“Sexual Ethics: Experience, Growth, Challenge” by Nate Gruel, Chair of The Task Force on Sexual Ethics of Dignity, Dignity/USA, December 1989.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
First: some perspective. In spite of all the supports from state and church, the sex lives of Christians remain far from the professed ideal. For example, Josh McDowell reports that teens in evangelical churches are only 10 percent to 15 percent behind their general population peers in having sex. By at 19, 43 percent admit to sexual intercourse and another 12 percent report sex acts just short of that. Forty percent of Lutherans live together before marriage. Adultery accounts for most church discipline cases in the Evangelical Free Church. Seventy-seven percent of fundamentalist pastors polled by the Fundamentalist Journal said they had to deal with members’ marital infidelity. The Journal of Psychology and Christianity reports that “23% of ministers have had affairs”. According to the Evangelical Newsletter, 70 percent of pastors report that Christian husbands batter their wives “sometimes” or “often”. And evangelical psychologist says that “the frequency of child abuse [physical and sexual] in Christian homes is near[ly] proportionate to that of non-Christian homes”. Sometimes the sexual behavior makes headlines, as in the case of the Moral Majority preacher at Maine’s biggest fundamentalist church who had an affair with his organist. More often it’s hushed up, as in the case of the Moral Majority editor in Virginia who had an affair with his sister-in-law. A TV preacher writes a booklet called Pornography: America’s Dark Stain while paying prostitutes to pose for his pleasure. An AIDS death reveals the double-life of a youth for Christ executive in California and an associate’s biography tells of the extra-marital affairs of a great civil rights preacher. After their divorce, a celebrity couple’s marriage is shown to have been a sham for many years and throughout their antigay crusade in Miami, “Pro-family” congressmen, a Nixon Supreme Court nominee, and other right-wing antigay “bisexuals” are arrested for sex crimes. Lest it seem to have been much different in “the good old days”, we note that marriage and birth records in 18th century New England reveal that a third of the brides were pregnant. And after studying American and European family documents of the 19th and mid-20th centuries, a Brigham Young University sociologist concludes: “The fully functioning, warmly supportive, traditional family is more of an ideal than a historical reality. … [it’s] a model family that never existed”. Some evangelical Christians do lead lives closer to the ideal. But as they themselves seek each other’s arms they get up in arms over homosexuals who seek each other’s arms. Within this context of selfishness and discrepancy between profession and practice, we turn to the Dignity document.
In 1982, a director of Dignity, the national gay and lesbian Roman Catholic group, wrote in the Dignity newsletter: “When I first joined Dignity in 1975, I was told that if we pursued the discussion of ‘morality and ethics’ we could possibly split the membership of Dignity right down the middle”. A year later, Dignity commissioned a Task Force on Sexual Ethics to prepare a document of “sound theological direction on the subject of gay and lesbian sexual expression” for the group’s 1989 convention. It’s now been published and “fully accept[ed] and endorse[d] by Dignity”. The attitudes that prompted that 1975 warning seem not to have changed, for what we have in this final report is not “sound theological direction” but a rationalization of the polled sexual experience of Dignity members. It’s about what is, not what ought to be. Indeed, the chair grants: “that in reality what the Dignity membership accepted and endorsed is nothing other than its own lived experience”. The Task Force “determined to take a decisively non-authoritarian approach”. But this authorized description of self-reported sex experience functions authoritatively, even if it’s hardly a document of Christian sexual ethics. It may be a survey but it tries to be more. It’s full of pious phrasings. For example: “What God is doing in our lives” covers whatever these members report they are doing.
What are the criteria for ethical judgment advanced in this statement? “Our primary resource [is] our individual experience and reflection … and personal values.” But it’s risky to build an ethic on what is taken to be normative for homosexuals when that has been a make-do response within the constraints of a homophobic church and society and a wounded and shortsighted gay community. “Most of us”, the document states, “regard … scripture study … as less helpful”. That’s unfortunate. “Most of us have not found official teaching on sexuality at all helpful”. That’s understandable. Sadly, the pain of antigay moralism deterred the Task Force from any negative evaluations of “sexual rituals”. It is naively urged that all “diversity of sexual and genital behavior” be seen to reflect “the presence of God”. It was not thereby deterred from its own judgmentalism. “We can tolerate diversity”, the report assures, and “we must explore together and learn from one another about …pornography, prostitution, sex with minors, multiple partners, anonymous sex, bondage and discipline” and other matters. The closest the document comes to suggesting any “direction” is to list questions concerning the value of self-liberation, consistent patterns, sharing, enjoyment, and the avoidance of coercion and pretense. No guidance is given on assessment of sex in the framework of the Christian’s obligation to love God with all we have and to seek the welfare of each other just was we seek our own. Moreover, the Task Force fails to recognize the unintended harmful psychological effects of some of the genital “solutions” improvised under oppression in a sex-negative society.
The tie that blinds the wider church to the needs of its gay sons and daughters has been a mask of traditionalism pretending to be Christian faith. It won’t be unbound by the tie that blinds gay men and lesbians with an ethics of subgroup custom or private preference passing for Christian discipleship.