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pre-marital sex

Feminism

Dianna Anderson’s "Damaged Goods"

I’ve been looking forward to Dianna Anderson’s Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity for well over a year now, so when it came in the mail a few weeks ago I was thrilled to pieces. I have so much respect for Dianna’s writing (today’s piece on Christianity and Empire is a must-read), and I was happy that someone like her would be tackling evangelical purity culture in a book.

One of the things that I love about Dianna’s voice is that she doesn’t talk down to anyone. She’s taking on some huge concepts in two hundred pages, and all of her explanations are clear and concise without ever once patronizing anybody. That’s a significant accomplishment, especially for this topic; for evangelicals, everything that Dianna is writing about has long since been settled and she’s overturning a lot of those apple carts, only without any well duh in her tone. I admire that, because it’s something I occasionally struggle with. Things that seem so obvious to me … aren’t actually obvious, as illustrated by the thousands and thousands of people who want to tell women that their husband ripping their vagina is a “beautiful moment.”

It was an interesting experience reading this, especially as I’m coming from a point of view where I already agree with her. As I read, I could’ve underlined the passages I knew more conservative Christians would object to– and when I read Christianity Today’s negative review, I laughed out loud because I nailed it. Some readers are going to be made incredibly uncomfortable by what this book argues, especially the places when she diverges from the evangelical interpretations of Scripture. These interpretations are enshrined as more than mere interpretation— according to people like Gina Dalfonzo, “flee fornication” just can’t possibly have any other meaning beside “don’t have pre-marital sex.” Anyone who proposes an alternative meaning — such as the one Dianna does — is going to be condemned for not toeing the party line.

The theme that I appreciated the most through Damaged Goods was the self-reflective honesty she presents about what love — and harm– look like in sexual relationships. It was interesting to see my lingering evangelical perception of “selfishness in bed” challenged; in evangelicalism, people are selfish when they withhold sex … but, to Dianna, selfishness can take on many different forms. The most harmful, to her, seems to be not cherishing the imago dei in our partners and reducing them to sex objects. Sadly, I think that’s something we all could be prone to– I know there have been some moments when I reduced my partner in this fashion.

Dianna argues that we should all begin seeing our sexual relationships through the lens of love, compassion, grace, kindness, and understanding. That seems extremely Christian to me– after all, Jesus said that “they shall know you by how you love one another,” and that is something that probably should be exemplified when we’re in bed with each other, but this component does seem to be missing from evangelical culture. Discussions of (cishet marital) sex don’t frequently emphasize love, instead usually opting to focus on fear (“if you don’t have sex with him enough he’ll leave you”).

It’s not just love for others, either, that drives the argument of the book, but love for yourself, too. That’s something that we should all start shouting about, especially around girls and women. Seeing sexual choices principally through loving yourself seems anathema to us, but Dianna shows us all the ways we can take our own needs and wants into consideration, whatever our ultimate decisions ends up being.

On a personal note, the one thing I wished we got more of was an exegetical breakdown of the passages Dianna works with. She is interpreting some well-known passages in a way completely unlike what most Christian teenagers have seen before (with “flee fornication” being a good example), but she simply offers an alternative explanation and moves on quickly. Including all of the scholarly, academic, linguistic, and theological research I know she’s done would have taken this book off the rails– it’s not an exegetical text, nor should it be– but the academic in my heart was sad. Also, if you’re looking for a thorough exegetical breakdown of the passages used to condemn pre-marital sex, this book isn’t for you.

It was an encouraging book to read, and contained a lot of very useful information (the “A Review of the Christian Purity Movement” chapter was fascinating), and I think this book should be a standby for every youth pastor and parent out there.

March 23, 2015 by
Feminism

is it possible to be a sex-positive Christian? [part one]

If you’ve spent any time in feminist circles, you’ve probably bumped into the term sex-positive. It gets thrown around a bit, and one thing I’ve noticed is that it can occasionally be difficult to nail down what the writer/speaker means when they use it, so I’m going to offer a definition for what I mean when I use it.

To me, being sex-positive means that sex can be a good and healthy part of human experience. Not everyone wants sex a lot — or at all — and that is also good and healthy. Being sex-positive means I believe in educating people about sex, about safe sex, about contraception, about STIs, about how to give and experience sexual pleasure, and I believe in removing stigmas and myths from sex (such as “virgin women bleed the first time“). Being sex-positive means that I believe in seeking enthusiastic consent, and that consent is the most basic, fundamental, necessary part of sex, as it is the only thing that separates sex from rape. I believe in educating people about being a responsible sex partner, giving young people especially the tools to make complicated, nuanced decisions regarding sex.

