about sex, unfortunately

I spend a great deal of time on (mostly Christian) twitter, as I have mentioned, and the rhythms of its many beefs are as familiar to me now as the hum and tumble of my front-loading washing machine. The content varies, but rarely the trajectory—although, at this fuzzy distance, the content doesn’t vary that much, either. Recently more than one has been, in one way or another, about sex. Of course they are about other things, too: interpretation, Christian doctrine. But also they are about sex, the question of its appropriateness in conversations about God, and its place in human living.

As a human activity, there is room in sex for theology, and in theology for sex, as there is room in theology (or should be) for everything that we do. What’s less clear is how much room it needs to take up; at any rate it takes up a lot of it everywhere you look. Perhaps it is a primary enemy, something that has to be warded off and carefully controlled without ever being looked at directly! Perhaps it is an unqualified good, always at least potentially, or by rights, good, fun, liberatory, instructive about identity! Perhaps it is both depending on whom you sleep with and how! At any rate it would appear to be very central, unavoidable, requiring from us a great deal of mental energy.

Christians are obsessed with sex in one way or another for our own reasons, but fiction mirrors the obsession in a way that suggests it’s not purely a Christian fixation. Of course love stories and epics with reunion or its thwarting being the dynamism of the thing are as old as time. But there’s a particular stream of narrative that, perhaps provocatively at the time of publication seventy and more years ago, sees sexual desire as really core to what makes us human, the truest thing about us, and its manipulation as particularly dystopian or disturbing (I am thinking particularly of Brave New World and 1984)—and that didn’t dry up when whatever we’re calling the shift in mores in the sixties reworked the boundaries of permitted and talked-about sex, is the thing. Vehicles as different as Oryx and Crake (novel, Atwood) and Steven Universe (children’s television, Sugar) also feature new or deliberately adapted humans who do sex or romance differently (i.e. less individually, less desperately, with less attachment, with less self), to the horror of the protagonists. The choices we make in sex and romance are positioned as demonstrative of and even constitutive of our social-political morals and values.

Even when this identification of romantic-sexual intimacy with humanity itself is less clear, it’s still the go-to motivation for action, especially heroic action. In the last handful of years I’ve seen several movies that work with extremely grand and serious themes, like virtue in war, the forging of identity in the fires of moral injury, loyalty across disagreement, dogged hope in the face of doom, and so forth: Wonder Woman and The Last Jedi films are the best examples. And, bewilderingly, both of these films included, near the very end, an explicit reduction of those themes to the dynamics of heterosexual romance, as though the writers themselves didn’t realize what it was exactly that they had written. Certainly romantic-sexual love can inspire us to great heights of achievement, but also it’s very likely to be as pedestrian as most of us are, or to sour or fade according to the characters of the people involved in it. It is a very strange horse to which to hitch the wagon of our humanness, not least because certain aspects of it are the clearest thing we have in common with non-human mammals.

Which brings me to these weird twitter beefs, which lately take the shape of some sexifying of a religious thing. Once there was a liturgy that used BDSM terminology to name God. This weekend it was a sexing up of the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. These things are very easy to argue about because they bother lots of people: People who care about precision with respect to language for God, people who care about traditional doctrine, people who are offended by sex broadly speaking, people who read the Bible primarily as a devotional text and are not impressed by genre study, people who are easily shocked, people who dislike what seems provocative, and so forth. The list of critiques is long, as is the history of people trying out language for God or reading of Biblical texts in ways that are disturbing to some in the hopes that some new truth will be revealed. But the recent sex things seem to me to be more reflective of the conviction that there is nothing more human than sex than the spirit of theological inquiry and greater desire for truth. If we reason that we can know something of God by knowing something of God’s creation, especially humans, made uniquely in the image of God, then the most human things we do must throw light on God; ergo sex, the way we do it, must illuminate the nature of the divine. It’s just that I think this is a misapprehension of the place of sex in human identity.

