Sex and the Liberal Christian  

Because of the saturation of fundamentalism over the airwaves, one could be forgiven for thinking that the term “liberal Christian” has an oxymoronic quality about it. After all, when was the last time you listened to the local liberal Christian radio station or channel surfed on the tube to watch a liberal Christian televangelist? The answer, of course, is probably never because no such media outlets exist, and in a media driven culture the thinking is that any movement that is alive and kicking will, at the very least, have its own cable channel. But in this case conventional wisdom is wrong.

Mainline Protestantism, though in the midst of a nearly forty year decline in membership, is still quite a formidable group in the American cultural and political landscape. There are more than 20 million members of denominations like the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and my own Presbyterian Church USA. Beyond that there are many more liberal Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, who may be embedded in a more theologically conservative tradition but are nonetheless closer on many of the hot-button social issues of the day to those out, loud, and proud liberals of the Mainline variety. According to election survey data, about a fourth of the electorate self-identifies as liberal, and of that number roughly two-thirds would profess themselves to be Christians, leaving us with an estimate of about 40 to 50 million liberal Christians in the United States. How do they think about sex?

Two basic intellectual traditions that undergird liberal Christian belief and that inform every aspect of thinking and not just about sex are the tradition of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and a scientific understanding of the world, and the tradition of scripture and theological confessions, with its emphasis on faith. Unlike their secular counterparts in American life who ignore the traditions of the faith while prizing Enlightenment rationality, and unlike their conservative Christian brethren who subordinate the rationalism of modernity to their beliefs, liberal Christians strive to hold the two strands together and are thus often conflicted about issues where the modern world and the faith don’t see eye to eye.

Classical liberalism, which, if truth be told, has come to inform traditional, conservative Christians as much as anyone, has had a distinctive impact on progressive Christians. Five hundred years ago monarchs passed on their power and wealth to their offspring, women were largely restricted to the sphere of hearth and home, and it was a thoroughly unremarkable fact of life for one human being to own another as personal property. The triumph of the liberal vision, namely, the undoing of natural law whereby what was purported to be natural and thus unquestionable was demonstrated to be cultural and thus thoroughly mutable, has permeated every aspect of American life and has thus touched Christians of every stripe and not just liberals. But the embrace of that newly created reality, with its valorization of the individual over the vested interests of longstanding social and cultural institutions, has been much stronger with progressives than it has with conservatives, and nowhere is that more clearly evident than in issues related to the bedroom.

For example, virtually all Protestants, the original rebels against natural law, have come to view marriage as a matter of personal pleasure, of self-actualization, of individual fulfillment, in contrast to the more traditional Roman Catholic notion of marriage as primarily a vehicle for the birth and nurture of children. In de-sacramentalizing marriage, Protestants moved marriage out of the heavenly realm and onto a more terrestrial foundation. Where liberal Protestants differ from their more traditional co-religionists is in their gradual, tentative, and sometimes even unspoken acceptance of the principle of individual fulfillment beyond the bounds of the one man-one woman lifetime commitment of marriage. That is not to suggest that liberals are libertine in their sexual practices. Rather there is what might be called an “ideal” state of sexual practice among liberals and an “acceptable” state that deviates from the “ideal” but which is nonetheless allowable without social approbation.

The reason that there is such a split among Protestants has primarily to do with different understandings of scripture. Protestants stand foursquare against the Catholic belief in the authority of the magisterium, or the traditional teachings of Church leadership, from whence sprang the natural law perspective of procreation as the primary purpose of marriage. Instead they hold to the authority of scripture alone. Consequently, it is not difficult for them to justify belief in a different understanding of sexuality than the one held by Catholics. The problem is that they are at odds amongst themselves over precisely how the scripture is to be read, and it is here that the rupture between the left and right within Protestantism occurs. Is scripture a set of rules and regulations to be followed by the faithful or is the scripture a family biography with the present generation writing the next chapter? How one answers this question makes all the difference in the world, for the former position presents a structured, invariable worldview that is to be accepted without question and which demands obedience, while the latter presents an open-ended, unscripted, and fluid worldview that is endlessly fraught with questions and which demands discernment.

