Most of us are adept at recognizing the neurotic compulsions of others. We see an overestimation of a thing’s significance or the hijacking of a person’s life by slavish obedience to an impulse that cannot reciprocate even a portion of the same attentiveness and care, and we know this person is beholden to something degrading. The webbed interface of people’s relationships and responsibilities diminishes in their yielding to its demands, and it often goes unrecognized by the neurotic until it is too late, if at all.
But we are disastrously unskilled in recognizing our own neuroses. Indeed, we are proficient in ignoring the log in our eye as we blunder about the courses of our lives, inflicting damage with every step, which we do not recognize as we cannot afford to recognize it.
This delusional destructiveness is particularly visible in contemporary attitudes regarding sex. It seems little exaggeration to say sex is the opiate of the people. It’s not so much that sex has replaced religion, however, as it is the chief form of contemporary religion.
The belief that most unites individuals across contemporary polarities is the assumption that sex is central to authentic human existence. This assumption adopts different forms, to be sure, but the baseline presupposition is that sex is paramount to our becoming. If one is not sexually active—in frequent, strenuous, thrilling sexual intercourse—then one has not arrived into humanity. Our life is deficient. We are pitiable.
Sex understood as such an unalloyed good that “sex positivity” is mandated. Sex is, and it is to be praised. This allows little to no examination of what criteria could make sex good or what could inform a decision not to engage in it. Instead, there is a command to enjoy that betrays an insubstantial core. Even the desire for grounds of sex’s goodness is suspect and maligned as puritanical prudishness or sex negativity.
But this is monumentally naive. Sex can be astounding, but it is not intrinsically so. And it certainly is not intrinsically good. Indeed, no good is intrinsically good, as that would mean that every instance of it, regardless of the motives of its agent or the circumstances of its taking place, would be unproblematically just, beneficial, and commendable. But nothing in a fallen world is without its shadow side. Every created thing has characteristic damage and is prone to failure, to falling short of the good it is meant to be.
While conservatives rightly complain of how common it is to ignore or underemphasize the disorder within our desires, too many of them myopically overlook that all sexual longing is broken and dangerously exalted in the modern subject’s affections, all of it distorted by excess and psychological need that cannot be satisfied. For too many conservatives, the idea that chastity is a virtue even within marriage would be as nonsensical as a triangle with four corners.
The New Testament is of course not unconcerned with sex, but it is far removed from the preoccupation that characterizes our culture. Scripture recognizes sex is a matter of real spiritual and moral significance and commends it as a relative good. It is just these unobtrusive notes of appreciation that should provoke a shocked recognition in contemporary Christians that sex is far from ultimate.
But if that is the case, then Christians must ask themselves how they can believe in the core of their being that something of such vital importance to them was never experienced by Jesus Christ, the exemplar of authentic humanity. And by and large, neither progressives nor conservatives have an answer to this because they wholeheartedly embraced this ideology a long time ago.
The formation that sexual desire receives in our culture is largely centered on the unhindered pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. Stanford professor and cultural critic Mark Greif explains how sex, in its so-called “liberation,” became a new controlling norm and standard for authenticity and how it could become nothing else once it underwent ideological transformation as the index of authenticity.
He observes that this liberation is better understood as a “liberalization” in that it creates markets for something that is freely, properly ours. New rules emerge for liberalization based less on the nature of those goods than on their traffic. Such rules reflect a commodification which, under capitalist modernity’s plausibility structures, alienate us from the ostensibly liberated thing.
“But a test of liberation,” he writes,
as distinct from liberalization, must be whether you have also been freed to be free from sex, too—to ignore it, or to be asexual, without consequent social opprobrium or imputation of deficiency … One of the cruel betrayals of sexual liberation, in liberalization, was the illusion that a person can be free only if he holds sex as all-important and exposes it endlessly to others—providing it, proving it, enjoying it.
In the wake of its unprincipled decoupling from prior norms, sex usurped a throne it was never meant to assume as the new norming norm. As a result, a new mode of unfreedom has assumed hegemony, one that distorts and degrades our humanity.
The enshrinement of sex as the most crucial, defining thing to a life that would be called human depended on the prior colonization of Western life by capitalism and its restructuring of norms. “The good” was reduced to non-interference by others to allow for consumer goods to be unrestrictedly purchased and amassed, ceaselessly sought in our quests to become persons worth being. The new rules that developed for the traffic of these goods inculcate fragmentation and discontent and advertise daily cycles of consumption as the means to take hold of authenticity.
But this is as substantive an exercise of freedom as the offer to customize your phone, website, or, indeed, any other product with the limited set of x options provided to you by the purveyor of that product. “Have it your way” gives the appearance of consumer freedom until you realize—if you ever—that “your way” is decided for you along this entrepreneurially predetermined axis, promising the fulfillment of desire but only ever agitating it further.
So it goes with sex. Television and film repeat the cliché when a person is in danger: “I can’t die! I’m still a virgin!” Which is not to say these scenes create the problem: rather, they illuminate and reinforce the plausibility structures that screen for us what is desirable and what is possible.
For people who disagree with one another about the particularities of what is licit, sex is still the key that unlocks the hinterland of reality, that hews you from the unshaped stone of being. Sex is a badge of personalization, a household god we carry with us to secure our safe passage through life.
But newsflash: sex does not confer on you a dignity you did not already possess. It does not inject the world with a meaning it lacked before your initiation into the experience of sex. Sex will not reorganize your senses to appreciate the beauty and mystery of the world if you did not already have that capacity to recognize and commend.
If you are routinely bored by the world and others, sex will not and cannot transmogrify you into an appreciator of the world’s quiddity. You are still you. If you are dull of heart and imagination, bored by existence and unmoved by the needs and fears and interests of others, sex will do nothing to render you a better person who is more attentive to these things. You ought instead to dwell in that unease you are trying to escape and acknowledge the terrifying truth that you are dissatisfied because something is both wrong with the world and with you.
With yourself, because wonderful things are continually evident and they provoke no awe from your bland, calloused soul. But also with the world, because things are dreadfully out of joint, distorted, and disordered. Even if fixing yourself were possible, it would not mean that now the world is as it should be. The damage is pervasive on both fronts. Grace allows us to live as if it were not (1 Cor. 7:29-31), which, crucially, is not a form of denial. It does not pretend that things are better than they are. It is simply able to cherish what is good and true and beautiful in the doses in which it appears despite the world’s imbecilic malice precisely because that malice has been issued its death certificate.
As with so many things, sex cannot bear the weight we place upon it. It cannot provide such a ground for God’s covenant partners. And like every idol, its veneration distorts and degrades us. This is not the opening up of a world: it is constriction into a closed circle of diminishing returns, of entrapment within and mastery by that which was never meant to be the whole of life.
Christians are under no obligation worth honoring to be “sex positive.” Thinking of sex as neither “important” nor as “trivial” is adequate. A dialectical approach is needed: sex is important enough that it cannot be experienced by all, for just any reason, under just any circumstance, sought before or above other things. But it’s trivial enough that not experiencing it means absolutely nothing, that prioritizing it is absurd, that desiring it beyond a certain level is inconsistent with being a moral subject set amid terrible and wonderful decisions to be made.
Both of these are so: not one or the other but the field of tension opened by the intertwined truth of both. One attitude is insufficient. We must be trained to scoff at every compressed, shrunken good that would promise us fulfillment. And at the same time we must be formed to enjoy the good miraculously supplied in discrete quanta in the million small moments we are given by the God who loves creatures as absurd and inconsistent as we are.
Ian Olson is a Guest Writer. His work has appeared on Covenant, Mockingbird, and Mere Orthodoxy.
