America Unzipped by Brian Alexander

chastisement with a yardstick.
    The fact is, some early Christian fathers were antisex. The very reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians Joe uses to introduce the sex portion of his seminar begins, “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” That’s a pretty simple declaration. Paul understands that we all have baser natures, however, and so we can’t all be celibate, like he is. So he grants the value of sex grudgingly. Marital sex is permitted as castor oil, bitter medicine we can take to avoid the much greater sin of fornication.
    â€œI speak this by permission and not of commandment,” Paul writes. “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows. It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.”
    According to Paul, “He that standeth steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power of his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well. So then he that giveth her in marriage doeth well: but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better.”
    The early church fathers—Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine—looked at the same scripture Joe is using and preached virginity, the better to hasten the end of the world and call forth the Second Coming. They were suspicious of the erotic power of women, and the role of lust even in marriage, the very thing Joe is celebrating. I’m on Joe’s side when it comes to the value of lust and good sex, believe me. But as I sit and listen, I don’t see how he can base this teaching on the Bible, and honestly, though it pains me to suggest it, I think Joe might be tying himself up in a knot of logic. I’m pretty sure Paul would not have been a fan of going down on your wife, no matter what the Song of Solomon says.
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    S o I wonder if even fundamentalist Christians are having to accommodate, and if all the contradictions in the Bible could be one reason evangelicals long preferred to ignore the topic. Why would they even have to mention it? Every believer knew what was sinful and what was not, and pretty much everything was sinful unless official doctrine explicitly approved it. Actually it was assumed to be sinful because church leaders didn’t address it. Sin was simply the default position. Masturbation wasn’t just sinful, it was bad for you, a sign of perversion, a weak mind, a drain on manly reserves. Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, famously told his youthful acolytes in the first 1908 manual that a masturbating boy “quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind and often ends in a lunatic asylum.”
    All that changed around 1970. A few Christian leaders realized that pop culture had changed the dialogue. TV increasingly beamed hints of sex into the homes of America.
Playboy
was mainstream. Naked hippies mucked around at Woodstock. The church was no longer a refuge. Believers could see for themselves what the unbelievers were up to. Somebody had to say something.
    In 1969 Charlie Shedd, a Presbyterian minister, wrote
The Stork Is Dead,
followed by two other books,
Letters to Philip
and
Letters to Karen.
They contained mostly unobjectionable advice to teenagers. But Shedd also called masturbation “a gift from God” and told the kids that even though sex before marriage was wrong, if you were going to do it, for crying out loud use a rubber.
    Shedd created a furor. He was harshly criticized for legitimizing masturbation and premarital sex.
    Then, in 1975, psychologist Clifford Penner was asked to give a lecture on “sexual adjustment in marriage” at his alma mater, the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. The wives of