Hot trends in theological sex
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Just so everyone knows, it’s now cool to claim that sex is a matter of complete indifference. Regular readers of theology blogs will not be surprised to learn that this newfound conviction stems from a quotation from everyone’s favorite pontiff, Rowan Williams.
The conclusion that doesn’t seem to be drawn in these discussions is that if sex doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. I’d be very surprised if the payoff of this stance was that we should take a laissez-faire stance toward homosexuality, gay marriage, or even promiscuity more generally, even though that seems to be the most logical conclusion. Instead, I assume that in the last analysis, the way we show how ho-hum we are about sex is to go along with traditional morality — that’s how to be really radical, in the strict Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtlian sense of the term.
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Are we the last bastion against this bullshit? AUFS, your home for refutation through accurate summary.
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 1:46 pm
“friendship itself – so lacking in anxiety, so free and undemanding…”
Ha!
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 3:51 pm
can you provide a phonetical rendering for “Turtlian”? i’m asking just in case I wanna drop it at some poncy summer bbq.
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I’d say it’s pronounced like Tertullian.
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 5:20 pm
A very protestant move on their part: liking sex is now too pagan!
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Not to mention the bizarre parachuting of Foucault, who is used to critique models of sexual liberation-from-repression, fair enough, but strange that this is paired with the idea that, for Foucault, sex doesn’t matter. Not exactly.
Maybe this is a subspecies of parachuting — where a non-Williams-type thinker is parachuted in a very limited, somewhat unrepresentative way.
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Hi all! A couple of quick comments: my post isn’t actually arguing that “sex is ho-hum” (what, are you crazy?), but simply that sex is not definitive of our humanness. These are completely different points: and since my point is the latter one, Foucault hasn’t actually been parachuted in (thanks for coining that term, by the way: I love it). Rather, the whole post is based precisely on Foucault’s analysis of “sexuality” (not “sex”!) in Volume 1: i.e., sex as discourse.
If you can’t see the difference between the two ideas “sex-defines-my-humanity” and “sex-is-ho-hum”, then just think of some other example: I take immense pleasure in a glass of good red wine; but I would protest if someone told me that drinking wine holds the key to understanding my humanity. This would be the difference between “wine” and “wine as discourse”.
And for what it’s worth, my own perspective is not that “we show how ho-hum we are about sex by going along with traditional morality”. I don’t know about Halden, but for me everything points in exactly the opposite direction: not because I’m interested in becoming either radical or Ninja Turtlian (although the latter does sound pretty cool), but just because I don’t think there’s any one-to-one identity between the truth of sex and the truth of what it means to be human.
In this connection, I’m impressed by William Stringfellow (if I can parachute him in at this point): he was once invited to address a gay activist group, and he began his address by remarking that he had never really seen why the world should be divided up into separate categories according to sexual orientation, since in his observation there were probably as many different sexualities as there were human beings.
Stringfellow’s comment certainly couldn’t be taken as a defence of “traditional morality”; but nor does it celebrate the formation of group-identities according to sexual preference.
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Adam,
You’re quite right once again on this. The “sex is really not that important” set seem to be patting themselves on the back for merely ignoring LGBT people as opposed to actively hating them.
Stringfellow’s statements to the gay group are about as laudable as a white Christian minister speaking to the NAACP in the 1960’s and saying that he has never really felt that there was any fundamental reality to race and that really there are as many races as there are human beings–all while leading a church that has no African American members. (Of course Stringfellow himself knew that race did matter and worked to fight that social injustice.) The point is: social context matters.
Now I’m off to bed so I’ll be well rested to view a Pride Parade tomorrow that has nothing to do with my deep humanness…
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 12:17 am
I think a point that Sarah Coakley makes in her essay, “Living Into the Mystery of the Holy Trinity: Trinity, Prayer, and Sexuality,” can be very helpful here. She speaks of the theological need “to turn Freud on his head,” and suggests that “God” language is thus not primarily about sex, but that sex is to be understood “as really about God.” This would mean, then, that to say as Ben does that sex is not definitive of our humanness (or, that sex tells us “nothing about what it means to be human”), is not to say that sex doesn’t matter, but rather to say that sex matters all the more, not because it is definitive of our creaturehood, per se, but because it says something about our deification, our being transformed as mere creatures into being partakers of our divine nature. Here, we might recall Herbert McCabe’s wonderful essay on “Prayer,” in which he suggests that if we can think God not first of all as the creator or maker of something, but first of all as Love, then we are perhaps in a position to think prayer as God’s confronting us not as maker or artist who has to “make us over,” but as bringing us into a relation of “lovers wasting time with each other uselessly” (I think that’s his wording). Thus, our relation to God is finally not merely one reducible to “creaturehood,” but a liberation — and not just from “sin” — into divinization itself. All this to say: This may very well change things in the conversation dramatically if we think of sex as a sacrament not of our “creaturehood,” but of our divinization — a sacrament of theosis, and so a theologoumenon to be treated within the Doctrine of God.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 12:19 am
Um, Todd, I think you might be missing something here: the reason they invited Stringfellow to address the group was that he was gay. (Sorry, I should have spelled that out.)
