Race, Gender, and So-Called Normal Sex

On a recent walk through our neighborhood park, what especially caught my eye were the more than usual skin colors of the families enjoying themselves in spite of blistering summer heat and blazing outdoor grills. Among the Moms and Dads, there was a lot of hand holding and even some smooching going on, in between delivering hot dogs at the pace of a ball park vendor. On my way home, I waved to another neighbor, who was hosting a party for his church friends --- his gay church friends. The happy laughter, the splashes from the backyard pool, and the cold cut trays being carried gingerly across the lawn added up to just as delightful a scene as the one that captivated me at the park.

It is painful to acknowledge that scenes like these would not have been deemed delightful where I grew up. The word my childhood neighbors would have used to describe them is: frightful. More members of our own communities than I care to think about are still uttering this same kind of condemnation. One I know sums up his take on scenes like these this way: They are just not NORMAL! When I push him a little, he will admit that he has reluctantly come to terms with what he calls mixed relationships. But gay and lesbian ones are another story. And so it goes in society and in churches: almost normalized hetero-racial relationships, and almost demonized homosexual ones.

The fact that racism is under siege in a lot of places should count for more than it does in the current thinking of many church folk about what so-called normal people do when they behave as the sexual beings God created all of us to be. It took a long time for people to figure out how to sustain civilization without enslaving large numbers of people on its periphery. But when they did finally get it figured out (unfortunately, not everywhere), the church no longer needed to distort its own gospel message for the sake of legitimizing racial discrimination. It also took a long time for people to figure out how to sustain civilization without co-opting every woman thirteen years and older for the purpose of replenishing the population. But they got this figured out, too (again, not everywhere), and the church no longer needs to distort that same gospel message for the sake of a wholly constricted and constricting theology of sexuality.

Even a casual look at the history of Christian thinking about sex makes plain how accommodating the church has been through the centuries to societal change, in its willingness to adjust its teachings --- radically, at times --- to altered circumstances. Consider, by way of example, the foundational affirmation of both Judaism and Christianity that in having been created male and female, human beings are invited to be fruitful and multiply. It must not have been easy for the first Christians to resist pressures to deform the invitation into a command. Struggling to survive in an Empire that needed every woman of childbearing age to give birth many times over just to keep the population constant, the church nevertheless stood firm against the challenge.

But not by sticking to principle. Rather, it repudiated principle altogether, and changed its view of normal sex drastically. Sexuality expressed ideally through intercourse aimed at both enjoyment and conceiving offspring quickly gave way to a new notion of sexuality expressed ideally through a celibate life of renunciation. Marriage, once considered the fulfillment of human nature, came to be viewed instead as a reluctant compromise conceded to those who could not control their lustful urges. The celibate life came to be taught as the far superior life, and by the fourth century people who doubted this new teaching were considered to be verging on heresy.

By the time of the Protestant Reformation, celibacy over marriage as the sexual ideal began fading away, the demise aided by both the profundity of Martin Luther and the licentiousness of Henry VIII. But almost as if frightened by its new (biblical) liberality, the church saw fit once again to dampen sexual enthusiasm, this time not by clinging to celibacy, but by binding the sex act to the intention to reproduce. This repressive view of normal sex has persisted, even though its natural consequence would stretch already shrinking resources around the globe to the breaking point.

Neither celibacy nor a no-sex-without-conception mentality remotely resembles what so-called sex is. As ideals imposed oppressively on everyone, both need serious re-visiting, just as the defense of slavery needed and is getting serious re-visiting. What we might re-envision normal sex to be, concretely, is the subject of the next column. I promise it will not be an R-rated one.