Last Tuesday, Bill Cosby was sentenced to three to ten years in state prison for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. Though it was Mrs. Constand’s charges that ultimately landed Mr. Cosby in prison, she is just one of 60 women accusing the famous actor and comedian of sexual assault.
In an age where the ugliness of sexual immorality is bubbling to the top all around us, Mr. Cosby’s case is another reminder of what happens when power, lies, and lust all coalesce. People get used. Tracks get covered. Spirits get shorn.
One of the things that makes Mr. Cosby’s case so difficult to process is the massive disconnect between the doting dad America knew as Dr. Huxtable on the Cosby Show in the 80s and the sickening nature of his alleged and, until recently, secretive crimes with multiple women. “Hypocrisy” feels like too weak a word to describe his actions.
Dallas Willard once wrote, “We are a whole being, and our true character pervades everything we do.” In other words, people may try, as did Mr. Cosby, to be one person in public while being someone completely different in private. Eventually, however, everyone gets revealed for who they really are. Dr. Jekyll inevitably gets mown down by Mr. Hyde. Or, as Jesus puts it:
“There is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” (Luke 8:17)
The secret sins of Mr. Cosby eventually caught up to the perfect persona of Dr. Huxtable. And now a legacy of laughter is clouded and a whole string of abused women are shattered.
The Bible testifies that human sexuality has been disordered for a very long time. King David used the power of his throne to commit adultery and murder his lover’s husband. A group of religious leaders tried to stone a woman caught in adultery, all the while speciously ignoring the sins of her male counterpart. From marital unrighteousness to incorrigible self-righteousness, there is plenty of sexual sin to go around.
God calls us to something different and better than sexual licentiousness and laziness. God calls us to a sexual commitment that is ultimately selfless instead of selfish. The apostle Paul writes of marital intimacy:
The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. (1 Corinthians 7:3-4)
In a cultural milieu that can egg people on to chase what they want sexually, Scripture invites husbands and wives to serve each other tenderly. Intimacy is not meant to be taken, but given. It is not meant to be violative, but restorative.
Let’s take what intimacy is meant to be, and let’s make a promise: this is what intimacy will be for me. And this is how I will use intimacy for thee. Your spouse will thank you. And others who are struggling in sexual brokenness just might take note of you.
These are just a few of the more recent names that have turned right-side-up the seamy underbelly of sickening sexual power-plays for the world to see. Charges that these men sexually assaulted people with whom they worked have sparked a social media movement among countless victims of sexual assault, who are now declaring, #MeToo. These men’s alleged sexual crimes have been roundly condemned, both in word and deed. Roger Ailes, who has now passed, was ousted from the powerful cable news network he founded. Harvey Weinstein was likewise booted from his own company. Production on Kevin Spacey’s hit show “House of Cards” has been suspended.
Sexual assault is one of those issues on which all people with any moral center can agree: it should never happen. So, why does it? From a theological perspective, sexual assault can be said to be a result of humanity’s fall into sin, a fact to which the manygruesomestories in the Bible of sexualassault attest. And no inexorable march of human history toward increasing moral enlightenment seems to be able to arrest the problem.
So, what can make a change, or even a dent, in the tragedy of sexual assault?
Our modern sexual ethics have, in many ways, been reduced to the word “consent.” As long as people consent to any kind of sexual activity, any kind of sexual activity is permissible and, yes, even moral. Indeed, in our sexually indulgent culture, it is considered immoral to restrain and contain one’s sexual desires, for sexual desire is considered to be at least a window, if not the window, into a person’s core identity. But, as David French points out in an article for National Review:
The practical result of consent-focused morality is the sexualization of everything. With the line drawn at desire alone, there is no longer any space that’s sex-free. Work meetings or restaurants can be creative locations for steamy liaisons. Not even marriage or existing relationships stand as a firewall against potential hookups …
When everything is sexualized and virtually every woman is subject to the potential “ask,” scandals like those that rocked Hollywood, Fox News, and – yes – the Trump campaign become inevitable. And they’re replicated countless times on a smaller scale in schools and workplaces across the land. Desire is elevated over fidelity and certainly over propriety, so bosses bully, spouses stray, hearts break, and families fracture.
Mr. French is precisely right. Sexual assault is a huge problem. It is a huge problem in and of itself, which is why we must stand with the women – and the men – who are victimized by it and declare, “No more!” But it is also symptomatic of another huge problem – a sexual ethic that has become so attenuated that it amounts to little more than a “yes” or “no” answer to an ask.
Andrew T. Walker, the Director of Policy Studies for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, tweeted last month:
So much cultural & personal hurt due to sexual sin. Maybe the church should see its sexual ethics as a gift of common grace to the world.