It is in light of this understanding of scripture that liberals have crafted their sexual ethics, which I refer to here as that which is “ideal” and that which is “acceptable.” This two tiered sexual ethic can be seen against the backdrop of a variety of issues.

Premarital Sex

There has been a considerable push among conservatives in recent years to make abstinence the core of any sex education curriculum in the public schools. As part of this, many evangelical churches have urged parents to extract vows of premarital chastity from their teens using the gift of a ring as a reminder of the promise, in much the same way that the ring functions as a sign of a promise within marriage. In liberal Christian circles you would be hard pressed to find this kind of thing, not because parents want to promote promiscuity among their young, but because it isn’t understood to be such a significant moral matter. No one wants an unplanned pregnancy or an STD. And certainly most liberal Christians don’t think that young people are emotionally ready to take the plunge into the sexual world. But the fact is that the matter just does not generate the kind of fear or passion that it does in conservative Christian circles. The concern, in other words, is simply for the well-being of young people. It is not an issue of purity or holiness, as it is with conservatives. Purity is simply not a concept in the liberal Christian worldview in large part because it depends on a good vs. evil understanding of life in general that liberal Christians on the whole do not accept. Certainly liberal parents would not be upset if their children stayed celibate until marriage (the ideal), but frankly, I have never wed a couple who remained thus (the acceptable), and most families are comfortable with this.

Of course the difference turns on the interpretation of the scripture. The Old Testament texts treat premarital sex as a property violation: premarital sex damages the amount that Daddy can fetch for a virgin bride on the open market. Hence the offender has to pay Daddy for damaging the goods. In the male dominated world of the text, the transaction is one between the two main guys in a woman’s life. The effects of the discovery of her premarital fling for her are not noted, although it may have rendered her unsuitable for marriage in some men’s eyes, which would have had negative repercussions for her in the long term. The New Testament, however, does not clearly mention premarital sex. It talks about “porneia” from which we get our English words “pornography” and “fornication.” Porneia is never fully unpacked. It is used in a variety of contexts to denote any illicit sexual activity, the problem being that for later generations what was considered illicit is not specified. Nonetheless Christians are enjoined by the New Testament to flee from it, to keep themselves separate from it, and to avoid it all costs. Conservatives are certain that this means, among other things, premarital sex. Liberals, on the other hand, see no such clarity and understand porneia more as a judgment against promiscuity. Conservatives argue that their sexual ethic is the same one represented throughout history going back to the scripture itself and that God’s unchanging essence demands that the faithful conform to what they see as the scripture’s immutable understanding. Meanwhile, liberals point out the clear shift in sexual ethics even within the scripture itself, from that of the Old Testament to the New, and that close examination of the history of Christian thought makes clear that the way that we understand sexuality today is very different from the ways in which other Christian communities have understood sex for the past two thousand years.

Liberals would be far more concerned about the nature of the relationship. Was there a promise made, such that an understanding of moving in the direction of marriage was at least implicit? Was there an equal distribution of the power dynamics, such that both parties were equals in the relationship and no one was coerced or taken advantage of? In short, issues that assessed the quality of the sexual relationship between the two people are of paramount concern in liberal Christian sexual ethics.

