard line and refuse to give up any portion of our ethics to make ourselves politically palatable. Ehrich is right to see an unbalanced focus in Christian discourse, but wrong to chalk it up t the weakness or supposed insignificant of the principles themselves instead of decrying a political system that makes perilous choices necessary.