Back before college, the United Methodist congregation I attended had a youth pastor who loved telling stories of how awful his oversexed youth was. Over and over, week after week, so many stories. He was the JRR Tolkein of elaborate anecdotes about lust and promiscuity. Eventually, I realized, he didn't regret his debauched youth.
He missed it.
As news broke this week that America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is structurally rotten with male sexual violence, I returned to that youth pastor. Back in the 1990s, purity culture infiltrated White Protestantism. Though quasi-puritanical attitudes weren’t invented in the Clinton era, they were codified in new and exceedingly intolerant ways. They divided the world into “pure” and “impure” camps, identity clusters which were reinforced through pulpit sermons, layperson testimony, and in-school outreach.
Purity culture has multiple forms. The lurid popularity of purity balls has attracted attention, as has voluble online condemnation of women wearing leggings and low-cut blouses. The adults governing purity culture have gained notoriety for punishing even the most rudimentary forms of female sexuality. Women’s bodies, according to this reasoning, are so inherently suffused with temptation, that men and boys need constantly shielded from their influence.
Notably, purity extends beyond sex. The SBC, like many conservative denominations, divides theological roles according to biological sex: women are excluded from authority though, as Jim Henderson writes, women mostly keep such congregations working. This division, called by the faux-doctrinal name “complementarianism,” pre-slots people into roles according to accidents of form, and just like racial segregation, gender segregation inevitably carries a whiff of uncleanliness.
The news emerging from the SBC should horrify anybody of any religious persuasion. An all-male pastorate preached sexual purity and defense of “family values,” while sexually abusing parishioners, including minors. A male power structure turned sex into a power prerogative, while spreading a message that women and girls were responsible for men’s libidinous reactions. Constant messages of submission and culpability turned out to have—quelle horreur!—an ulterior motive.
I’ve never heard any accusation that my youth pastor, whom I’ll not name, ever actively abused anyone. By all accounts I received, he was a paragon of respectability… I guess. Because his constant messaging had definite effects. I watched church youth descend into doom-spirals of self-recrimination (Christians are no less likely than anybody else to have premarital sex). Youth, drawn to our congregation by his personal charisma, soon drifted away in a fug of self-hatred.
This problem isn’t universal. As Austin Channing Brown observes, chastity is a preponderantly White church obsession. Freed from the impositions of oppression, poverty, and captivity, White Christians could pursue a ministry of service and responsibility. But that’s a difficult sell; much easier to convince believers they’re secretly oppressed. The belief that, if sexual violence happens against you, you’re covertly responsible, is an outgrowth of Calvinist belief in depravity.
Functionally, this sexual fixation doesn’t preserve anybody’s purity. It just transfers sexual autonomy onto powerful, mostly male, adults. It creates an atmosphere of guilt, stifles forgiveness, and convinces those who most need Christ’s guidance that they’ve fallen outside His domain. I’ve watched Christians, mostly youth, leave the church, not because they don’t believe, but because they believe they’ve done something God can’t forgive. That’s heartbreaking to witness.
Let me stress, irreligion isn’t the answer. The secular world of commerce hasn’t liberated anybody; a casual browse through the internet, or a stumble through any shopping mall, demonstrates that irreligious influences frequently conflate a woman’s dollar value with her sex appeal. Who can blame youth, browbeaten by constant sexual messaging from the spiritual and secular realms, for relinquishing control of their sexual choices?
My youth pastor probably meant well. His voracious sexual history innately entailed disrespecting not only the girls he had sex with, but also himself, and he wanted other youth to avoid that pattern. But his single-plank platform turned Christianity into a vehicle to shame sex, and especially female sexuality. He presented a world without hope, only momentary escape from constant temptation. That’s no way to live a life.
Extreme and repressive attitudes about sex are innately abusive, even before powerful people exploit those attitudes for selfish ends. What we’re seeing revealed at the SBC is simply the end result of a cosmology that ties people to their pasts, rather than opening them to a better future. White Christianity's relationship with sex has been distorted and toxic for some time.
And sadly, evidence suggests that it's going to get worse before it gets any better.
No comments:
Post a Comment