The New Rules of Lovemaking

He collected holiday socks, was twenty-five years older and a couple inches shorter, but I was in awe of him anyway. He was my favorite professor, and he could unpack a piece of literature into the smallest detail, then blast out a hundred miles and show us how it fit into the larger spirit of its time.

His teaching shaped who I am in many ways, but his exhortation that comes to mind the most is that thinkers should not only look out at the world, but also look backward into what shaped the lenses through which we view it. He called this "knowing where we are in time."

So many times when I have disagreements with other believers, if I will only follow that simple advice, I will discover significant life experiences that have nudged my opponent and me to believe the different things that we do. I might still disagree with another person's conclusion, but if I can be patient and curious, I can usually see why another opinion has been reached.

The same sense of "eureka" happens when I look into some of the criticism progressives are now bringing against the church. They are right in saying that during the 1980's and 1990's there was often a spirit of pride, elitism, legalism, materialism, and consumerism in evangelicalism. It's true that unethical practices took root as conservative politics hijacked religion. I can identify with a lot of the skepticism and disappointment that is fueling modern American Christianity.

Trends in Christianity seem to swing back and forth like a drunk man trying to walk a straight line. When I have studied church history, I have seen how from almost the very beginning, believers have veered to the right for a decade or two (or century or two) until someone thoughtful has noticed the developing extremism and has overcorrected it, causing the church to veer to the left, then right again, then left again.

And here we are in such a situation today.

When progressives first started criticizing evangelicalism, I was relieved and excited. I had felt out of place in straight conservatism, and when more artistic, socially-minded people like Donald Miller and Rob Bell began to voice complaints in language that resonated with my literary sensibilities, I felt hopeful for the church. I thought maybe we could shed the Western errors of our past and begin to speak in a way that finally connected with the secular culture.

A little more than a decade has passed, though, and I feel differently now. What began as a needed call to change has snowballed. Where the church was once infected with elitism, we are now infected with a negativity that ranges from cynicism to open hostility against orthodoxy.

Now, instead of just desiring to connect non believers with God by our relevance, we have made relevance a new god in itself. We allow it to trump awkward or unpopular commands, thinking "God must not mean THAT, because the world HATES that idea." Like Thomas Jefferson snipping out sections of the Bible that displeased him, we emphasize the parts of the gospel that are lavish and safe, while skipping over that which makes us vulnerable to criticism from both progressive Christians and a secular society.

One of the casualties of recent overcorrection is found in how modern believers view sexuality. So many of us were disappointed in the results of religious campaigns like "Why Wait? and Promise Keepers. We saw conservatives try to kiss dating goodbye, then live hypocritical lives. Some idealistic couples who followed all the rules still ended up in unhappy marriages. Some of our "wholesome" old right-wing leaders have been exposed as scoundrels. We are tired of pep rallies and promises that don't hold water.

"And besides," we think, "Is it really that big of a cosmic deal to God what two grown adults do with their bodies when there are so many life-and-death social justice issues at hand? Women are being trafficked. Children don't have clean water to drink. There is poverty, illiteracy, oppression all around. Is God all that concerned about my sex life when there is so much pain in the world?"

Every week my Facebook feed is filled with memes mocking sexual purity. My friends will post pictures of billboards covered in fire with headlines like, "You can't hold hands with Jesus while you are masturbating," and the implied joke is based on the dominant cultural belief that some imaginary god doesn't have any business telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies.

Most of us are fine with God being love, and even agnostics bubble over with praise about grace. Jesus Version 2015 is an emotional synthesis of Santa and that grandmother who tells the media what a great person you are, even after you have burned down a public building. We ask him to bibbity-bobbety-boo over sick babies and credit card debt, but we either lock the door of the bedroom against him or try to remake him so that he approves of what we do there.

To some extent, even the most traditional, moralistic believer among us takes advantage of the gospel. God has made divine mercy to bear us up as we make mistakes and learn (practically) what it means to have Christ living through us. Growth is almost always a messy process that involves a lot of falling down, so to be given acceptance, even as we fail and get back up again, provides a beautiful security.

But it seems many moderns have forgotten the context of that grace. We take it and run back into our independent lives instead of letting the safety net of forgiveness sustain us as we grow. We forget that we are on a trajectory that ends in seamless communion with a holy Being.

