I once dated a girl who told me her therapist had, at one point, suggested that people take sex too seriously, that intercourse in particular is “just friction.” She admitted to me, however, that she didn’t entirely buy into this view, nor did I, though at the time, I was scarcely certain as to why in any concrete sense. Thirteen years later, I believe I’m now able to fully understand the lie that was begging to be believed. I had a friend from high school who definitely felt I took sex too seriously and used to tell me, whenever I would share my romantic frustrations, that I needed to get laid. He was teasing, of course, though only in part; despite his understanding my desire to connect with a woman intellectually and spiritually as well as physically, he made it clear he believed I was elevating sexuality to a significance it didn’t truly merit and that it could indeed be at once satisfying and meaningless. Again, I had to disagree. The only difference now is that I know precisely why. I should have agreed with him at the time except for having some vague sensibility about the lie for which he seemed to campaign so lucidly. It is simply this: sex doesn’t have to mean anything, or to be more specific, it only means something if we intend it to. And by such a myth is our cultural fluency poisoned and the notion of casual sex directed, a notion that feels all too casual these days.
In the apologetic opus Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis identifies chastity as “the most unpopular of the Christian virtues,” and reflects that we’ve inherited a world filled with propaganda favoring unchastity. This seems at least as true today as when it was first published in 1952, though I believe it is perhaps more so now; broader media restrictions and the ease of access to information through technology and the internet seem to have exacerbated the enormous mess we’ve made of sexuality, drawing it to the attention of younger and younger ages and encouraging ourselves to believe that the self-control necessary to lead a chaste life is not only somehow perverse, but virtually impossible. Lewis makes a valid point, too, when he says, “There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance” (Lewis, 99). This always makes me smile, it’s so true. Then again, while I can think of many benefits to entrepreneurial vigor and commercial ingenuity, the exploitation of lust is not one of them.
To clarify my own view, I see in the present age an obsession with sexual gratification that seems to annul all sense, though I admit it is perhaps merely symptomatic of a larger cultural pathology, which is an obsession with both personal fulfillment and freedom from accountability. For now, however, I restrict myself to a discussion of sexuality, in which the current moral temperature seems uniquely characterized by a determination to divorce ourselves completely from any traditional wisdom in the matter. It is now considered highly antiquated to remain sexually pure, particularly if you are in a committed relationship, and particularly one that seems headed for marriage. Proponents of chastity, then, find in one another a kind of fellowship in being generally regarded by the greater population as zealots who favor self-deprivation out of some senseless religious dogma, suppressing an impulse that is perfectly natural and healthy. Hedonistic culture currents aside, however, chastity also seems quite frequently viewed as quaintly old-fashioned, an endearing and somewhat Victorian relic of an option—which places the couples who practice it in some hyper-romantic vein of sentimentality—as opposed to a vital, reverent, and sober degree of self-control and spiritual obedience with universal benefits that bind us to the will of a benevolent Creator. To a vast majority of the ordinary, down-to-earth people in the world, and even to some Christians, such a principle is completely ridiculous.
A young woman I once knew was dating a guy who tried to convince her that fornication was not in fact a sin at all, quoting 1 Corinthians 7:36, in which the apostle Paul discusses the merits of marriage, not fornication: “If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry—it is no sin.” The guy’s purpose was predatory, of course. This was not a young man soberly considering the truth revealed in Paul’s letter, but rather using a text in which he had no faith himself to attack the faith of my friend in the hope of fulfilling his own thoughtless sexual appetite. He was quick to follow her refusal by remarking what a shame it was she would allow her religion to keep them apart. In other words, if appealing to her doctrinal allegiance proved fruitless, he was more than happy to ask her to reject her faith completely—a move which, of course, smacks of desperation. Every horny guy is liable to act desperately, but so is every love-starved girl. Together, the two are spiritually volatile. One wants desperately to be loved and appreciated. The other wants desperately to be physically gratified. Both sides of the stereotype can be understood, but neither can be excused. And in fact, even among couples who have agreed to a mutually superficial exchange of affection, it doesn’t hold up. Sexuality is only casual to those who have tried to divorce themselves from the mystery of true intimacy. In other words, they have given themselves permission to believe a woefully permissive and thoroughly comfortable lie.
