Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Sexuality and Culture: Bodies and Scripts

Truly this is the unending miracle of love; that one loving person, through love, can embrace God, whose being fills and transcends the entire creation ... [We] were created to love and everything else was created to make love possible.

— The Cloud of Unknowing

Mark and I spent a week at St. Thomas, interspersing writing with snorkeling, kayaking, hiking, and eating. One night we ate dinner on the beach, with windows open to the ocean breeze, background music for the small band playing Caribbean music. A group of older women ate at the table beside us. At one point, a woman in her sixties, dressed in an elegant evening gown, got up and graced us with her dancing. She sashayed around the dance floor by herself, moving her hips and arms with sensuous grace. After I got over the initial wonder of it, I started rooting for her in silent praise. Here was a woman comfortable in her aging body, a woman who loved to dance and knew she danced well. She gave us all a gift. We clapped when the song ended, and Mark and I thanked her heartily as she passed our table on her way back to her own. I wished I could dance, and I longed for the kind of comfort she had with her body. Her ease and way of being present in her body encouraged me, comforted me.

Mark identified less with the woman on the dance floor than with the framers pounding nails on the new house next door. We went over almost daily to watch their progress. The day they rearranged the earth to accommodate the house, our neighbor Jeff brought his three-year-old son over to watch the backhoe move dirt, shrubs, and debris. We smelled the lumber the day before framing began — a particularly sensuous experience for Mark, who sometimes wished he worked with houses instead of ideas. We watched a team of men build walls, coordinating the raising of those walls and securing them in place. "They don't have to lift weights to look like that and to be able to do that so easily," Mark observed. Those men used their bodies well, gracefully coordinating their strength in a cooperative effort to build.

Part of God's image is expressed in sensuous beauty that calls forth a response and a desire to draw near. Another aspect of God's image is reflected in strength, in a cooperative effort to create. The presence, voice, and perspectives of women and men reflect aspects of God's character somewhat differently, bringing different abilities and skills to the task of caring for the earth. Certainly, women are strong and creative and men are graceful and beautiful, yet it is women's beauty and men's strength and drive that are often identified in our culture as central to sexuality. Culturally derived ways of being male and female often overemphasize female beauty and male strength and sex drive. These "ways of being" are passed down to us in the form of cultural scripts.

Cultural scripts are taken-for-granted, learned ways of being that reinforce behaviors and roles that are considered important in a society. They become almost sacred beliefs that are represented in traditions, expectations, and laws that dictate maleness and femaleness. We learn norms from Ian Fleming's British spy character James Bond, on the latest reality television show, from song lyrics, from our friends, in our churches, and in our homes.

Cultural scripts are pervasive and inescapable. Girls and boys grow up with scripts instructing them how to integrate their bodies with appropriately gendered activities that will make them acceptable and lovable. Early on, we learn how to behave to ensure that we will find someone to love us, to fill the emptiness and longing we have for connection.

Cultural scripts for men and women vary from era to era and from place to place. Scripts throughout much of the world have broadened in the last century for both men and women, bringing new opportunities for people in their communities of faith, civic communities, work, and residential communities. Some churches embrace this time in history, channeling the energy and enthusiasm of greater opportunities to better use the gifts and capacities of women and men. Others are unsure how changing cultural trends reflect what they understand as doctrines of the church. The debate about what kinds of opportunities should or should not be available for men and women centers in part on the question of whether or not it is legitimate for definitions of maleness and femaleness to be flexible. What is embodied and unchanging about being male and female? And what is embedded in culture, reflecting the potential for flexibility and change?

Speaking of what is embodied and embedded — what does any of this mean for the person whose sex as listed on their birth certificate is radically incongruent with how they experience gender and desire to express their gender? What are the cultural scripts for people who are transgender and transsexual? Answers to all these questions emerge from our values and frameworks, the cultural scripts with which we see and come to understand sexuality.

Cultural Scripts for Approaching Sexuality

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex thing, I offer three scripts currently used as a subtext to determine how one thinks about sexuality, particularly how people of faith think about it. Each of them comes from and reinforces assumptions held about sexuality, maleness, femaleness, gender roles, and identity.

