I Need Some Lovin’1

“Sex is either consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory in between.”

-Roger Scruton

Why does sex matter? It seems a rather futile question to ask under the current
circumstances. It is rather obvious, however, that it does matter. From evangelical purity culture to
the #MeToo movement, we are all acutely aware of the power that sex holds over us. For most of
us, it is a hopelessly comic affair, accompanied by countless opportunities for making a fool of
ourselves. And so, society in general, and religion in particular, have dedicated tremendous energy to
the precarious task of doing it right. Acknowledging the difficulty inherent in seeking to flourish
sexually – and thus the need to follow certain patterns to do so – in no way hinders us from
rejoicing in sex as a good. Rather, it makes such joy possible.
Both high society and popular culture vilify Christian teaching on sexuality as puritanical and
outdated. The Church gets pilloried for placing unreasonable limits on the sexual freedom of
contemporary people. Moreover, Christians are sometimes worthily accused, at least in America, of
worrying about what people do in bed much more than whether or not they have a bed to begin
with.
Thus, opponents to Christianity certainly would have predicted that the marginalization of
the Church in our culture would lead to a new flourishing of sexual and mental health. Unchained at
last from all that old religious nonsense about sin and shame, individuals ought to have been freed
to live openly, vividly, fiercely, unburdened by guilt or fear. Indeed, we have at long last achieved the
sexual liberty activists had so longed for, and yet we are finding it wanting. It seems after desperately
reaching for the sun, we flew too close and are now hurtling back down to earth. We are as Icarus
had he survived the fall. The wider culture is beginning to realize the underlying wisdom of the
Church’s sexual ethic: it is indeed difficult to cultivate truly respectful and mutually consensual
relationships.
There are many good developments as a result of the sexual revolution, and there were many
aspects of the old, patriarchal customs surrounding sex that needed to be tossed aside. For this, we
must be grateful where it has forced us to confront our hypocrisy. Nevertheless, much of what held

1 Marvin Gaye, “Sexual Healing”

us together has also been tossed aside, and it may be impossible to recover. As Wittgenstein
lamented, reviving tradition is like trying to repair a torn spider’s web with your bare hands.2 We
have been “liberated” from old sexual mores, but the new regime of anti-morality may prove to be
far more constraining. Having at last attained the pleasures we were promised, as they turn sour in
our mouths we have also realized they were not the pleasures we so wanted.
We as a culture are meant to hold two wildly antagonistic positions in tandem. On the one
hand, the #MeToo movement has brought us to the stark realization that the act of coitus has such
supreme value and is susceptible to such awful corruptions that it must be approached with the
utmost caution. On the other, fashion dictates that anyone and everyone can have sex for any reason
they desire, as long as it is between consensual adults. As the revolutionary slogan goes, “il est
interdit d'interdire!” – it is forbidden to forbid.3
Scarred and scared, we have seen from the #MeToo moment that “sex is a gigantic force in
our lives and unless controlled becomes unbridled lust under which woman is victim and suffers
most of all.”4 Thus, many of us have begun to recognize that once you have given people beds, you
really had better worry about what they did in them, for that can have just as damaging an effect on
their wellbeing.

How, then, shall we live?

Let us take a look, then, at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of sexual
health:
“Sexual health is a state of physical, mental and social well-being in relation to sexuality. It
requires a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as
the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion,
discrimination and violence.”5
Now, I doubt anyone would object to the basic premises here. The WHO seems to value mutuality
(enjoyment for all involved) and consent (not just a lack of protest). Agreed. This probably
represents what most of us here at Duke consider a good sexual ethic.