Twenty years ago, when I would hear about believers having sex outside of marriage, those affairs typically happened in the context of two lonely people falling in love and breaking their vows after encountering a "real soul mate." There was also usually a terrible struggle to resist infidelity that eventually just gave way.

Today, I'm seeing that sort of situation less and less. I'm seeing a sharp increase in progressive believers simply being okay with sleeping around. Just a mild emotional connection is needed to justify intimacy, because sex is embraced as a healthy, casual, physical activity that grownups can fiddle with to burn off lust while waiting for a real life partner to show up. Or not. 

If the practice of sex outside of marriage is challenged, the conversation quickly turns to "real" social ills in the world, or a sort of mockery about ancient societal rules that enlightened thinkers can be mature enough to circumvent. Those who embrace liberal sexuality can worship with, pray with, reference God with the very same people they are using sexually, not even blushing before a living God who has commanded them to save intimacy for marriage.

It is now so common to live this way that moderns have developed a blindness to the broken hearts which result directly from this kind of living. When temporary relief ends up crashing, ex-lovers often end up either blaming God for their pain or doubting that He exists at all. To fill the growing, hollow ache that grows like a disease from uncommitted sex, a new relationship is sought, more temporary relief is found, and the cancer of rewriting God's rules numbs us more and more, eating away our sensitivity until we don't even have the ability to repent.

Strong conservatives are in a panic about this, pulling out Bible verses to try to combat it. But most of the progressive believers I know who are actually living in this way lost respect for the Bible's authority long ago. That is why I am making an appeal to my old literature professor's words. Let us begin by simply knowing where we are in time, and then let us see our present in light of our past.

There is wisdom in admitting that we are a product of a pendulum swinging too far the other direction. It doesn't validate extremists who are unlike us to admit that we have also become too extreme ourselves. We can acknowledge the ugly, insular tendencies of the 80's and 90's and the well-meaning corrections of the early 2000's so that we can then see the resulting excesses of our modern time with clarity.

We do not have to simply relax into the currents of our era like flotsam. We can rise up and see why we believe what we do, and then decide if we want to continue to believe it. We can explore the new rules of lovemaking and critique them in light of the past and in light of the future.

Because for many moderns, this lifestyle isn't working. People are still tired. They are still lonely. Repeated violations of intimacy have discouraged us, because sex is powerful, and there is a growing sense that our isolation must be permanent if nothing is truly sacred at all. All of this is interconnected, see?

It's time to admit that even though generations before us erred, we have, too. We have not been so wise and enlightened after all, we have only filled our bellies with the husks the pigs eat. We have taken our inheritance of grace and divorced it from the love and authority that provided the gift. We have taken our Father's generosity out of his bank account and blown it in stolen beds, yet the party hasn't turned out like we had hoped. Despite all we have tried to steal, we are still miserable.

Real repentance is foreign in our time, but if it is rare, it is also beautiful. It is a deep down, honest assessment of all we've tried, simply saying that it has gone sour and that we are willing to receive help and guidance. It is a sweet humility, the kind that draws us to other people when they admit what is obviously wrong about themselves. It tears off the lies that strangle and disorient us. It situates us back in the core of our true selves.

Remember how the Prodigal Father ran to his son who had tried alternate ways of living? He put aside his dignity and lifted his skirts to embrace his son. And moderns who have used sex outside of God's plan, a father waits for you, too. He wants us to release our fingers from the filth that we have tried to rub over and again into our wounds, and he wants to return us to a life under his loving, complete indwelling.

Because there is something bigger going on here than just naughty people needing to live nice. Sexual resignation is not a big joke on you that the enlightened can mock. It's a part of engaging with Divine love as whole people.

Despite the hopeless whispers of darkness, you and I are not just in the business of surviving a couple dozen years of thirst on a dry, worn out planet; this is a classroom, all of it. Working through longings and choosing ultimate good is training. These are our lessons for an everlasting realm that the bliss of human lovemaking only hints at in its very best moments. Delights and wonders are before us that we can not even begin to imagine. 

Look at where we are in time. Look at what has led us to where we are. Then look forward, friends. Look forward.