The first script upholds the sense of completeness of being created as male and female. According to this script, human sexuality, by God's design, draws us to a complementary otherness, which requires some giving, receiving, and accommodating the other. Males and females are different and we find love, security, and meaning in life through faithful, lifelong relationship complemented by the other. Sex is a sacred representation of our longing for, and completion in God, and keeping our commitments is both a response to the faithful love of God, and consequently, allows for the greatest possibility for individual, family, and community flourishing.

The second script assumes that the fall impacted everything. According to this script the world is not the way it's supposed to be; we are not the way we are supposed to be. Women's voices have been silenced, men have abused power and been abused by other men with power. Married men and women do not stay faithful to each other. A woman's value is tied to her beauty and she tends to judge herself and other women according to unrealistic standards of beauty. A man's value is in accomplishment and he tends to compete with other men, to seek power, productivity, and toughness over relationship. Brokenness permeates the physical world as well as the social world, so it is no surprise that some experience sexual longings for people of their own sex or that some feel trapped in a body of the wrong sex. Redemption requires us to see that we are all broken in various ways, living with people who are broken, in a broken world. Humbly accepting our human frailty opens us to receive the fullness and healing potential of God's love. Our task, then, is to be compassionate and loving in response, to welcome others into the loving arms of God.

The third script focuses on diversity. According to this script, rather than anything being broken (though certainly evil abounds — in rape, incest, sexual exploitation, abuses of power), men and women are different (both within males and females as well as between them) and their differences should be celebrated, and all should be free to participate and contribute equally in private and public spheres. When sexuality shows up in forms other than a heteronormative one that values marriage between one man and one woman, it is showing us something of the variety and diversity in the world. People who are sexually attracted to others of their own sex or to people regardless of their sex or whose experience of their physical body does not align with their biological sex are unique, not broken. Their uniqueness means they have experiences and ways of seeing and understanding the world that others do not have, which would enhance and broaden the good we might accomplish as humans if we brought these missing voices and perspectives into our classrooms, boardrooms, and onto our church staff as equal partners and participants.

Each of these contributes to efforts to understand the complexities surrounding human sexuality. The first script affirms differences between males and females that draw us toward the other, ideally toward a humble interdependent longing that is aware of incompleteness in oneself alone. The second script asserts that the world is not the way it is supposed to be, and affirms empathy, compassion, and love as a response to despair, suffering, and pain. We become our best selves when we live as Jesus lived — with courage and integrity, giving and receiving blessing as he journeyed through a broken world. The third script reminds us that God's creation was first good and created to explode in an array of diversity reflecting God's glory. It also asserts the importance of having a sense of self and identity that is affirmed and celebrated, a place to belong that welcomes each person's contributions to help their community flourish, the world to flourish.

Hold these scripts in mind as you make your way through the following pages. I will hint at them, from time to time, to remind us how we might think about things inclined to divide us.

Explaining Femaleness and Maleness

Humans are characterized by strength, passion, compassion, motivation, nurture, vision, and creativity — all qualities that we inherit from God and that create stable and progressing societies. One popular way of telling history is that men have always been in charge as the active doers providing sustenance, while women have functioned as caregivers and nurturers. Christians endorsing this history say that the pattern is God-ordained and that God created men and women to have different roles. Research in archeology and anthropology suggests that this interpretation of history is flawed. Although there are general patterns of male dominance throughout history, both men and women have actively provided sustenance and participated in caregiving roles.

This perspective of maleness and femaleness was passed on to me in the flannel-graph stories of heroes in Sunday School classes and at Vacation Bible School. We learned about David who killed Goliath, about Samson who killed lots of Philistines, and about Gideon who, with a small army, wiped out thousands. Although we were taught to respect Peter as the cornerstone of the church, we did not talk about him as though he was a hero. Our teachers talked about Jonah and Aaron as men who ran away from both adventure and battle. The unspoken message: they were an embarrassment to real manhood, but God found ways to use them anyway. Women were hardly talked about at all except for Bathsheba, who led David into adultery, and Delilah, who seduced and ruined Samson (physically the strongest prophet of God), or Esther or Mary, who submitted and did what they were told or asked to do. Societies have always used their folklore and histories to reinforce particular values that society holds. The church has similarly used biblical stories to reinforce particular ideas of masculinity and femininity.

Explanations for male and female differences that deviate from a rooted-in-biology-and-so-God-ordained explanation have been held in suspicion — a slippery slope sending us down the road toward relativism. Especially suspect is an explanation suggesting that culture rather than biology shapes and defines masculinity and femininity.

