Christian Sex Ethics: “Performing Covenant”

This is the fifth post in my blog series on same-gender marriage. For an outline with links to the whole series, click here. The views expressed in this series are my own and do not represent those of my denomination, conference, or local church. 

So far, I have managed to write four posts on the topic of homosexuality without saying much about “sexuality” at all. And there is a reason for that: As I argued in my second post, the Biblical passages that speak against homosexuality do not seek to regulate specific sexual behaviors or desires. Instead, they are concerned about maintaining gender norms: they only seek to regulate who engages in which sexual behaviors based on gender of the participants. However, because the trajectory of Scripture releases us from gender norms, these regulations lose their legitimacy. This opens up the possibility of same-gender marriage. However, it does not release us from all of the Bible’s norms and expectations about sex. Instead, it leaves us with a Christian sexual ethic that applies to heterosexuals and homosexuals equally. [E1] But it presses upon us to consider the question, what is the Christian sexual ethic?

Once again, we find that progressives and conservatives are divided on this subject. Conservatives maintain that Christians should only pursue sexual intimacy in the context of marriage, [E2] while progressive Christians tend to be supportive of several other expressions of sexual intimacy, so long as there is consent between all of the parties involved. [E3] In this case, I believe that conservatives do a better job discerning the teaching of Scripture. For although the Bible offers a “progressive” narrative of gender, it maintains a “conservative ethic” about sex. [E4]

Unfortunately, many progressives have become so distrustful of the Bible that the testimony of Scripture doesn’t hold much weight with them. So in order to make the case for what I understand to be the Christian Sex Ethic, I’ll begin not with Scripture but by engaging one of the most important and intelligent sexuality theorists from the past 50 years: Michel Foucault.

If you have dabbled with philosophy at all, you have probably heard of Foucault before. He is typically identified as one of the major “postmodern philosophers.” [E5] But in a more specific way, his work is relevant to our discussion because it has been very influential on the LGBTQ rights movement. [E6] Bearing this in mind, one might expect Foucault to recite the standard progressive narrative about how conservatives are threatened by sex and therefore seek to repress sexual desire, while progressives recognize that sexual desires are good and that they ought to be explored and celebrated. Instead of doing this, Foucault rejects the idea that we suffer because our sexuality is repressed and that we ought to respond by talking about sex more frequently, openly, and accurately. Instead, he says,

 “One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall term the ‘repressive hypothesis.’ First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?... Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every society, most certainly in our own?... A third and final doubt: Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it ‘repression’?” [E7]

I want to call attention to his “second doubt” in the above quote, which asks, “Do the workings of power… really belong to the category of repression?” By asking this question, Foucault reveals to us what he is most interested in understanding: how power works. Indeed, this is a theme that comes up in all of his major works: Foucault is convinced that there are forces at play in our modern society that seek to control us. At one level, this is not new; powerful people have always tried to control the masses. But the “mechanisms” of control are more subtle and pervasive than they have ever been before. Social forces seek to control us through seemingly harmless tools such as architecture, medical research, therapy, and – most of all – through discourse. [E8] If we can be manipulated into talking in a certain way about a specific topic, then this shapes the way in which we think about that topic, and eventually, even how we feel about it and even react to it. Consequently, if we don’t want to be controlled and manipulated by others, we need to think more broadly about the ways in which power works.

Foucault goes on to argue that there have been forces at work in the past few centuries that have been seeking to control us by getting us to talk excessively and in a particular way about sexuality. [E9] This is ironic, because many talk about sexuality in order to be free from the repression we feel by a rigid, controlling sexual morality. However, as Foucault suggests in the above quote, the act of talking about sexuality only puts us further in the power of the forces that are controlling us. What are these forces? Foucault struggles to give a clear answer to this question because he knows that these forces– although cohesive and powerful – are not individual people. [E10] However, Christians have a language for describing these kinds of forces: powers and principalities. [E11]

Like Foucault, the Bible recognizes that there are powers in society that seek to control us. However, unlike Foucault, it insists that the only way to be free from them is to submit ourselves to the power of God. [E12] Doing this not only involves explicit acts of submission, such as pledging our allegiance to God in a conversion prayer, but also by giving ourselves to God in the more subtle and profound patterns of our lives, including and especially by re-forming our sexual patterns in ways that align with God’s vision for society. [E13]

What does that mean? How can our sexual behaviors “align” us with either God or sinister social powers that try to control us? To understand this, let’s not think about some kind of “possession” occurring in a single moment, as though we gain or lose God’s favor in the midst of a sexual act. Instead, let’s think more broadly about the ways in which we pursue sex, and how that pursuit eventually influences our thinking, feeling, and doing. The progressive and conservative ethics that I described above offer two different approaches to ways to pursue sexual fulfillment: the former is modeled on a contract and the latter is modeled on a covenant.

