Reconstructing Christian Ethics 05: Virtuous Systems

I've spent some time discussing what a virtuous person is, and what virtues a Christian strives to have. But what about systems? What about rules and laws and processes and states? Christ is the redeemer and judge of the world, not just the humans in it. So what does a virtuous system look like?

First, a system cannot be formed to be like Christ in the same way that a person can. A person makes choices, and the choices we make become easier every time, building and changing us from the inside. A system doesn't learn and grow in response to choices, so that process can't directly apply.

Like individual Christians, a Christian system would have to be identified based on its impact; by its fruit you shall know it. That leads to two questions.

First, impact on who? The people making the system? Surely not. This would imply that a law made by one person with good intent can be a Christian system, even if it does immense harm to millions of people. A system with bad fruit is a bad system. Presumably, the fruit of the system is its impact on the people affected by it.

Second, what sorts of fruit do we want? For example, if we could implement a policy that feeds all the hungry, that would be good (all other things being equal), but would it be necessarily a Christian system?

I say that would no more be a Christian system than a person feeding the poor is necessarily a Christian person. Christ had all sorts of things to say about people who looked good on the outside, but were hollow tombs inside. Just as individual Christian ethics are not consequentialist or rule-based, neither are Christian systemic ethics.

Instead, a Christian system would help individual people become more like Christ. By that reasoning, any Christian system is, almost by definition, part of the Church! But what does that look like?

People build virtues through their choices and actions. So a Christian system would train people to make the virtuous choice, even when it's hard. That means a Christian system is basically pastoring, and is almost by definition part of the Church.

Would a Christian system actually make it hard to do the right thing? No, there's no virtue in purposefully creating stumbling blocks. But it might identify natural cases where it's hard to do the right thing, and put the right people in positions to make those decisions.

So a Christian system would always be presenting people with moral choices, would determine which choices are harder than others, and would help people grow in the Christian virtues by putting appropriate people in places to make those various choices.

Side Issue 04.4: Safer Products

Another health-related issue is reducing your exposure to potential toxins.

If you're anything like me, you read that sentence and said "Toxins!? He's peddling new-age woo!" and your finger automatically tried to close the tab. I am absolutely not doing that. I'm talking about legit toxins, like arsenic, or chemicals that are known to disrupt endocrine function. You do not want this stuff in your body. So if you have the opportunity to reduce its presence in your environment, without much disruption to your life, you should seriously consider it.

Enter the Environmental Working Group, EWG. EWG has guides for nearly any product in your house, with a detailed analysis of the ingredients and their potential impacts on human biology.

Now, EWG's website is a little opaque. I usually just google something like EWG dishwasher detergent and get to the site that way. Be aware that brand loyalty doesn't help. A single brand might have a super-safe product right next to a not-so-safe product, even within different scents of the same product. You should drill down to the specific product and variety, every single time.

Now, EWG may grade based on things you don't care about. Maybe you don't mind asthma triggers, but are super-concerned about endocrine disruptors. Perfectly fair! EWG scores aren't the end-all-be-all, and I'm not saying a product that EWG grades with a D will kill you; there are some jobs only chlorine bleach will do. But still, it's good to know the options out there.

The other problem is that it's sometimes not trivial to actually obtain the products you find on EWG. I've made a list of what we buy regularly off Amazon, to save you some legwork.

• Hair products
• Shampoo
• Clarifying shampoo
• Conditioner
  
• Kids conditioner
• This stuff is amazing for tangly hair!
  
• Kids detangler
  
• Bar soaps
• EWG certified bar soaps are particularly hard to come by on Amazon, and they keep changing. There's one right now, but you may be better off going to your local Whole Foods or farmer's market and just buying something made by a local farmer. No guarantees that way, of course.
  
• Hand soaps
• We've started using Dr. Bronner's, in foaming dispensers. It works great, smells amazing, has a very low EWG score, and the foaming dispenser keeps small children from getting 10x too much soap.
  
• Dish soaps
• Better Life dish soap gets a B, while almost every Dawn product gets a D or F.
  
• Dishwasher detergent
• One particular variety of Seventh Generation dishwasher pods is easily available, gets an A for its ingredient content, and it being in a pod means you don't get exposed to it during use. Again, don't assume other Seventh Generation products also get good scores; some don't.
  
• Laundry detergent
• Biokleen Free and Clear works great, and gets a B from EWG. Compare to All Free and Clear, which gets a D.
  
• Toothpaste
• David's Natural is pretty expensive, but it's there. Also keep in mind that it's fluoride-free, so if you're particularly concerned about cavities, for you or for your children, maybe this is an area where you should keep using a fluoride product.
  
• Lip gloss
• Dr. Bronner's Naked gets a good score. So does Burt's Bees, but it's made with canola oil, so I'm avoiding it for that reason. This is another area where finding a local farmer's market may be more cost-effective.
  
• Sunscreen
• Metal-based sunscreens are much safer than chemical-based ones. Badger was the best one I could find on Amazon.
  
• Food Storage
• Try replacing your plastic food storage with glass or silicone or beeswax wraps
• Household cleaning
• Stop using bleach wipes! They don't really work that well, and they expose you to terrible chemicals. E-cloth works just as well, if not better.
  

Dr. Annie has tons of other great data-oriented experiments on other cleaning processes and products.

Another issue to pay attention to is makeup. Imagine how much of lipstick gets into the digestive tract and blood stream of the person wearing it. It sits on your mucus membranes for hours, right next to your mouth. You have to be consuming some of it, right? Unfortunately, I don't have any detailed recommendations here, but EWG has quite a database.

Side-Issue 04.3: Reconstructing Your Diet

Now I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent. I was planning to take up some ascetic practices to develop self-control along a few different axes, hoping to have some actual results before these posts went live. But due to health reasons, I've had self-control thrust upon me in the form of a thirteen-week elimination diet. So this isn't about my faith reconstruction, but since we're talking about food and self-denial, it seems like a good time to interject what I'm learning in that realm.

The standard American diet is awful. American health outcomes are terrible, and deteriorating rapidly. Christians aren't doing any better in this domain than anyone else. Perhaps we can combine a renewed commitment to fasting and self-denial with a renewed commitment to healthy eating. Build self-control by denying yourself delicious poisons! What's not to love?

But what is healthy eating, anyway? Sadly, there's not much hard science behind any general theory of human nutrition. We've been told for decades that we should all avoid eating fats, especially saturated fats, and probably also salt. We grew up with the food pyramid, telling us we should eat an entire loaf of bread every day. This is, of course, horrible advice.

It's truly embarrassing that we have no real idea of how to feed humans in a healthy fashion. Of all the things that one could prioritize figuring out, shouldn't that be at the top of the list? But if science isn't there, what we're left with is an unending stream of pop culture books and diet fads, with relatively little theory or hard data behind them beyond "Do this, it's natural!" There's Atkins, and paleo, and keto, and intermittent fasting variants, all of which seem to have some impact, but none of which agree with each other!

Enter Deep Nutrition. Hardcore biochemistry almost all the way through. (You may have to slog through the early chapters that spend way too much time talking about beauty. Trust me, the back half of the book is worth it.) My layman's summary is this:

• Some oils high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) tend to be extremely chemically reactive, decaying easily into free radicals that basically rip apart the chemical mechanisms of your body. This is especially true when heated for an extended period.
  