Mr. Walker packs a lot of profundity into 138 characters as he invites us to entertain a wholly different, and certainly a more robust, sexual ethic than that of our culture’s as the remedy to our sexual assault problem – a uniquely Christian sexual ethic.
The Christian sexual ethic is wholly different from our culture’s not only because its content is sweeping, as any glance through Leviticus 18 will quickly reveal, but because its very trajectory is countercultural. In a culture that approvingly trends toward the permissive, Christianity vigilantly trends toward the restrictive. This is why Jesus says things like: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). In sexual ethics, Jesus goes far beyond consent. He cuts straight to the heart. Even what happens in one’s interior life can be an opportunity for sexual immorality.
Why would Jesus trend toward the restrictive with regard to sexuality? Is He a prude? Or a prig? Or a Puritan? Hardly. He simply knows that with great power comes great responsibility. And sex does, in fact, carry with it great power. So, Jesus is inviting us to handle with care. To quote David French again:
It virtually goes without saying that the sex drive is incredibly powerful. Sex is also a remarkably intimate act that often has a profound emotional impact. An ethic that indulges that drive while also denying the emotional significance of sex will inevitably wreck lives. The wise person understands that desire – even mutual desire – can be dangerous.
It is time for us to take a step back and recognize this reality. In a culture that lionizes consent when it comes to sexuality, Christians have something much more profound to protect and prosper sexuality – a conviction that sex is best when sex is contained, not so that joy in sex may be decreased, but so that joy in sex may be released.
It’s no secret that we live in a sexually infatuated society. In an article for The Federalist, Shane Morris cites research showing that 92 percent of the 174 songs that made it into the Billboard Top 10 during 2009 included references to sex. What’s more, in another study, researchers found that from the 1960s to the 2000s, songs with sexual subject matter sung by male artists went from 7 percent in the decade known for its “make love, not war” attitude to a whopping 40 percent in the 2000s. In another compelling factoid, Morris mentions that out of Billboard’s top 50 love songs of all time, only six are from the year 2000 or later. Why? Because artists just don’t sing about love like they used to. Instead, they boast about sex.
And yet…
For all our boasting about sex, it turns out that actual sexual intimacy between real human beings is down. In a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers found that “American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s” due primarily to “an increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner.” Even those who are married reported “a decline in sexual frequency among those partners.” Interestingly enough, these same researchers found that, out of all the recent generations, it was the generation born in the 1930s that enjoyed intimacy most often.
As Christians, we know that part of our culture’s quandary over what we say and what we actually do about sex comes because sex has become largely decoupled from its biblical context – that of marriage. Our culture’s vaulted sexual revolution has not led to more or better sex. It’s just led to the enshrinement of sex as an idol. And anything that is idolized inevitably becomes counted on for too much, which, in turn, makes it deliver less than it could if it was kept in its proper place in the first place. Thus, it is no surprise that our near-worship of sex has not led to an increase in sex.
There are some hopeful signs that we, as a society, know, even if only intuitively, that we have taken a wrong turn when it comes to sex. In a post for National Review, Max Bloom notes that for all of the avant-garde attitudes Millennials might have about sex, in their actual intimate lives, they are trending toward the traditional:
Millennials are more than twice as likely to have had no sexual partners in their early 20s than those born in the 1960s. In general, Millennials have about as many sexual partners as Baby Boomers and considerably less than Generation X-ers – those born in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
It turns out that, when it comes to sexual partners and practices, what is old is new again. There is still plenty of room for monogamy and abstinence. Bloom notes that Millennials are trending traditional in other ways, too: “They are less likely to drink, smoke marijuana, or use cocaine than previous generations.” But for all their traditional habits, one non-traditional trend continues: Millennials continue to increasingly drift from traditional religious practices such as worship and prayer.
So, what does all this tell us? First, it tells us that even as our culture drifts from any understanding of or appreciation for Christian orthodoxy, natural law, à la Romans 2:14-15, seems to still hold some sway over our concrete propriety. Second, our trending sexual traditionalism also tells us that our God really does have, even for a society that can be as misguided as ours can be, what the Calvinists call “common grace.” Regardless of whether or not our culture believes in traditional sexual mores, the very fact that so many of us live by a more traditional code of ethics that protects us from the pain, fear, and heartbreak that sexual egalitarianism inevitably brings is a testament to God’s broad, gracious protection of society. To those who have walked down the road of sexual anarchy and have had their hearts and bodies broken in the process, Christians must be prepared to offer love, understanding, guidance, and grace.
Hopefully, the materializing rupture between what we as a culture believe and what we as a culture do when it comes to sex will lead us to try to reconcile our curious pockets of orthopraxy with a much-needed orthodoxy. Our culture will be better for it. And who knows? We might just be able to stop boasting about sex in songs because we’ll actually be enjoying more love in life.
