Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (5 page)

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From the website of City Bible Forum, Melbourne, Australia. Available online at
http://melbournecbf.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/ffl-27-may-sex-can-anything-be-better/
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Where do we get our sexual maps? Why is religion so interested in giving us the map? Why are sexual restrictions so important in the religious sexual map?

“Of all the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself. and what do you think he has done? He has left it out of his heaven! Prayer takes its place.”

-Mark Twain, Notebook, 1906

Religious sexual morality is fundamentally meaningless.
Any instruction is largely negative. Where does the Koran instruct on the ethical way to have a fun and open sexual relationship? Where does the Bible teach a parent how to deal with a child’s sexually oriented questions? How many sermons have been preached on the multitude of ways to give a woman an orgasm? Is there a chapter in the Book of Mormon on oral sex for males and females? Of the dozens of Scientology books, which ones teach about the joys of sex toys in masturbation? Do any of these religious documents teach people how to relate to one another respectfully and equally as sexual beings?

Sex is the weak spot of religion. What would happen if sexual restrictions were taken out of the equation? Can you imagine the Pope waking up one morning and saying, “Wow, I had the best wet dream last night. I think we will make masturbation legal in the Catholic Church.” Could the president of the Mormon Church receive a revelation that women are allowed up to three lovers? Such a revelation was given to Joseph Smith, allowing him all the wives he wanted.
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And a similar revelation came to Mormon Church President Welford Woodruff in 1890, eliminating the practice of polygamy in the church. God gave him the revelation just in time for Utah to be admitted to the Union.
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Imagine such homophobic ministers and leaders (who have all been caught engaging in suspect acts) as Ted Haggard, Bishop Eddie Long, Senator Larry Craig or George Rekers saying homosexuality should be accepted by the church.

Let’s explore where we get our sexual ideas and preferences. Then we can better understand how religion plugs into the development of sexuality to its own advantage.

We inherit a map of sexuality from our culture and religion just as we inherit a map of the food we eat. Our food map is small compared to the
global possibilities. Indeed, your food map is so limited that you might starve to death in the midst of plenty if you were transplanted to another time or place. How well would you fare if you were plunked down in the jungles of Brazil or the Kalahari desert in Africa? Local peoples survive, even thrive, but you would starve or get accidentally poisoned by eating the wrong food.

In modern society, we have expanded our local food map with a variety of ethnic foods and spices unheard of by our ancestors. As a result, we have far more interesting and varied foods than any culture in history. Yet, even with these amazing changes, some religions still try to control food selection: Jews and Muslims condemn pork and classify foods as Kosher, hal
l (lawful) or har
m (unlawful); Hindus condemn meat of any kind; some Buddhist traditions require a vegetarian diet, etc. Many religious people find the old rules ridiculous and simply ignore them in favor of more interesting and varied eating experiences.

The same is true of sex. The breadth of sexual behavior is enormously varied across cultures and time. Your individual sexual map is tiny compared to the knowledge, experiences and practices of other people and times. Unfortunately, because of religious interference, our sexual maps are not only restricted, they are inaccurate.

Just as some religions restrict foods or dictate their preparation, most religions restrict sexual practices and dictate holy and unholy, clean and unclean practices.

Religious sexual maps are based largely on Bronze- and Iron-Age tribal ideas, but for most of us, that’s what we know. No one is born with an understanding of sex and sexuality. We learn it from explicit teaching and more important, from the myriad signals in our environment. Starting as infants and toddlers, we may get messages like, “Don’t touch yourself down there!” or we feel the disapproving hand of a parent when we show curiosity about our own anatomy. Jokes from adults and peers instruct us on how to think about sex. We observe dress and absorb comments like, “She is dressed like a prostitute.”

As a 19-year-old church camp counselor, I was asked to take a camper aside and read certain scriptures to warn him against masturbating. He’d been a little too enthusiastic the night before and one of the other campers had complained. It was a difficult assignment, since I masturbated regularly myself, to my great shame. In the same camp, I witnessed a young girl run
crying across the campus after being told by the minister that she was dressed like a slut. Over the course of the next years, that same minister was caught twice having affairs with women in his church.

These kinds of experiences help us build our sexual map. Maps are somewhat different depending on whether you are a Muslim or Catholic, Orthodox Jew or Episcopalian, but they have one thing in common: They bear almost no relationship to the reality of who we are as sexual creatures. None is based on biological or evolutionary fact. None draws upon anthropological knowledge or neurological studies of brain development and sexuality.

These religion-based maps only get updated when the culture forces it. For example, birth control was considered sinful by virtually all religions just 100 years ago. Today, most religions say nothing about birth control for married people. Even the Catholic Church looks the other way while still disapproving. It was almost unthinkable for a woman to wear pants 100 years ago, especially inside a church. If all the women wearing pants were kicked out of church today, most churches would stand empty. Sex before marriage was very sinful 100 years ago. Today, 95% of all Americans have sex before marriage.
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Churches still preach against it, but the statistics show most people aren’t listening.