• What fats are high in PUFAs? Vegetable, corn, and canola oils, and a bunch of others, including margarine. Basically, anything that's completely artificial. You know, the healthy things we were all told to eat to avoid those animal fats! Remember how they banned transfats a couple decades ago? A bottle of canola oil is so reactive that by the time it reaches your shelf it's already 5% transfat. Imagine what happens when you put it in a deep fryer for a week at McDonald's!
• This doesn't even consider the chemical contaminants in these "healthy" oils, which are expressed by some really unpleasant means and aren't necessarily cleaned up all that well.
  
• Now check your convenience foods, cereals, breads, snacks. Almost all of them are made with vegetable oils! Once you start looking, you find that this poison is in almost everything we eat. There are exceptions, but you have to look pretty hard.
  
• We eat way too much omega-6 fatty acids, and not enough omega-3. This is largely related to our choices of fats, as well as our meat-raising practices.
• Good fixes include salmon and other seafood, spinach, flax seed, and chia seed. Grass-fed or pasture-raised meats or eggs may also be an improvement over conventional.
  
• Many other diets in the world do not have the bad health outcomes the American diet has. What are the healthy people eating that Americans are not?
• Meat cooked on the bone
• Organ meat
• Fermented and sprouted foods
• Raw foods

(Amusingly, perusing American fast food, the most likely place to get meat cooked on the bone or organ meat is KFC! If we could just talk them into using something besides vegetable oil to fry in, they might be the healthiest place around.)

Another widespread issue in the US is endocrine dysfunction. Diabetes is a form of this, and it's everywhere. Thyroid conditions are often undiagnosed, and may contribute to the increase in autism. Thyroid conditions can cause anxiety, body aches, low energy, depression, brain fog, PMS, and all sorts of other problems. I recommend reading more about this, or at least taking this quiz.

There's a reasonable argument that all these endocrine dysfunctions may be tied to autoimmune reactions to foods we eat. I understand that the hard scientific evidence is lacking, but that's okay. If you have these symptoms, first, go to a doctor to have your thyroid levels checked. Then, try an experiment: drop gluten for a couple weeks and just see if you feel better. If you do, great! If not, no harm done. If that doesn't help you, other foods that are generally recommended to drop experimentally include dairy, sugar, soy, alcohol, and caffeine. Caffeine in particular can be difficult, because many of us feel so bad we're dependent on the caffeine to function. So be gradual about it all and see if there are improvements.

And don't tell yourself any of this is a permanent lifestyle change. Consider it a temporary challenge. Do it for a day, then stop. Do it for two days, then stop. Have a final target of a few weeks. If the eliminated food is going to make you feel better, it's probably going to do it by then. If there aren't any improvements, and it's still a burden, give yourself permission to revert, at least partially.

So what can I actually eat that's free of these bad fats, also free of gluten, and aren't just giant piles of omega-6 acids? Here's a partial list of categories or specific products:

Snacks:

• Peanuts
• Pumpkin seeds
• Walnuts
  
• Cheese or cheese crisps
  
• Olives
• Bubbies fermented pickles
  
• Xochitl corn chips
  
• Boulder Canyon potato chips in olive or avocado oil 
• Sour cream makes an excellent dip 
• Siete grain-free chips
  
• Popcorn, homemade with peanut oil and real butter
• Asturi bruschettini
  

Drinks:

• Coffee with real cream, not fake creamer
• Whole milk, preferably organic grass-fed
  
• Matcha is an amazing coffee replacement if you're trying to cut down on caffeine
• Kombucha is excellent; bubbly, sweet, tart, probiotic
• If you don't like one version, try another, there are hundreds to pick from 
• Water, preferably spring water or reverse-osmosis filtered, with lemon
  
• Fluoride is a thyroid suppressant!
  

Breakfasts:

• Eggs with bacon or sausage
  
• Oatmeal
• Add chia, flax, coconut, peanut butter, preferably with sprouted oats
• Yogurt
• For single servings, Siggi's triple cream yogurt is amazing, texture like sour cream
• Any large tub of full-fat unflavored yogurt is a good choice too; add chia, flax, coconut, pomegranate, almonds, consider honey or jam to sweeten if needed
• Cereal is properly a dessert, but if you must eat it for breakfast...
  
• Regular Cheerios
• Qi'a is pretty fantastically healthy for a cereal
• If you don't care about gluten, most varieties of Special K lack dangerous oils and are quite tasty
  

Meals:

• It takes a lot of prep, but roasting a whole chicken, then throwing the bones in the slow cooker to make broth, is a great way to plan ahead. With that broth and chicken on hand you can throw together an amazing soup in under five minutes with whatever vegetables you've got in the fridge. And the best part: you get to eat fresh crispy chicken skin right out of the oven.
• Salmon is not cheap, but it's a great thing to include in your diet if you can.
• Sprouts are an excellent addition to salads, sandwiches, or anything else you can throw them on.
• California Pizza Kitchen frozen gluten-free Sicilian pizza is the best GF oil-free convenience pizza commonly available.
• Life Cuisine's frozen pizza-style cauliflower bowls are better than they have any right to be. Seriously.
• You can replace breads with corn tortillas, which are dirt cheap and very nice when heated in an oven or toaster
• Or you can just do without bread entirely. Really, did that peanut butter and jelly need to be on bread, or could you have just eaten it mixed in a bowl? Make that sandwich into something you eat with a fork or spoon, take the extra five minutes, and just sit down to eat it!
  

Dessert:

• The best dessert I've found is some very dark chocolate with Redi Whip and almonds. When I say dark, forget that Hershey dark chocolate, I mean at least 72% dark, preferably more like 90%. Dove Deepest Dark dark. It's very low sugar, high in fiber and antioxidants, and pairs wonderfully with the cream and almonds. Some coffee finishes it off beautifully.
  

Also, one thing that's sometimes tricky to work around is mayonnaise. Most commercial mayo is made with bad oils, even the stuff labeled "olive oil" is still mostly vegetable oil. The few brands of mayo we've found made with coconut or avocado oil are literally inedible; don't even bother. Making your own mayo with peanut oil takes some work, and can be tricky, but it's certainly doable. There's also a simple aoli that can be made with garlic and olive oil, but I haven't mastered that yet.

Salad dressing is another source of problem oils, but it's easier to work around. Olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice or vinegar makes an excellent dressing, better than anything I've had from a bottle. If you're looking for ranch dressing, just get the packet of mix, and follow the directions, but replace the mayo with full-fat unflavored yogurt, as much fat as you can get. Again, it's better than anything bottled.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 04.2: Resources on Fasting and Self-Denial

Part of what I've been advocating is a sort of asceticism, or mortification of the flesh. (Doesn't that sound awful?)  Many Christians have believed the flesh to be evil, worthy of punishment. That's not the position I hold; the body is part of us, and is only as good or evil as we make it be. Nor do I hold that suffering is good, in itself, or that self-denial can earn you points with God. Our goal is to become more like Christ, by building the Christian virtues.

