On Sexual Frankness at Church

Maybe "more freedom" isn't always free for everyone

In the weeks since Beautiful Union-gate (please see Beth Felker Jones’ excellent review for a critique), it’s been common to hear some criticism of how the church in its virtual expression reacted to this book. The first is that critique is mob violence, which, frankly, we’ll have to get to at another time. The second, though, is reframing critical reactions to this excessively graphic book as prudishness. “Do we really want to go back to squeamishness about sex? Isn’t it better that we can talk openly about it?”

This is usually, but not always, a response from Christian men, and it comes from one of two positions:

1) Christians used to be prudes, that was bad, now we aren’t, and this is an improvement or

2) No one’s actually prudish anymore, we just act shocked when pastors do and say things that are comparable to what’s on Netflix.

The latter criticism is silly. Church is not TV. Theological discourse is not HBO. Just because I’m willing to tolerate an overindulgent scene in Game of Thrones while waiting for Arya to come back doesn’t mean I want that experience at church. What I find comfortable in my own living room is not equally comfortable while trying to worship with 150 adult men. Likewise, smut in entertainment is optional. I don’t have to read Fifty Shades of Gray, and neither do you.. But participation in Christian spaces isn’t optional for most women of faith. So: my standards are higher for pastors than they are from HBO.

This leaves us with the first objection. Isn’t it better to be able to discuss sex openly in church? Maybe. It depends what “able” means. Should people to be “unable” to discuss sex in Christian spaces? No.

But, people can’t discuss sex in Christian spaces right now, either.

Freedom is never distributed evenly among unequal groups. Birth control has ostensibly made us all more sexually free. But effortlessly sterile sex is a benefit men get more than women. Women are less likely to be pregnant against their wishes, but they’re still overwhelmingly responsible for paying for birth control, managing side effects, and dealing with unexpected pregnancies. Meanwhile it’s still culturally normal for men to refuse condoms. Sure, birth control means there’s more sexual freedom - but there’s even more freedom for men.

If your church has no women in the pulpit, leading seminars, writing curriculums, or critiquing the content men produce, then by definition women have no freedom to talk about sex in church.

So, in the same way: is it actually true that frank discussion of sex in Christian material makes us all more free? No! In many evangelical churches, women don’t speak or lead at all. They don’t speak from the pulpit. They don’t lead seminars on sex for a mixed audience. They don’t secure the status and platforms that male pastors of large churches have.

If your church has no women in the pulpit, leading seminars, writing curriculums, or critiquing the content men produce, then by definition women have no freedom to talk about sex in church.

Women only have a right to hear frank speech from men. If your church only has male pastors and a frank attitude towards sex, the freedom you’re describing is limited to men being franker than they used to be. Because of this, when we “talk about sex” in evangelical churches, we’re not really talking about sex, per se. We’re talking about men experiencing sex. By design women don’t shape this conversation. They don’t have authority to teach.

The presence of pastors’ wives in these conversations can’t add much. If they’re raised in a purity-based system that decentralizes female pleasure and denies information about female anatomy, wives may not know how to talk about sex except with the language men give them.

So if you want to keep women out of the pulpit and from teaching men, and if you don’t have a plan for how women can learn about their bodies (and in a purity-based system, you probably don’t), we’re not really talking about “increased frankness” in church about sex. We’re talking about men having more freedom to talk about what they like, what they want, and even what they think women like.

Is this good? No. What straight men can learn from straight men about sex with women is limited. When you read or listen to content on sex from evangelical men, it usually devolves into men gassing each other up for sex that sounds like a lot of fun unless you’re a woman.

Frequent, penetrative sex with uninhibited women who love what men love (plus maybe a little mushy stuff beforehand), and who work out, clean up, and count calories to be sexually desirable. (Read Sheila Gregoire's studies of marriage books for examples if you haven't seen this).

Who cares if we've finally achieved talking like this in church? This is the same view of sex we see in the vast majority of entertainment, to say nothing of porn. Sex is men having frequent orgasms with hot women who love men having orgasms. The only thing that seems to make this distinctly Christian is the insistence that this is only supposed to happen in marriage. But the kind of sex it valorizes isn’t good for marriages – to say nothing of whether it’s good for women. It puts pressure on women to make this sex happen, and it disappoints men whose wives can’t keep up or are left dissatisfied.

So I don’t think it’s good for men, or for women. But there’s also a darker side of this. The right to insert sexuality into a discourse, and to speak of sex from your own perspective, is a way of demonstrating power. Men and women in church do not share this right. Men have the right to speak about sex from their perspective and set the priorities. Women don't.

Men have the right to stand at a pulpit and opine the inhospitabilty of women who do not have enough enthusiastic sex. Women do not have the right to stand at a pulpit and talk about the ungenerosity of husbands who don’t care about their pleasure.

