Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (3 page)

Most adults feel they are making their own choices. But for adults like Anna who live in a religious culture, many of those choices have already been made for us. We’re not even aware that our sexual identity is being throttled by a tyrannical set of impossible religious restrictions.

This is a book about choices. Choices that were made for you and new choices you can make. You may be restricted in the choices you make about your sexuality by ideas you have never questioned, ideas that do not appear to have anything to do with religion. Some choices were made for you before you were even born. Some choices were cut off, some were prohibited, some were forced on you. Others felt like reasonable choices when you made them, but you now realize they were determined by the religious ideas and training you received. Even if you were not raised in a religious home, you were raised in a religious culture. From the way kids talked about sex in elementary school to the laws your legislators are passing today, sexual choices are being made for you based on religious assumptions.

How are your choices restricted? If you live in a Christian community, you will learn that god is always watching you. If you have impure thoughts, god knows. If you masturbate, god sees. If you have sex before you are married, god will punish you. You may be told you cannot marry someone you love because he or she is the same sex as you are. Preachers tell you that you don’t need birth control because you shouldn’t be having premarital sex. You also hear that masturbation will injure your marriage. You learn that the instant of conception is when some god plants a soul into the embryo and, therefore, it is a sin to stop the development in any way.

If you are female and living in a Muslim country, you may be prohibited from choices about mates or about control over your body. You may be forced to marry a man with other wives. You may have no choice about premarital sex; in fact, you might be killed for making that choice. As a Muslim boy you will be taught how to treat and control women, that they are subservient to you. You will read in the Koran that your wife is always supposed to be ready to have sex, even if she in the midst of cooking a meal.
³

Unless you are in a more sex-positive minority religion, like Pagan, Wicca or Unitarian, you will never be taught the joys of sex. The religious messages from priest, minister, Sunday School teacher or imam are all focused on the role sex plays in god’s plan. If you choose to have sex in any way that is not blessed by your particular god, you are sinning and subject to eternal punishment.

If you belong to one of the more liberal religions, you may not get the harsh messages, but the choices are still narrowed by your god. You may still feel guilty or uncomfortable about your son or daughter having a sex life in college. You may have difficulty understanding your nephew’s choice to marry a man. And no matter how liberal your religion, the laws of your state may make you a felon whenever you have sex in anything but a missionary position. It may also be illegal for you and your spouse to use sex toys. Even liberal people may find it difficult to talk about their fantasies and sexual desires with their spouses. These inhibitions and ideas probably came from the many subtle signals that surround all of us in our religious culture.

All cultures have some rules and ideas about sex and sexuality, but the major religions have taken sex and sexuality as the strict purview of their god or gods. The major religions seek to restrict sexual expression for no apparent reason other than to propagate their particular dogma.

Human sexuality is vast in its expression. Even a cursory study of other cultures finds many different forms of sexual expression; if other cultures can survive for tens of thousands of years without the religious rules of Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism or Christianity, what purpose do religious restrictions and religious guilt serve? Why is masturbation a non-issue in
modern secular Europe but still disapproved of by the Catholic Church? How is gay marriage a threat to marriage when Christian divorce rates in the United States are highest in the most evangelical and fundamentalist states? How is homosexuality destructive of a culture when many North American Native cultures and many ancient cultures, including Greece, celebrated homosexual relationships in song and legend?

Religion is about restricting sexual choices in the interest of the religion. Many beliefs and assumptions came from your religious upbringing and environment – assumptions that you may have unknowingly picked up from your devout grandmother, a prudish Sunday School teacher, or a religious gym coach. Religious sexual ideas can infect you, especially when you are young and unable to think critically. We hold many sexual myths as facts, and most come from religion.

Ironically, much of the evidence to dispute these myths can be found in our everyday lives. That is the power of religious myth; it can blind us to the obvious.

Living a religious sexual lifestyle is tantamount to living a lie.
Religion distorts our sexuality when the majority of religious people live one life for the public and another in private. It can be as simple as living as a “happily married” couple when you are both miserable with your sex life. As a good Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or Mormon, you must deny and pretend that you don’t masturbate, all the while “abusing yourself” regularly. You must condemn pornography even as you use it. You must preach against lustful thoughts even if you can’t avoid them. You must condemn your spouse or others for certain sexual ideas, thoughts or preferences even when you have them as well. You must tell your children how bad premarital sex is even when you had several sexual partners before you were married.

In sum, most religious people live a double life. (When I refer to “religious people,” I mean those who adhere to the mainstream ideas and beliefs of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, etc.) We know from decades of research that the religious are no different from secular people when it comes to sexual behavior – they just feel more guilty about it. The result is a dishonest life. While secular people can live openly with their sexuality, negotiate ethically with partners about preferences and behaviors, enjoy fantasies and experimentation, religious people are constrained from
being open and forthright because they view many things about sex as sinful. Nevertheless, they do it, hide it and deny it.

Religions of all kinds use our powerful sex drives to infect us with ideas that benefit the religion and hurt and inhibit our ability to be truly human. Religion’s goal is to propagate religion. Sex is one powerful method for achieving this. That is the thesis of this book.

The social and psychological toll of living a lie includes emotional numbness to our own sexuality and often anger and aggression towards those who live a more open and honest sexuality.

