Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (7 page)

The divorce rates among ministers is roughly equal to that of the general population.
¹⁶
If those who preach and teach about welcoming Jesus into their marriage show equal divorce rates, obviously the Jesus treatment isn’t working.

Dr. Roy Austin, a religious therapist and graduate of Southwestern Seminary, made this observation about the Barna study:

Magical thinking is often a factor among evangelical and fundamentalist couples and that leaves them less prepared for the rigors of marriage. The atheist doesn’t believe in God and so doesn’t depend on God to save or fix a marriage. It’s just “the two of us,” and that takes the magic aspect out of it.
¹⁷

Gary Thomas, author of
Sacred Marriage
and director of the Center for Evangelical Spirituality in Bellingham, Washington, says, “Christians should use marriage to seek ‘holiness, not happiness.’” Mr. Thomas believes that the Christian church contributes to divorce by being too tolerant. “Christians need to think of their marriage as a chance to serve Christ. A Christian who
gets divorced
puts their happiness before their devotion to Christ.” It is pretty easy to see how following this guy’s Jesus might lead to marital unhappiness and divorce.

These are just a few of the many myths religions perpetuate on their members. In the next chapters, many more will be explored in different contexts.

14
Barna Group, 2004. “Born Again Christians Just as Likely to Divorce as are Non-Christians.” Available online at
http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/194-born-again-christians-just-as-likely-to-divorce-as-are-non-christians?q=divorce
.

15
“Dumbfounded by divorce,” a report by Christine Wicker on the Barna study. Available online at
http://www.adherents.com/largecom/baptist_divorce.html
.

16
As noted by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, in “Pastors’ Wives Come Together,”
Time Magazine
, 29 March 2007. Available online at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1604902,00.html
, and “Study Shows Average Divorce Rate Among Clergy,” available online at
http://articles.latimes.com/1995-07-01/local/me-19084_1_divorce-rate
.

17
As reported by Wicker in “Dumbfounded by divorce.”

What happened to the symbols of sexuality in Christianity? Why does Christianity demand monogamy? Were all early Christians asexual?

The idea that a god is watching you during sex, knows when you are masturbating and sees you when you look lustfully at another person comes from early Christian writings that are influenced by a strong antisexual mythology. The New Testament and the Ante-Nicene Fathers
¹⁸
advised avoiding sex to make sure you don’t fall into temptation. Christian writings and tradition make Jesus a virtual eunuch.
¹⁹
Jesus was called rabbi. Throughout Jewish culture, a rabbi has been a married man, unless he is a widower. How could Jesus be a rabbi and not married? It’s highly unlikely for him to be single at age 30. Any wife would automatically make Jesus a sexual creature, especially if he had children. Being married or having children would interfere with the Christian narrative of Jesus as an asexual creature.

Another possibility is that he was female but was thought to be male (see also the discussion of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome in
Chapter 10
). If he was born of a virgin, that means he was conceived through parthenogenesis. Parthenogenesis is the ability of a female to reproduce without being fertilized by male sperm.
²⁰
Unfortunately, the offspring of any parthenogenic human would be female since that is all parthenogenesis ever produces. Therefore, biologically speaking, Jesus would have been a female, if the virgin birth were true.

It is interesting to look at the whole virgin birth idea from a biological perspective. Sex as an unclean act is a theme throughout Christianity. How can the savior be born of an unclean act? Such a thing could not be allowed in the sex-negative worldview of early Christianity. For this reason, there was some editing going on by the early writers to eliminate inconvenient facts. Wives, children, sexual conception all would say that Jesus was a
sexual creature, born of two other sexual creatures. But all this challenges the asexual perspective of the early church.

And what about those who followed Jesus? In the Jewish culture of the day, marriage was incredibly important, as it is today among most Jews, especially Orthodox. It is difficult to believe that most of Jesus’ followers were not married. Peter certainly was (Luke 4:38). And Paul makes a clear reference to wives: “Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?” (I Corinthians 9:5). Most authorities would concede that at least some of them were married.

But the wives were left out of the New Testament and so were any children. Is it possible for such a large group of apostles and disciples not to have children? It has been suggested that Jesus and his disciples were all gay, hence no need for wives or children. But that seems a bit far-fetched.

So what happened to the women and children? Ask a Christian biblical scholar, and he might say, “Women were not seen as important, so there was no need to refer to them.” That answer has some validity, but male children were important. Where are the references to the sons of Peter or Paul or the grandsons of John?

Progeny are always a problem when there is a charismatic founder; just look at the problems Mohammed’s children and grandchildren caused. The split between Sunni and Shi’a Islam is, in part, a result of the battle for spiritual succession between the children of Mohammed and his key followers. And what about the split in the Mormon Church between Joseph Smith’s son and Brigham Young? In a patriarchal culture, sons have a claim to the property and reputation of their father, especially oldest sons. Just as Oral Roberts’ son took over his empire and Billy Graham’s son took on his father’s ministry, early Christians would have revered the sons (and daughters) of apostles.

There can be no doubt that children and grandchildren existed. Paul would have known some of them, but his writings rarely mention the original apostles and never mention their children.

As for Paul, a well-educated Jewish official, it would have been imperative for him to be married. Did he abandon his wife and children to wander around the Mediterranean proselytizing for the new Christian cult? What
happened to his children and grandchildren? Why were these people edited out? And how did they get edited out?

I suggest two reasons: First, the political inconvenience of having children on the record, and the second, the importance of the asexual myth to Christianity. It is probable that some kind of struggle took place between the growing church hierarchy of the late first century and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the founders. Ultimately, the budding hierarchy won and did its best to erase the names of those who were descended from Jesus, Paul, Peter and other important figures. Once the non-related leaders gained the upper hand, history was rewritten without wives, children or grandchildren.

