Our theme for the month of June is “sex and the church.” To read posts from our first pass at this theme, check out our June 2018 archives.
Cover photo: Jacob Jonas The Company
Sometimes I grouse about being on the tail end of the post publishing cycle, but this month I’m glad. It takes a lot to marshal together something coherent on this month’s topic that also tries to find some new ground, so it’s been nice to see what others are writing about and where my piece will be positioned in the discourse. After percolating ideas through my nose piercing for weeks now, here’s my hot and sexy take.
The church (sort of) teaches the idea of one holy body but fails to teach the idea of a multiplicity of holy bodies. There’s an occasional vague gesture towards “your body is a temple,” but no one really means anything. “Fearfully and wonderfully made” refers to the microscopic workings of neurons and mitochondria, not the whole body. You never hear how your hands and feet—the discrete appendages of your body—are the hands and feet of Christ. You never hear that the sexual pleasure your body experiences is a reflection of God’s holy love for his Bride. It’s too unseemly to talk about the body in detail, let alone to be positive about it.
Cue the Big Bad Wolf of purity culture.
I was homeschooled and, while mostly spared from the atrocities of Midwestern purity culture that have plagued my peers, I still got a good balcony seat to the shit show that was Joshua Harris and his insidious book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. My best friend’s mom made him make me read the book at the age of thirteen when it became evident I had a crush on her son. Harris preached that dating was futile and treacherous; courting was reserved only for the person God intended you to spend the rest of your life with. It might be difficult to deny the desires of the flesh, but the end reward was worth waiting for, or some crap like that. A whole generation of Christian millennials became afraid of having bodies and many ended up with the reward of a miserable, affectionless marriage where bodies remained Bad.
The contours of Reformed Christianity rely upon the y axis of metaphysicality instead of the x axis of tangible faith; it’s always been this way. As Ben so aptly put it, the church only has the vocabulary to describe one bodily and sexual experience, and poorly at that. Sure, there’s a lot of talking and philosophising about what it means to have a body—it’s an obligatory part of being a Reformed protestant, after all—but there’s never anything you or I can sink our teeth into.
Bodies are not valued. The church only cares about bodies when a body has gone wrong.
- The choir teacher says he can’t stay with his wife because he can’t live the lie any longer; can’t he pray harder to overcome the sinful impulses of his body?
- The daughter is back from college with an unmistakable “baby bump”; her body is now second-hand and not as valuable as a virgin’s.
- The scans show stage four cancer; we pray for healing, but you should also take comfort because you know that you will be given a new heavenly body.
- A visitor explains they use they/them pronouns; God clearly made them one way, how could they defile their body by trying to be something else?
- A woman comes forward about her pastor’s abuse; her body wasn’t even fully formed and she’s just overreacting—no harm, no foul.
It’s no surprise, then, that we feel uneasy and miserable in our relationship with Christ’s body and the relationship we have with our own bodies. (After all, it’s well-researched how physical wellbeing directly relates to mental wellbeing.) You sit inside the dedicated four walls that purportedly house the holy body, but your own body feels bad because you’ve been led to believe you can’t feel anything else. And when you examine Christ’s supposed body in the mirror, you see its flaws in the same way you see the sags and creases of your own skin. The body does not feel beautiful; your body does not feel beautiful. You are one body dysmorphic.
A common Calvinist refrain is “every square inch (but only in the heady spiritual sense because we love to hear ourselves talk about applying theology).” But you can’t just believe in nice metaphorical inches; you have to believe in the literal, carnal inches of skin and grass before you. The body was broken by the fall of creation, too, and it needs to learn a better story of love, too. Surely there is another way we can tell the story of bodies instead of continuing to run dysmorphic.
P.S. Fuck the Supreme Court and the people who value the idea of a person more than the actual, physical person begging them to stop.
YES. I was so out of touch with my own body that it took leaving Christianity to make simple connections like, “Huh, I get a headache when I’m thirsty. Hm, when I stopped going to church, my years-long pattern of Sunday morning IBS flare-ups disappeared completely. Wow, maybe my lack of sex drive isn’t a bug of purity culture repression but a feature of me being asexual.” Embracing embodiedness is a powerful part of being human, whether you’re inside the church or outside it.