Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics

A Feminist Christian Account

Karen Peterson-Iyer

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781647122287, 9781647122270
• eBook ISBN: 9781647122294
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics, Karen Peterson-Iyer applies a feminist Christian framework to practical sexual issues facing young adults today, from “sexting” and “hook up” culture to sex work and sex trafficking. This feminist, justice-based approach to sexual ethics will facilitate meaningful discussion about sexual agency and flourishing.

CHAPTER ONE

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Human touch is powerful. Anyone who has ever interacted with an infant immediately knows of the mysterious ability of touch to soothe, to comfort, or simply to connect two previously separated individuals at a more-than-rational level. This experience is perhaps even more acute in the case of sexual touch, whose power is largely inchoate. Sexual touch can open up hidden forms of sentience and recognition, drawing us together in a profoundly humanizing fashion and leading us into deeper awareness of ourselves, our partners, even our place in the universe; alternatively, it can limit and even damage us in ways that extend far beyond our physical bodies. An appreciation of this power of sex—to expand or to diminish, to open us up or to shut us down—points us in the direction of a basic assumption that underlies this project: sex means something beyond its simple physical significance. In other words, sex potentially ties into something profound within us and reveals something important about human persons’ relationships: to themselves, to each other, and, from a Christian perspective, to God.

When it comes down to it, however, Christian ethics has often articulated that deeper meaning in rather narrow terms—terms that privilege heterosexual marriage as the only or at least the most humanizing environment for sexual activity. Not only does this approach bypass other contexts as potential locations for sexual flourishing; it also deflects the sociopolitical analysis necessary to understand what, exactly, is going on with sexual activity in the real world, thus undermining an authentic and robust account of what is necessary to thrive, sexually speaking. It is not that the Christian tradition has nothing to offer to this conversation; on the contrary, Christianity offers wisdom and insights that shed genuine light on some of the thorniest sexual questions facing twenty-first-century society. But in order to tease out the best insights from Christianity, we must also be willing bravely to name the ways that it has fallen short.

Hence, the present chapter and the one that follows form a pair that together aims to critique, to retrieve, and to propose. Here in chapter 1, I trace the contours of a more traditional Christian approach to sexual ethics, highlighting some of the problematic tendencies and indicating why they are problematic, particularly for women. In chapter 2, I begin by combing the biblical tradition for its most life-giving discernments related to human sexuality, insights that shed genuine light on what it means for persons, including women, to thrive. Drawing upon those themes and insights, and together with feminist theological and philosophical accounts of what it means for women to flourish, I then propose a normative feminist framework that includes but moves beyond simple freedom of choice as a way of understanding the qualities of “good” sex. Together, these discussions pave the way for the analysis that takes place in the topical chapters that follow.

Locating the Tradition

Historically and traditionally in Christian thought, the deeper meaning of sex has been described to encompass both a procreative and a unitive significance. The first of these held a certain pride of place in Christian tradition for centuries. Augustine of Hippo, perhaps the first Christian thinker to systemize Christian sexual ethics, placed great emphasis on procreation as the central justifying feature of sexual activity and the passion that often accompanies it. Augustine’s strong focus on the corrupting influence of original sin led to his belief that the passion of sexual desire must be subordinated to the influence of reason and will. Procreation thus constitutes the necessary rational purposing for sex, in the face of what Augustine termed concupiscence. In fact, according to Augustine’s view, sex without procreative intent involves at least “venial fault,” even if that sex takes place within the confines of a faithful marriage.¹

As the tradition developed, sex became more clearly integrated under a natural law style of reasoning, especially evident in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas organized his views on human sexuality using principles of reason reflecting upon the “natural order” of things—a natural law perspective with a clear emphasis upon the physiobiological character and procreative logic of sex.² In Thomas’s writings, procreation retains its status as the primary purpose of sexual expression and thus the chief end of marriage. Like Augustine, Thomas expressed a suspicion of the “deformity” of “excessive concupiscence” and held that this would not have existed in a state of innocence.³ Thomas did place a greater emphasis than his predecessor upon the love that binds spouses, particularly understanding marriage to be a form of friendship that confers grace.⁴ Still, the procreative norm continues to stand tall in Thomas’s thought, driven ultimately by his stress on the strong function that human reason plays in discerning the physical and biological ends of sex.

This prioritization of procreation did noticeably soften, over time. The Magisterial Reformation disrupted the procreative paradigm, notably taking shape in the thought of Martin Luther. Luther continued to value procreation as a “good” of marriage, but he contextualized it among many other goods, including both social stability and the mutual cherishing of the spouses.⁵ Luther accepted sexual pleasure as a created good, disordered by sin, and to be channeled by way of marriage in a postlapsarian world. A stronger suspicion toward sexual desire can arguably be found in the writings of John Calvin, who, in characteristically severe fashion, admonished his followers against “uncontrolled and dissolute lust” within marriage and urged that “each man have his own wife soberly, and each wife her own husband.”⁶ After the Reformation, Protestantism continued to diverge from a strictly procreative ethic, with most Protestant traditions eventually affirming artificial contraception and, more recently, some actively affirming marriage for same-sex and same-gender couples, whether or not procreation is in the picture. However, the tradition has continued to approach sexual pleasure itself with some degree of ambiguity. While modern Protestant traditionalists tend to be less apprehensive about physical pleasure than their predecessors, until recently, few have explicitly lifted it up as a positive sexual value.

