Human Sexuality and Religious Norms
Decades after the sexual revolution, many religious conservatives remain fiercely committed to preaching, if not always living, an absolute and absolutist understanding of human sexuality. Mainstream biologists, psychologists and sociologists, building on the science of evolution and other modern advancements of understanding, have helped redefine the meaning of normal when it comes to sex, moving mountains so to speak, and yet these religious conservative retain a rule-heavy belief about who should and shouldn’t be having sex and how sex ought always to be done by those morally permitted to get down to business. In word, if not always in every deed, they morally reject sex before marriage, entertaining lustful thoughts, masturbation, fornication, cohabitation, homosexuality, and pornography. They stand athwart the new normal yelling “Sin!”
Social progressives may hold out hope that these religious conservatives will one day appreciate sex as something good outside the hard and fast rules of their religion. I think this change unlikely because it would take a fundamental paradigm shift. Conservative Christians, for example, view human sexuality principally as a sacred reality. In a number of moral theologies, God designed human sexuality for the purpose of procreation, and commanded all human beings, from Adam and Eve onward, to be fruitful and multiply, engaging in sex strictly in accordance with the order of the divine plan. St. Thomas Aquinas argued this philosophically, concluding that every emission of semen, ordered in such a way that generation cannot follow, is contrary to the good and nature of man, and if done deliberately, a sin. Every sexual act must, in principle, follow a form that is open to life, whether or not the couple’s union is fertile, infertile, or sterile. To engage in sex in any way contrary to the good, human nature, and God’s design makes the person or persons involved arbiters of God’s plan, manipulators of something holy, grave sinners. They are not to take control of their sexuality, but control their appetites and behaviors in keeping with a strict religious meaning of sexuality to which is owed devotion and obedience. The giver of the gift of sex makes the rules, and they must follow these norms.
It should be noted that some religious conservatives will, in addition to approaching the reality of human sexuality from a theological position, also strive to understand its meaning from the standpoints of science, philosophy, and culture. They may accept that human sexuality is the result of millions of years of evolution, but—and this is key—they will interpret this evolutionary meaning in light of their religious doctrine. Where evolution may suggest a fluid meaning to sexuality, this meaning will be understood within the framework of the God-given morally-absolute meaning. All inquiry here will begin and end within the religious sphere, even if detours are taken into the sciences.
So long as these religious conservatives begin their understanding of human sexuality on the premises of revelation, they’ll not change on the basics. To make such change would indicate that the meanings of sex and of revelation are not truly fixed. What we might see in time is some of these religious conservatives changing the starting point of their approach to sex and sexual norms from religious premises to secular ones, beginning, for example, without the assumption that human sexuality has an immutable divinely-given meaning, but rather a fluid evolutionary one. Were this road to be taken, while religion retained, the statements in revelation pertaining to sex would have to be reinterpreted so as to be taken less literally. The theologies of God’s providence over human procreation would need to be rethought. In this context, a sexual revolution would necessitate a religious revolution. We’re unlikely to witness such a sweeping change, especially given the position of religious conservatives, who stand not passively against the waves of secularism, but seek actively to turn the tide and win converts to their cause. (FP)
All true, leaving not much room for controversy, or even commentary…
Kyle, this (i.e. sexual norms) should have been my example instead of abortion during the latest LeagueCast. We have effectively 2 different kinds of sexul norms. Under 1 set of norms, being 27 years old and never having had any sexual relations with anybody is a kind of ideal. Under another kind of sexual norms, such a person is somebody to sneer at, pity or otherwise be the butt of a joke such that whole movies are made on this premise.
The public reason point I want to make is that neither side should have to change their views about sexual morality. They just have to not make the resulting moral demands on others based on their belief that their view of sexual morality is the true one. In particular, religious conservatives should be free to be religious conservatives so long as they do not impose their conservatism on the rest of us without at the same time the state designating their beliefs as suspect in a way more libertine sexual moralities are not even though both beliefs are similarly controversial; not everyone is a libertine in pretty much the same way not everyone is a social conservative.
@Murali — In what way has the state designated conservative beliefs as “suspect?”
In states where Gay marriage has been legalised due to legislative acts, this is often due to the majority of citizens thinking that there is nothing wrong with homosexual relationships. Conservatives, who in such situations, form the minority may reasonably perceive that the state is also making a judgement about their beliefs many of which may be religious in nature. Contrast this with California, where Gay marriage was protected by finding a right to it in the state constitution. In such a situation, it is not a matter of whether gay relationships were morally kosher or otherwise. The basic civil right of people to engage in and formalise said relationships trumped such considerations.
