Will We Ever Get Naked?

A few days ago, I met with a group of therapists and church leaders to discuss a thorny issue: sexual dysfunction and addiction in church leadership and congregational life.

There has probably not been an era (or a culture) since Canaanite times in which such a wide spectrum of sexual experience is so readily available to so many. Ancient cultures were often promiscuous. However, sexual energy in them was channeled through such agencies as temple prostitution. Incest and rape were often unreported and thus unrecognized by society.

The Old Testament is clear that prostitution existed among the Jewish people. In fact, many of the heroes of faith visited prostitutes. If the women were not temple workers, in which case the sexual experience would have religious significance; it appears that Jewish culture viewed these indiscretions as misdemeanors.

My point here is this: during their brief and brutal lives, ancient peoples found outlets for sexual expression within the structures provided and approved by their culture.

In the New Testament, believers also lived in a world in which sexual experience was readily available for most people. The city of Corinth, for example, was famous for its promiscuity. However, Christ and the apostles taught clearly that sexual purity was foundational to holy living. Believers were invited into a struggle, in which learning how to govern sexual life was vitally important.

Christians were not transformed into angels, nor could they revert to prepubescent life. Somehow, they had to learn to be mature sexual adults who both acknowledged sexual desire and governed it.

They did this in cities like Corinth. In that respect then, there is some parallel between our Christian experience in a sexualized culture and that of the first century believers. However, there is a big difference as well.

Believers in ancient times had to cross real hurtles in order to participate in the kinds of sexual experiences offered by their cultures. They could rarely be anonymous -- or even discrete -- in the villages where they had lived their entire lives. Sexual indiscretions were not private. They could not be. Crossing a sexual line meant the loss of Christian community and open shame.
As Christianity replaced paganism, Europe became increasingly guarded about sexuality. The display of nudity and sexuality, so prominent in pagan art and writing, became forbidden and even criminalized. This was the way things were from late antiquity to modern times.

To a great extent, this was true even for our grandparents.

If granddad wanted to see nudity or have sex with someone other than his wife, he had to go far away or to a part of the city where no one knew him. If he wanted pornographic material, he had to buy it from people and in places that society judged as criminal. Good people didn’t visit such people or go to such places. We can assume that granddad sometimes thought about what a prostitute would be like. If he were a Christian however, he would quickly dismiss the thought and pray for forgiveness. The price was too high. He just didn’t go there.

With all due respect to granddad, he didn’t have access to a computer. He didn’t see billboards, magazines, and television advertisements promoting sexually explicit messages. Granddad had his own private sexual struggles, surely. But they nearly always remained there: in the privacy of his own heart.

Privacy and anonymity is what makes our experience with sexuality so different from any other age and culture.

Would granddad always refused to see a naked body had he been able to do so in private and without being known? Was his degree of holiness that much higher than ours?

I really doubt it!

The average age that an American child first views pornography is eleven.

The fastest growing porn market in America is young adult women.

Women, as it turns out, are as susceptible to private and anonymous sexual temptation as men. Removing the fear of pregnancy and of being socially ostracized has revealed that they too are also fallen creatures!

We are not acknowledging these things.

Believers are suffering from the church’s silence but church leaders hardly know what to do.
Our congregations are full of gender and sexual-preference confusion – in the pews and in the pulpits.

Liberal churches deal with these issues by rewriting the Bible.

Conservative churches deal with them by not dealing with them. Or, by getting angry at the people who struggle.

The clergy and other church leaders are as likely to act out (or to cover up) their sexual issues as anyone else. The real problem is the silence, denial and avoidance surrounding our people’s sexual pain and misconduct. We are passing through an epidemic that few people seem willing to address. Our churches tend to pour their passion into church business, workaholism and concerns about national and local political matters. They go on crusades against societal ills. They get involved all sorts of things that seem noble and grand. In the meantime, the levels of sexual pain in our congregations, staff and clergy continue to rise.

A large percentage of the people we see on any given Sunday morning are dealing with some sort of sexual struggle. They want to serve God and be faithful to Him. But they don’t know what to do with their temptations, hunger for intimacy, sexual dysfunction in their marriage, addiction, or sexual emptiness that eats away at their thoughts and emotions.

The people who lead us are not different in this regard than the ones in the pews. Many church leaders are also lonely, isolated, confused about their role in this emerging culture, sad about what may be missing in t heir private lives, trying not to fall into the pit that seem to surround them every time they leave the sanctuary.

One wonders if we will ever have the courage to care for one another by addressing one of our greatest sources of pain: the struggle between the way we ought to be and the way we actually are.

Well, La, Ti, Da! Or, On The Importance of Culture

When I was a child in West Virginia, if someone used a highfalutin’ word, someone else would inevitably respond, “well, la, ti da!”