Religions are slowly modifying their maps of sexuality, but not without a fight. These modifications still have nothing to do with who we are. They are based on the Koran, Bible, Book of Mormon or some other obsolete text. Religion’s success, for much of the last three thousand years, depended heavily on sexual myths. Today is no different. It’s just more difficult to perpetuate such myths when so much contrary information is available on the Internet or from books in the library.

The sexual map we acquire in youth includes body image, masturbatory guilt, sexual preferences and more. From what turns us on to what turns us off. From attitudes about menstruation to the right of women to wear certain clothing. But using this guilt- and shame-ridden map as a guide to sexuality is like using a map of an ancient city sewer system to locate the fiber optic network.

What if the only map we had of a city was made 2,000 years ago? How useful would it be today? My city was an open prairie 2,000 years ago with no roads and maybe a few animal paths. A map of that reality would be of little use today.

An accurate map of a city or country requires measurement, constant adjustment and updating. No map can display every aspect of a particular landscape. Does a road map tell where the sewer pipes are? Does it show where the best soil for planting is? Maps are only an approximation of the territory.

Religion tries to give us maps of sexuality that are no better than a 2,000-year-old map of my hometown. In addition, each religion also tries to convince us that their map is never wrong or inaccurate. If you have trouble understanding or interpreting the map, you need only talk to your imam, priest or minister. They can show you the way.

If I were convinced that my 2,000-year-old home town map was god-inspired and totally accurate, I would ignore buildings, concrete, trees, cars and any other object that was not on my map. I would refuse to believe what was right before my eyes, and then very likely something terrible would happen – like crashing a car into a tree or a building. It seems like an absurd idea, but it is roughly the same as someone trying to use the Bible as a guide to sexuality. In the last 100 years, we’ve learned a lot of about human sexuality and sexual development.

There are hundreds of Christian books on marriage. One of the long-time bestsellers is
Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy
by Gary Thomas (2000). Using this book as a map for sex and marriage teaches how to pray better, deal with conflicts through faith in Jesus and how to deny sexual appetite. Nowhere does the book discuss how to negotiate a fetish scene with your partner, nor does it contain information on fun, healthy sex. But it does have a lot of ideas about how wrong sex is in the eyes of god. The underlying message, repeated ad nauseam, is one of guilt couched in “spiritual” language. Sex is a minor part of god’s plan and shouldn’t be an important part of a faith-based marriage. It is not until
Chapter 11
, “Sexual Saints: Marital Sexuality Can Provide Spiritual Insights and Character Development,” that Thomas discusses sex.

Thomas’ book, as well as most Christian marriage books, is an excellent exercise in how to create huge amounts of guilt between two married
people. The irony of groups that study books like this is that many, if not most, had sex before marriage, masturbate and peek at porn occasionally, all the while pretending they never do such things. In other words, they are behaving like human beings even as they pretend that some ethereal, spiritual entity inhabits their bodies and watches them day and night to keep them righteous.

The book is all about god. It is really a threesome, with an invisible man in the middle constantly meddling with the pleasure and bonding that ordinarily develops between married couples. This is a formula for disastrous sexual communication, and ultimately, divorce or a sexless marriage. Having talked to and witnessed uncounted Christian marriages, I have concluded the product of this kind of training is anxiety and guilt. Within a few years, sex loses meaning and fun, becomes perfunctory and may cease altogether.

All religions have something to say about sex, and it rarely coincides with scientific knowledge of sex and sexuality. How many times has a young person suffered through the night, praying and asking Jesus or Allah to help him not defile himself by masturbating? How many young lives have been destroyed in Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia because religious parents caught their daughter kissing a boy? How many Baptists or Catholics have suffered through years of sexual deprivation because their religion prohibits premarital sex? How many pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases have children of evangelicals contracted because their religion disapproves of sex education?

Many a person has been prohibited from exploring a possible relationship with a perfectly good partner only because of one or the other’s religion. Many people have been discouraged from enjoying their own bodies in perfectly harmless yet enjoyable ways, because a priest or imam told them such actions would send them to hell or make them go blind.

Most deeply religious people will claim that sex is sacred. The “sacred rules” associated with a given religion invariably coincide with the interests of the religion in forwarding its own propagation. Rarely does a religion allow truly human sexual expression. Religions claim, “We are not animals. We should not behave like animals in our sexual expression.” Yet, religions of all kinds prescribe sexual behavior that looks far more like those of animals than humans.

For example, the Pope’s prescriptions for sex look remarkably like the way dogs, cows or cats express their species sexuality. A Muslim or Southern Baptist has views of sex that are more closely related to the reproductive strategies of insects. For example, most animals have sex only when they are in heat or sexually receptive – for procreation. Humans can have sex any time. Procreation is a small part of human sex. Recreation and bonding is far more important. Therefore, to have sex only for procreation is not human, but more like other animals. Humans may have sex thousands of times for every live birth. No dog or insect does that.