The way a culture treats babies born with ambiguous sex organs (referred to as intersex persons) demonstrates how much culture plays a role in sculpting maleness or femaleness; biology is seldom allowed to have the final say. Parents and doctors assess and then determine whether or not to assign intersex babies the status of girl or boy, depending on the size and presence or absence of certain genitalia. The underlying assumption is that biology is only a piece of what makes one male or female, and culture needs to manipulate biology and resolve any ambiguity by filling in necessary gaps, usually with medical interventions. So a boy born with a penis that is too small (less than half an inch) has his penis surgically removed, along with his testes. A clitoris (which may or may not produce sexual pleasure) and vagina are built in their place. Boys are given hormones to help them develop breasts and are subsequently raised as girls. There are numerous ways that babies end up being neither fully male nor female in terms of their sex organs, so frequency is difficult to determine. However, in North America, one or two in one thousand babies are surgically altered to "normalize" their genital appearance. Most parents in this situation are reluctant to let biology have the final say about their child's sexual identity or to postpone medical intervention until the child can decide what to do; they feel the need to intervene, overriding biology, as it were. Nurture rather than nature, this example suggests, holds the ultimate power to shape femaleness and maleness in our culture. However, treatment of intersex babies is controversial and recommendations and attitudes are changing rapidly across the world. In 2015 the World Health Organization, the Council of Europe, and the Office of the United Nations Commission for Human Rights all criticized performing these medical interventions without consent.

Other explanations integrate the embedded and embodied dimensions, asserting that maleness and femaleness is an interaction between biological realities that are reinforced, focused, and exaggerated by cultural influences. The two cannot be separated; both powerfully shape how girls and boys, men and women come to understand what it means to be male and female. For instance, men have a predictable arousal response — an erection that they cannot always control, though they can control what they do with it. Culture interprets that reality and assigns meaning to it (men cannot help that they are naturally inclined to have sex with lots of different women), as well as meaning to women (since the biological goal of his desire is to have sex with her, she, as the object of his arousal, exists primarily to help propagate the species). Such an interpretation, while rarely vocalized, subconsciously contributes to a justification of male dominance over females.

How one explains broken sexuality (Christians would see this scenario as broken) influences how one goes about redeeming it. Two explanations are particularly interesting for Christians responding to the challenges posed by our sexuality. The first explanation, from sociobiology, says men and women are biologically hardwired to behave in certain ways, regardless of cultural influences. The second, from social learning theory, says the power and influence of culture trumps male and female behavior over biology.

Sociobiological and Brain Sex Explanations

A sociobiological explanation says men and women are hardwired physically to want to reproduce themselves. Males are predisposed to desire multiple sexual partners, especially young, fertile ones, because having sex with these women provides a better chance of producing lots of healthy offspring. Men do not want other men having sex with their women because then they cannot be sure their own genes are making it into the gene pool of the future. Men band together to protect what is theirs, including their women, and they will be aggressive in their pursuit of acquiring things that do not belong to them because they want a promising future for their offspring. Males who survived and reproduced themselves abundantly were men with this high drive for sexual conquest and aggression. Gentle males died out; they were either killed or withdrew, choosing not to fight. That meant gentle males had less reproductive influence on future male generations.

Males, according to sociobiology, are more likely to be driven to create, subdue, build, and protect than to nurture relationships. For the most part, honor and achievement matter more to males than to females. Men are more likely to support dying for a cause than are women; they tend to sacrifice relationships for achievement and have been the primary force (though women have contributed significantly) in moving civilizations from their hunting and gathering beginnings into an agricultural era, followed by an industrial and then a postindustrial era. Cultures reinforce and support this creating, subduing, building, protecting tendency that seems hardwired in males.

Females are hardwired to reproduce themselves too, but because they make a great physical investment with every pregnancy and can only have a limited number of children, they are more particular in their choice of sexual partner. They want good genes and someone who is likely to stick around to help protect and provide for their offspring to ensure their young make it to adulthood. Biologically, females adapt and accommodate their lives and bodies to receive and nurture others, which is evident in sexual intercourse when females are penetrated and semen is deposited in their bodies. When they become pregnant, females accommodate and adapt to fetuses that grow and are nourished in their wombs and at their breasts.

---

Excerpted from "Sexuality and Holy Longing"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media.
Excerpted by permission of 1517 Media.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---