Let me draw an analogy. It is one thing to say that we should have religious freedom because ultimately all paths (even atheism) lead to God, or because there really is very little evidence one way or another whether or not there is a God and what Her nature may be. It would be another thing to say that we should have religious freedom even if one or only some paths lead to God/elightenment and others to eternal damnation or an endless cycles of rebirth.
In the end, we get the same set of policies (i.e religious freedom/legalised gay marriage) but the kinds of reasons proferred for the policies can determine whether such policies are problematically authoritarian or not.
‘They’ don’t begin their understanding of human sexuality on the premises of ‘revelation’, but on the acceptance of a counterfeit substitute for revelation, contrived by theology and called natural law. And the entire nature of human spiritual union is already undergoing a complete rethink, taking a few lines from The Divine Comedy:
Call it not love for love to heaven is fled
Since sweating lust on earth usurp’d His name.
Under who simple semblance man hath fed
upon fresh beauty blotting it with blame,
which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves
As caterpillars do the tender leaves.
Love comforteth like sunshine after rain
but lust effect is tempest after sun.
Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain.
Lust’s winter comes, ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies,
Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies.
Robert is right a “natural law” — it’s a crock. Why is interfering with the teleology of sex wrong, but interferring with the teleology of the organism that causes smallpox a very positive thing. Didn’t God create the smallpox organism and send it forth to kill and disfigure its hosts? Who is man to thwart that grand plan? Natural law? I don’t think so.
“In the end, we get the same set of policies (i.e religious freedom/legalised gay marriage) but the kinds of reasons proferred for the policies can determine whether such policies are problematically authoritarian or not.”
I would suggest that a policy can be “problematically authoritarian” only if it either forbids every citizen to do something, or if, on the other hand, it commands every citizen to do something. A policy that allows any citizen who wants to to do something is not “authoritarian” but “libertarian” (if we must put a label on it.)
Laws which for example, forbid rape, and killing are authoritarian?
“Laws which for example, forbid rape, and killing are authoritarian?”
That is an absurdly argumentative non-question. Laws prescribing punishments for certain acts which virtually every sane person agrees are wrong and undesirable cannot be considered “authoritarian,” because they are seen universally as desirable. A law is not oppressive if everybody *wants* that law to be in effect.
That’s basically my point with public reason: We should only have laws that can be justified to everyone.
Admittedly, my question was a bit of a low blow, but the key thing worth noting here is that any kind of law requires coercion to enforce even the kind which everyone prsumably “wants”. The difficulty is trying to justify why we give guarantee people some freedoms (e.g the freedom to practice whatever religion you want/marry whoever you want) while at the same time we forbid certain other types of freedoms (the freedom to punch random strangers for no reason) The distinction between laws that allow stuff and laws that forbid stuff is practically non-existent. All or most laws do both.
Even more importantly, the key disagreement I have with Kyle is that Kyle seems to be claiming here that ultimately, the way forward for Gay rights is to convince conservative Catholics that they have got the wrong religion and that they should switch to a more liberal Catholicsm. I don’t know about the counterpoductivity of the message, but there is a certain illiberality to it. The hallmark of liberalism is its claim to value neutrality/ its commitment to not impose particular value judgements on others. While there are limits (in that psychopaths and Nazis’ value judgements will have to be imposed on) mainstream social conservatives do in fact hold reciprocity norms and are thus (at least in principle) amenable to being reasoned with.
It would seem that a Catholic who favors gay marriage has already switched to a more liberal Catholicism in his heart. That said, there is no question that the Church is authoritarian. If fact, it is totalitarian to the ultra-orthodox. I have no argument with what you’re saying so long as you keep it within the context of Catholicism and don’t morph into a political voting block and try to impose your medieval beliefs on the entire society. Catholicism is by far the largest religious grouping in this society, but it is only about 1/4 of the population. It also disturbs me that Catholics–as poltical entities–have forged alliances with traditional enemies, such as conservative Jews and Fundamentalist Protestants (both of which groups they still in their hearts despise religiously) in order to bring about political ends. This I see as the height of hypocrisy at the very heart of the Catholic Church.
I’m neither catholic nor do I think that there is anything wrong with either Gay relationships or their formalisation or even of calling such formalisation marriage. I do think that conservative and communitarian accusations that liberalism also imposes its own morality on reasonable others is a serious criticism that has to be and can be answered.
Religions evolve slowly. They will either alter their position so as not to be too far behind or they will become irrelevant and possibly die.
For someone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural religions are children of the culture which spawned them. They get their morality from that original source with perhaps a few quirks of their founder.
Once a written scripture is agreed then the moral position tends to become fixed in time and change towards what the culture currently prefers is dependent on new interpretations of scripture.