As part of that, I've talked about one particular form of bodily self-denial: fasting. Fasting has a long tradition in Christianity. (Martin Luther's position on fasting seems to match mine rather closely.)  Christ fasted, in the tradition of Judaism. Indeed, all other major religions also practice fasting. I've been focusing on fasting, and more broadly about bodily self-denial, as a means to greater self-control. But fasting has many other benefits, both spiritually and physically!

Broadly, fasting can help lead to greater humility before God, deeper drive for righteousness and restorative justice (including repentance and lament), and the money you would have spent on food can be given instead as an act of kindness, mercy, and generosity. Fasters report feeling deep joy, and patience and endurance are surely also built by the practice.

If you want to learn about fasting as a spiritual discipline, I am not the expert for you. Fasting has never been part of my spiritual practice, though I'm more and more sure it should be. Instead, I can point you to these books:

• The Sacred Art of Fasting gives an overview of how fasting is practiced in every major religion, and the reasons and methods involved.
• The last chapter gives details on exactly how to fast, safely and effectively.
  
• Celebration of Discipline talks about fasting as one of the inward Christian spiritual disciplines, along with meditation, prayer, and study.
• Fullness of Life gives a deep historical overview of Christian asceticism, which was largely impenetrable to me as a non-academic, but which might be more valuable to others. I was able to appreciate the author's summary at the end of the requirements for any modern Christian asceticism to be successful:
• Recognize that the state of the body affects the state of the soul.
• Ascetic practices should be good for both the body and the soul.
• Ascetic practices should be temporary and targeted to some particular weakness.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 04.1: Mastering Bodily Impulses

What does mastering a bodily impulse look like? Like most things, it's a series of steps.

1) Understand what bodily impulses you have. These include, but are not limited to:

• Hunger and thirst
  
• Sexual satisfaction
• Comfort and rest
• Connection
• Input

Pick one that you want to build control over, either because it's a specific problem for you, or if you don't see a specific problem, just because improvement is always possible. 

Now, I want to make it very clear that I am not claiming this process will help anyone overcome actual medical addictions. If you have a medical condition, get medical help. Don't try to fight that alone, or with amateur help like mine.

2) Define the range of activities that can satisfy those impulses.

• Hunger and thirst
• Food and drink
  
• Sexual satisfaction
• Sex
• Masturbation, possibly including pornography or erotica
  
• Comfort and rest
• Sleep
• Relaxation 
• Hot showers
  
• Connection
• Personal visits
• Telephone calls
• Texting
• Social media
  
• Input
• Movies and shwws
• Reading
• Games
• Music
• Noise

3) Define your baseline. How are you presently satisfying this impulse? In what manners? How often? For how long? To what degree? Are you eating three large meals every day? Are you spending two hours a day on social media? Taking a long hot shower every night? You need measurements, or you can't know that you're succeeding or failing. Be honest, or there's no point. Remember, nobody is judging you here.

4) Define your restriction. Develop a clear plan to regularly pull back from your baseline. Have a final goal, but start small. If you want to restrict your eating, maybe pick one meal, one twelve hour period a week, to eat something small, simple and cheap without any frills, like a very poor person would have. If you want to restrict your sleep, pick one day a week to get up half an hour early. Work up from there toward your final goal.

These practices can be taken to unhealthy extremes, especially fasting, so don't do anything dangerous. Most bodies can go for several days without food, but your particular body might not. Risking your safety is contrary to what you're trying to achieve. Don't give up medications or vitamins!

5) Track success and failure. There can be no shame in this process! Shame makes you lie, and then you may as well just not do it. Own your failures, do better tomorrow, and try a different way to succeed. If your goal is self-control over your sleep, but you keep sleeping in, try a different alarm type, or a different way of sleeping, or drinking a huge glass of water before bed.

Also, be aware of failures in other ways. If you've given up smoking as much, but are now angry all the time, that doesn't mean you've failed, but it does mean you have more work to do.

6) Adjust the restriction as needed. If you're consistently succeeding, try something a little harder. Abstain for longer periods, or more often, or in new ways. If you've hit your restriction goal, but you've developed a secondary problem, work on the secondary problem before increasing your restriction.

If you're consistently failing, change the rule to be still a form of self-denial, but something more achievable. Be creative about what this looks like. Maybe instead of giving up desserts one day a week, you give them up for just two hours after dinner. Or maybe you give up all other sweets except dessert.

If you've hit your final goal, without developing additional problems, congratulations! Keep on your restriction for a while, then return to step 1 and pick a new impulse to learn to control, in parallel to your first one.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 04: Self-Control and Bodily Impulses

One aspect of  Integrity and self-control is subduing bodily impulses. What bodily impulses? The obvious ones are eating and sex, but there are definitely other things where our body pushes us in one direction or another. We need an appropriate Christian responses to all these impulses. But before we talk about that, we need to address some basic assumptions.

First, bodily impulses are morally neutral. In purity culture, one implied message was that male sexual arousal was a moral evil, one that females were somehow responsible for protecting us from. (Female sexual arousal, on the other hand, may as well have not existed.) Everything about this is wrong! We are mammals, God made us to want sex, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Augustine was just full of crap on this one.

But wait, aren't we commanded to avoid lust? Well, lust is not sexual desire! Lust is longing for anything that doesn't belong to you. Sexual arousal is a thing that happens to you. Lust is a regular thought process, a thing you do. It is opposed to the virtue we identified as Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude. I've also heard it said that lust for a person objectifies them, in opposition to the virtue of Love and respect.

Second, bodily pleasures are morally neutral. The taste of sugar, the feel of an orgasm, or a good sleep-in, are not to be avoided in themselves. It is details and context that make these pleasures virtuous or not. We cannot conclude that all Christians are required to permanently abstain from a bodily pleasure. Some are certainly called to such, but to apply it to everyone is a burden that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear. We reject the idea that full-scale lifelong asceticism is the most virtuous possible path. 

Third, bodily impulses can control us. I'm often reminded of how an acquaintance once described her first experience of sexual intercourse, which I'm sure is the story of a hundred million other people. She had been raised to believe sex before marriage was to be avoided, and so she and her boyfriend were maintaining technical virginity, while engaging in ever-increasing degrees of sexual intimacy. But "your body takes over" and they found they were having sex without any conscious choice to do so. There may be ways to have God-honoring sex outside marriage, but losing control of your body is not among them.

Addiction is another obvious (and more medically serious) example of a controlling bodily impulse, but there are many others we don't talk about as much. How many people struggle to resist food, or can't get out of bed on time, or just can't stop talking to their friends? How many can't control their temper, or overcome their fear? All of these are bodily impulses that can overcome our choices, make us do the things we do not want. It is not we that do them, but sin living in us.

Fourth, we can and should master our bodily impulses. Like we said before. eating cake itself is morally neutral, but the inability to abstain from cake is a failing of character. We strive to grow into the perfection of Christ; the perfected me could choose to never eat cake again, and make it stick. Again, permanent rejection of a bodily pleasure is not a goal we're interested in, and obviously we can't do without food or sleep forever. But temporary abstention, such as fasting, builds endurance, and can help us distinguish between the things we really want and the things our body is driving us towards. 