Divorce

Fifty years ago there would have hardly been a hair’s breadth of difference between liberal and conservative views on this and fifty years later that is still true, although in the mean time both liberals and conservatives have moved their positions by softening their stance on divorce. Again, a two track “ideal”/”acceptable” basis exists for how the community reacts to a split between a couple. In a perfect world couples would get married and stay married, but the rise in divorces in the 1960s and ’ 70s affected Christians as much as anyone else. Liberals were quick to be forgiving and to acknowledge that sometimes marriages simply end in failure but the individuals who comprise the marriage can nevertheless be held in high regard by the community without stigma or sanction. This view was initially resisted in conservative circles, particularly when it occurred with clergy, for whom it could be a career ending event, as was the case with my own father. But as the marriages of more and more conservatives failed, including those of the clergy, many on the right were forced by necessity to reevaluate their position and, over time, to adopt the stance of the liberals, which was that divorce was regrettable but not insurmountably immoral. Ironically, some of the primary leaders of the opposition to gays and lesbians in the Presbyterian Church, for example, are themselves divorced, a status that just decades before would have disqualified them for ministry in the same way that they are advocating the disqualification of gays and lesbians for ordained service today.

The biggest problem for any Christian who wants a divorce is the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament. Actually the problem is not so much divorce as it is remarriage (the gospels present Jesus as saying that anyone who divorces and remarries is guilty of adultery), still a no-no even among liberal Christians as well as conservatives, except in cases where one spouse has been unfaithful. Here Christians have begun to use creative exegesis to justify the change in their views. First, people began to understand cases of physical abuse as being a form of infidelity and thus allowable within a certain broad reading of Jesus’s teaching. Then the boundary shifted to include mental abuse, which, many have correctly noted, is often as detrimental to the well-being of people as physical violence. Over time that standard even has become blurred until now it is perfectly acceptable for a couple to simply admit that they do not love each, can’t get along, and are no longer willing to put any effort into the project.

Abortion

Liberal Christians have had more effect on this issue than perhaps in any other area of public policy. Demographers have long known that somewhere around 70 percent of Americans believe that abortion is morally wrong, while a small majority believes that abortion should remain a legal option for women. That counter intuitive result is deeply rooted in the views of liberal Christians, for whom the ideal is that all children would be welcomed and born, but who nonetheless recognize that there are instances in which abortion is an acceptable albeit morally fraught decision that women must make in order to protect themselves. Mainline denominations, such as my own Presbyterian Church USA, have long been supporters of keeping abortion legal, although they were swayed toward this view, not because of a concern for protecting women’s rights, but because of concerns for women’s health and concerns over the prosecution of physicians who attempt to provide women with skilled care lest they avail themselves to back alley solutions.

There are no direct references to abortion in the scripture so battleground has become trickier to negotiate for both liberals and conservatives. Those opposed to abortion have latched onto “life” as their buzzword, while those in favor have relied on “choice.” The problem for liberals is that “choice” as a biblical concept is almost unprecedented. It comes from the Enlightenment strand of individualism and self-determination, whereas the protection of human life has scores of references in both testaments, all of which are eagerly employed by Christian abortion opponents. On the other hand, there isn’t a simple, direct biblical rationale for people to assert their rights or to make choices that are totally in their self-interest; instead what one finds in the scripture is an appeal to duty, to fulfilling obligations and to serving others. Thus the rhetoric of “choice,” which has become the mantra of abortion supporters, actually leaves many liberal Christians cold. The result is that conservatives have slowly eroded support for abortion among many mainline Christians, particularly in the areas of parental notification and so-called “partial birth” abortions.

Homosexuality

This is the issue that above all others has roiled the mainline denominations for the better part of the last two decades. At issue in these churches is not whether to accept gays and lesbians as members but whether or not they should be ordained as clergy. Thus far only two of the mainline groups, the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ, have allowed member churches to ordain openly gay ministers. Others, such as the Presbyterian Church USA and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have managed to hold back the liberal tide and to maintain the more traditional response of denying ordination, if only by a slim majority.