Those who think the Catholic church doesn’t fit this model need only look back at past Catholic practices now abandoned
“I do think that conservative and communitarian accusations that liberalism also imposes its own morality on reasonable others is a serious criticism that has to be and can be answered.”
Can you provide an example of something that liberalism forces a conservative to do that the conservative does not want to do. (Please don’t use taxation used to pay for things the conservative doesn’t approved of, because that gate swings both ways.)
Liberalism does prevent expressions of specific religious belief within the context of public institutions. But that is a constitutional issue, settled by federal courts, and not simply a product of liberal politics. Conservatives not suffering from cognitive dissonance which allows them to be both “strict constructionists” and to want Christian prayer in the schools, would agree with that separation of church and state.
But, please–provide an example of something liberalism forces to conservatives to do against their will, so we can discuss the pros and cons of it.
Let’s leave aside Conservatives and their bizarre constitutional interpretations for a minute and look at stuff conservatives want. Prayer in schools, Teaching of creationism/ID, stricter abortion laws, no gay marriage etc.
Now, should they get these things? No. But the laws are still laws that they don’t want. Why is it acceptable to pass laws that they don’t want but not acceptable to pass laws that we don’t want? Because we’ve got the right theory of justice and they don’t? Do we think that we’ve got a theory of justice that they ought to accept in the same way they think that Christianity is a religion that we have reasons to accept? If so, aren’t we back to saying that they’ve just got the wrong religion? We’ve got to find a way to bypass this.
The problem is that they want all of these things for religious reasons. People who favor legal abortion favor it for sociological and/or health reasons. Pro-abortion people have sound, practical reasons for wanting it to be legal. Conservatives have only religious reasons for wanting it banned. Now, so long as conservatives are not forced by the state (as they are in China, for instance) to have abortions, they should not feel oppressed by the liberal position which has prevailed legally. The reverse would not be the case. Non-religious people who were prevented from having abortions because religious voting blocks made it illegal would have every reason to feel oppressed by a state that was enforcing religiously-based laws. The would be unconstitutional.
Basically, we should be liberals because agnosticism or atheism is the soundest religious opinion to have?
Well yes, but there’s a point to be made about secularism here. Historically governments imposing religious laws have produced awful outcomes, and the US constitution was written with that history in mind. Conservatives are free to practice their religion, but not use government to impose it on others.
Each of the items you listed is about conservatives imposing their beliefs on others. If we were debating making prayer illegal, teaching creationism illegal in any context, making abortion compulsory or forcing churches to officiate gay marriages then you’d have a point.
Exactly. Well put.
Conservatives are free to practice their religion, but not use government to impose it on others.
Presumably, part of the practice of their religion involves things that constitute state imposition of it. I’m not arguing against secularism. I’m arguing that if secularism is to be justified, it cannot be based on the supposition that agnosticism is the most rational position to take on the issue of God. i.e. the lesson we learned from the enlightenment was that making laws based on our own comprehensive views just because we thought that those comprehensive views were the truth is the problem
Then that aspect of their religion is illegitimate. The one freedom you can’t expect to have in a free society is the freedom to impinge on the freedom of others. Otherwise you end up with a war of all against all, precisely what we are trying to avoid. After all I think it’s morally wrong to raise a child into a religious tradition, but you don’t hear me running around suggesting we make it illegal.
Yeah, it is illegitimate, though not necessarily false. I’m not arguing that it is legitimate. I’m just arguing that we should be focusing on whether or not it is legitimate and not whether it is true or false. Kyle thinks that the only way to move forward is to convince evryone that it is false. (In fact if I read him right, he thinks that falsity is sufficient to revoke legitimacy and truth is sufficient to confer it) i.e. if raising children in a religion was genuinely morally wrong, Kyle, i believe, would say that people shouldn’t have a right to do so.
Kyle thinks that the only way to move forward is to convince evryone that it is false. (In fact if I read him right, he thinks that falsity is sufficient to revoke legitimacy and truth is sufficient to confer it) i.e. if raising children in a religion was genuinely morally wrong, Kyle, i believe, would say that people shouldn’t have a right to do so.
No, this isn’t my position. I’m fuzzy on the existence of “rights,” but I do hold that people as a rule ought to have the freedom to seek the truth in their own way, which in practice means that I want people to have the freedom to disagree with me about what’s true and false and live according to their view and not mine.
“The problem is that they want all of these things for religious reasons. People who favor legal abortion favor it for sociological and/or health reasons. Pro-abortion people have sound, practical reasons for wanting it to be legal. Conservatives have only religious reasons for wanting it banned”
Were that the abortion debate were so easily characterized, it wouldn’t be much of a debate.