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), #106.
3 This was a slogan of the May 1968 demonstrations in France.
4 Dorothy Day, The Day of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (New York: Image Books, 2011),
409.
5 https://www.who.int/topics/sexual_health/en/
 Indispensable as consent and mutuality may be, I wonder whether these two parameters are
really all that is required for sexual flourishing. There is still so much that can go wrong under those
basic guidelines. I can have a consensual and mutually pleasurable relationship with a person while at
the same time cheating on them with someone else. I could give my consent but it only be out of
desperation or willingness to please. The Church can do better than that. What constitutes a healthy
Christian sexual ethic goes beyond a check list of thou shalt nots.
Now, I can feel people’s objections. So much of what people think of sexuality in
conjunction with Christianity is precisely that: a list of thou shalt nots. Across the religious and
philosophical spectrums, a puritanical stream is of course apparent. Within the heresies of
Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and platonic dualism6 that infected much of the early church, this strain
teaches that spirit is good and holy whereas matter is fallen and evil. For the most part, this sort of
philosophy claimed the purpose of life was to escape matter. Essential to that mission, of course, is
the avoidance of sex which ties us to the material world. Sadly, as many of us know all too well, this
heresy is alive and well in some churches. Rigidity surrounding Christian practices of sex has caused
untold harm to people’s bodies and spirits.
But biblical Christianity is not limited to that one position. Genesis tells us the Creator made
the whole array of the physical and found all of it – from supernovae to coral reefs to sexual human
beings – “very good.”7 Then, in Jesus Christ, God took on human flesh and thereby redeemed it.
Accordingly, bodies, sex, and sexual desire are all good, even very good. Plato may well have been a
puritan, your grandmother too, but Jesus, God made flesh, most certainly is not.8
What separates the Christian view of sex and pleasure from that of the WHO, then, is this:
sexuality must be expressed within the context of love, defined as willing the good of the other as
other.9 In other words, desiring their good not for your sake but wholly for theirs. This is expressed
most fully in the total gift of self, spiritually and bodily – an act characterized more by decision than
emotion. Otherwise, reducing sexual ethics to mutuality and consent misses the reality that sex is
inherently the progression from idiocy (from ἴδῐος, one’s own or private) toward ecstasy (ἔκστασις,

6 Each of these were prominent movements in the early Church. Gnosticism taught that the god who made the world is
evil and Christ saves us from it with esoteric knowledge (gnosis). Manichaeism was a similar syncretic religion positing a
dualist world where materiality was shunned and Jesus never became human. Platonism has a base world of matter and a
higher plane of forms.
7 Genesis 1:31
8 Barron, Robert. "Sex, Love, and God: The Catholic Answer to Puritanism and Nietzcheanism." Word on Fire.
December 09, 2018. Accessed April 16, 2019. https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/sex-love-and-god-the-
catholic-answer-to-puritanism-and-nietzcheanism/455/.
9 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, 26 4, corp. art.
to stand outside oneself).10 If you want to see what happens when this standard is ignored, take a
long hard look at both the reality of widespread sexual violence and the prevailing hookup culture.
Loveless and recreational sex, sex as contact sport, has conscripted a vast army of sad, anxious, and
broken men and women.
In large part, this is because most of us, the children of a heartless consumerist society, only
know how to love ourselves. Our culture is so obsessed with a sort of self-creation – the impossible
quest of deciding for ourselves what will make us happy – that bland toleration is the only objective
value many of us recognize. Within that mode of tolerance, freedom – with sexual freedom above all
– is the greatest prize. Deprived of this, we somehow feel that we have been cheated, that we are not
being our “authentic selves.”
Our modern hero’s journey is that of the person who searches deep inside herself and,
enduring whatever obstacles society has placed on her, strives to embody the “real” her that she
finds within. And, of course, only she could ever have realized who that “real” her is – no one
should ever dare to suggest that she ought to have discovered someone else in there. Nowhere is
this right to self-actualization more sacred than in the realm of sexuality. Sex is the release of desires
welling up from the “real me” inside. Any rules placed on this mode of self-expression would,
therefore, be to deny the true personhood of the individual.
We would thus prefer that sex take the “shape of water,” flowing with the appetites of those
who engage in it. Traditional sexual principles are shunned as fussy anachronism and any suggestion
that sex ought to have an intentional form independent of free choice is derided as an arbitrary
imposition. Christians would caution, however, that although good sex does indeed include
dynamism and free choice, if it only has the shape of water – that is, none at all – it is actually in bad
shape.11 For good or ill, our sexual choices have consequences and form our characters. Moreover,
sex is never a purely private affair – it always has effects in the wider community.

