In order to make reading these easier, I am posting these two pieces in a way that makes them easier to read as a visitor scrolls down the page. Hope it makes sense.
Now that we've managed to deal with the silliness, stupidity, and negligence of contemporary religious ignoramuses who push failed (non)education policies, I think it important to make a positive statement concerning what is, or perhaps better put, should be the best way to talk to young people about human sexuality.
First, I have included this image of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden because this is the paradigmatic view of our current status vis-a-vis not just God, but the world and one another. Symbolic not just of our fallen state, our separation from God, it is symbolic of our willful rejection of a grace-filled, and sinless, relationship with one another on an interpersonal level. While we live in a post-Romantic age, many of the ideas concerning human love and sexuality are soaked in Romanticist ideas concerning the power of love, its ability to overcome obstacles, and the possibility of finding with another human being, a partner with whom one can spend not just this life, but the next as well. These ideas, the Christian view of the Fall and the Romantic idea of Love Triumphant, are in fundamental conflict, yet they rest easily enough in the American mind.
We Americans, however, add another layer to this odd combination of ideas - our obsession with sex. For a country that denies the most basic information concerning the reality of our physical and psychological drives in that regard, we are besotted with images of human beings engaged in sexual activity. It pervades our popular culture. Porn stars are celebrities. Mainstream actors and actresses are sexualized. What we deny and ignore and dance around on the left hand, sneaks back on the right in our images and words and songs in order to keep us titillated.
The church has a legacy of ignorance and dishonesty and bigotry when it comes to human sexuality. Late antiquity was a time when Platonic and neo-Platonic thought was pervasive; it invaded the church's teaching in a variety of ways, including celebrating a certain sexual asceticism that could become fanatical. The Greek Father Origen is the best example; in order to remove sexual temptation from his life, he castrated himself. After the Constantinian establishment, there was an exodus from communal life, especially on the fringes of the Empire, and the rise of what became known as the Anchorites - hermits living alone in the desert. The first and greatest of these, St. Anthony, lived in a cave in Egypt. While sitting and praying, he reported being visited frequently by the Devil in the guise of a woman to tempt him.
During the Middle Ages, it was firmly established church doctrine that sin entered the world not through one man, as St. Paul writes in Romans, but through one woman. Eve as sexual temptress was a ubiquitous figure in Christian writing. Women were often portrayed as sexual animals, and sometimes worse. One writer referred to women as a sink of ordure (excrement) and vomit.
In order to talk about sex in the church, we need, first, to come clean about our double millennia of misogyny, and our rejection of one of the gifts of a good God. I feel fortunate to belong to a denomination that affirms that sex is indeed a good gift from God. Yet, in order to truly affirm this gift, we should be honest enough to deal with some facts about human sexuality. First, as research has shown, it is as powerful a drive as the drive for survival. Sometimes, it overwhelms our desire for food and drink. In human relationships, it certainly overwhelms common sense and a rational consideration of our best interests, at least at times. It is not enough to affirm that sex is a gift from God. It is not enough, as a community that affirms that, to insist on the necessity of using that gift correctly. I believe, and have believed for a long time, there is a need for instructing people (not just young people) on what it means to use the gift of our sexuality correctly.
Our denomination, like most American denominations, affirms the proper role of human sexuality is in a committed, monogamous relationship blessed by both church and state, between a man and a woman. In other words, sex outside of heterosexual marriage is a no-no. This is a marvelous ideal, yet it ignores several realities. First, it ignores the reality that our sex drive starts to rev up before we have reached a level of emotional and intellectual maturity to deal with it. It also ignores the reality that some people are attracted to members of their own gender, or both. It ignores the reality that some people, even acknowledging that married sex is far better than other forms, will engage in non-connubial pleasures.
Without telling stories out of school (and dodging any lawsuits tossed my way), I will say that I have experience with what I have called in my life the "demonic aspects" of human sexuality. That is to say, a sexual relationship devoid of serious emotional attachment and the resulting damage to both of us, psychologically and otherwise. I have called this state "demonic" because it was far worse than the easily described and dealt-with "obsession". While I do not know the end-results for my partner, I do know that it was many months of serious soul searching and talking things out before I felt comfortable entering in to any kind of relationship with a woman. I had looked for too long in to the abyss, and it had not only looked back, but captured me. I was self-aware enough to fear what I had become, and knew I could become again.
From that experience, I have gained an interest in making sure the church's teaching concerning human sexuality is honest enough to include some serious psychological education. It is all well and good for non-religious teaching to deal with the physical, psychological, and emotional complexities of sexual desire. The church needs to be clear that, absent the depths of emotional attachment, the desire for sexual union to be indicative of, symbolic of, and part of a deeper, more fully developing emotional attachment between two human beings, simple physical sexual intercourse is abused. That is to say, just "doing it" to "do it" is wrong, not on some grand metaphysical level, but on a deeply personal and interpersonal level. Simply fulfilling one's craven physical desire for another person, without any corresponding emotional component isn't really "sex" at all. It is masturbation, with the other pserson substituting for one's hand. Period. Doing this over time not only dehumanizes and depersonalizes the other, it destroys one's own sense of oneself.
For that reason, I think it necessary for the church to talk to people about sex, and to do so including the very real dangers posed by sexual activity without a very real human connection. Between two people where such a connection exists, and where the sex act is part and parcel of deepening and extending this connection, I think the issue of marriage is something that might be negotiable. Just sex for the sake of sex, however - down that road we might just look like Adam and Eve in the above etching.
