Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (10 page)

-Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex

Saudi Arabia has religious police charged with maintaining the public morals. They arrest people who are in violation of the religious dress or behavior codes of the kingdom. Thus, if two people kiss in public, they are subject to arrest and prosecution by the religious authorities. If a woman is not properly covered in public, she is seen as a public danger and prosecuted for exposing an ankle or face. Consequences can be severe for both the individual and the family. As we discussed in
Chapter 5
, shame is an enormously effective tool because it brings communal pressure to bear on both the individual and the family.

While we may be horrified at the notion of religious police, there are ways to control by different means. The guilt cycle is an effective method of creating self-policing and self-censorship. It works like this.

Each religion has certain things that are forbidden or sinful. Children are taught these with many examples, stories and subtle signals as they grow up. In the area of sex, the secretiveness, subtle language and behavior of adults and occasional public examples all work to infect a child with fear of transgressing. Also, punishments, ostracism and humiliation often occur when sexual behavior is discovered or suspected, ensuring that these lessons are internalized. If a person violates the code, there is no way to hide, the god knows you did it, even if your parents do not, and the god will punish you unless you confess. These are powerful ideas for a child. Children are very susceptible to magical thinking at three to seven years of age, when they’re being taught magical ideas about gods watching or punishing them. It is a pattern of thinking that is embedded in the child's mind and often continues in adulthood.

Fast forward to today. A child learns that you must pray for forgiveness when you do something bad. If you do not pray or do not confess, god will punish you. This scenario sets up the guilt cycle.
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When you transgress or sin, you must return to your personal religion for forgiveness. Catholics do not confess their sins to Baptist ministers. Baptists don’t ask forgiveness from Muslim clerics. You must seek forgiveness from
the place where you learned about sin. It is as if the religion infects you with the disease and then gives you a fake cure.

The former Muslim, now atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali gives a perfect example of the guilt cycle in her excellent book
Infidel
(2007). A popular local imam, Abshir, began spending time with her. In his sermons, he preached strongly against intimacy before marriage and sinful thoughts, but his behavior was somewhat different. Ali says,

I was having more and more sinful thoughts. When we were alone Abshir would kiss me, and he could really kiss. It was long and gentle and thrilling and therefore sinful. Afterward I would tell him how bad I felt in the eyes of Allah, how much that bothered me. And Abshir would say, “If we were married, then it wouldn’t be sinful. We must exercise willpower and not do it anymore.” So for a day or so we would steel ourselves and refrain, and then the next day we would look at each other and just kiss again. He would say, “I’m too weak, I think of you all day long.”

She concludes,

In hindsight I don’t think of Abshir as a creep at all. He was just as trapped in a mental cage as I was. Abshir and I and all the other young people who joined the Muslim Brotherhood movement wanted to live as much as possible like our beloved Prophet, but the rules of the last Messenger of Allah were too strict, and their very strictness led us to hypocrisy. At the time, though, I could see only that either Abshir or Islam was thoroughly flawed, and of course I assumed it was Abshir.

Sexual drive pushes a person one direction, religion uses the guilt cycle to push back. The internal conflict creates misery and self-blame, leading right back to the religion. An effectively infected person will learn from childhood the things that are sinful and develop an internal moral police force to keep watch on all thoughts and deeds.
This is not the same as a conscience.
People develop a conscience with or without religion. Our culture teaches murder and cheating are wrong; we don’t need religion to know this.
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Guilt comes from a different place in our mental experience, a place that is independent of general cultural training and directly related to religious indoctrination. That is why two people may feel guilt about different things while being equally convinced that cheating and murder are wrong.

A simple mental experiment will illustrate this. Mary, a Catholic, was raised from birth to go to mass and pray each week. If she misses mass, she feels guilty. Sally, a Presbyterian from childhood, was taught that church attendance is good but not mandatory. If she misses church, she doesn’t feel too guilty about it as long as she has a good excuse – like visiting her elderly grandmother. Judy, an atheist from birth, wouldn’t dream of wasting a Sunday in church and feels no guilt whatsoever. All three women firmly believe that cheating and murder are wrong and abhor such behavior. This thought experiment shows how each religion imprints a unique guilt pattern on their adherents but has no bearing on whether a person is law abiding or moral.

Of course, there is also non-religious guilt. We usually feel it when we make a bad choice or mistreat someone. But non-religious guilt is directly related to widely held cultural expectations, whereas religious guilt is clearly related to a specific religion. Using this model, it is possible to learn what people feel guilty about and trace it directly back to religious childhood training.

Religious training may lead people to feel guilty when:

• I don’t put money in the offering plate at church.
  
• I promise to pray for someone and then forget when I say my prayers.
  
• I use the Lord’s name in vain.
  
• I think a lustful thought.
  
• I know someone needs to be saved and I don’t witness to them.
  
• I walk by a beggar and don’t put any money in his can.
  
• I forget to bring my Bible to church.
  
• I don’t do what the Lord wants me to do, like go to the hospital to visit the sick.
  
• I don’t spend enough time preparing my Sunday School lesson.
  
• I pray for selfish things.
  
• I put my loved ones above others.
  
• I feel conflicted over a decision, knowing that if I were a better Mormon (or Christian or Muslim) the answer would be very clear to me.
  

This list could go on and on. Religious guilt is a bottomless pit. The distinction between religious guilt and the more generic cultural guilt is important in understanding how religion impacts the mental life of religious people. Having a religious police officer in your head makes the job of keeping you infected with religion much easier. No religious police required.