As for the Roman Catholic moral tradition, a similar softening of a strictly procreative norm has taken place. By the time of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), the procreative and unitive functions of sex—the latter expressed as conjugal love and intimacy within marriage—were officially elevated as coequal.⁷ A landmark event, however, took place in 1968 with the publication of Humanae Vitae, where Pope Paul VI, rejecting the majority opinion of the Pontifical Commission on Population, the Family, and Birth Rate, instead determined that each and every act of marital sex should be open to procreation, thus effectively muffling incipient stress on interpersonal union.⁸ Several decades later, the loose corpus of John Paul II’s teachings referred to as the Theology of the Body portrayed the meaning of sex as stemming organically from the body itself as revelatory of God’s will. Relying heavily on the Genesis creation stories, the Theology of the Body simultaneously lifts up both procreative and unitive functions of sex, realized as a personalist matter characterized by male/female complementarity.⁹ According to this logic, loving heterosexual marriage that is fully open to procreation is the only context that adheres to the true meaning of sex, since anything else belies the “truthful” language of the body itself.

Throughout this history, the virtue of chastity has played a key interpretive role in Christian sexual ethics, particularly in the Catholic tradition. Thomas Aquinas defined chastity under the rubric of temperance; he framed it as the subset of temperance with respect to “venereal pleasure” and the property that curbs concupiscence.¹⁰ This rather negative and primarily regulatory framing of chastity predominated for centuries; in one representative twentieth-century illustration, for example, chastity is designated “the moral virtue that controls in the married and altogether excludes in the unmarried all voluntary expression of the sensitive appetite for venereal pleasure.”¹¹ Recent usage of the term has reflected a more positive and holistic understanding, however. The current Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, defines chastity as the “successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man [sic] in his bodily and spiritual being.”¹² In spite of the way this definition moves beyond the realm of the purely physical and helpfully points toward the inner unity of the person—a more holistic posture, to be sure—it nevertheless remains squarely situated in the context of reasserted natural law teachings that stress the absolute inseparability of the unitive and procreative dimensions of the sexual act, teachings that (among other things) limit sexual intercourse to heterosexual married couples. Hence, a more traditionalist and physicalist understanding of natural law sexuality is arguably operative behind the scenes, even in this more expansive definition of chastity.¹³

Problematizing the Traditional Approach

There is no doubt that the strictly procreative ethic that once prevailed in Christian sexual ethics has relaxed over time. Yet, in spite of the fact that even Christian traditionalists have expanded the deeper meaning of sex beyond procreation, enormous problems still surface when the tradition is considered from a feminist point of view. While feminism is a term often mischaracterized and even misconstrued, I use the term here simply to designate a “conviction and movement opposed to discrimination on the basis of gender.”¹⁴ Such negative discrimination typically takes place both in personal and public realms, and feminism thus opposes both interpersonal beliefs and behaviors that support such discrimination as well as patriarchal social structures that codify and express it. In reality, many different types of feminism exist, differentiated by such factors as political or economic worldview, racial or ethnic identity, and any number of further qualifiers. Feminist approaches to Christianity generally seek to reconcile the aims of feminism as a whole with a religious tradition that has at times proved fundamentally non-inclusive and even harmful toward women. I understand these approaches to be neither anti-male nor anti-egalitarian but rather to hold as a central commitment the respect and equal social power of all people, in a world where women are de facto discriminated against, both personally and institutionally.

Adopting a feminist ethical lens reveals that the concept of gender complementarity runs like a red thread throughout traditionalist Christian perspectives, fortifying a rigid, binary, and overly simplistic understanding of gender. In this tradition, what it means to be “male” or “female” is more or less hard-coded into human biological reality, failing to account for historical and contextual influences on sexual identity—including the developing awareness that gender is often experienced in less binary ways. Additionally, traditional notions of gender complementarity downplay or even erase the negative impact of societal roles, the gendered distribution of power, and the reality of LGBTQ+ sexual experiences. To use postmodern terminology, false universals are thus wrongly projected into ethical discourse. In the case of women, the resulting account of “womanhood” found in the tradition maps onto a real-world disempowerment of women in the socioeconomic sphere, thus effectively baptizing their subjugation. Motherhood, for instance, is traditionally depicted as fundamentally constitutive of women’s sexual identity¹⁵—a damaging and reductionistic portrayal that accounts neither for the breadth of women’s experience nor for the deep socioeconomic inequalities in which women, including and especially mothers, are mired.¹⁶ A portrayal of women as somehow essentially connected ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sexual Flourishing in an Unjust World
• 1 Looking Back and Looking Forward
• 2 Moral Anthropology, Justice, and Sexual Ethics
• 3 Hookup Culture and Sexual Agency
• 4 Teen Sexting, Objectification, and Justice for Women
• 5 Commercial Sex, Well-Being, and the Rhetoric of Choice
• 6 Sex Trafficking, Rescue Narratives, and the Challenge of Solidarity
• Concluding Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author