Characterizing this issue in terms of the “ideal”/”acceptable” categories is difficult, since the left itself is divided. It is still not at all uncommon to find people who are liberal on every other social issue of the day but who are still uncomfortable with this subject. Old prejudices die hard. Probably the fastest growing but by no means the majority position of “hardcore” liberal Christians is that which prefers gay marriage, a position that has exploded in demographic terms in just the past couple of years. The “moderate” liberal Christian position, which used to be considered the lunatic fringe of American political life but which has now become the mainstream, even for many Republican voters, is that which favors some form of civil union for gay and lesbian couples.

What is unacceptable for even liberal Christians is sex without commitment. It is a deeply entrenched, Christian conviction that covenant life is best for the individuals in the relationship as well as for the community in which they live. The rightness or wrongness of sex should not be considered, they believe, on the basis of what body part goes in what orifice, as conservatives insist. For liberals it still must be judged on whether or not promises are made and kept. The problem for many liberals is that the notion of two men or two women marrying is still too “out there”: calling the promises that gays and lesbians make between themselves “marriage” is thus still farther than many on the left are willing to go.

It is on this subject that the Bible is more hotly contested than in any other area of church life since the issue of slavery in the nineteenth century. Only a handful of texts mention same sex behavior and while they do seem to oppose it, most of those do so only obliquely. There are two references in the book of Leviticus, which liberals immediately discount as irrelevant because of their appearance in a larger textual framework, which includes prohibitions against such matters as wearing cloth of two different kinds of thread and planting two different types of vegetables in the same garden patch. That worldview is not now nor has it ever been in force in the Christian understanding, liberals insist.

Two other possible mentions in the New Testament occur in lists, or “vice catalogues,” in which the terms in question that ostensibly refer to same sex practice are a kind of slang that may refer to same sex behavior. Lacking narrative context, however, the meaning cannot be nailed down with any specificity. And liberals are not about to start excluding people based on unclear biblical language, so they discount these passages as well. The clearest example of a condemnation of same sex practice is found in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 1, but even here the matter is contested, for Paul is plainly associating the sexual practices that he describes with the worship of idols, causing liberals to question whether the brunt of his critique is directed at the idolatry and not the sex. Moreover, there exists some evidence that the kind of sexual relationships to which Paul would have been exposed were likely in the form of pederasty, in which adolescents became the sex toys of their elders in exchange for having their careers and social standing advanced by their elder patrons. In both cases, liberals assert, there is no simple correspondence between what Paul is arguing against—idol worship and pederasty—and the actual practices of Christian gays and lesbians today; therefore the abundance of biblical texts that speak about the love of God and the equality of all humanity ought to make acceptance, rather than judgment, the standard of Christian ethics.

The openness to reason and the emphasis on the quality of human relationships rather than their form are both the weakness and strength of liberal Christianity. It is a weakness in that liberal Christianity has a much more difficult time maintaining its own identity, which is an essential aspect of all forms of Christianity or any other religious tradition for that matter. The inability to tell where society stops and the liberal Church begins often makes it difficult for members to see themselves as possessing the unique identity conferred upon them in their baptisms. For this reason, more conservative churches, which have focused on the disjunction between their sexual ethics and those of society, have done a better job at assisting their member’s identity formation and maintenance. At the same time, the openness of liberal Christians is its greatest strength in that it offers to American society a “kinder and gentler” faith than that of their fundamentalist and evangelical counterparts. This allows millions of people in American life, repulsed by the harshness and judgmental views of the right, to find a place within the church. By presenting a God who offers unconditional love and acceptance to the individual however he or she comes, and who urges that one find and foster those same qualities in their sexual relationships, liberal Christianity gives meaning and purpose to the lives of millions of contemporary followers of Jesus.

Rev. Timothy F. Simpson is interim president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, an organization of liberal and progressive Christians committed to countering the threat of the religious right, and the editor of Political Theology, an academic journal of theology, politics, and culture. He is ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA and has taught at Saint Ambrose University, Florida State University, and the University of North Florida. His work has appeared in such publications as Christian Century, Koinonia, Lectionary Homiletics, and the Journal for Preachers.