What does mastering our bodily impulses actually look like? Next time.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 03.4: Christian Sex Education

We all worry about teens running around having unrestricted sex. The impulse toward sex is strong, or we wouldn't be having this conversation. We cannot control our half-grown children, any more than we can control another adult. 

So what do we tell them?

Well, first, we teach them the Christian virtues. If we're not doing that, I'm not sure why we're worried about anything else. The converse is that we do not teach any lists of rules, except as a temporary measure before they're able to process the virtues those temporary rules derived from.

Second, we teach them facts. Not all at once, and not at an age that they can't yet properly contextualize something. But we withhold nothing. Anatomy, physiology, puberty, pregnancy, sexual arousal, everything. Drawings, photographs, there should be no mysteries left about the isolated human body at all, at least from an intellectual standpoint.

Conversely, we do not teach lies. If you can't support it from science or scripture or experience, don't teach it. Especially do not teach things just because you heard them from your teachers or parents. There are so many lies floating around in this space that you should verify everything you can, and reconsider who you trust to give you good information.

Third, we teach them what actions are possible, what choices they have. This includes sexual interaction in all its variety, self-stimulation, birth control, and other safe sex practices. It also means teaching them what lies are out there, like those spread by pornography, and how to process them if they're encountered.

Fourth, we tie it all together. How do you use the virtues to decide what choices are better than others? That means, among many other things, how to deal with sexual arousal in a healthy fashion, including developing self-control in that arena. It also means teaching basic relationship ethics. One good way to do that is to go over scenarios, lots of scenarios, in detail. Consider possible responses to each scenario, and the virtues or vices of each possible response.

This may also mean helping them develop a preliminary ethic, perhaps a very vague one from one of several possible starting points. More important is the process for filling in the details and modifying it over time. By helping them developing a relationship ethic early, with a clear head, not under the hormonal pressure of being in a relationship, we give them a way to distinguish between their hormones and their conscious choices. Again, we help them learn self-control.

Fifth, we make it possible to learn more. Books are good. Open dialog is better. Sex pervades all forms of media, and being able to distinguish between realistic messages and unrealistic ones is a skill young people cannot learn in a vacuum. Some sort of filtered search engine or online Q/A system could be  incredibly beneficial. And in some contexts, there could imaginably be a place for explicit instructional videos and photographs. (The prudish part of me is still WTFing at that idea, but if there's anything morally questionable about that idea, I can't find it.)

There are a couple of comprehensive Christian sex ed curricula out there. (Presumably without instructional videos.) I have no details about the contents, but they seem to be well-regarded.

These Are Our Bodies (Episcopal Church)

Our Whole Lives (United Churches of Christ)

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 03.3: Homosexuality

So in this Christian, scriptural virtue-based ethical framework, what do we do with the verses about homosexuality?

First, we need to be clear about what proposition we're even talking about. Christians broadly fall into three camps on this issue. The sides below are not my terminology, but they are my attempts at definitions.

Side A: God has no objection to either people who experience same-sex attraction, nor to the action of two people of the same sex having sex, at least in some contexts.

Side B: God has no objection to people who experience same-sex attraction, but does object to the action of two people of the same sex having sex in any context. Non-straight persons should remain celibate.

Side X: Experience of same-sex attraction is sinful. Non-straight people can and should change their sexual orientation, or should be excluded from the Church in all capacities.

I'm just going to say outright that the ideas of Side X are completely disconnected from objective reality. All truth is God's truth, and one way to determine that truth is by science and observation. Looking at the world, we see that people cannot change their sexual orientation, and that attempts to that end are often or universally harmful. Sexual orientation is a fixed aspect of someone's created personality, and God will not exclude for such reasons. If you want someone willing to entertain the notion that God hates anyone, or wants anyone excluded from the Church, you're reading the wrong writer. And if anyone has told you anything like that, they were not preaching Christ to you. Find another preacher.

The difference between Side A and Side B is largely the question of whether God objects to two people of the same sex having sex in all contexts. It's entirely about actions, not about desires. There's a spectrum of teachings in various churches about this. Many evangelical churches would describe themselves as Side B, but in practice there's a lot of Side X actions mixed in. The shame involved is often literally unbearable. Take a look at the suicide rate among LGBT+ youth in the Church, and tell me the teachings of the Church on this subject are a tree that bears good fruit. We, as a Church, need to take a very close look at what we're teaching on this subject. Anything that makes any person, especially a child, feel less than loved and wanted by God? That is blasphemy.

But let's pretend that doesn't matter and act for a moment like we're legalists. What does the Bible say about this matter?

There are about half a dozen passages talking about homosexual sex in the Bible. There are a few in the Old Testament. (Recall: that part of the Bible which we completely reject as binding on Christians.) And then there are a few verses in the New Testament, in the writings of Paul. Nowhere is it a major subject, by any means. But we'll walk through these verses, and I'll explain why I no longer find them convincing.

(To be clear, David Gushee does this vastly better than I do, in his book Changing Our Mind.)

Now, before we get into those verse-by-verse, I want to point out something: every single one of these references is explicitly about two men having sex. In the entire Bible, the only verse that can be construed as talking about two women having sex is in Romans 1:26. "...for their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones..." And that's it.

Now, it's not at all clear that this is intended to be a blanket condemnation of the idea of two women having sex; it definitely could be, but it could also be about a dozen other things. But even if it is a blanket universal condemnation, let's think about the implications of that. There's no mention of lesbian sex in the entire Old Testament! I mean, how could there be? In their context, sex was a thing a male did to someone; two women having sex was linguistic nonsense.

But then, what are we to make of this? If Romans 1:26 is really a verse we should interpret to mean "God universally objects to two women having sex," then we also have to conclude that God was perfectly okay with Jewish lesbians for 1,500 years, before finally telling them to knock it off, very obliquely, in a letter Paul wrote to non-Jewish Christians in Rome.

This proposal is improbable to the point it does not bear further discussion.

Based on this, I think we can reasonably say that any prohibition of female-female sex is man-made, once again elevating the teachings of man to the level of scripture. Interestingly, a second-century parabiblical book called the Apocalypse of Peter references lesbians being condemned to eternal torment. So while man-made, it's not exactly new. (AoP is also the earliest reference we have to hell as a place of eternal conscious torment, also a man-made idea that's not in scripture.)

Now, I've never heard anyone actually argue that God is fine with lesbianism, but still objects to male homosexual sex. But it's at least an imaginable argument, so I'm going to work through the scriptures anyway. Remember, we're trying to answer "Does God clearly object to male-male sex in all cases?"

So where do the objections start? Sodom, where the men of the condemned city tried to rape Lot's angelic visitors. Since we're testing whether God condemns consensual male homosexual relationships, a story about rape has no bearing on that point. That should shut down the usefulness of Sodom right there. But even beyond that, the sin of Sodom is discussed multiple times elsewhere in scripture, and nowhere is the cause of their destruction called out as homosexual sex. And ignoring that, if the primary sin of Sodom is the homosexual part, the implication is that if they'd been gang-raping female visitors, God would have objected to that less. Really? Using this as some sort of proof text against homosexual sex just falls apart at even the slightest examination. It's kind of embarrassing.