It seems as though declining marriage rates are not just changing our society sociologically, but are stressing the wedding capital of the world, Las Vegas, economically. In an article for Bloomberg, Jeanna Smialek explains how:
Roland August has officiated at thousands of weddings in Las Vegas, the self-proclaimed capital of “I do.”
But these days August – who often presides dressed as Elvis Presley – has a rare vantage point from which to observe the nation’s long shift toward “I don’t.” …
The wedding chapels where August works have seen business dwindle, he said, and Vegas is pushing to reverse the decline in an industry that generates as much as $3 billion in economic activity annually. In 2015 the surrounding county introduced a $14 surcharge on marriage licenses to pay for marketing, and local business leaders helped start a Wedding Chamber of Commerce last year.
A drop in weddings, it seems, amounts to a drop in revenue for a city that is known as being flush with cash. Of course, this is all part of a broader nationwide trend. The Pew Research Center reports that, whereas 72% of adults 18 years of age or older were married in 1960, now, only 50% are. But, if the graph published by Bloomberg is any indication, the nationwide decline in marriage has hit Nevada especially hard.
In one way, none of this is particularly surprising. For all the fun and levity, which are not bad things in and of themselves, that I’m sure Mr. August brings to the weddings he performs, vows taken without things like spiritual guidance from a pastor or other religious mentor, serious prior consideration of all the things marriage entails, a commitment to make marriage alone the sacred space for sex, and, often, even a baseline of sobriety do little more than to cheapen and make a mockery out of the whole institution. And when something becomes cheap, it inevitably becomes expendable. After all, if Britney Spears can drunkenly marry her childhood friend in Las Vegas and then have their marriage annulled 55 hours later, one has to wonder: why bother with marriage in the first place?
They key to reversing the decline in marriage and the denigration of marriage is not to try to repristinate the marriage-saturated days of 1960, hoping that, somehow, marriage rates will soar again if we just yell enough at the cultural forces that have damaged the institution. No, the key to a deeper appreciation of and desire for marriage is to consider what marriage is really meant to reflect. So here are three things that we can say, as Christians, marriage reflects.
Marriage reflects community in Christ.
One of the great mysteries of Christian teaching is that of the Trinity – that God is one, yet, at the same time, He is also three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus, God is in community, in some sense, with Himself. For centuries, professional theologians and Sunday School teachers alike have tried to explain this mystery in a way that is comprehensible. My Sunday School teacher, for instance, mused that the Trinity is like an apple. There is the peel, the flesh, and the core. These are three parts, and yet they are all part of one apple. The problem with this illustration, however, is that God is indivisible. He cannot be divided like an apple. He is not made up of three parts, but actually is three persons.
Thankfully, the Bible presents us with its own object lesson to help us understand the Trinity. What is this object lesson? Marriage. When marriage is given by God, He explains that it is meant to be when “a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). In marriage, there are two persons, and yet they are one flesh, even as in God, there are three persons, yet He is one God. Moreover, throughout this life, a husband and wife ought to be indivisible, as is God. This is why Jesus says divorce is so damaging – not only because it hurts the people involved, but because it tarnishes the very reflection of God! Thus, community in marriage, even if it is broken by sin, is meant to reflect the perfect community of the Trinity.
Marriage reflects the sacrifice of Christ.
As anyone who has been married for any amount of time will tell you, marriage requires sacrifice. It requires laying down your own wants, needs, and desires for the sake of another. The apostle Paul eloquently explains the sacrificial nature of marriage when he writes:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word,and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. (Ephesians 5:25-27)
Paul notes that the sacrifice a husband makes for his wife ought to reflect the sacrifice that Christ made for His church, even if that sacrifice includes laying down his very life, as it did for Christ. Thus, at the same time marriage gives a community that reflects the Trinity, it also eats away at our proclivity toward selfishness. Marriage is fundamentally centered not on yourself, but on your spouse, even as God is fundamentally centered on us and on our salvation.
Marriage reflects eternity with Christ.
The best marriage is not the one you celebrate once a year on your anniversary. The best marriage is the one that is still to come:
I heard what sounded like the roar of a great multitude in heaven shouting: “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give Him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready.” (Revelation 19:1, 6-7)
When the apostle John gets a window into eternity, he sees that every wedding on earth between a husband and wife is ultimately meant to reflect a perfect wedding in heaven between Christ and His people. Marriage in this age, then, however wonderful it can be, is not an end in and of itself. It is a sign pointing to something even greater. This is why Jesus, when He is questioned by the religious leaders about marriage in eternity, says, “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30). Marriage between people till death do them part is meant to point to perfect communion with God where death no longer reigns. Marriage, then, at the same time it fills a longing, should also create a longing. It should create a longing for a deeper community that not even your spouse can meet. It should create a longing for a deeper community that only Christ can fill in His wedding feast.