@ Kolohe — I completely disagree. Just that much is more than enough. The rest of it is just a fruitless attempt of the anti-abortion side to finesse the pro-abortion side by reference to DNA, etc. The bottom line is that the anti-abortion side views a fertilized egg as “ensouled” and therefore a “person” made by God (the religious reason) and the pro-abortion side doesn’t hold that belief. It’s black and white.
If it were really that simple, fourth trimester abortions wouldn’t be controversial either.
Third (not forth) trimester abortions are controversial for the reason that a fetus more than six-months developed can often survive outside of the womb, and is therefore considered to be an individual person, no longer fully dependent on being attached to the mother’s body, by many people. Even most pro-abortion adovocates are willing to draw the line at the point of viability outside the womb. The anti-abortion people draw the line at conception. It’s a perfectly understandable matter of degree.
Rodak – then what explains things like this?
I didn’t look deeply at the site, but google ‘atheist pro-life’ and it’s not the only hit.
I think atheist pro-lifers (probably a select group, to be sure) would disagree with how simple you are making it out to be.
Also, I think Kolohe’s comment was no typo. 😉
Even most pro-abortion adovocates are willing to draw the line at the point of viability outside the womb
Clearly you have never heard of Peter Singer. Even if his views are a distinct minority, they are hardly an insignificant minority.
No. That’s not the point at all. Basically, we should be secular so far as statute law is concerned and religious in our private lives. Restaurants should be allowed to served pork, regardless of the religious “opinions” of Jews and Muslims. If Jews and Muslims don’t like that, they are free to eat elsewhere, or at home. Where religious law becomes statute law it should be only by coincidence, as in your earlier example of murder and rape, because the prohibition is the result of general consensus.
@ glyph — The site you link to warrants no explanation. It is an anomaly. There are always anomalies on any issue. And the person writing the blog says right off the bat that he’s an anomaly. The two distinctly divided, and statistically significant groups veying agains each other on the abortion issue are as I described. As for the human gestation period as measured in trimesters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation
Three trimesters, three months each = nine months = full term. If the reference to a fourth trimester was some kind of veiled reference to infanticide, again, those favoring that are statistically insignificant and not worth discussing. Advocates of murder are few and far between.
Hi Rodak – we’ve been over this before, so I see no need to re-hash it here. Suffice to say that I do think an anti-abortion case can be made without reference to religion, or God, or ensoulment, and the existence of atheist pro-lifers (even one!) proves that.
Doesn’t mean I think that case is the only case to be made (in either direction, pro- or anti-), or that the case is decisive; but it exists all the same. Thus is the issue made more complex.
When you make sweeping, categorical statements such as ‘only religious reasons’ and ‘the anti-abortion side views a fertilized egg as “ensouled”’, don’t be surprised if people say, well, what about these exceptions?
To avoid nits picked by others, pre-pick ’em yourself. No one is going to argue with a more nuanced and complete statement like ‘the bulk of opposition to legalized abortion in the US is religiously-affiliated.’
So, why not use a statement like that? Just a suggestion.
@Glyph —
The reason I don’t worry about the tiny number of exceptions is that I view all of these matters as personal choices. If you are Catholic and don’t believe in abortion–don’t have one. If you are an atheist and don’t believe in abortion — don’t have one.
To the extent that these questions stop being personal choices and become political movements, only the groups in large numbers, representing many votes, are relevant. I am arguing on this thread that abortion should not be a political issue, but a personal choice. It may be interesting that an atheist can find reasons to oppose abortion, but it is not relevant to my argument here, because–as I’ve said before–such cases are statistically (and therefore politically) insignificant.
Ah, fair enough. I wasn’t quite grasping the full context you were working in. Re-reading the thread that got you there, shows me that more clearly – that is, what looked like a sweeping generalization, well, is one; but it’s one about a narrower facet of the question (political) and so makes more sense.
Right. Anecdotal evidence of the unusual opinions of fringe individuals doesn’t interest me in the context of the anti-abortion movement as a political entity.
“Clearly you have never heard of Peter Singer. Even if his views are a distinct minority, they are hardly an insignificant minority.”
No, it’s true, I hadn’t. And I would bet my life that 9999 of 10,000 American voters never have either. Again, my interest on this topic is to state why I believe that abortion (and the other issues you named) should be matters of personal choice, not matters of statute law. People like Singer do not factor into that discussion, at all. There is no American politician quoting Peter Singer as part of his/her campaign. And I have heard no liberal politician advocating universal access to third trimester abortion, much less infanticide.