What if the traditional Christian sexual ethic (as we see in early monasticism) isn’t oppressive or repressive?
What if it was liberating and freeing for men and women?
What if the Christian sexual ethic was demanding self-control of men by freeing them from the inordinate and abusive sexual desire that was cultivated in (elite) men in Rome (late antiquity)?
What if the Christian sexual ethic was offering agency to women by allowing them to refuse the oppression of patriarchy through the freedom of celibacy/virginity?
Two Lines of Thought
Two lines of thought have me thinking about this.
Re-evaluating Monasticism
First, there is currently a massive re-evaluation of early Christian asceticism and monastic life that shows it was not nearly as body-denying and repressive as commonly taught after Freud. Early monasticism took the body seriously, as a positive and negative place in which God is working out salvation.
I’m thinking of something like
- “Glorify God in Your Body: The Redemptive Role of the Body in Early Christian Ascetic Literature.“
- The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God by Sarah Coakley.
Why we are WEIRD
Second, the very important new book on The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, (by Joseph Henrich, Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard).
He argues that the Church’s “Marriage and Family Program” (as Henrich calls it) ended up changing the psychology of the West by moving us out of tribal psychological practices (I’ll be reviewing this book more moving forward).
- Henrich’s summary of his book.
- And here is a review.
Is there something still to learn?
All of this to say, as shocking as it might seem, the counter-culture Christian sexual ethic changed the world.
And if that is so, perhaps there is something still for us to learn about the body, sex, sexuality, and spiritual formation.
What do you think?
One reply on “Is Christian Sexuality Repressive?”
Thanks for these thoughts, Geoff. I think there is much to be mined here, and I look forward to hearing more. I also think any conversation which hopes to touch on the “liberation” of a traditional Christian sexual ethic has to include LGBTQ issues. This is the topic at the table to which I don’t often hear it having much to say that’s liberating at all.