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 4:33 am
Nate’s contribution is the most helpful thing in this discussion so far. Unlike the post itself, which to me was about as constructive as taking a hammer to a wendy house, he actually advances the conversation somewhat.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Since we’re talking humdrum, let’s get some exegesis right:
Firstly, since the quote is taken from 1997, before Rowan became a lot more careful with what he says in public, we can probably assume that this produces a laissez-faire attitude towards homosexuality and sexual promiscuity, or at least openness towards the transformation of marriage. (that’s exegesis without reading the original article – sorry)
Secondly, Foucault really does say something like this, that sex doesn’t matter. (Furthermore, he thinks it didn’t matter much for early Christian ascetics) It really is when sex starts getting taken seriously that it becomes integrated into the juridico-medical system, which opens up whole new strategic moves and appropriations. The interviews of the late 70s and 80s will bring this out nicely I reckon.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I’m deeply offended that you don’t think my petty sniping post advanced the conversation.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 12:50 pm
In response to Ben, I think Stringfellow’s statement is pretty naive (at least without more context). If I were starting human society from scratch, then yes, I absolutely would get rid of groupings by sexual orientation. But the fact remains that forming a grouping based on homosexuality makes perfect sense as a way of working against the destructive effects of heterosexual group identity.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 1:31 pm
My first response on reading this post was that surely what’s meant is that sex doesn’t matter as much as liberals and conservatives have made it matter and this post is a clever way of going after half straw half man (and Ben confirmed as much).
I think Todd’s concern about taking such route in a context with no lgbt folks is quite appropriate. However, it runs against my actual experience in the three Christian communities in which I live and work and go to church. Deemphasizing sexuality has very much opened up a space in those places for lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, and gay people to be members, interns, staff, and/or child care providers. People with more traditional views of marriage have found ways to bend over backwards theologically to live and work and cooperate in genuine day to day care for each other.
There is one notable exception in one of the three communities. A youth pastor was let go at the end of a two year church process after announcing she was in a committed lesbian relationship. At the other church an openly gay man and an openly lesbian woman – one of whom is currently in a relationship – serve on a staff of a dozen or so. I was mentored by the gay man and have since supervised a bisexual woman intern on a regular basis. At the church that fired the youth pastor, it was made very clear that almost 2/3rds of the church disagreed with the decision, a statement affirming membership open to lgbt folks was agreed upon, and an openly bisexual woman has since joined while another has gone overseas with the Mennonite Central Committe (which requires celibacy outside heterosexual marriage while under contract) with the church’s support.
Not only do I think Foucault can be useful here (though it is admittedly somewhat of a perverse reading; Foucault simply celebrates the fact that “this glittering array” of sexualities we now find ourselves with was in large part produced by a sweepingly new and constant attention to sex), but I think deemphasizing sex to a certain degree is a helpful corrective to an unintended consequence of the Jerusalem Council and the early Christian contest with Stoicism. (In this I think Foucault either got it partly wrong, or perhaps he got it right and we’ll never know because his complete draft of Confessions of the Flesh may very well not ever be released).
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 2:09 pm
My ignorance of Stringfellow’s sexuality breaks down the analogy quite obviously.
Still, I’ll stick to the point that it is utterly tiresome when straight Christian leaders proclaim that “sexuality is irrelevant” while refusing to take any steps to combat homophobia or to make their religious communities welcoming to LGBT people. I mean it’s not like Christianity has ever had anything to do with homophobia or anything…
Regarding Foucault, I think it’s a highly disingenuous reading of his late interviews to draw from them some (over)broad notion that “sex doesn’t matter.” To the contrary, in a 1982 interview published in The Advocate, Foucault wrote, “Sexuality is something that we ourselves create–it is our creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand with our desires, though our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not fatality: it’s a possibility for creative life.” Clearly, we cannot count Foucault as among those who believe that sexuality is really only as important as one’s oenological preferences.