There is nothing casual about sex. Consider perhaps the most superficial and seemingly innocuous form of “casual sex”: pornography. And let us not waste too long on questions like is porn degrading to women? or is it art? Of course it’s degrading to women, but it’s also degrading to the person who looks at it. Of course it’s not art. The purpose of porn is nothing but to excite sexual desire, and so it cannot be art, because its purpose is not artistic. Let’s rather proceed to the simple issue of indulgence. As Lewis further reveals in Mere Christianity, “Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based in truth—the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’, and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humour, and frankness. For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing” (Lewis, 100). The argument is perfectly fair, and pointedly delivers us to the most important issue concerning sexual immorality, which is the questionable validity, or rightness, of the propensities and excesses of human nature. Porn, by many accounts, is entirely natural, though only as natural as any other human vice. Lying is natural. Vengeance and even murder, under a variety of circumstances, may be seen as natural. On a larger scale, the human race seems to have come by war quite naturally and quite regularly for thousands of years. Lots of things are natural. Let us not allow human nature to wear the guise of virtue any more than a court of law, for instance, may wear the guise of justice. Despite their purpose, courts are corruptible and laws abused and stupidly interpreted, because a court of law is no better than the people who operate it. Likewise, a human being can never be of unilaterally good instincts. So, as Lewis illustrates so clearly, the argument that sexuality is natural is a genuinely poor and altogether naïve justification for such as adultery, promiscuity, fornication, casual sex, and audience with pornography. Some would undoubtedly argue that sexuality in fact requires no justification, that it simply is what it is and that we shouldn’t try to moralize it with sophomoric religious dogma. Never was a view more sophomoric than to believe that the potential for human frailty and vice can transcend moralization, and once again, I believe such persons have attempted to divorce themselves from the hard-won reward of complete intimacy in deference the more immedate payoff of partial intimacy. They have allowed a very comfortable lie to supplant their capacity for wisdom, because all people, when able to transcend their primal appetites, seek completion—that communion by which we may achieve a transcendent spiritual peace, which is an echo of the divine in each of us and a fundamental understanding of righteousness apart from one’s own instinct. Denial of this is simply a matter of postponement. The young man who attempted to pervert the meaning of the 1 Corinthians verse is simply too far from that stage of life at which he is able to recognize his truest need. Or, he is so acutely aware of it that he believes fornication is his best hope in contrast to a level of intimacy he suspects he may never achieve. In this way, sexual immorality may be a simple matter of impatience. Sexual desire is part of being human, to be sure, but unless we’re able to govern it, like other human passions, it will govern us. And it does. The young man I’ve mentioned criticizes his prey for allowing her religion to upset their prospects as a couple. Asking her to carry the entire blame is, of course, sheer hypocrisy, since he is the one who deserves it; he himself is, at least for a time, in pious deference to his own kind of doctrine, a devotion entirely accountable for impeding a right and balanced relationship. His religion is libido.
It is a matter of passion. No sex is casual. The truth is we don’t get to choose what’s sacred and what’s profane. Something in us knows the difference, and while we so desperately try to legitimize the sinful employ of the sexual appetite, it is my belief that those who claim to have emancipated themselves from the traditional ethics of chastity have simply disguised their own weakness, fear, or impatience, which is not emancipation at all, but total enslavement to these motives. The traditional ethics of orthodox Christian doctrine do not condemn sexual passion. The sin rather lies in the enslavement, and human beings are likely to attempt all manner of ways to rationalize their enslavement to sin. Sexual hunger is elemental, God-given, to the person of faith, but like all things in our nature, it is susceptible to corruption. Our hope is that if we can trivialize sexuality, we might be able to disguise how much we want it. “Just friction” nothing. The fact is, we want sex so badly that we’re willing to lie even to ourselves, to pretend it doesn’t mean what it really does, and we clearly wouldn’t want it so badly if it didn’t. We’re eager, in fact, to entertain such a lie, since it allows the experience of physical pleasure in isolation from accountability and the hard work of building intimacy. As such, sexual immorality may also represent a kind of emotional sloth. In lieu of addressing the true meaning of sexuality and establishing its righteous context in the bonds of a commitment, many would rather just fire some neurons in the skin and call it a day.
