Sexuality and spirituality have been on my mind as we prepare for tonight’s Level Ground Film Festival.
I am very aware of the cultural conversation that continues to circle around marriage equality and issues related to legal matters. As a pastor and theologian, my concern is more specifically focused on people’s understanding and engagement of sexuality and spirituality. [1]
If someone were to ask me what was the single biggest thing that would make a difference in how we approach matters of sexuality and spirituality … I would have to say that the reductive impulse to simplify sexuality is the main problem.
Sex and sexuality are not simple. [2]
When we attempt to reduce sex and sexuality down to single thing or try to squeeze it into a simplified category we make a massive error.
Sex, sexuality and spirituality are all inherently complicated and complex. [3]
How one is embodied in one’s own skin, how one conceptualizes of that in-carnation, who one is attracted to, and how one participates in that attraction are at least 4 separate issues. It gets more complicated from there.
Sexuality and spirituality are two areas where complexity and diversity are actually a good thing!
It is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness when we attempt a reductive move to simplify sex/uality down to one thing – especially if that one thing is the biological.
The unfortunate thing is that those attempting the reductive move too often attempt to reduce the purpose of sex down to procreation.
Sex is about so much more than procreation. [4]
Sex is about intimacy, expression, sensation, exploration, and experience/experimentation.
Sometimes it results in pro-creation … but, more times than not, it doesn’t.
Sexuality has an aspect that is emotional.
And one that is physical.
Then there is the aspect that is psychological.
There is one that is social.
And one that is spiritual.
Sexuality is personal … and private … and (to a certain degree) public.
Not to mention the part of it that is political.
Our sexuality involves all of who we are and em-bodies so much of our identity.
It even entails part of our capacity to engage the world around us and the social constructs that we are caught up in and by which we are acted upon daily. [5]
In one sense everything is sexual, even how much money we make … in the same sense that is it political. This is why our inherited enlightenment categories do not work anymore. The reductive impulse is failing us. Things need to be recognized as complicated and part of the emergent reality.
Sex/uality is never about one thing.
We do a great disservice to all that Creator god intended for us when we reduce sexuality down to pro-creation.
We ignore all that the evolutionary process has encoded us with (and for) when we boil our sexuality down to a single act with a single purpose.
The more I have studied and listened and considered the challenge for the church in the matter of sex and sexuality in the 21st century, the more I am convinced that it is the reductive move that hampers and limits our capacity to explore and engage the issue in a way that would lead to life and health.
I would want to confess 3 things:
- Sexuality is a gift of God and is a good thing.
- Any view of sex that begins with secrecy or shame should be viewed with suspicion and interrogated accordingly.
- Reducing sex and sexuality down to a single aspect is both misguided and dangerous.
Sex/uality is complex combination and collaboration of elements including (but not limited to) the physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, social, private, personal, communal, and political.
One way that the church could bless the culture in the decades to come is to resist the temptation of the reductive explanation and to instead provide an understanding that is complex (even complicated). The more diverse the areas being engaged (and examined) the better!
We need sex/uality to be more – not less. The temptation to reduce and simplify is a false construct. The reality is that human identity is inherently complex – and that is a good thing.
Sex, sexuality and spirituality are but 3 aspects of that rich complexity.
We need more spiritually minded exploration and even theological examination of our humanity … not less.[5]
Sex and sexuality are not simple – any spirituality that attempts to make it so is both limited and, in the end, false.
I’m looking forward to tonight’s conversation and the followup when we release the podcast audio tomorrow.
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[1] We have wonderful snapshots of different historical takes on the role and purpose of sex in Biblical passages like Genesis, the Song of Solomon and some of the New Testament epistles.
[2] I am saying that things are complicated as a straight, middle-class, white, cis-gendered male in a Western culture. It doesn’t take much listening to figure out that if even one of those elements was different, let alone two, things becomes increasingly layered.
[3] In full disclosure, for those who prefer letters, I am a big fan of the Q in LGBTQ. Just FYI.
[4] As someone who has been married for 21 years and is childless, I have an admittedly different angle on that whole line of ‘reasoning’.
[5] I have found great help in those reflecting on the work of [link] Marcella Althaus-Reid’s ‘indecent theology’.