Ben posted a link to this great article on sex-positive evangelicals. Sex as a topic has come up quite a bit recently. Rob posted a challenge regarding pastoral talk about sex and money. The usual odd conversations have turned to this often avoided topic. And I've even recently been talking with a friend about a new ministry addressing human trafficking and the sex-slave industry.
The temptation is to jump into this with both feet. But Amanda Marcotte makes some excellent points - we have to consider out agenda. I agree with her that is our renewed interest in sex has an ulterior motive, and especially one we are willing to BS about, then we need to think twice about opening up the sex-talk conversation. Seriously, sex is not another tool in the arsenal of evangelism! Sex should be sacramental - making it instrumental simply further detracts from anything we've tried to say about the nature of marriage. Seriously.
There is a reality of frankness about sexuality that I do think we need to navigate. It is not easy to talk about sex in ways that we would not consider. But how much of that discomfort is because we have somehow internalized a warped understanding of sexuality. I'm not proposing that we should introduce the sex-talk into our ecclesial experience, far from it. In fact to address Rob's challenge, I'd rather never talk about money from the pulpit either! (That's not going to win me friends, doh!) But it does need to become a part of our community dialogue. We have to be able to walk through a very confusing minefield of sexual possibilities, and we have to have a good theology of sexuality to do this well. Hence, my insistence that sexuality should be sacramental.
I'd love to interact with your thoughts on Marcotte's piece. I think she makes some very good points.
2 comments:
Because USA "culture" in particular, is heavily influenced by the sex and body negative double minded sex-paranoid mind of puritanism it is almost impossible (indeed IMPOSSIBLE) for there to be any honest individual or collective conversation or coming to terms with the all important emotional-sexual dimensions of our being.
And thus for the emergence of a culture of sanity.
What you are as an emotional-sexual being IS what you ARE altogether in every aspect of your life---no exceptions.
Plus it takes much much more than mere conversation for any and everyone (one at a time) to understand and thus renounce, or rather transcend, their sex and body negative cultural conditioning.
I've railed against the puritan vilification of sexuality, but I'm actually more convinced now that it might have been kept alive through the puritans, but throughout the history of Christianity. That makes it more than just a Protestant problem - I dare say it is a Western problem.
I think about how some of the claims of sexual liberation that are an overreaction - like homosexual promiscuity. This does not help the cause of a homosexual identity - but I get that the impulse is a response to repression. I want to be careful though - I'd never say that because it is a response it is excusable. Our choices are always our responsibility.
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