It was an insult, and often a devastating one. Roughly translated, it meant, “Something is seriously wrong with you for using that word. A refined vocabulary puts the rest of us down and makes us feel bad. Lower the level of your conversation if you want us to like you.”

Sometimes it was deserved. There are those who deliberately use obscure words to put others down through feelings of inadequacy.

However, “la, ti da,” can also be used to resist refinement.

The establishment or continuation of culture can be undermined by such things.

I think that the ‘la, ti, da response’ is a great and present danger to the future of Western Civilization, which is the accumulated culture of six thousand years.

My definition of “culture” is “nature colonized by intelligence.”

The most basic form of culture, I submit, is agriculture: the purposeful management of soil and plants to maximize food production.

Even in their natural state, soil and plant life provide food. However, in that state, food must be sought and gathered from large tracks of ground. This requires most of the waking hours of anyone who wants to eat.

Agriculture makes it possible for a few people to feed many people. That, in turn, allows the many people to build material things and to create the kinds of immaterial things that make human life meaningful and joyful.

Agriculture moves human life beyond mere survival. It allows people to congregate in large numbers, where they can create cities. The cities can then form networks that can become civilizations.

This is what culture in all its aspects does for human life: it keeps us moving from mere survival and toward meaning and enrichment. It turns isolated brutes into cooperative citizens.

For example, education cultivates natural human intelligence. When we educate a child, we are maturing his or her raw intelligence. It moves from a preoccupation with mere survival into a focus upon artistic, spiritual, economic, and social concerns.

This is the way all kinds of culture work.

Culture develops individuals.

In turn, cultured individuals develop culture.

Therefore, we may say, culture tends to create a self-perpetuating cycle of development.
This cycle will continue unless and until individuals within a particular culture begin to resist it and to prefer a state of raw nature. It is at this time that culture begins to disappear.

This occurs when a substantial percentage of a people within a given culture adopt a “know-nothing” attitude. They begin to take pride in being unlettered, uneducated, or uncultured.
Religious people may express this attitude by disdaining their own scholars who study their own scriptures. They may begin to view ignorance as a form of piety.

Politically minded people do this when they seek their information only from those sources in agreement with their own political ideology.

These choices disrupt the cycle of cultural development. Culture begins to unravel. Things begin to head toward the state of raw nature: barbarism.

This is a serious trend. Unless reversed, it suggests the approaching fall of a culture because civilization is too frail to survive the state of barbarism.

A man or woman in a state of nature cannot do arithmetic.

For that matter, a man or woman in a state of nature cannot decide when and where to empty his or bladder. When the urge strikes, it must be obeyed. That is “what is natural.” One must belch when he wants or shout when he pleases.

Both arithmetic and toilet training are fruits of culture. They are behaviors we deliberately produce through the willful colonization of our natural human drives. They develop when we invite the collective intelligence of human society to influence and challenge our natural ideas and mental states.

Learning to navigate within and to make meaningful contributions to human society never comes naturally. It requires deliberate training. Those who ignore this cultural training, resist it, or disdain it, remain locked in the lower levels of intelligence and skill available to those who prefer states of nature. There are many ways we can do this.

One of the most disturbing trends of our times is the acceptance (and even celebration of) states of barbarism. The uncouth, the uncivil, the rude and the rash, are everywhere celebrated for their courage and forthrightness. Meanwhile, the measured and the cautious, the moderate and the considerate, the polite and the gracious are often taken as cowards and compromisers; unworthy of respect.

I have lived in a state of nature with Stone Age people. I have learned from them that civilization is fragile, that culture is precious. I know how raging fools, spilling out venom and vitriol, can stir up a mob that will develop the courage to kill. A blood lust can develop in the soul of a people that propels those people into states of insanity and mass hysteria. This can occur even to ordinarily gracious and generous people, if they adopt a know-nothing philosophy of life.

It happened once in Europe. A highly educated population began to tolerate the shouts of angry, hurling insults against Jews. The mob soon arose and carried Jews to ovens, where they baked and turned into smoke as their countrymen cheered.

It happened once here. A populist president drove an entire race of people across the continent as old people and babies died by the thousands. The path those people marched is a mere five miles from our church. Our culture –through our highest court -- said “don’t do it.” But the mob said “go ahead” and the deed was done. Our nation sinned against God and against an entire race of people. We then covered up the deed in the history books and our political speeches.

Art and Science, Athletics and Spirituality, Agriculture and Medicine; all require stability, civility, moderation, manners, discussions that honor difference and definitions of terms. Such things do not arise from states of nature. They are the deliberate fruit of intentional cultivation.

Their continued existence is dependent upon our steadfast resistance of any romanticizing or celebration of states of barbarism.

La, ti, da is not an innocent jingle. It is an insidious call to return to the jungle.