The subsequent church’s suppression of female figures in the Jesus story is good evidence that women, in particular, were edited out. The Gospels of Phillip, Mary and Pistis Sophia all have stories of conflict between Mary and Peter. In each story, Peter is said to oppose what Mary says because she is a woman. Yet, these and many other writings show women played significant roles at one time. While several of these writings have been rediscovered in recent times, like the Gospel of Mary, all these manuscripts date from the 200s to the 500s CE. They were probably in wide circulation for the first 400-500 years of the church, and then eliminated.

Dr. Richard Carrier, a scholar of ancient history, says:

Women were conspicuously important to the cult from day one. Paul has to thank several for providing funds and housing for his congregations and sets rules for their equal participation in the church. The Timothy letters and the anti-woman passage in Corinthians are forgeries, and represent later Christian misogyny, whereas Paul was nearly an egalitarian, and Acts makes a point of mentioning the role of numerous female converts. So the silence on disciples’ wives/daughters/mothers (and kids) is even more bizarre.
²¹

Many early writers had motivation to edit out any inconvenient or powerful women. The strong patriarchal model of early Christianity did
not allow for powerful women, so it was best to edit these women out than to have questions later. Others simply forged new documents that mention no women or children. Tertullian (160-220 CE), the “Father of Latin Christianity,” has been revered and quoted by Christian scholars for centuries. He was amazingly misogynistic. With him setting the pace, it is no wonder that women were eliminated from the narrative where possible.

We have recent parallel examples of religion eliminating competing versions and rewriting the story while eliminating women. For example, the Mormon Church started rewriting its history before Joseph Smith’s body was cold in the ground, and it continues to rewrite it today. Ask a devout Mormon how many wives Joseph Smith or Brigham Young had. He probably won’t tell you 34 and 54, respectively (plus or minus a few). Church officials deny or downplay plural marriage. Even Joseph Smith’s wife, Emma Smith, denied her husband was polygamous and campaigned against it after he died. Yet Brigham Young practiced polygamy and encouraged it among his followers in Utah. The Church does not celebrate these women and children, though they played a big part in the early Mormon Church.
²²

Catholicism has actively rewritten its history and that of others’ versions of Christianity from the beginning. For example, those who opposed the winners at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE were edited and eliminated from the writings shortly thereafter.
²³
The heretic of the day was the bishop of Alexandria, Arius (ca 250-336). His so-called heresy had an enormous following, including two Roman Emperors, but the winners wrote the history. Constantine ordered Arius’ writings burned and suppressed – and thus we know little of him except through the denunciations of Catholic
writers. Arian Christianity along with its writers and thinkers continued to thrive for another one hundred years in some parts of the empire, but their writings have largely disappeared.

The second reason to eliminate these “inconvenient” historical figures deals with sex and sexuality. In the Christian view, sex was an unclean act. Ask Christians, “Did Jesus have sex?” and watch their nonverbal response. Or ask, “Did Peter enjoy sex with his wife?” or “Did Mary and Martha, ‘whom Jesus loved,’ ever enjoy a good orgasm?” Such questions do not compute in the Christian mind. The Christian founders are seen as asexual.

Contrast these beliefs with Muslim beliefs about their founder’s sexuality. Mohammed gives all sorts of advice on when to have sex, with whom to have sex, how to treat sexual slaves, etc. Mormon founders were also very sexual. In the Mormon pantheon, Jesus was even married. Mormonism started out as polygamous, but as Mormonism attempted to become more accepted within the greater Christian culture, it evolved into an asexual cult as well.

Unlike some other religions, asexuality is so important to Christianity that it has written and rewritten its history to reflect the non-sexual nature of its founders. The asexual ideal of Christianity allows it to assign guilt to anyone who falls short of this ideal.

The appearance of asexuality was so important that even the mother of Jesus had to be a virgin. The Catholic Church vehemently denies that Jesus had any brothers or sisters, despite the mention in Mark 6:3.
²⁴
If Mary had other children, then she would have participated in the unclean act of sexual intercourse and would not be the pure and undefiled person of Catholic mythology. It is upon this mythology that entire components of the catechism are built. Mary was not married to Joseph. She was married to god, and a god impregnated her. Joseph was just a convenience to give cover for the potential embarrassment that Mary was really a sexually active adolescent
who got pregnant with her boyfriend. According to church doctrine, the marriage was never consummated, and Joseph didn’t hang around long. Mary was a virgin before, during and after the birth of Christ (
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second English Translation
, 496-511). No mention is made of Joseph after Jesus’ incident in the temple when he was 12.

This plays out in current sexual distortion with respect to nuns. Nuns are celibate and are “married” to Jesus. They also practice a good deal of Mary worship. Many nuns and priests, as well as the Pope himself, worship Mary above Jesus. Although they would deny this, a look at their behavior says otherwise. When Pope John-Paul II was shot, during his ride to the hospital he kept repeating, “Mary, my mother.” A year after he was shot, he made a pilgrimage to Fatima to give thanks to Mary for his recovery.

While we have focused on Catholic doctrine, ideas like the Virgin Birth also inform the Orthodox and Protestant branches. There may be nuances and differences, but the one thing they all hold on common is the asexuality of the founders. For example, the Nicene Creed is common to all and contains this fundamental concept:

…who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man ….
²⁵

So does the Apostle’s Creed which many Protestants use:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ,
His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary….
²⁶