We want, I think, for sex to be blessed, because it was denigrated for so long and with such a profound effect on so many people, especially women. The best remedy would be for sex not to be particularly bad but actually particularly good, meaningful, important, human in the Imago Dei way. And one way to know a human activity is good or blessed is that it in some way resembles what we understand God to be or do. So, doing justice, being kind and merciful, and so forth. And if God does sex in some Godlike way—if there’s something like sex among the persons of the Trinity, or if God’s relation to us is something like sex—that means it’s blessed the way we need it to be. It’s just that analog to divine activity is not the only way to know a human activity is good or blessed (some good activities are commanded, for instance), nor are good and blessed the only acceptable moral valences for human activity. Certainly we do many bad things, also knowable by their relationship to God’s activity in the sense that they are unlike it, but probably most of what we do is essentially neutral. Eating, wearing sweaters, walking to and fro: God presently does none of these things nor did them apart from the Incarnation (sweaters probably not a feature of the Incarnation either), and yet, outside of the horrific and inescapable web of sin we have built through capitalism and Western imperialism, all of these things are neutral. Once can eat or wear sweaters or walk in good ways (contributing to the flourishing of a community) or bad ones (exploitative of other people). But there is nothing about eating or wearing sweaters or walking that is particularly good or bad. They are just things humans do.

I really think it would be salutary if we were able to move sex to this category of basically neutral human things, out of the two categories it’s inhabited simultaneously for [historically ungrounded assertion of duration]—God-like and good, or un-God-like and demonic—with the result of making everyone anxious and fixated. The biggest problem with the BDSM liturgy or the sexy-woman-at-the-well retelling isn’t that it is inappropriate because one shouldn’t think about sex in the context of God, it’s that they presume sex itself is instructive about the nature of God, which is less shocking to modesty than it is simply inadequate. Sex isn’t something that God does. Sex does not need to be something God does in order to be, sometimes, good, or subject to serious and sustained theological thought. God doesn’t have to eat food in order for meals among loved ones to be blessed and holy moments, either. Or, less poetically, for Eucharist to be a means of grace.

Scripture portrays God as desirous of humankind: Desirous that we know God, desirous that we be saved, desirous that we live right and well. But desire is a double word; it means either something very capacious, wanting in every sense, including the body when it does only because it includes so very much, or it means wanting sex. Meanwhile eros has suffered a collapse in English: in some usages and maybe in a different time it is the capacious kind of desire, a desire for closeness, living together, mutual knowing, provision, intimacy apart from gross anatomy, that is a way to talk about the way that God desires people and the greater way that people desire each other both in and out of romantic relationships. But more commonly and now “erotic” means, specifically, about sex, extending maybe to the psychology of the thing but specifically about having sex, as in “erotica.” The collapse is a problem because appropriate and necessary talk of how God desires us becomes, very weirdly, talk about how God wants us in the way that we might want to take someone to bed, or at least a way analogous to the way we might want to take someone to bed, such that the ways we might want to take someone to bed can tell us something meaningful about God beyond the fact of some kind of desirousness. But even human and largely secular frameworks of consent and power make it very clear that God could not interact with humans in a way inflected by sex without it being harmful and exploitative beyond any pale of acceptability.

I’m very conscious of the irony of my deprecation of sex as a good lens on God or God’s relationship with humanity, since it can easily sound like the kind of prudery that is equally horrified by my being a woman married to a wife. But in that horror is the same kind of preoccupation with sex at the expense of every other thing, connected and not, that shapes and upholds human life and the many relationships that structure it. A very old idea about same-sex desire is that it is specifically about excessive lust, that it is understood exhaustively by focus on behaviors which are due to too much wanting of the purely physical kind and nothing more. This is no more true about us than it is about the portion of humanity that sorts itself into heterosexual pairings, that is, occasionally true but nearly always wildly more complicated, because people are about more than sex. Even our sex, most of the time, is about more than sex.

This, I think, is the best instinct behind the unfortunate hegemony of sexual-romantic relationships as the cypher for everything from God to abandoning the graves of fallen comrades to regroup in another, hidden star system: That there is something in our intimate relationships of the whole of us: The desire for the good of the other that motivates us beyond our ordinary capacities or proclivities, connection to the whole of humanity, courage, vulnerability, truth, comfort, curiosity, honor, justice, hope. But the order needs preserving: It’s not that everything is actually about sex, but rather that everything humans do, even sex, is borne upon by everything that humans are.