It also means that I don’t shame, judge, or condemn those who are (or are not) having sex, regardless of their life circumstances.

Including whether or not they are married.

And that is where I and probably most Christians part ways. To many Christians, the only conversation to be had about sex is in the context of heterosexual (and, in same cases, such as Matthew Vines, homosexual) marriage. The gold standard in evangelical conversations about sex is abstinence, and it is typically the only information and encouragement unmarried people receive.

However, just because I disagree with many (if not most) Christians about this doesn’t mean that I don’t have access to either Christian tradition or the Bible to make my argument. I’m going to lay out my argument in a few posts, with today’s focusing on laying some groundwork.

A note before I begin: I am a progressive Christian, and that does mean I interact with Scripture differently than an evangelical who believes in inerrancy and takes a literalist approach. I don’t want to hash that all out, so if you’re curious about how I see the Bible, Peter Enns’ The Bible Tells Me So is a good book to start with. For more controversial reading, Forged by Bart Ehrman was interesting.

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I. Sin

The question that I have to start with, as a Christian, is “is pre-marital sex a sin?”, but the most relevant part of that question is our definition of sin. In many Christian conversations about what sin is, it seems to be assumed that “sin is a transgression of the law of God.” In a sense, I agree with this definition, but it’s because I believe that “the law of God” can be summed up in “to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.” Where I disagree with this definition is in its common application: many Christians preach and act as though “sin” is “doing something that God says you’re not allowed to do.”

That application is non-sensical to me because the Bible doesn’t cover that much ground, really, and there’s a whole lot of things we can do that is never addressed– so how are we supposed to know God’s stance on it? Especially when what we do have in the Bible has God apparently telling people to commit genocide and infanticide … repeatedly. I think we’d all agree that genocide is a moral evil, but the Bible shows God commanding it, which is disturbing. Personally, I believe that either a) the people who wrote the Old Testament believed that God told them to do that, regardless of whether or not he did, or b) they said God had commanded it to justify it. “B” makes the most sense to me, as people have used their deity to justify all sorts of evil things through history.

This is why I believe that it’s important to have a more consistent sense of ethics than my deity (dis)approves of this action. Personally, my ethics and morals are guided by the question could this action or inaction cause harm? This aligns with my understanding of “love your neighbor as yourself,” and “they shall know you be how you love one another.” This question allows a lot of room for nuance and complexity, as not every situation and person is going to require the same response from me. Does my deity approve of this action? is very black-and-white and does not allow for circumstance, but could this cause harm? does.

So, for me, the question “is pre-marital sex a sin?” becomes “will having sex cause harm?” It’s extremely important to note that this question applies inside of marriage, as well as out of it. This is not a question we can stop asking just because we signed a piece of paper.

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II. Rejecting the Premise

The Bible is a very old collection of books. I wish that’s something that didn’t need to be mentioned, but it is. It is very old. Ancient, in fact. Directions in Deuteronomy about stoning women who didn’t bleed on their wedding night are from 700 BCE, possibly. Conversations about “fornication” or “sexual immorality” from the Pauline epistles are from the first century. These facts mean that there is some historical context we have to situate ourselves in before we can even begin having a biblically-based conversation about sex.

On its face, it seems as though the New Testament consistently condemns all forms of extra-marital sex, but I think it’s important to ask the question why? It’s also important to address the problem that what the New Testament writers had in mind may not be a 1-for-1 correlation to our modern-day situation, and for us to seek the “eternal principle” that can apply to us. I believe that the consistent morality presented in Scripture is rooted in love and not causing harm to others, and I’ll get to why I believe that specifically applies to sex on Friday.

For today, the most important idea to keep in front of us is that the New Testament does not reject the practice of owning people as property. Property law, it can be argued, was the foundation of Roman society (and, by influence, Western civilization. See: white police officers being more concerned with the destruction of property than the destruction of human life in places like Ferguson). At the time St. Paul was writing, the paterfamilias, the head of the household, was able to order his life and by extension society because he owned people. He owned his wife, he owned his children, he owned his slaves. We see this in the way that several biblical passages are organized around the Greco-Roman Household Codes.

Paul doesn’t directly challenge this system in his epistle to Philemon, although he doesn’t exactly endorse it, either. Owning people as property just … existed. Paul might not have been happy with it, but it was there. The NT almost seems to shrug it off in some ways– explaining to Christians how to live in this system while practicing love and doing no harm. Paul even made the shocking suggestion to the paterfamilias that he was morally obligated to take good care of his property. For its time, these letters were progressive. However, we’ve gone farther. Most of us have decided that slavery is a moral evil and that, specifically, women are capable people and are not possessions attached to their husbands.