Re-reading that interview rather makes me lament the sad state of gay news magazines today. I suppose it’s the price we pay for becoming more mainstream.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Todd:
If we think “making” or “artistry” where Foucault says “creation” in the passage you cite, and then think the distinction between “making” and “creating” that Thomas Aquinas deploys with regards to human beings in relation to God, then I think that Foucault’s quote resonates well with the idea that sex can be entered into as a kind of sacrament of the coming Kingdom.
To quote McCabe again, this time from “Original Sin” (which is also where his reference from “creaturehood” to “divinization” comes from): “The Christian believes that it is indeed men and women that will create heaven, but not through what they possess, not by their power, but through the love that springs within them, the indentical love that sprang within Jesus, the Holy Spirit which leads us as often to failure as to success. We help to create heave by failing to make it. The suggestion is paradoxical. but that is what the crucifixion meant. Jesus failed and that is how the kingdom was established.”
And this returns the conversation to the christological point at which both Halden and Ben first meant to locate it. And allows us to think of sex not as “meaningless,” but in terms of a certain kind of “folly” — the folly of the cross.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Personally, I kind of hope that the payoff is more promiscuity.
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Nate,
I lack the theological sophistication (or theism really) to engage fully with your argument. But I do wonder how you think this rethinking of sexuality would “play out” when it comes to how Christian communities respond to the presence of LGBT people. The history on this front has been pretty terrible, so you’ll have to forgive me if this is the first question that comes to mind.
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 2:07 am
God forbid I should say anything inoffensive…
Just as a humdrum Foucault interpretation, I kinda meant that Foucault doesn’t think sex really matters as an identity. “The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.” (a 1981 interview in the Ethics collection of his collected works in English: p135) I think the article Todd is referring to brings out the same point though.
I say nothing as to whether he’s right of course…
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 11:33 am
Can someone explain just why it is that Jesus being incarnated as a man means “we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness?” Halden’s post is not clear, and the on the face of things, it reads absurd.
Especially when the “historic details” of the life of Jesus involve his attending a marriage and talking quite a bit about the temporal permanence of the marriage bond, being called the Son of God and remarking that his mother and brother and sister is he who does the will of his father, and having a lot to say about how having sex with another means leaving behind your parents and forming a bond only broken by death. Nothing whatsoever? Is the body of Jesus some sort of template, and nothing of what he did in his sayings or ripostes or intimate teachings matters?
Why is being male a more ultimate position of humanity-defining? This alone implicates Jesus in the differentiation of the sexes–unless the truth of Jesus is that he was entirely asexual and had no genitals whatsoever. It seems making male the default position of human-defining the sort of thing smacking of audacity.
I have to be missing something.
Friday, June 19, 2009 at 3:35 am
And as to openness to the text … I’m actually open to something similar to what you are arguing in your summary of Ted’s book. It’s just not my way (as Badiou would say with respect to theological uses of his reading of the event). But I am genuinely open to the fact that I may be wrong. Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon at my church (http://www.tumc.ca/fstart.htm) suggesting that Acts 15 holds the potential for both the best argument for and the best argument against acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender practice in the life of the church. To give some context, over sixty percent of my church supports gay marriage (we know because we had a vote four years ago which required a 2/3 vote to buck the conference on the matter and keep a lesbian youth pastor in an open relationship), and approximately the same number of the adult membership has graduate degrees.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Todd:
I apologize for not responding to this earlier; and I don’t know if you are still following this thread. But to answer your question nonetheless, I think the issue for the Christian church has to do with discerning what it means to give freedom to the gay, or lesbian, transgendered person to live freely human lives as a testimony to the transfiguration of sex and sexuality that happens in Christ. It means not the repression of their sexuality, but the giving of the space within which to discern how their sexuality has such as been accepted and renewed by conversion to the gospel. Of course, this requires the church to think of itself morally as a created space of discernment, rather than as a given morality or ethic which is to be realized and to which one is to conform. I think the work of Paul Lehmann is highly instructive in this respect.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Nate,
Would you be willing to say in vulgar, concrete terms what you mean?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Anthony:
In any Christian community where homosexuals have become necessary as victims of a prescribed ethic and moral scapegoats, that community’s own repentance and conversion to the gospel would seem to me to involve directly the fact that homosexuals will find the freedom to live and to practice their homosexuality, precisely as homosexuals, in such a way as to unmask the hypocrisy of those ecclesiastical authorities who are illicitly making their beds with the worldly institutions and powers that they so piously call “marriage and family.”
Such freedom and such practice alone can bespeak the necessary vulgarity and concreteness here.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Thanks, I think I understand what you’re saying here.