Next, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, a crime/punishment pairing. 18:22 says "And with a male you shall not lay [as the] lyings of a woman." (Ancient Hebrew is awful. The Septuagint Greek translation is basically the same thing.) This is usually translated as "You shall not lie with a male in the manner of a female." But consider that it could also be translated "You shall not lie with a husband in the bed of a wife." Or more clearly, "You (a man) should not have sex with a man who is married to a woman." In a culture where sex with with another man might not necessarily be considered cheating on your wife, having it called out explicitly as a form of adultery might make sense. Either way, even if we accepted the Old Testament as binding, which we do not, the meaning of this passage is not clear.

And that's it for the Old Testament. This really doesn't get talked about much.

In the New Testament, we get three passages from Paul, all of which are ambiguous.

Romans 1 (New English Translation):

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for an image resembling mortal human beings or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to dishonor their bodies among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones, and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Now, this is clearly talking about two men having sex. But it may be talking about two men having sex in the context of pagan worship. Even if it's not that, it could very well be a reference to the pervasive rape culture of the first century Roman world, where a man could rape anyone below him in the social order, but was subject to rape by those above him.

Can we interpret Romans 1 as a blanket condemnation of male-male sex in all cases? I don't see how.

Then we get to the really interesting ones. Paul throws a couple references to homosexual sex into a couple of his sin lists, without further elaboration. 1 Corinthians 6 includes μαλακός/malakos and ἀρσενοκοίτης/arsenokoitēs. 1 Timothy 1 also includes arsenokoitēs. These are the words usually translated into English as some variant of "practicing homosexual."

Malakos is literally something like "soft." Some Bibles translate it as "effeminate," other times it gets lumped in as a variant of homosexual partner. It's not used anywhere else in the New Testament except to anti-describe John the Baptist's clothing in Matthew 11:8. Other Greek sources treat it as something more like moral softness. So this word isn't doing much heavy lifting for telling us what's considered right or wrong here.

Now, the word arsenokoitēs seems straightforward at first. It's a combination of two Greek words, and pretty clearly means "male-bedders." This is definitely about male-male sex, at least some subset of it.

But when you dig further, this word is fascinating, because we have no record of it prior to Paul using it in 1 Corinthians. There might be one usage roughly contemporary to Paul, also by a Greek-speaking Jew, in a list of economic wrongdoing. If you look at the Septuagint, the standard Greek translation of the Old Testament that Paul would have known, those verses in Leviticus are translated into Greek using arseno koitēs. It looks for all the world like Jews made this word up, expressly to reference Leviticus!

Now, why would they do this? There were many common Greek words they could have used to reference homosexual sex. And Paul is well-educated. He's not writing these letters to introduce new concepts to his readers; he's reminding them of conversations they've already had in person. He's not using a rare Jewish-Greek word because he doesn't know any other. He's got to be purposefully referencing some subset of male-male sex that standard Greek didn't have a specific word for.

There's all sorts of deeper academic discussions about this available. But I'm at this point very comfortable saying that Paul's usage in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy does not constitute a compelling case for universal condemnation of male-male sex.

And then there's the argument from Jesus teachings on divorce. Mark 10:

Then Jesus left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan River. Again crowds gathered to him, and again, as was his custom, he taught them. Then some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “He wrote this commandment for you because of your hard hearts. But from the beginning of creation he made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Here the Pharisees reference Deuteronomy 24, and ask Jesus to take sides in one of their religious disputes. Jesus quotes Genesis to them, saying that marriage is always intended to be permanent, and divorce was never God's intent. He never starts saying "Oh, divorce is okay in these circumstances, but not these other circumstances." He restates the problem, but expects those involved to figure out the solution.

Now, the reasoning here goes something like this:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage and divorce
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were heterosexual
• Therefore, two people of the same sex cannot be married
• A separate argument concludes that sex should only exist within the confines of marriage
• Therefore, two people of the same sex should not have sex
  

(If I'm missing a step here, I'm not purposefully trying to set up a strawman. Let me know.)

First, I just object to the idea that we can take Jesus statements about divorce and apply them to a very different subject. That's not respecting his words. Jesus said what he meant. You do not get to bend his words to apply to something else. "No, no, what he actually meant was, 'Blessed are the makers and purveyors of all dairy products!"

But it gets worse. This argument structure can be made to mean basically anything you want. As a source of moral dictates, it is inherently not compelling. For example, similar logic goes like this:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were commanded to multiply
  
• Therefore, married couples should not use contraception

(It should surprise nobody that I don't subscribe to this argument.)

Or consider this example:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were naked vegetarians
  
• Therefore, married couples should not eat meat or wear clothes
  

Still, for the sake of argument, suppose we assume that Genesis 2 should be our guide for choosing between Side A and Side B. Side B says we should look at the story, and understand that all marriages should be heterosexual. This is clearly a man-made inference and not in the text at all, but okay, let's explore the implications of that.

Since Jesus references Genesis 2 as a standard for marriage, we must conclude that Genesis 2 does refer to marriage, and not some sort of non-marriage companionship. God saw that it was not good for man to be without a suitable marriage partner. So either:

1. God wants homosexual persons to remain without a suitable marriage partner. The clear statement of God that it is not good for man to be alone, and the statements by Jesus that avoiding marriage is only given to a few, is simply not applicable to gay people.
   
2. God wants homosexual persons to have a suitable marriage partner, of the opposite sex. Simple observations of how this works out in practice puts this under "no good tree bears bad fruit."
   
3. God wants homosexual persons to have a suitable marriage partner of the same sex, just... without the sex. This would be a very odd definition of marriage to extract from a very tortured connection of ambiguous scriptures. And it would also mean one can't actually be opposed to gay marriage, in itself.
   

Now, consider this argument from Genesis 2:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were commanded to be fruitful
• Some people, due to the details of their brain structure, cannot be fruitful in a heterosexual relationship, but can be fruitful in a homosexual relationship
• Therefore, two people of the same sex can have a fruitful relationship in the same sense that Adam and Eve did
  

One could still try to strain out smaller and smaller gnats. One could try to parse out what it is to be fruitful. (Not a bad idea in itself, perhaps.) But we are going to far down this rabbit hole that we can't even see daylight any more. If this is an argument you expect other people to find convincing, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.

There is no clear indication in scripture that sex between two people of the same sex is generally condemned. Neither shall I condemn it.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 03.2: Can XXX Be Virtuous?

Let's talk about some particular sex-related issues from this virtue ethics perspective. Remember, we are no longer comparing these things against some list of rules. We're asking, is it possible for these things to build the virtuesin some circumstances? Or if not that, to at least to not build vices?

First, any of the below including non-voluntary people (including minors) clearly constitutes harm to that person, and disrespect of that person.

Hookups

I will presently define hookups as sex involving minimal relationship, all other things being equal. What virtue problems would this this present?

 

Could a lifestyle of nothing but hookups also make it more difficult to build relationships? Perhaps. But could sex without preexisting relationship actually build relationship in these cases? I've heard of such. So from a peacemaking perspective, it depends on the details.