As Lewis illustrates, “The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again” (Lewis, 105). To people of faith, such self-control is difficult, but not impossible, certainly not with the help and strength of the living God, who desires right relationships, not clumsy, ill-conceived ones. Chastity then goes hand-in-hand with acceptance principally of a universal moral law, which, according to Lewis, is known to us and yet transcends our instincts. Instinct, then, cannot be universally trusted. There’s a good reason sex feels right, even when it’s wrong. If human impulse cannot be universally trusted, our trust, or faith, if you will, must then be in a higher source, a God, and in the words He has spoken to us. But if our desire and God’s are one and the same, which is to intimately commune with a single partner, why then is sex wrong for those headed for marriage? Rather, I would ask, what level of passion or impatience directs the previous question? Certainly, it is not a sober one, but rather, once again, the unbridled urge to indulge without check, without commitment. And we have a word for the commitment: marriage. The evil of food lies in excess, but the potential sin in our sexuality is not a matter of mere temperance per se, but rather one of context and purpose. Adopt the true purpose of sexuality, and you’ll quickly realize that the legitimization of an unchecked and uncommitted sexual lifestyle is impossible. My opponents in this issue will surely ask, why is commitment necessary? Who is hurt in a situation where two people already in a committed relationship allow themselves to express that commitment by engaging in sexual congress? My response: Sexual intimacy, despite the immediacy of the pleasure it affords, demands of us, by its very design, an enormous degree of accountability in terms of the mutual exchange of trust, and the inherent safety implied by that trust; the complexity and depth of emotional attachment; and naturally, in the case of intercourse, the potential for bringing into the world a new human life and the overwhelming duty to bring that child up in, one would hope, a responsible and loving manner. In fact, we’re required to go to great lengths of contraception to avoid the potential for pregnancy and, subsequently, an entire life, which is the natural outgrowth and clearest biological function of sex. We have to intercept gametes in ways that admittedly defy sterling reliability. Of course, instead of leaving these things haphazardly to one’s physical whimsy, what’s right is to work them out ahead of time. Again, it’s called marriage.
The depth and importance of these issues, which surround the most intimate physical connection, as a reflection of the emotional and spiritual connections that justify it, ought to inspire a gravity and a reverence that supersede, in one’s judgment, the immediacy with which physical passion might otherwise be gratified, and it disgraces both parties to supplant commitment with immediacy, to take such intimate measures beyond the protection of the soberest and most sincere promise. In other words, the only reason we insist on asking the question is because we’re too intemperate to wait. There are many reasons to wait, but only one reason not to.
The isolation of sexuality then also signifies a salient depreciation of marriage. The two go hand-in-hand, the one with the other. As my good friend and colleague Jim Altizer has often said, “Passion without fidelity is adultery. And fidelity without passion is captivity.” The deepest measure of commitment validates the deepest measure of physical intimacy. Likewise a lack of such commitment forfeits such intimacy. And let us not kid ourselves that we are fully committed simply because we say we are or because we’ve entered into exclusive relationships. Such alliances are transient. But marriage is a solemn promise and a blessed endeavor. Without such blessing, we are captives in sexuality. As Lewis says, we’ll have to resist a great deal in our own nature to find peace or contentment. To the devout Christian, this is largely a matter of obedience. Such a person is aware that chastity is the only way to glorify God with one’s sexuality. For many, however, even a variety of Christians, this is a tenuous incentive. What would the world be like if all of us were of the requisite humility for it to be enough? However, I believe my point here is to address the person of the second type, the one who isn’t satisfied not to touch the boiling pot because mom or dad says no, but who needs rather to understand that the reason is because it is boiling and quite harmful to touch, or worse, who must actually touch it and get burnt before the understanding is achieved. Spouses might think that their sexual indiscretions prior to walking down the aisle were harmless, but the harm is in their believing so, which seeds must necessarily breed further sin, whether it is in their own actions or those of their children, having inherited the same structure of belief and the subsequent potential to debase themselves by equal or worse degrees. Either way, firsthand experience of sex with your partner should, in my belief, never be a determining factor in your decision to, in fact, become their partner. Don’t bother with a question like what if the sex isn’t good? The best sex you will ever have is with the person whom you love and adore deeply and truly with all your heart, and if that love hinges on their expertise as a sex partner, it cannot be a very deep love, nor a lasting one.
The cultural diminishment of sexual virtue addresses not merely the antiquation of chastity, but also, in my view, that of humility and supplication, which are the seeds of true wisdom and both necessary to lead a good life. Not that actually practicing chastity isn’t terribly difficult, but rather, imagining it outdated, quaint, irrelevant, or pleasantly beyond the scope of moral consideration is not well and good. What’s strange is that even many Christians seem to find chastity so unpalatable that they prefer to ignore it or deem it quaint—yet another indication of how insidiously we’ve been convinced that our want is so great as to seem foolhardy to control. But who is the more foolish, the one who lies or the one who believes the lie? Hard as it is, I would rather have an insoluble, ageless faith than a conventional one that hinges on the climate of the culture in which I find myself. Likewise, I would rather practice abstinence than give myself over to sexual desire completely, which enslavement is precisely what a “casual” approach to sexual ethics requires. If it isn’t fashionable to be chaste, it certainly isn’t honest to oneself not to be.
Work Cited
- Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. HarperCollins, 2001.
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