“EC Laguna’s Statement of Sexual Integrity”, Good News: The EC Laguna Newsletter, November-December, 1995.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s centennial is being commemorated with our 1996 calendar and a literary tea. As abolitionists, she and her husband, Bible professor Calvin Stowe, clashed with other Christians who, for socio-economic self-interest, rationalized slavery as biblical and said Northerners shouldn’t tell Southerners how to behave. Lincoln once told her that she had started the Civil War with her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While all Christians have now learned to oppose slavery – though the “pro-slavery” verses remain in the Bible – we’re divided today on issues o homosexuality. But historian Joan D. Hedrick, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Stowe, speaks of “the nineteenth century’s easy acceptance of same-sex physical intimacy (later termed ‘deviant’ by the sexologists).”
The Stowes lived apart half the time during their first 15 years of marriage. On Valentine’s Day, 1847, Calvin – who along with his wife, doubtless knew Leviticus 18:22 – wrote to Harriet: “When I get desperate, and cannot stand it any longer, I get dear, good kind hearted Br[other] Stagg to come and sleep with me, and he puts his arms round me and hugs me to my heart’s content.” Calvin later wrote his wife to tell of a Mr. Farber who “[took] it into his little black-curly pate to fall desperately in love with me” and related how “he kisses and kisses upon my rough old face, as if I were a most beautiful young lady instead of a musty old man. The Lord sent him here to be my comfort. … He will have me sleep with him once in a while, and he says, that is almost as good as being married – the dear little innocent ignorant soul.” Meanwhile, Harriet was living at Paradise Row, an all-female commune, exchanging lovks of hair with another woman andd enjoying “long, long talks lingering in each others’ rooms”, as she told Calvin. “Not for years,” she wrote to him, “have I enjoyed life as I have here … real keen enjoyment … everything agrees with me” and so she intended, she said, to stay even longer. “That physical intimacies flourished in the dormitories of Brattleboro is likely,” says Hedrick. The closest today’s evangelicals come to acknowledging any of this is to say, as does the head of the Evangelical Press Association in his book, Harriet Beecher Stowe Had a Husband: “It was an unusual marriage.”
None of this is to say that the Stowes were homosexuals. Rather, it is to give yet another example of the relativity of Christian sexual ethics, mores, expectations and experience over time. For though we may agree with Dr. Ruth when she says that the Bible is the “wisest guide to sex ever written” (and her critics on the Religious Right may agree) – as with all else in the Bible, just what is its wisdom on sex is always a matter of interpretation. Indeed, as a Bible scholar states: “At point after point, the Bible condemns sexual behaviors that Christians today permit”, e.g., sex during menstruation, inter-ethnic marriage, etc., and “at point after point, the Bible allows sexual behavior that most people today would condemn”, e.g. polygamy, sex with a dead husband’s brothers, etc. (Walter Wink)
It’s in this context that we read in the Statement of Sexual Integrity drawn up by the Laguna chapter of Evangelicals Concerned Western Regional Fellowship: “God intended for human sexuality to be optimally expressed within the context of a loving, committed, monogamous and lifelong relationship of mutual respect and integrity … regardless of sexual orientation” and that “this goal [is] support[ed] and promot[ed] within our community of faith in Christ.” Whatever have been the obviously varied mores and expectations in sexual ethics in biblical times and in church history, in view of today’s expectations for mutuality in peer relationship and (for Christians) the love commandment that we should always seek the true welfare of the other person, this modest Statement of Sexual Integrity should be endorsed and lived. It’s especially helpful because there’s such banal thinking on sexual ethics in lesbian/gay circles. For example, it’s naïve for Advocate columnist Donna Minkowitz to call for “public spaces where people can meet for sex for sex’s sake”, to pretend that these are “of great value – spiritual value, aesthetic value, political value, moral value.” It’s absurd for her to have no “problem with the sex clubs permitting unsafe sex”. Gay/lesbian Christians-in-recovery from fundamentalism of the Right (No homosexuality is o.k.) uncritically embrace the fundamentalism of the Left (Any homosexuality is o.k.). Inescapably, they champion a “non-judgmentalism” most judgmentally. They may mean to be objective, but their subjectivism is absolutist. It’s untenable for them to say that nobody should tell others what is right for someone else while they nonetheless insist that all others should agree with them on that!
Since sexuality springs from our deep core as relational human beings, sexual ethics dare not be indifferent to the disintegrative, destructive and deadening effects of, for example, genitalizing with strangers, non-monogamy, and pornography – all so frustrating to the achievement of sexual intimacy. Sound Christian sexual ethics is a matter of neither Bible proof-texting nor “your truth/ my truth” subjectivism. If we’re to be practical rather than to be merely “orthodox” or “politically correct”, we must not be blind to unintended and counterproductive, but predictable, consequences of our thinking and behavior in trying to meet our sexual intimacy needs.