In this system, in a society where women are either the property of their fathers, husbands, the government, or religion, we could be damaged. If we “lost” our virginity, we were quite literally worth less, and, as such, had been harmed. The fathers who owned us were also harmed because they’d lost their ability to sell us for an ‘unsullied’ price. Because of this, it’s easy to see why the NT seems to so roundly condemn extra-marital sex. When a woman’s value is directly attached to whether or not she’s had sex with or been raped by a man, having sex with her is harmful, and should not be done.

However, that’s not where we are today. Today, women aren’t property. Marriage isn’t about a sale. We don’t care about things like dowries and ensuring the existence of legal heirs. The context has changed, although the basic question (“would having sex be harmful?”) hasn’t.

Photo by Sarah Reid
January 21, 2015 by
Feminism, Theology

marriage as a blood covenant

blood covenant

Last week I heard something I didn’t expect to hear outside of a fundamentalist church, and it shook me up a little. Someone was talking about the importance of marriage, and they launched into an explanation of how marriage is a blood covenant. I’d heard passing references to this idea in the last year, but since I’d grown up in a church that never actually talked about sex, the whole “penis goes into vagina, vagina bleeds = blood covenant” idea was not one I was familiar with. I assumed that it was just something this one person had decided made sense and wasn’t that wide-spread.

But, last night when I was talking with my small group about the idea, it seemed like everyone in the room was way more familiar with it than I was– several had grown up hearing that “marriage is a blood covenant” and it didn’t stand out to some of them as unusual. How parents are supposed to keep the marriage-bed sheet as proof of their daughter’s virginity was cited as at least one example.

That disturbed me.

So, I’ve been doing some research today, and I’d like to talk about this somewhat common misconception that marriage is a blood covenant. When you google “blood covenant” all the results you’re going to get are many, many pages of Christians talking about it, which honestly wasn’t very helpful. It took me a little bit of digging until I finally grew a brain and consulted Judaic resources. That finally gave me a basic understanding of historical blood covenants:

The old, primitive way of concluding a covenant, (בְּרִית “to cut a covenant”) was for the covenanters to cut into each other’s arm and suck the blood; the mixing of the blood rendering them “brothers of the covenant” . . . A rite expressive of the same idea is the cutting of a sacrificial animal into two parts, between which the contracting parties pass, showing thereby that they are bound to each other.

There are only a few examples of blood covenants in the Bible that look like this– it seems that a lot of what modern-day Christians refer to as “blood covenants” are not really blood covenants at all. One of the few examples is interesting because of how it diverges from this: in Genesis 15, when God makes his first covenant, Abram sees it as a torch passing between the sacrificed animals, but Abram doesn’t follow. The significance of this covenant is that by passing through it alone, God declared that he will keep this covenant regardless of whether or not Abram did. The imagery of this is repeated, again, in the Crucifixion. Jesus did not require our blood to seal the covenant– just his.

There are, of course, other kinds of covenants, not just blood covenants, and I think one can argue that marriage is a type of covenant. It can be difficult to understand covenant as something different from a legal contract, especially since Christianity has been deeply influenced by a lawyer-like interpretation of the Bible for the last few centuries– but covenants are essentially about trust, while contracts are essentially about distrust.

The problem I have with talking about marriage as a blood covenant isn’t that I think it’s bad to think of marriage as a covenant– I think it’s horrible to think of marriage as a blood covenant for the very simple reason that it accepts violence against women.

I’ve written about this before, but the culturally accepted idea that female virgins bleed is just flat wrong. People with vaginas (who are not always women/female, to be clear) do not have to bleed the first time they have sex, and perpetuating this idea that bleeding is normal– in fact, it is necessary for a blood covenant— is wrong and harmful. It’s a teaching that has, at its core, the notion that female pain and suffering is completely normal, even unavoidable.  It keeps alive the incredibly damaging notion that men do not have to care about a woman’s pain, in fact, they must cause her pain, at least occasionally.

People with vaginas who have sex only bleed when their partner has done violence to them. If your partner is hurting, then you hurt them and you need to slow down, listen to them, and care about their body. Most likely this harm is done in complete innocence, in ignorance, but it is disgusting when our churches, our pastors, our Christian teachers, push pain as good, even holy, because it is a “blood covenant.”

Instead, when we talk about sex, what we should be encouraging is a mutual understanding of our bodies, of how to bring and give and share pleasure, and most of all, to never ever believe that it is acceptable for one of us to experience pain.

March 7, 2014 by