Cause and Effect

This is why love of the other as other is so crucial for Christian sex. Remove it, and
historically you get male domination of women on one hand and on the other meaningless,

10Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon: Founded upon the Seventh Ed. of Liddell and
Scotts Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

11Barron, Robert. "Paul Tillich and "The Shape of Water"." Word on Fire. December 09, 2018. Accessed April 16,
2019. https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/paul-tillich-and-the-shape-of-water/5734/.
throwaway encounters. The perennial problem of patriarchy perpetuates a loveless, self-serving sin.
It rears its ugly head all over the place today. So much so that the American Psychological
Association has diagnosed traditional masculinity as toxic.12 “Toxic masculinity” – as if it were
masculinity that were at fault for such behavior. That is exactly the issue: such men are not masculine
by God’s definition. Brutish, patriarchal, licentious, whichever you prefer – but not masculine. To be
masculine, to be a man as God intended, is to respect – to love – women.
On the other end of the spectrum, hook ups are the epitome of capitalist exploitation of
bodies. This loveless, self-serving sin participates in the consumerist culture by trying to treat sex as
a commodity that two parties can trade apart from commitment. Sell the masses condoms to
prevent pregnancy, the pill to guard against condom-breakage, an abortion to remedy pill-failure,
pornography to escape intimacy, surgery to evade undesirability – perhaps an injection could one
day prevent emotional attachment to sexual partners and, at last, we will engage in a free sexual
market.13
At the same time that we are desperately longing for connection in serious relationship, we
are cheapening the encounters that we are having. The justification that “we all have needs” is
absolutely correct – the problem is that we are often so woefully misguided in identifying what they
actually are. Having sex with a stranger to scratch an invented itch is not serving us well. That, rather
than just cultural stigma, might explain why many of us feel “dirty” doing the walk of shame the
next morning, or, God forbid, a couple minutes after climax. Friends and culture might contend that
you need to have as much sex as possible, but this is simply not true. Why lend your body to
someone who does not care about you? It may be easy to get caught up in hurried motions and
stolen breaths, but lust is selfish, and love is selfless. Only love will satisfy.
How is such love cultivated then? Well, this kind of love is necessarily covenantal. This is
because deep, abiding love can only come to be if it is in fact abiding. It is forged through living
through both the quotidian and the extraordinary together. For this reason, in order for sexual
flourishing to occur, lifelong monogamy is required. This makes room for love that is so powerful
and concentrated that it is able to overflow and create new life. We are thus enabled to participate in
God’s vibrant creativity. Sex, then, is the way we use our bodies to express the promised,

12https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf
13Barnes, Marc. "The Case for Complicating Sex." Bad Catholic. March 30, 2016. Accessed April 16, 2019.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2016/03/the-case-for-complicating-sex.html.
covenanted bond between ourselves and our beloved. In giving oneself entirely, one signifies to the
other that “with my body I thee worship.”14 Through this divine act, “the two become one flesh.”15
The question of which kinds of relationships are capable of embodying this kind of love is,
of course, controversial. In particular, various churches and denominations in recent years have
come to different opinions concerning same-sex relations. Tragically, this has meant the institutional
divorce between conservative and progressive arms of the body of Christ. Such a difficult issue that
involves scripture, tradition, and bodies in a changing world cannot sufficiently be discussed in the
confines of this article. I will say this, however: Many believers have maintained orthodoxy on this
issue only incidentally – not because of a compassionate obedience to the vision of scripture but
disgust toward fellow image-bearers. Such hardheartedness requires repentance. This would entail
actually listening to the men and women, young and old, who this argument is about. They are
beloved children of God – not an issue to be dealt with by denominational votes.