This is what marriage is meant to reflect. It cannot be reduced, then, to a Vegas jag, or, for that matter, a well-planned out and exorbitantly expensive ceremony and reception. These things are not necessarily bad on their own terms, but if they become the things of marriage, they reduce marriage to something that is entertaining, cheap, and contrived. But marriage cannot stand if it is this. Marriage must stand as a gift from God that gives you community, costs you your very self, and points you to the One who gave Himself for you so that, on the Last Day, He can walk you down His eternal aisle.
During my exploratory college years, I was often confused about my sexuality. I knew I had loved women, but found myself, drunkenly, in the arms of various men. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. Was I in denial of being gay? Was I simply an open-minded straight guy? Or was I just a drunk and horny hot mess?
These questions kept me up at night.
This has all the trappings of a hackneyed B-list movie about a frat guy caught in an existential crisis fueled by alcohol and lust. But Mr. Zane isn’t playing on silly stereotypes. He’s serious. This becomes all too clear as he continues:
My senior year of college, I entertained the idea that I might be bisexual, but I didn’t embrace the label until a year after graduating. That’s when I learned that I didn’t have to like men and women equally to be bisexual. I learned that sexuality was a spectrum, and my point on the spectrum wasn’t fixed…
In my queer theory class in college, I also learned that gender, too, is on a spectrum. Some of us don’t view ourselves as strictly male or female. We can be both, neither, or somewhere in between, a.k.a. bigender, agender or genderqueer.
This led me to ask the question: Since sexuality and gender aren’t understood as binary anymore, does monogamy have to be?
The morphological ludicrousness of the claim that monogamy can be on a continuum aside – “mono,” after all, does mean “one” and “gamos” refers to marriage, which means that any romantic relationship that involves more than one person committing themselves to one other person is, by definition, no longer monogamy – this claim also brings with it a whole host of relational, emotional, and theological problems.
Relationally and emotionally, polyamorous relationships are recipes for ruin. Narratively, the Bible makes this clear enough in its description of the disastrous polygamous relationships of patriarchs like Jacob and Solomon. Theologically, however, the problem goes deeper than just ill-fated relationships.
Timothy Keller makes the point that Christianity places a high value on self-sacrifice. Indeed, the heart of the Christian faith is found in a man who sacrificed Himself on a cross and invites us to deny ourselves by taking up our own crosses and following Him (cf. Matthew 16:24). Our culture sees things differently. Rather than placing a premium on self-sacrifice, our culture tends to value and even idolize self-assertion. We are obsessed with asserting who we believe ourselves to be and demanding that those around us accept and celebrate who we say we are.
The problem with self-assertion is that it is often little more than a flimsy mask for self-indulgence and self-centeredness. This is why polyamorous relationships are so dangerous. When two people are more concerned with their own sexual desires than with committing themselves and giving themselves sexually to their partner, they wind up using each other instead of loving each other. In this way, self-assertion is the very antithesis of love. The words of the apostle Paul come to mind here: “Love is not self-seeking” (1 Corinthians 13:5). You can’t love someone well and seek first yourself.
I understand that two people may freely agree to live in a polyamorous relationship. But is this because they are truly committed to each other, or is this because they are secretly committed to themselves? I also understand that monogamy can be difficult. I have counseled enough couples rocked by affairs to know how easily and how often marriage vows can be broken. But I have also seen how deeply an affair hurts the cheated upon and the children in a family. The person having the affair may find some measure of self-indulgent satisfaction, but only while exacting out of others a steep and terrible price of brokenness and pain.
Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves: what kind of people should we be? People who indulge our fetishes, chase our desires, and flex our selfishness, even as we try to disguise our shamefully selfish selves under a facile moral-esque construct of self-assertion? Or should we be people who think about others before we think about ourselves, even if that means denying our desires and even if those desires include our sexuality?
Christianity’s answer is clear. To repeat Jesus’ call to us all: “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24).
“Deny themselves.”
Deny the money you could spend on yourself to give it to someone else.
Deny the time you could keep for yourself to be present with someone else.
And yes, deny the sexual desires you feel in yourself to be devoted to someone else.
Why? Because when you deny the desire to assert yourself for the sake of someone else, that’s when you find the things in life that matter most. Indeed, that’s when you find yourself.
“Whoever loses their life for Me will find it” (Matthew 16:25).
That’s self-sacrifice. And that’s a life well-lived.