When progressives claim that consent is the primary factor that should shape our sexual pursuits, they may or may not realize it, but they are drawing on a contractual approach to sexual fulfillment. They depict every sexual experience as a contract between two parties, in which both parties must consent for the contract to be valid. I completely support the principle of consent, but what is subtly hidden behind this over-emphasis on consent is the fact that the reason it needs to be considered each and every time is because the “contracts” never extend beyond a single experience. Even long-term couples who abide by this model cannot assume that the contracts they made in the past still hold true. Consent in one transaction doesn’t apply to the next, and both parties are free to end the partnership at any time and for any reason.

This freedom to leave at any point has a certain appeal when you are the receiving party – especially in light of the abusive way in which women are all-too-often bound to sexual relationships. However, there is a negative side as well: it means that the other person can leave at any point and for any reason, and this is something that you be ethically prepared to accept. After all, each sex act in the contractual model not only involves consent but also negotiation: what am I willing to offer to get what I want? And so we must not only be prepared to consent but we must also make ourselves desirable or marketable – which is true of the conservative model as well.

However, the difference is that in the contractual model, I have to recognize the fact that my partner could leave at any time for any reason, and so I have to make myself marketable to a general audience, I have to look to the “market” to learn what the standards are, I am compelled to make myself “sexy.” Consequently, the broad social forces that define and re-define sexiness have a stronger hold on me than they do on someone who is not threatened by the short-term nature of contractual relationships. Some people might protest that I can resist the market impulses if I just decide to “be myself” and “learn what I want.” However, if Foucault is right and our understanding of what we want is shaped by the social discourse, then here too I find myself unwittingly under the control of the powers and principalities of our society. As Foucault writes near the end of his first book: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality.” [E14]

By contrast, the Christian emphasis on marriage – though often used in a legalistic way – can be understood as a covenantal model for pursuing sexual fulfillment. When entering a covenant, you give up some of the freedom of the contractual model – you cannot leave a relationship as soon as it loses its appeal or something better comes along. [E15] But this also makes you less susceptible to the general demands of sexiness, trends of the market, and the need to figure out “who you are and what you want.” [E16] Ultimately, this is because you have decided to value togetherness above personal fulfillment. Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t have sexual or romantic fulfillment, just as it doesn’t mean that people who follow the contractual model can’t experience togetherness. But the priority matters, not primarily because of the psychological impact it may or may not have on you, but because of the broader social/spiritual patterns to which it subjects you.

After all, this pattern of seeking sexual fulfillment (or giving it up!) in the context of covenant forms coheres with the broader Christian pattern of relating to God. God asks us to let go of the pursuit of our own fulfillment in order to maintain unity and togetherness with Christ, but the Bible promises that we can still experience fulfillment once our priorities are properly ordered. To borrow the language of another seminal gender theorist, we might say that we are performing covenant when we pursue our sexual desires in this way. [E17] These ways of thinking, talking about, and using bodies transform our minds. They shape us at a deep, subtle, and fundamental level.

All of that is really just a primer to what I understand as the Christian sexual ethic. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, including… How are teenagers supposed to “perform covenant” when we discourage them from thinking about marriage until their 20s at least? How can we “perform covenant” in the context of a dating system that is inherently evaluative and contractual? What do we do when our covenantal partner simply ceases to honor the covenant?  Honestly, I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I hope that good dialogue emerges around them.

But I hope you come away with two conclusions from this post: First, that there is more at stake spiritually in the Biblical sex ethic than progressive Christians generally recognize. And second, that the Biblical sex ethic is centered on the idea of covenant, not the concept of gender, which means that there is no reason that same-gender couples can’t practice it within their own covenantal commitments.

End Notes

[E1] It also applies equally to bisexuals, asexuals, and people with other sexual orientations (toward human beings). I speak above in the binary frame because that is the context in which the prohibitions emerge.

[E2] This is clearly expressed in the Nashville Statement, Article 2, which is a pretty good representation of conservative Christian sexual ethics. https://cbmw.org/nashville-statement/

[E3] This HuffPost article is pretty representative of a progressive Christian sexual ethic: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-chiakulas/the-christian-case-for-se_b_8281058.html. However, there are a number of prominent Christian thinkers who have advocated for monogamous and covenantal gay relationships, including Matthew Vines, James Brownson, and Rob Bell. Although my reasoning differs from theirs slightly, I tend to identify closely with this subset of “affirming Christians.”

