Nadia Bolz-Weber is mad. Actually, mainline Protestantism’s most famous and “famously foulmouthed pastor” according to The New Yorker, would no doubt use a four-letter word to describe her fury.
She is angry that conservative Christianity, going back to St. Augustine, has repressed the natural and healthy sexual desires of human beings and heaped shame on people of faith. In her book Shameless, published last month and already number one on Amazon’s “Gender and Sexuality in Religious Studies” category, she argues for a thoroughgoing reformation of how Christians approach sex.
Shameless on sex
As a mainline Lutheran minister, Bolz-Weber long ago left behind the idea that sex is only for men and women inside of the bonds of marriage. But in Shameless she even goes beyond advocating that sex is for “two consenting adults,” so as to include the LGBT community in her sex ethic. She argues sex is, in almost all circumstances, a positive good, that Christians need the freedom to experiment with pornography, have sex before marriage, have sex as adolescents, and consider the possibility of getting a divorce if there’s not enough intimacy in your marriage.
Bolz-Weber is a gifted speaker and storyteller. She uses her acerbic wit effectively to keep her audience engaged. She believes in the divinity, miracles, and resurrection of Christ, and in some ways her preaching reflects the best of the Lutheran understanding that we are all simul justus et peccator, simultaneously justified by Christ yet sinners.
But Shameless is so full of logical inconsistencies and straw man argumentation that, frankly, it’s hard to follow. She argues the church is to be blamed for most of the sexual pain out there in the world. Really? Maybe in 1919 you could make an argument for that, but in 2019 does anyone seriously think anything like a majority of Americans are following the lead of the church when it comes to sex?
Blaming Augustine
According to Bolz-Weber, it’s St. Augustine’s fault for making up the idea of original sin and creating a culture where men can dominate and humiliate women through mansplaining, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse. I am under no obligation to defend the views of St. Augustine, but for her to critique his doctrine of original sin without even engaging with Romans 5 is to be either shockingly ignorant or willfully disingenuous. And I seem to remember from my reading of world history that the Greco-Roman world did a pretty good job of demeaning and dehumanizing women long before Christianity came on the scene.
She also psychoanalyzes Augustine, saying his guilt over an experience in an all-male Roman bath led him to espouse such a repressive sex ethic. But that kind of critique can all too easily be turned on oneself. Bolz-Weber recently divorced her husband of twenty years because, in large part, of an unsatisfactory sex life. Now she’s reunited with an old boyfriend and the sex, according to her New Yorker interview, “was amazing.” I don’t mention that to shame her or minimize how hard this must have been on both spouses, but could it be her desire for guilt-free passion with someone new now leads her to espouse such a boundless sex ethic?
Sex as individual fulfillment
Bolz-Weber says if the church would just fall in line with her new sex ethic it would keep people like her parishioner Cecilia from a world of pain. Cecilia grew up in a conservative Christian environment, was a virgin until twenty-nine, then fell in love with her boyfriend and started having sex. When he cheated on her, Cecilia was devastated. In the book, Bolz-Weber says Cecilia was “robbed” by the church. Cecilia followed all the “rules” of sex, but if her church had only told her it was ok to have pre-marital sex she would have had more experience with men and her first serious relationship wouldn’t have been so overwhelming to her.
But, of course, Cecilia didn’t follow all the “rules.” She had sex before marriage. And does having a lot of sex somehow eliminate the pain of being cheated on? Do breakups always hurt more at 29 than 19?
The sex ethic proposed in Shameless can be summed up in this quote from the book: “I’m here to tell you: unless your sexual desires are for minors or animals, or your sexual choices are hurting you or those you love, those desires are not something you need to ‘struggle’ with.”
But such a view of sex is, fundamentally, individualistic and selfish. Bolz-Weber pays lip service to mutuality, but her reformation amounts to “make sure you get yours.” Self-satisfaction is the prize promoted in Shameless.
A valid concern
Having said all that, Bolz-Weber has a good point in her critique of what she calls the “purity culture” around the evangelical teaching on sex. The message she heard growing up in the Church of Christ was that if you (especially girls) remain sexually pure until your wedding night, you’ll automatically find a great physical relationship with your spouse in marriage. Without purity, you’re only used, and probably broken, goods – and who wants that?
The church of her youth was apparently more conservative than mine, but I remember picking up on that message as well. Purity was emphasized as just about the only thing that mattered, to the point to where it felt as if it was Frodo’s ring or something.
But the blunt fact of the matter is that purity doesn’t guarantee a great marriage, and promiscuity doesn’t guarantee lifelong misery.
Sex and the city
What is, then, the Christian view of sex? It is, like everything else for the Christian, a form of service. Jesus told the disciples, “Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” Mark 10:43-44.
We are to use sex to serve and build up the community around us, just as we are to use our time, talents, and money. The difference is that while we can be promiscuous with our other gifts, sharing them with many different people and organizations to promote their flourishing, we must be conservative with sex. We can safely share our bodies only with the one person to whom we have made a covenant, whole-life and lifelong commitment.
By giving ourselves sexually to only our spouses, we actually minister to virtually everyone around us. Marriage is hard, because it involves two sinners trying to share a bedroom, bathroom, and bank account (among other things) while building a life and raising children together. The temptation to abandon marriage can be tremendous.
Therefore, sex has the power it does in large part because God designed it to serve as the “cement” that helps keep spouses together. Genesis 2:24 says, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Outside of the commitment of marriage the power of sex tears souls apart. And, as Genesis 2 makes clear, only a man and a woman can be “one flesh.”
While Christians certainly believe sex has other purposes for which it was designed by God (see Revelation 19), it is clear that our communities desperately need healthy families. Civilization cannot exist without them. And healthy families exist where husbands and wives love one another and are absolutely committed to one another. All the research tells us that children from homes where mom and dad clearly love one another are the happiest and most well-adjusted.
In other words, sex, as powerful and wonderful as it is, is not for the individual alone. Sex is also for the city.
What Bolz-Weber and many conservative Christians fail to see is that the individual fulfillment view of sex and the purity view of sex are both legalistic. The individual view says that if you don’t get out and experiment before marriage, then you probably won’t have a healthy sex life (and you may not satisfy your spouse either, and they will in turn leave). It’s all up to you. The purity view says that if you don’t keep all the rules and be good boys and girls before marriage, you won’t have a healthy sex life (and you’ll be broken and consumed with guilt). Again, it’s all up to you.
But inside Christian marriage you have the security of knowing that your spouse isn’t going anywhere, so you can work these things out over time with lots of conversation, patience, forgiveness, and, yes, maybe some counseling. And you have the freedom that comes from knowing that even if you “broke the rules” Christ died for those sins. Jesus makes you pure and washes you clean by his blood, not by your behavior.
“It is for freedom that Christ set us free.” Galatians 5:1. Christian freedom goes hand in hand with service, because you are never more free than when you can joyfully serve those around you. This is true in all areas of life, even sex.
JD SHAW 