The power is not just in who talks, but in what the goal of talking about sex is. The goal is not to foster sexual relationships that are mutually enjoyable. The goal is for men to name and receive what they want. It demonstrates that men are central.

Or, if the discourse is about both people enjoying themselves, the problem of the blind leading the blind is insurmountable. To return to the subject of Beautiful Union, as much as Butler says that women should enjoy sex too, he doesn’t demonstrate awareness of how that that happens. He doesn't seem to know what words like "foreplay" or "stimulation" mean. I'm pointing this out not to trash a book that's been trashed to hell and back, but to point out that the problem of men talking to other men about sex means it's hard to even carry out good intentions. Men just can't drive this bus by themselves very far.

More freedom for men also increases the possibility that men with bad intentions will abuse it. If you’ve read case studies of clergy sexual abuse, one thing that comes up consistently is the role of breaking down boundaries with the victim. The pastor has the right to ask sexually explicit questions, to joke about sex, to test. The victim does not have the right to respond with her own questions, to refuse answers or to say that the pastor is out of line.

The freedom for men to be explicit in such settings is taken for granted. For women, it is granted in response to the man - to tell him what he wants to hear.

So to go back to our original question: isn’t it better that we can talk about sex frankly in church? Here are possible answers for this:

1) Yes, it's better. It's better if the conversation is actually frank from all sides. Sermon series about marriage and sexuality should share the floor between men and women, who have equal authority to correct and hold each other accountable.

It’s also better if your church is non-hierarchical and women are empowered to draw boundaries. Authority to teach and discuss sensitive subjects needs to be in the hands of mature, mutually accountable adults and who represent a range of ages who are committed to safety. Men generally don’t know what safety looks like for women, so men on their own can’t handle this task.

2) Or: No, it’s not better. I've assumed that your church is willing to give women power, instead of one guy and his ten closest friends, to deal with this subject. However: if you are committed to the platform of one man, and you are not willing to have authoritative women with him, then: don’t talk about sex. Return to prudery. The conversation that Christian men are having with each other is not productive or insightful.

I do not like option 2. But I like it better than what we have. What we have now is so insular and distorted that the men leading the conversation have lost sight of how ingrown and bizarre it has become. It would be better to stop than continue.

People will say this is overly restrictive. But: if women shouldn’t have the freedom to talk about sex in church, then men should observe the same limits. Not because it’s fair, but then because the limits must be correct. It can’t be true that talking about sex from a male perspective is Christian content, but sex from a female perspective is alienating.

There’s no way Christian podcasts or publications would platform material about how a woman who receives oral sex or uses a vibrator is like Pentecost, even though the scriptural and traditional warrant for depicting ejaculation as atonement is exactly as good (nil). The latter, however, continues to enjoy defense.

The problem isn’t that the theology is worse in my silly counterexample, it’s that penises have been upgraded to church-worthy subjects but clitorises haven’t. But if one shouldn’t be discussed in church, neither should the other.

It also can’t be the case that invoking “natural theology” (as Butler does) while working with a mythologized picture of reproduction (receptive women house growing sperm-seed, which is the generative principle of nature) is more appropriate for church than truth about what the uterus and fallopian tubes do to cause fertilization and implantation. Women’s bodies are not passive. This is an image that is imposed on women by long-dead men with tenuous grasps on gynecology.

If the image of a seed in dirt as a model of reproduction is useful to think theologically with, despite the fact it has nothing to do with reality, then surely the cilia that move an egg cell down the fallopian tube are even more useful. Cilia and fallopian tubes are real!

My strong suspicion is that men don’t want to hear a theology of cervical secretions preached in church. To which I say, fine. I don’t either. Let’s also not talk about semen.

If we’re going to be shameless about bodies and sex, do it. Talk about menstruation, childbirth, menopause, everything. Use all of it to think about God. Have a theology of periods, preached from the pulpit on Sunday morning. Use a gynecology textbook in your sermons. Remember that time we all had to listen to the really graphic depiction of crucifixion on Good Friday? Let’s do that at Christmas but with vaginal delivery and mastitis.

Oh? Is that gross? Get your head out of the gutter! Come on – didn’t Jesus get here by Mary pushing him through a birth canal? You must not have read the part of the Bible where God describes himself as in labor. Genesis tells us about Sarah’s periods. God’s comfortable talking about periods. Aren’t you? Or don’t you think that bodies are good? Don’t be such a Gnostic. What a prude.

Or don’t do that. But not because that would

be less appropriate for church than any other sermon on sexuality is. What I don’t accept is that it’s important for men to talk about sex while women take notes. We can all be shameless, or we can all be private.

If the options I have laid out are unappealing to you, I would suggest you actually don’t want sexual frankness. You want women to listen to you while you talk about penises.

So maybe sit with that for a minute before you come after me telling me that I’m the weird one.