[E4] Once again, I feel compelled to confess the inadequacy of the terms “progressive” and “conservative” here. They reflect our own modern divisions and it is not necessarily.

[E5] Describing Foucault as a “philosopher” – even a postmodern one – is somewhat misleading because he doesn’t engage Western philosophy in a direct/classical way. However, it is accurate to identify him as one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century and to think of his work as moving Western thought in a very different direction from the Enlightenment project.

[E6] Broadly speaking, Foucault challenges various Enlightenment concepts by exposing them as historical particularities rather than universal principles. He looks at the contexts in which they arose and looks for the powers that benefited from the emergence of these ideas. The LGBTQ community often adopts this approach when challenging various notions about what is natural, healthy, or divinely ordained. They point to the evidence of sexually ambiguous individuals (which is a move that Foucault himself made), they argue that our modern rules against homosexual behavior were not universal or timeless, and generally speaking, they are more sensitive to social constructions. These all reflect Foucault’s influence. That being said, few of Foucault’s specific insights about sexuality make it into the contemporary discussion. I find that really disappointing, because I think that both progressive and conservative Christians could be challenged by Foucault’s insights, if they understood them.

[E7] I am pulling my quotes from the Robert Hurley translation of The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction by Michel Foucault, which was produced by Random House in 1978. This quote comes from p. 10.

[E8] For an example of architecture, consider the way that aisles are designed in supermarkets, in lines with no natural places to stop, sit, rest, or gather, in order to keep people moving efficiently and maximize the number of business transactions possible. For an example of medical research, consider the psychological handbook DSM-II, which classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Several more examples could be listed, but hopefully this gives the general ideal that power is exerted in modern society in really subtle ways. Discourse is the way in which we talk and think about certain concepts, and for Foucault, this is a primary locus of power. If you can get people to think and talk about homosexuality as a mental disorder, for example, then this sets the frame for the various responses to it and keeps us from even considering the possibility that it might be healthy or normal. (Or at least it did… for a while.)

[E9]  “When one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformations… one sees a veritable discursive explosion.” (Foucault 17)

[E10] He has a pretty good grasp about how these social forces emerge from a complex web of relationships within society and yet come together and act as a singular force. Not finding any vocabulary in Western academia that could adequately describe this, he invents a new term himself to describe this force: bio-power. The key quote goes: “If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.” (Foucault 143)

[E11] I introduce the concept of powers and principalities in this older blog post. Western Christians were rediscovering this concept around the same time that Foucault was producing his History of Sexuality series.

[E12] This is the big point where I break from intellectuals such as Michel Foucault or Judith Butler. They seem to be chasing after a “freedom” in which we as individuals are not under the influence of any greater power, even though they must understand that this individualistic notion of freedom cannot exist. For me, the question is not, “How can I be an autonomous being?” but “Which power is beneficent?” and “Under what power can I flourish?” The Bible appeals to this kind of reasoning when it suggests that we must choose between being slaves to sin, the flesh, and/or spiritual forces such as “Mammon,” or slaves to God. Cf. Matthew 6:24, Galatians 5:16-25, Romans 6:12-14.

[E13] Both Foucault and the Bible acknowledge that our sexual behavior patterns have a deep and pervasive influence on us that extends far beyond sex itself. Foucault writes, “Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species.” (Foucault 146) In the context of sexual ethics, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a prince; therefore glorify God in your body.”

[E14] Foucault 157.

[E15] That being said, there are some legitimate reasons to break a covenant, as even the Bible acknowledges. But they should only be pursued after other options have been exhausted or in cases of abuse.

[E16] I should clarify that being married doesn’t automatically guarantee that you are less susceptible to these forces, because many people who get married in our society today perceive that marriage as more of a privileged contractual relationship than the Biblical model of covenant. They may stay in the relationship because it is too inconvenient to leave or because they feel social pressure to stay married, but they will resent it, and it will not be good for their spiritual life because they are not ultimately functioning in a covenantal context.

[E17] I am referring to Judith Butler. Originally, my post was going to engage both theorists, but because it turned out to be so long and so dense, I felt that I needed to reduce it to one. But to make a brief comment, I think Butler's concept of performativity offers a healthy corrective to Foucault's over-emphasis on discourse.