Christopher Hitchens illustrated this best when he said:

I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned. This is why, whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later he will be discovered down on his knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.
⁴

Hitchens’ observation rings true for more than public figures. Average religious people may not make headlines, but their crises are as devastating to individuals and families. When a good Christian wife finds her husband harboring pornography, she may be appalled and find that she can’t enjoy sex with him any more. When a good Christian man finds his wife having an on-line erotic exchange with another woman, he may be so hurt he eventually asks for a divorce. When Christian parents catch that their 14-year-old son kissing another boy, they may resort to incredibly cruel language and treatment, going as far as beating or ostracizing him. A Muslim father, learning that his daughter is secretly writing love letters to a boy, may go into a rage that results in severe beating or worse.

The list goes on, yet none of these offending behaviors is wrong or abnormal except in the light of religious insanity about sex. How can someone be honest about normal, harmless behavior when it leads to social sanctions and psychological abuse in the name of religion and religious beliefs? Sexual
beliefs are manufactured by religion and have no basis in reality. Believing and living according to these ideas leads to broken marriages, sexual dysfunction, child abuse and much more.

Without religion, none of these examples would come to such an end. Children would have no need to feel ashamed of perfectly normal behavior. Spouses would have room to negotiate sexual desires and needs in ways that respect both parties and lead to loving and sexually gratifying lives. Parents would have healthy ideas about normal sexual behavior and development and be able to teach their children skills for decision-making about their own bodies.

Three key beliefs in "modern" religion lead to sexual distortions, sexual terror and support the many myths:

• Belief in an afterlife
  
• Belief in a voyeuristic, all-knowing god that determines your status in the afterlife
  
• Belief that the god dictates a specific kind of sexual behavior to the exclusion of all others, as a condition for entry into the afterlife
  

You must hold all three of these beliefs for religious distortions to truly impact your behavior.

Here is how this works. Simply believing in an afterlife does not necessarily create sex-negative behavior. For example, some New Age religions and most Pagans are quite sex positive and yet include some idea of an afterlife.

Believing in a voyeuristic god does not necessarily lead to sexual distortion either. You could believe in a god who wants you to masturbate and have joyful sex with your partner or partners, and watches you while you do it. This would not lead to celibacy or fear of eternal damnation.

The third belief combined with the first two creates sexual distortion. God expects you to adhere to a specific, narrow set of behaviors. Since he is watching you all the time, failure to comply will result in eternal damnation.

This unique combination of beliefs is what makes Islam, Christianity and other religions so powerful. These tenets provide a framework for understanding the behaviors of people in most of the major religions. This
toxic trio creates a rigid system that prevents exploration outside arbitrary limits, ignoring patterns of attraction that are part of our genetic programming. The notion of specific sexual behaviors dictated by an all-knowing, voyeuristic and vengeful god can terrorize adherents into public compliance and private misery without leading to sexual self-actualization or fulfillment. This god inhabits your mind like a parasite ready to interrupt any improper behavior.

I have seen first-hand the destructive impact of these three beliefs. I once practiced as a clinical psychologist within an institution for adolescent boys and then in private practice for children and families, including marriage counseling. I then transitioned into organizational psychology working with executives, managers and employees.
⁵

In this capacity, working with people who are having sexual difficulties, I asked, “What prevents you from communicating your concerns, desires or problems to your parents – wife – boyfriend, etc.?” Their first response was often one of terror as they answered: “I could never tell my husband what I really like. He would divorce me!” Or “I could never tell my parents my boyfriend and I are thinking about having sex. They would kill me.” Or “I could never tell my parents that I am gay. They would disown me.” These people were so afraid that they could not even imagine communicating openly with the most important people in their lives.

It took little probing to find religion at the root of this terror. Religion forces people into denying, avoiding, judging and hating themselves and others for their sexual desires and behavior.

As we will see in later chapters, people who are terrorized about sexuality do not make good decisions or lead sexually satisfying lives. They often perpetuate the cycle by terrorizing their children. People who learn sex without guilt make better decisions, talk and negotiate more openly with their partners and respect the sexual preferences and desires of others. They enjoy their own bodies and are less jealous, possessive and judgmental.

Religion seeks to control the uncontrollable, especially when control is the most difficult – in adolescence. What does religion gain by putting unnatural restrictions and perpetuating myths about sexuality? As I explored in my earlier book,
The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and
Culture
, sex is only one of several channels to religious infection, but it is among the most effective.

If you were raised in North or South America, Europe, Australia, or India, China, the Middle East and Indonesia, you were very likely brought up in an environment dominated by one religion. In broad terms that means Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Communism (yes, Communism acts like a religion where sex is concerned). These dominant religions tend to control and restrict sexual information, making their version of sex and sexuality the norm.

Most religions try to isolate people from alternative sexualities, persecute those who do not conform and teach that their behavior is immoral. The ability to control sexual information and induce guilt keeps people tied to the religion. How does a religion keep people coming back for forgiveness or feeling shame without controlling information and using sexual terror?

The sex drive is so powerful that only the most drastic psychological and physical means can control it. These means can be classified as religious sexual terror. Fear is the foreplay of religion. If done right, it interferes with all aspects of human sexual pleasure.