TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082691/0826640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 70

Of Church Pews And Bedrooms


By Richard Brookhiser


    The Protestant churches seem obsessed with sex these
days. Not that their interest in the subject is new. Puritan
disquisitions on sex were so plainspoken that early 20th century
editions of them had to be bowdlerized. But the terms of today's
discussion are revolutionary -- not Why do men sin? but Why
shouldn't they party? Traditional strictures against
homosexuality, premarital sex (once called fornication), even
adultery, are up for theological debate. The Presbyterians in
conclave assembled gave thumbs down to the new morality; the
Episcopalians gave thumbs sideways; the United Methodist Church
and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will not be far
behind in giving their thumb signals. Bees do it; do Wasps?

    Roman Catholics have caught the bug too (as in so many
other areas, liberal American Catholics find themselves playing
catch-up with their Protestant soul mates). Their arguments over
sex are complicated by the fact that the Vatican, the ultimate
source of authority in their church, is not known for taking its
cues on matters of discipline from Gallup polls or what it
hears on Oprah. Or from Protestants.

    The obvious secular explanation for this hubbub is that
America's churches are internalizing the mores of a developed
society. Once the automobile, the college dorm and the Pill
became almost universally available, it was inevitable that men
and women would start their sexual careers earlier and build up
longer and more varied resumes. It was also inevitable that the
churches would adjust to the new reality. If that meant
adjusting traditional interpretations of the Ten Commandments,
so be it.

    Like most obvious secular explanations, this one is
shallow. American churches don't just passively receive ideas
from the general culture. They also stimulate them. (Thomas
Jefferson wrote about the "wall of separation" between church
and state in a letter to a group of Baptist political allies.)
If America's pews ring with debate about America's bedrooms,
that is because the churches have their own reasons for
grappling with the subject.

    What we are witnessing is in fact a clash between two
earnest and articulated theological impulses. Traditionalists
and innovators disagree about sex because they disagree about
the universe, and about God.

    Defenders of tradition are often accused of blindly
upholding the social status quo. That is selling them short.
Even the most conservative American churches have assailed
aspects of the status quo, from dueling to saloons to the
12-hour workday. Instead the sexual conservatives see themselves
as defending divinely given guides to human behavior.
Fundamentalists look for these instructions primarily in
scripture, such as St. Paul's comments on homosexuality.
Conservatives who are not fundamentalists can agree that the God
who made covenants with ancient Israel and with the church wants
sexuality to be restricted to the covenant of matrimony.

    The sexual radicals, on the other hand, are not simply
looking for divine justifications to make whoopee. They
represent the latest phase of a 200-year evolution of German and
American Romantic theology, which sees God not as a transcendent
Other, giving us texts or examples, but as the ground of our
being. God, the Romantics believe, is within us; the purpose of
religion is to enable us to make contact with him (or her). As
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Unitarian minister turned essayist and
lecturer, put it, "That which shows God in me, fortifies me.
That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen." A
century after Emerson, his heirs have decided that
self-fortification can come through sex -- gay or straight,
married or un-. Today's Romantics say, with Walt Whitman, "God
comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night."

    These two positions are not intellectual fashion
statements that track rises or falls in the incidence of
sleeping around. Nor are they matters of degree, which can be
compromised by living and letting live. Their proponents face
each other across a fissure in philosophical bedrock.

    Each side also faces internal contradictions in its own
position. The question the radicals must answer is, Why are they
Christians at all? Many radicals argue that the way to religious
empowerment was pioneered by Jesus as if he were a kind of Kit
Carson of the soul. But who needs pioneers once the frontier is
opened? It often seems that the radicals cling to Jesus for the
sake of the name ID and some pretty 19th century buildings
erected in his name.

    Traditionalists, meanwhile, must realize (and some do)
that even if they are willing to defy the spirit of the age,
they cannot ignore it. Churches that tell their flocks to live
a traditional sexual life, without helping them find
alternatives to the singles scene or the gay subculture, are
meeting their responsibilities less than halfway.

    Unbelievers have an interest in this religious faction
fight, if only because so much social policy revolves around sex
and its consequences. Are America's Christians (still more than
85% of the population, according to a recent survey) going to
order their erotic lives by rules and their inevitable
accompaniment, guilt? Are they going to order their erotic lives
at all? Samuel Johnson once contrasted preachers who deplored
intoxication because it "debases reason, the noblest faculty of
man," with preachers who warned drinkers that "they may die in
a fit of drunkenness." (Johnson preferred the preachers who did
not mince words.) If America gets a generation of preachers who
boost sex because it gets you close to God, how will that affect
the number of single-parent families or of AIDS cases?

    Meanwhile, the disputants are primarily motivated not by
policy considerations, but by what they believe to be right.
That is what makes this fight so all-American, and so angry.