 

There are also considerations of when sex qualifies as kind and truthful; sex can make a person vulnerable, and without knowing a person's background before having sex with them, you could inadvertently do them great harm. (For that matter, if you just met your partner, can you be sure that they are a legal adult?) So there are risks here, it seems a lot depends on the details, and more data could definitely result in different conclusions.

 

Can virtue-neutral, or even positive-virtue, hookup sex exist? So far I don't see that it can't. It seems like finding it depends greatly on the details of each individual case.

Sex Work

In some ways, exchanging money for sex isn't that different from hookup sex, in that both are sex without relationship. For the same reasons, in principle, a for-pay sexual relationship involving mutual kindness and humility could exist. But in reality, money changing hands results in a power dynamic that is difficult to avoid or escape.

Many sex workers are not making free choices. Some are not free in the same sense that no person living hand-to-mouth is truly making free choices. Many other sex workers are victims of outright human trafficking and slavery. Participating in this is participating in great evil.

Without full information about the sex worker's circumstances, the client may be unknowingly contributing to their harm. Truthfulness is a prerequisite to kindness in this case. I suppose a free sex worker could also unknowingly contribute to the harm of the client, though clearly in an asymmetrical fashion.

 

Again like hookup sex, optimal kindness to a person requires understanding their life situation. Perhaps ethical consumption of prostitution could exist, but knowing what we know about the contingent details of the world, I'm not sure what it would even look like.

Masturbation

There's never been a good scriptural argument that self-stimulation is wrong, even from a legalistic framework. The best I've heard is that masturbation necessarily invokes lust, but that comes from a misunderstanding of what the sin of lust fundamentally is: not sexual desire, but wanting a person as an object for your own ends.

 

From this virtue framework, there's not much to say, since most of the virtues we've seen are relational. Actions around self-stimulation, such as objectification of a desired other through pornography or just imagination, would certainly be negative in love and respect, but that's not actually a problem with the act in itself. Like almost everything, It could be negative in integrity and self-control, but that's only in some situations. Indeed, for some people with higher sex drives, sexual release may be part of achieving self-control in other domains of life, and therefore virtue-positive in some sense. In general, self-stimulation appears to be virtue-neutral, but the context around it can make a tremendous difference in that assessment.

Pornography and Erotica

Let's define pornography as imagery intended to facilitate sexual arousal, and erotica as text to the same end. Creating, purveying, or consuming them are all different activities, and the existence of virtual pornography complicates things further, but we can probably make some general statements.

 

For people in relationships, anything involving pornography or erotica might constitute faithlessness, depending on their relationship. Distribution of pornography as revenge after the end of a relationship would also constitute faithlessness. But for single persons, or some persons in relationships, these problems don't seem to apply. What about them?

Now, I don't have actual data on real-world pornography. (My brain deeply connects sex with relationship, so actors on a screen doing it for money is of basically no appeal for me. I have other problems, as we all do.) But anecdotal evidence says that habitual consumption of unrealistic pornography can build unrealistic expectations of what sex is like, and make real sexual relationships difficult to build. I understand pornography commonly shows violence against women! What awful and disgusting messaging. Not to mention the trope (also present in lots of non-pornographic productions) that all women are absurdly young models matching our society's narrow physical standards of perfection.

 

So (some) pornography actually interferes with the development of relationships, thereby building vices. The creation and purveyance of such pornography is untruthful, and the consumption of such pornography is the opposite of embracing truth. Such consumption can incentivize creation of more. So any participation in deceptive pornography is severely problematic, at least given our present world. Presumably the same applies to erotica, though I have no data on that subject.

 

Let's assume for the moment we could find honest pornography or erotica, with an accurate portrayal of sex. Unlike hookups or prostitution, there is literally no interaction between the creator and the consumer. No relationship can be built between them. I suppose couples might consume pornography or erotica together, and find some positive relationship-building virtue. Solo consumption of pornography and erotica is, at best, neutral on this virtue.

But like those selling sex for money, many of those involved in creating pornography may not be free to say no. Consuming that pornography incentivizes rape, which is clearly unethical in any imaginable system. I've heard that ethically-sourced pornography exists, but I couldn't say more about that. Erotica and virtual pornography don't seem to have this problem.

So suppose erotica or ethically-sourced pornography with a truthful depiction of ethical sex existed, what would it look like? I suspect it would look very much like instructional videos with an erotic bent, probably showing a wide variety of ages and body types. This would seem to be virtue-positive for Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth. All truth is God's truth, and that truth being sexually arousing doesn't make it any less God's truth. The consumption of such erotica or pornography by a couple could also be virtue-positive for building relationship and facilitating kindness with a sexual partner. 

Do such videos exist? Got me, but given the breadth of the video available in the world, I'm going to say "probably." Is creation, distribution, and consumption of them ethical? I can't at this time see why not. Am I advocating making them available as part of some level of sex education curriculum? No, but I'm not sure it's for ethical reasons. It's just because the whole idea squicks me out.

Of course, the wild card in all this is Integrity and self-control, as it is in a lot of analyses. More about that soon.

Reconstructiing Christian Sexual Ethics 03.1: How does marriage fit into all this?

Some people are going to ask, if virtuous sex can exist outside of marriage, and non-virtuous sex can exist inside of marriage, what's the point of marriage, then?

The question answers itself: the point of marriage is not sex. Anyone who gets married so they can have sex is, at best, being distracted from the dozens of other things that should be driving their decisions. But we all know this happens in purity culture. Our failure to teach how to subjugate our bodily desires (more on this later) has resulted in a lot of failed marriages. In an attempt to make marriage meet our man-made idea of the sacred, we have instead made it cheap.

But first, what even is marriage? We could be talking about several distinct things! If the Church chooses to be in the business of litigating what people should and should not do inside and outside a marriage, we need a clear definition. And if we're trying to argue from a Biblical perspective, it gets even more problematic.

• Are we talking about the legal structures?
• Those clearly didn't exist for much of the Old Testament period
• Are we talking about the religious ceremony?
• Are we then saying that people married in a civil ceremony, or in another religious tradition, aren't really married?
• Are we saying marriage is (gasp) a sacrament!? Evangelicals don't even have the language to participate in that argument!
  
• Actions like cohabitation, sex, having children?
• This implies that a lot of people are married without intending to be, which I would reject as a useful definition.
• The private commitment between two people?
• If this is what matters, why do we have ceremonies and paperwork?
• The public commitment between two people?

The public commitment seems to be the critical piece, with the legal and religious layers as additional covenants.

Now, there might be issues of Kindness, mercy, and generosity to keep in mind, but those are contextual, depending on your particular circumstances. In this virtue framework, the universal unique value of marriage is under Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship. Making and keeping covenants is a good, in itself.

Consider the story of the prophet Hosea.

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, he said to him, “Go marry a prostitute who will bear illegitimate children conceived through prostitution, because the nation continually commits spiritual prostitution by turning away from the Lord.”