These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth 16

This discussion would be incomplete without also addressing the path of celibacy. There is a
“deep and pervasive public pessimism” about whether or not actual celibacy is even possible. 17 A
deep-seated psychological presumption lurks behind this: that celibacy is unnatural and even
harmful. And if it is not necessarily unnatural, then it must be fanciful. This position is often traced
back to Sigmund Freud, but his actual views concerning what he termed “sublimation” (repressed
and redirected sexual desire) do not necessarily support this view. The Oedipal cocaine-user’s stance
remained unclear and inconsistent to the end, but he did finally decide that all of us must engage in
sublimation in one way or another. When Freud talks about Christian celibacy in Civilization and Its
Discontents, he neither disparages it nor claims it impossible. Instead, he observes that celibates are
those who have managed to direct their love to “all men alike” rather than to one “love-object.”
With the commands of Christ in mind, that does not sound too bad to me. Nevertheless,
Freud objected that “a love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value
[…]; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.” Many agree. But none are better prepared for
the task of “lov[ing] [their] enemies” than celibates who love so indiscriminately.18 As humans, we

14 1662 Book of Common Prayer, Solemnization of Matrimony

15 Genesis 2:24
16 Revelation 14:4
17 Sarah Coakley, The New Ascetism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God, (London: Bloomsbury), 34.
18 Matthew 5:44
desire to be taken possession of, even if only for the moment of orgasm, by some force greater than
ourselves. Our flesh cries out “fiercely for consummation and fruition.”19 In choosing singleness,
Christ-followers can widen this ecstasy beyond the usual confines of sex and gender. Odd as it
sounds in the present day, you do not need to have sex to be fully human.
Most of us have no idea what we’re doing. Some of us come to Duke and delete Tinder for
Grindr, while others, if you can believe it, come and trade Grindr for Tinder.20 Others of us get no
more action than a few chance encounters at Shooters. And I’m in the same boat as everyone else.
So, who should let a college sophomore – a virgin no less – tell them how they should lead their
sexual lives here and afterward? No one, I suppose. But I don’t think that we are condemned to
inventing the wheel for ourselves in every generation. Perhaps there are, in fact, some small bits of
wisdom in the supposedly repressive, patriarchal sexual mores of our great-grandparents’ generation.
And so, while the Church desperately needs to expunge legalism and shaming from the
conversation, the world also needs to come to terms with the depravity that lurks behind so much of
sexual interaction. Sex is a fire capable of bringing both warmth and destruction. Our only hope lies
in basing our sexual lives on the example of Christ’s self-sacrificial love. Only when sex becomes a
sharing of “ourselves, our souls and bodies” can it be a worthy endeavor.21 Many of you may find
yourselves agreeing with some of what I have said, yet still pray under your breath with St.
Augustine, “Give me chastity, O Lord, but not yet.”22 Very well, the Lord will have you. As Pope
Francis has said, Christianity has a whole lot more to offer than just the “pelvic issues.” But sex is an
important aspect of our existence here and now, so it is worth getting it right. The glory of God is a
human being fully alive.”23 And thus, the Church’s teachings on sex are not meant to be burdens but
an invitation to fuller life; the gospel’s Nos are always in service of a greater Yes.

19 Dorothy Day, The Day of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (New York: Image Books,
2011), 267.
20 Or so a meme posted by Avery Boltwood on Duke Memes for Gothicc Teens on Feb. 7, 2019 contends.
21 1662 Book of Common Prayer, Post-Communion prayer
22 “Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo” (Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones, Book 8, Chapter 7, Section 17)
23 “Gloria enim Dei vivens homo” (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, Book 4, Chapter 34, Section 7)