Monday, August 20, 2007

Another Kind Of Adultery

Toward the end of a course on professional ethics I had been teaching for pastoral counselors in training, one of the members reported on a recently completed session that she said had unnerved her to the point of making her dread its follow-up. Her case unnerved all of us, too, partly because at the time none of us, myself included, had dealt with anything like it. Over the years to come, all of us would be dealing with cases like it in abundance.

Our colleague's counselee was a 32 year old avowedly hetereosexual man who was terrified that his wife would discover his sexual activity outside the marriage relationship --- with a series of men --- and leave him. The more the man disclosed about himself, the more committed he seemed to be to his marriage, the less homosexually oriented he appeared to be, the more defensive he was about the innocence of his one night stands, and the more confused his therapist became, to some extent about her pre-conceived notions of what homosexuality is, but more especially about where her professional responsibility in this case lay. Whatever the course of treatment, her obligation to protect confidential disclosures would remain binding. However, the man's behavior was putting his wife at risk, and the counselor was feeling more identification with the partner who was not in therapy than with the partner who was.

With this case, and some of my own that soon followed, I first began my research into the psychologically murky waters of casual, gay sexual activity engaged in by men who are neither homosexual nor bi-sexual in orientation, and who see no reason why their behaviors should undermine their intimate and often deeply committed heterosexual relationships. I am no less startled by what I find in the literature now than I was then. For one thing, this pattern of behavior is disturbingly widespread. The Centers for Disease Control puts the number of straight men who often engage in secret sexual activity with other men at 3 million plus. In one recent survey, 10% of all the married men who participated reported engaging in same-sex behavior the previous year.

And secondly, most people who are writing about this issue continue to focus on therapeutic strategy rather than on ethical reflection. Typically, the discussions revolve around helping straight men whose forays into gay sex have become a problem to explore unresolved conflicts from childhood as the root of at least part of it, and to do this in an atmosphere of non-judgmental, empathic, supportive responses on the part of the therapist, with the patient's well-being and no one else's the principal concern throughout. Therapeutically speaking, the problem comes down to helping their clients appreciate the potentially self-destructive consequences of their activities, and on the basis of that insight-based appreciation, modify them in a healthier direction.

Ethically speaking, though, the problem lies elsewhere. As my supervisee pointed out in our group clearly and passionately, a husband who fools around with other men puts his wife at serious risk for life-threatening diseases, and a counselor who does not somehow (the big question is always: How?) intervene on her behalf is guilty of a serious moral offense, whatever her obligation may be to confidentiality as a standard of care. Gay men, of course, are not the only transmitters of AIDS in the population; a husband committing adultery with another woman also puts his wife at risk. Any and every kind of extra-marital sexual activity --- whether gay, lesbian, heterosexual, with one accomplice or many, in one night stands or in long-term relationships --- threatens the health of the marriage partner. But it also threatens the integrity of the marriage relationship to the core and compromises, sometimes fatally, the character of one who pledges himself or herself to another and then breaks the pledge by not keeping only to the other sexually.

Once upon a time, couples whose marriages were faltering because of adultery usually conceded that for the marriage to survive, the messing around had to stop. Further, most couples whose marriages did survive came to a deeper grasp of the reasons why this is so. Right now, though, it is unclear to me whether men who are adulterating their marriages by having sex with other men are at all cognizant of what the moral foundation of marriage is all about. I do know that what passes for therapy with this population is pretty discouraging on this score. My specific concern here opens out on a more general one, about the massive erosion across our culture of the understanding that committed relationships are intended to serve moral ends even more than utilitarian ones.

Monday, August 06, 2007

What's Right About The New Atheism

Several years before some of my former classmates would be heading to Woodstock, I spent a memorable Holy Week with a bunch of fellow preachers on a Florida beach, striking up conversations with kids willing to pause long enough in their chugging to do a little praying. The evenings were spent under a big tent in the sand, engaging in coffee-house style give and take on, of all things, the question of what may have happened to God. That week, TIME magazine had put out its famous --- or infamous, depending upon your point of view --- feature, front page and all, of the really big God-is-dead kahuna of that generation, Thomas J.J. Altizer. And neither the magazine nor church folk in general were giving him an even break.

A year later, in connection with my work as a denominational chaplain on a state university campus, Tom and I got it on in front of the student body, and then of local clergy, and I revelled in the experience of listening to people who really understood what the "radical theology" agenda of that generation was all about. It was primarily about, well, theology. Not God, but human statements about God, especially the misstatements.

Altizer, along with Richard Rubenstein, and to a lesser extent Paul van Buren and Harvey Cox, were working overtime to help us understand how many things were wrong about the traditional idea of God that Christian theology had been transmitting for centuries, and to develop a sense of zeal about replacing it with a better one. As a group, what they were after was a new conceptualization that would respect the dynamic, changing essence of deity, that would close the gap between divinity and humanity in the direction of the former, that would substitute hard thinking for mushy doxology in the face of the problem of evil, and that would help people make peace with an increasingly secular society. Altizer and Rubenstein confused things a lot with their sloganesque, "God is dead" talk. But "classical theism" had been dead for a good while, and they knew it.

In the light of this brief bit of nostalgia, perhaps it will come as no surprise that I have been delighting in the break-outs of atheistic thinking in today's popular (actually, wildly popular) writing. For one thing, this generation's final four --- Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Bennett --- are every bit as captivating as the Altizer gang was, and behind their bombast, carefully calibrated of course to produce record royalties in durationless time, there is the same trenchant and important critique of traditional ideas about God that need just as much correcting as they did two generations ago. Further, what these guys have been writing is a whole lot better for our mental health than what we have been getting from most of their ranting and raving opponents.

As each of these writers in his own way points out, what the world needs now is anything but violence-inciting mythologies, crammed down peoples' intercessory prayers by authoritarian religious establishments hell-bent on doing in anyone and everyone with a different religious coding in their DNA. And what the church needs now is anything but the kind of anti-intellectualism, especially in the form of biology-bashing, that has been losing the more thoughtful of us friends in the secular marketplace for decades. Galileo, finally, is in, but Darwin is still taking his lumps, and that is just downright embarrassing. If you aren't cringing about creationism now decked out in the fancy language of intelligent design, read Natalie Angier's chapter on evolutionary biology in her delightful new book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

On Easter Sunday those forty years ago, I got asked by a number of my fellow parishioners why, in their word, I chose to "dignify" all those Spring Break shenanigans by showing up on a littered beach with my religious t-shirt on. When I went on to tell about a Good Friday night marathon discussion under our packed tent on the beach, with the death not of Christ, but of God, as the theme, several of them freaked out. I began to see that their take on evangelism was a good bit different from mine. For them, good Christians simply do not give the time of day to God-deniers. For me, the only way to get a hearing for the truth about God at all is to be willing to take all the time in the world with them. Anybody for whom that truth is either not news at all, or not the kind of news that portends good for anybody, is missing a lot from life. And that is something every lover of God should be concerned about.