"Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum.
"'I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I'm that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away." And that's how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,' Smart said. 'Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.'
"Smart says children should be educated that "you will always have value and nothing can change that."
For a decade or so, I have been anxious that the innovations in the Episcopal Church with respect to GLBT inclusion have been impoverishing what and how we teach about sex everyone, gay or straight. At the same time, I found both Roman Catholic and evangelical teaching on sex made me uncomfortable.
Just now, I realized why. I have a visceral objection to any connection between sex and a commercial transaction. And a discourse that makes virginity or sexual interactions of any kind into either a gift (a common Roman Catholic view) or a consumer product (like gum) troubles me.
Sex is certainly not something to be held in dishonor. Medieval preachers often understood marriage to be a monastic order, but a very special one, ordained by God Himself. Sex and its direct connection to parenthood is a way we can experience in the body the way God relates within Himself and with us. The mystery may be imperfectly participated in by defect of body or soul, and God through Christ and the leading of the Church by the Holy Spirit has opened up to us other ways to experience the mystery, but "it was not that way from the beginning." Marriage's place is primal but not necessarily one of primacy.
For most of the Church's history, sex has been a unique part of the charism of marriage. And if Episcopalians are going to be a witness for the wondrous estates of the gays and lesbians in the Body of Christ, we need to be clear about this. To adopt a medieval view, fornication is bad in two ways: (1) it risks children not being raised by their natural parents, which is the ideal; and (2) it divorces something temporal from the spiritual context in which it is meant to be experienced. Point (2) is still very much valid, no matter how we take point (1).
When I blanche at relations between sex and commerce, I see the explicit divorce of the temporal thing (something done in the body) from its spiritual component (God and the virtues) so clearly, because the commercial exchange makes me see that the entire interaction is temporal. The difference is one of degree, not form.
Now, it's also possible for sex to have a bad spiritual component, which should be discussed, but I think differs from "simple" fornication. The medieval theologians, whatever their flaws, recognized fornication as a species of lust. And as early as Augustine, it was recognized that manipulation, disrespect for liberty and autonomy, and exploitative self-regard was a species of lust: libido dominandi (the lust for mastery).
Which is all to say that any teaching on fornication is pretty ironic if it's comparing fornicators to used chewing gum, a self-gift that is given or exchanged, or any temporality. Sex is a state into which we enter, not an exchange relation. And thus, if we are uncomfortable with practices that seem like the buying and selling of husbands and wives, we should reflect whether it is simony: what Simon Magus did when he tried to buy the Holy Spirit from the Apostles with silver.
The only way I have been able to see sex as a temporality is to compare it to a wedding ring. It comes to you as a gift. You keep it safe. It merely symbolizes your relationship, so as long as the relationship exists, no one would fault you for having it replaced if it were lost. And you would only sell it as an act of desperation. It's not the best analogy.
And when the groom used to give the bride a ring (men didn't wear wedding rings in the 17th century?), the 1662 Book of Common Prayer has him say, "WITH this Ring I thee wed, with my Body I thee worship, and with all my worldly Goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
The ring is thus a symbol of sexual intimacy with both temporal and spiritual consequences ("my Body I thee worship") and of endowment with temporalities ("all my worldly Goods I thee endow"). The only way marriage avoids participating in the vices that underlie fornication and simony is the total mutual commitment of persons and property in the company of God. I think the totality of the implied economic exchange is one way married people can participate in the evangelical counsel of poverty.
However, the spiritual and temporal components of one's sexuality cannot be lost. For too long, humans in western civilization turned virginity into an asset. This thinking still pollutes most Christian teaching about sex. So let's think about it a different way.
Jesus said, "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man" (Matthew 15:11) and to explain this (the Pharisees saw the stern critique immediately) He also said, "Do not you yet understand, that whatever enters in at the mouth goes into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashed hands defiles not a man" (Matthew 15:17-20).
I don't think Jesus is just talking about food. I think he is talking about everything we do in the body. Defilement for his audience meant sexual impurity as much as it did eating non-kosher food. And he emphasizes this, not by talking about the vices of our heart, but by saying that what his audience considered gross violations of the Law came from the heart.
So in the classic tale of evangelical or Roman Catholic advice books, when some poor sweet innocent young Christian has slept with a man who breaks off the relationship and she feels like she's lost something, the Gospel teaching is that no transaction has taken place. What she (or he) feels is the conviction that her heart has been revealed: that something in herself has gone astray.
Repeated, unexamined behavior in this way can change us physically and spiritually. Unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease is a risk, especially when you get in a situation where you are having sex but not talking about it outside of having sex. Sex can be addictive, which can lead us astray to get our fix. And worse yet, in cases of rape and sexual abuse like that of Elizabeth Smart, we are not culpable for those changes, but they may happen anyway.
The Good News is that our failures in sex can be remedied like our failures in every area of life, because they proceed from the same set of weaknesses. Victims of abuse need to be pointed to their intrinsic worth and God's love for them by the deepest love those who love them can muster.
The rest of us need to use our failures as an opportunity to reflect and turn once more to God. But let's try to lay off analogies in which sex uses us up and spits us out, shall we?
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