God told Hosea to marry Gomer, to exemplify to the community how bad God's marriage to Israel was. Hosea was a prophet, not by words, but by action. This was an anti-marriage. Therefore, our marriages should be the opposite. We are to be a living prophecy, exemplifying the love of God for his people through love and sacrifice for each other. That is our holy calling. Making marriage about sex makes it less sacred, not more.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 03: Dating and Relationships

I grew up in the late nineties evangelical purity culture, though perhaps a less pernicious implementation than some I've heard of. If you don't know what I mean, here's the rundown:

• Men are uncontrollable lust machines
• A woman's sexual role is to satisfy her husband, having no sexual desire of her own 
• Sexual arousal is lust and therefore sinful
• Women are responsible for men's lust
• Women who engage in sex before marriage are permanently rendered less valuable as humans
• Everyone should suppress their sex drives until they get married, and then suddenly flip a switch and become healthy sexual beings
  
• If you follow these teachings, sex within marriage will be far better than otherwise
  

Not a bit of that is scriptural, of course. Seriously, find one place that backs any of that up. It's all teachings of man that are elevated to the level of scripture. And it's not even teachings that work. Numerous studies show that purity teachings have no statistical impact on the average number of sexual partners a person has, or the age of first sexual experience, and they tend to result in more accidental pregnancies and abortions. And these teachings result in tremendous sexual dysfunction and shame.

Many excellent books and podcasts exist for people recovering from these false teachings, and it is not my intention to add to them here. I will only say this: no good tree bears bad fruit. The tree of purity culture bears bad fruit. Cut it down and throw it into the fire.

Now, I have a much more pressing question: what should we be teaching instead? When I was growing up, I saw almost no discussion of what a Christian relationship, sexual or not, married or not, looks like. All we really got is "don't have sex until you're married." We've seen that the scriptural position on sex outside of marriage isn't as cut and dried as many of us have been taught.

So if this ground isn't solid, where do we have to stand? Do we default to the worldly ethic of enthusiastic consent, and say that God has no interest in our sex lives as long as we're not harming anyone? By no means! God clearly wants us to give him all aspects of our lives, including this one. But what does that look like?

I haven't seen much discussion of this. There's a lot of discussion of rejecting and recovering from purity culture, but not as much about what scripture-based ethics we build in its place. I am not claiming to have all the answers. But here's how I suggest working through this problem: start with the Christian virtues (the ten clusters we identified earlier, or some other list if you prefer), and see how they all interact with the domain of our lives that includes dating, relationships, marriage, and sex.

Keep in mind, this is not a list of rules. If you're trying to develop a list of rules, you're doing virtue ethics wrong. It's possible some general rules will fall out of it, but that's not the goal. The goal is to learn to think about the situations you might run into, so you have some idea what's virtuous and what's not. So here are our virtues, and my first-pass thoughts on how they apply in this domain:

• Humility before God: Serve God, and see that his ways are higher than your ways
• Consider how your religious beliefs and practices will interact with those of your partner
• Drive for righteousness and restorative justice: Make your life and the world more in line with God's will; mourn sin and repent
• Ask your partner to help you recognize sin and repent of it
  
• Help your partner recognize sin and repent of it
• Work together to make the world more just
  
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth: Learn true things, reject false things, and spread that learning
• Do not lie to your partner
• Tell your partner all relevant truths; don't lie by omission
• Recognize and reject when your partner lies to you, or leaves out relevant truths
• Ask the important questions
• Love and respect: Place others before yourself
• Place your partner before yourself
• Recognize when your partner places themself before you
• Consider other people whose needs your actions might affect
• Your former and future partners
• Your family and friends and children
  
• Your partner's former and future partners 
• Your partner's family and friends and children
  
• Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude: Recognize the good God has given you
• Accept that you may not have the relationships you want, and find joy in the ones you have
  
• Accept that the relationships you have may not have all the qualities you want, and find joy in the positive qualities they have
  
• Accept that your partner may not do or be everything you want, and find joy in what you can
  
• Accept that your relationship will end, and find joy in the time you have
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship: Give up revenge, and encourage community
• Build a relationship with each other. Date! Spend time together, learn about each other, do new things together, read books, talk about ideas and dreams and fears
• Forgive each other, constantly
  
• Build relationships with each other's family and friends and faith communities
• Marriage and building a family are the ultimate expression of this, exemplifying God's abiding love for His people
  
• Patience and hope: Remember that God will act in time
• Do not rush or pressure your partner to advance your relationship
  
• Recognize and reject when your partner rushes or pressures you
  
• Encourage each other to enjoy whatever stage your relationship may be in
  
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity: Do good for people, especially those in need
• Do not cause your partner harm
  
• Recognize and reject when your partner causes you harm
• Recognize and reject when your partner causes others harm
• Do your partner good
• Recognize when your partner does good for you
• Recognize when your partner does good for others
• Help each other do good for others, together
  
• Integrity and self-control: Be one thing, all the time; subdue bodily impulses
• Recognize, acknowledge, and communicate about physical drives
  
• Help each other build self-control over those drives
  
• Faithfulness and endurance: Keep your covenants, carry on in the face of all adversity
• Don't break agreements of fidelity with your partner
  
• Don't spread secrets or lies about your partner
  
• Don't harm your partner after a relationship ends
  
• Help each other continue in all the virtues for as long as your relationship lasts
  

I don't see that any Christian would object to the above advice. That makes me think we're on the right track, that our process for understanding Christian ethical behavior with respect to relationships is valid.

 

Now, I'm going to go back over the virtues and point out places where they are specifically applicable to sex. In the below, I'm using "sex" as shorthand for "any physical or sexual interaction," because I can't really justify drawing an arbitrary line for where "sex" begins.

• Humility before God
• Consider whether your relationship ethic is compatible with that of your partner
• This requires that you know both your own relationship ethic and that of your partner; see Embrace of knowledge and truth
  
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom and truth
• Both partners should understand how sex, pleasure, pregnancy, and sexual safety work in general
  
• Both partners should have all the important information about each other's sexual and emotional needs, desires, and history, including any applicable covenants
  
• Both the above are critical for Kindness and mercy; you cannot show your partner kindness without understanding their needs
  
• Love and respect
• Consider your partner's sexual and emotional needs as more important than your own
• Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude
• Most sexual relationships will not meet 100% of both parties' desires. This is normal. Be okay with that.
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Sex should build relationship with your partner through shared intimacy, vulnerability, and pleasure
  
• Patience and hope
• Do not pressure your partner to advance the sexual intimacy of the relationship, or for existing levels of intimacy at an unwelcome time
  
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
• Use sex for mutual pleasure and comfort
• Ensure the physical safety of sex
• Remember your partner's emotional needs
• Consider anyone you or your partner have covenant relationships with who could be harmed
  
• All this requires Embrace of knowledge and truth, to know what can cause harm
  
• Integrity and self-control
• Make your sexual actions match your inner goals and statements of purpose
  
• Do not let bodily sexual impulses control you
• Faithfulness and endurance
  
• Keep covenants of sexual fidelity within a relationship
• Do not spread intimate information during a relationship, or after a relationship ends
  

Once again, I don't expect that any Christian would find the above objectionable. At worst, it's incomplete in some fashion. But we are at least forming the basis for a more comprehensive teaching on relationships and sex, in whatever context.