Growing up in a religious environment, children learn what not to do sexually. They learn that some practices or ideas, such as homosexuality, lust, masturbation and pornography are sinful. These ideas are embedded in the minds of children years before they are ready for marriage, so it’s no surprise that many religious people have little or no experience with sex and know little about their sexuality.

The guilt cycle that results from this training creates a form of self-censorship. Because so many sex acts and ideas are liable to lead to eternal damnation, people have a strong incentive to avoid expressing or discussing secretly held ideas and interests. Fear leads to hidden thoughts and activities and prevents normal, appropriately channeled sexual expression.

It is like damming a river. Sooner or later the water will flow around or over the dam. Controlled release allows for benefits like recreation and irrigation and less potential destruction downstream. Simply damming water leads to problems.

Sexually inhibited or frustrated people will eventually express sexual energy, but in ways that may be destructive of self or others. They may condemn those who express themselves freely and attempt to impose religious restrictions on them. They may become inappropriately aggressive toward others or have secret affairs that undermine their family and relationships. Worst of all, they may physically, verbally or sexually abuse those who are more vulnerable. Ignoring sexual drive and energy is a dam without a flood control plan.

Religious guilt can take a normal, straightforward drive and distort it into unrecognizable forms. Many a church has angry, gossipy women in the kitchen who have not had sex in years. Many a male church elder has been known to abuse his children or wife. The incidence of sexual acting-out
on the part of important church members is not reflected in clergy abuse statistics. It seems reasonable that church members engage in at least as much sexual acting out as clergy. This is not to say that everyone in a church is acting-out sexual frustration, but there are many, as we might suspect from the divorce statistics discussed in
Chapter 3
and the porn and child abuse statistics we will discuss next.

There is no way to quantify the sexual behavior of religious people because the behavior is so easily hidden. But if priests can get away with child sexual abuse for decades and ministers have illicit affairs for years, even fathering children
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with church members, why wouldn’t this be happening with many others in the church?

Over the course of 30 years, I saw dozens of quiet scandals among laity. The issue came to glaring clarity for me when three lay church officials from two different churches were caught in various forms of inappropriate or abusive behavior in the same week! One man was found to have abused his own children from a young age. A key woman had a child that was not fathered by her husband, but by one of the ministers. Another long-serving and upstanding “family-values” leader was “exposed” and pushed out of the church for homosexual behavior.

It is time to acknowledge that sex is happening all the time among church members, but it is hidden, secret and all too often exploitative or abusive. Three statistics bear this out:

1. In the United States, the most religious areas of the nation have the highest divorce rates.
   
2. One of the best predictors of child abuse and sexual abuse is the religiosity of the parents. The more religious the parents, the more likely they are to abuse their children.
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3. The states with the highest porn use are Utah and Mississippi.
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   Mormon Utah tops all states in Internet porn in each of four different measures. Generally speaking, the more religiously conservative U.S. states and zip codes have the highest porn use by a small margin. In the most religious areas, the only time porn use drops is on Sunday, but it more than catches up the rest of the week.
   

Could these three statistics be related to religiously dammed-up sexual desire? Could these be proxies for the effects of religious sexual repression? It seems to point in that direction.

Now let’s look at how religious sexual guilt impacts women more stongly than men.

Gender differences are evident in infants with respect to emotional expression, social interaction and social contagion. That is, infant girls are more attentive than boys to the emotional states of their mothers and those of other children. This heightened sensitivity to the emotional environment seems to be genetically based. Throughout life, women interact more, talk more and listen more than boys and men. Women are generally more tuned into the emotional environment than men. This seems to be true at all ages and in all cultures.

This general tendency for women to be sensitive to the emotional environment means they imbibe emotional messages and cultural ideas more rapidly and easily than men. Religion takes advantage of this tendency by creating guilt messages that are uniquely targeted at women.

All major religions put most of the responsibility for sexual morality on women. Religions teach that women should remain chaste and should control and hide their sexuality so men will not be tempted. Once a woman is infected with ideas of chastity, modesty and sexual morality, she is more susceptible to guilt when these are violated or she imagines that they have been violated. If the woman “gives in” to the man, it is her fault. If she tempts a man, it is her fault. Some religions even blame the woman if she is raped.

Sarah Hargreaves, a rape counselor and group facilitator, writes:

Women agonize over Matthew 6:14-16, “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not
forgive your sins.” They torture themselves trying to forgive the person who humiliated and terrorized them. Or worse, yet, they stifle their genuine emotions because they believe forgiveness is the magic cure for fixing their anger and resentment. If they cannot forgive their attacker something is wrong with them and they will not be able to heal. These are frankly crazy ideas because it assumes the rapist is worthy of forgiveness.
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With this intense programming, women experience religious sexual guilt more often and more strongly than men. They are encouraged to get relief by going to their religion. They are told, it is their duty to forgive or they are not worthy of Jesus.

These religious ideas are the ultimate distortion. Women can pray, attend services, go to mass, do Bible study, go to women’s religious meetings, but the fact remains, they are guilty of being a woman. Just as Eve was guilty of the “fall of man,” all women are guilty in the context of Christianity and Islam, as well as many other religions.

Further, religions often teach that women are responsible for children’s moral development. Not taking their children to church is a sign of moral neglect. The guilt messages are so strong that even non-religious mothers have been known to take their children to church or send them. In the church, children are exposed to abstinence-only messages, purity rings, and most of all, messages about female responsibility in most sexual matters.