Now, again working from the virtues, are there times when a couple should not have sex (of any kind)? Again, this is not a list of rules. But there do seem to be times when a person should clearly not engage in sex, because it cannot be virtuous in the context we usually find ourselves in. I see only four definite ones:

• If you won't put your partner's needs above your own, don't have sex with them
• Enthusiastic consent is a requirement
  
• Are there cases where sex with enthusiastic consent can still fail to consider a partner's needs? Absolutely. Enthusiastic consent is not sufficient unto itself.
• Also, if your partner won't put your needs above theirs, you are in danger; just run
• If you don't know how to have sex safely, don't do it
• Safe sex and informed consent are requirements
  
• If you don't know your specific partner well enough to understand their physical or emotional needs with regards to sex, you could very well harm them without intending to
• If you have an existing covenant of fidelity or chastity, don't break it
• No cheating is a requirement
  
• If having sex is not consistent with your personal integrity and exercise of self-control, don't do it

These are our bare minimum Christian ethic for sexual relationships. They include the world's minimum ethic, plus some additional demands on us. That's what we would expect to find, I think.

 

Now, how does all the above interact with the idea of marriage? Is it possible to build all of these virtues within in unmarried sexual relationship, in exactly the same way as within a marriage? There have certainly been points in history where that was not possible; in the hardcore patriarchy of the Old Testament, sex with an unmarried woman could ruin her entire life. It would lack the virtues of Love and respect, of Kindness and mercy. But in our cultural context? Within this framework, there is no obvious reason why sex outside of marriage is, in itself, unvirtuous.

 

Further, is it possible for sex within a marriage to not build these virtues, and thereby be less pleasing to God? Absolutely! Not all sex within marriage is God-honoring, by any means! Sexual ethics within marriage go well beyond "Keep sex within marriage" and we fail when we don't teach that. With a near-exclusive focus on premarital chastity, evangelicals lack any teachings about what ethical sex looks like, inside or outside a marriage.

So does God intend for sex to be universally reserved for marriage? Whether we take a mistaken rule-based legalistic approach to scripture, or this virtue-based approach, no such requirement is apparent. If it's anywhere, it's got to be in a virtue I've missed in my framework. Chastity is certainly a virtue that's been included in a lot of lists, but I wasn't able to find it in scripture the way I looked at it.

But importantly, by taking this scripture-based, virtue-oriented approach to sexual and relationship ethics, we have found a path to a Christian sexual ethic that requires more of us than the bare minimum. We are not just reducing our ethics to that of the world. Christ demands more of us.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.5: Covenants and How to End Them

The Church has dramatically altered its teachings on divorce in the last century. The Church has, at times, taught that divorce is only allowable in situations of sexual unfaithfulness. This position is based on some of the words of Jesus, which is a far better foundation than some Church teachings we've talked about on this blog. In recent decades, some churches have loosened this teaching to allow for divorce in cases of abuse or desertion.

It is not presently my intent to re-litigate those changes. Instead, I will consider divorce as one instance of the larger phenomenon of ending a covenant. By understanding the end of covenants more generally from a perspective of Christian virtue ethics, we may also hope to learn about divorce in particular.

Mortals, by definition, eventually die. All covenants involving mortals must therefore end. Those ends can fall into three categories. I'll use the language of covenants with two parties, but the same principles apply to multi-party contracts without loss of generality.

• Covenants can end naturally
• Covenants can end bilaterally
• Covenants can end unilaterally

Creating covenants builds the virtue of Peacemaking and building relationship. Keeping covenants builds the virtue of Faithfulness and Endurance. A covenant ending naturally or bilaterally can perhaps be virtue-neutral on both scores. But a covenant ending unilaterally, being broken, is virtue-negative. That means to be the moral choice, breaking a covenant would have to be virtue-positive along other directions. Either the covenant itself is virtue-negative, or the covenant is preventing actions that are virtue-positive.

Here are some thoughts about situations in which keeping a covenant might be less virtuous than breaking it:

• Humility before God 
• Your covenant is incompatible with your service to God in some fashion. If you have a covenant to serve in one religion, then convert, for example.
  
• Drive for righteousness and justice
  
• Your covenant makes your life less like God wants it to look.
  
• Your covenant makes the world less just, less like what God wants it to look like.
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth
  
• Your covenant was made in ignorance, was rashly considered, or you were deceived.
  
• Love and respect 
• Your covenant requires you to place your needs before those of others.
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Your covenant damages relationship and community, or prevents more valuable relationship and community from being formed.
  
• Patience and hope
  
• Your covenant was made under inappropriate pressure.
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
  
• Your covenant causes harm to others, or prevents good being done for them.
  
• Faithfulness and endurance
  
• You have conflicting covenants.

I don't see any way that the virtues of Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude; Integrity and self-control; or Endurance might justify breaking a covenant. But I may just be missing something.

So back to our first paragraph, where does divorce fit into this? If we reject the legalistic idea of Jesus giving us some list of check-boxes, and instead work from the virtues Jesus taught us, when might divorce imaginably be net virtue-positive?

• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth
  
• Your marriage was made in ignorance, was rashly considered, or you were deceived.
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Your marriage prevents a more valuable relationship from being formed. An example might be when children are involved, one parent has abandoned them, and the other parent chooses to remarry.
  
• Patience and hope
  
• Your marriage was made under inappropriate pressure.
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
  
• Your marriage causes harm to others, or prevents good being done for them. This might be the case in a situation of abuse, for example.
• Keep in mind that among its many other problems, allowing your spouse to abuse you without push-back is unkind to your spouse, not to mention literally everyone else in their lives they may also abuse.
  

Interestingly, sexual unfaithfulness doesn't seem to have a place in this virtue scheme! The one time the Church has traditionally taught divorce to be allowable seems to be virtue-negative in at least some cases. As we often saw in the gospels, living like Christ may actually place higher demands on us than following the legalists. God has infinite faithfulness, even when we break our end of the covenant.

Now, what about bilateral divorces or other covenant-endings? There's less faithlessness involved at that point, so the details of the particular circumstance would need to be evaluated to determine whether such a situation was virtue-positive or negative. I see no reason that a bilateral divorce would necessarily be either. Still, since creating and keeping covenants is generally virtuous, covenants should only end with deep consideration. Since marriage is a living prophecy, exemplifying the love of God for His people, it should perhaps only be terminated if it cannot fulfill that function. But then, the number of people with good marriages who want divorces is presumably vanishingly small.

 

We can also apply some of this reasoning to non-marriage relationships. As relationships progress in stages of deepening commitment, the ability to end those relationships becomes more limited, almost by definition. What if one partner gets a job offer somewhere else? Or if one partner becomes unwell? How the partners react is dependent on their level of commitment. This is why a person should be slow and deliberate about progressing through relationship stages; that which is hard to undo should be hard to do.

 

Part of developing a relationship ethic should include some thought about the conditions when relationships end, with discussion of those circumstances between the partners before the end is suddenly upon them. We should never take ending a covenant before its time to be a casual thing.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.4: What's Love?

I heard a fascinating TED Talk podcast a while back, describing how thoughts of love actually manifest in the human brain. It turns out there are three completely separate systems that have almost nothing to do with each other.

• Sexual desire. This part of your brain makes you want to have babies.
• Romance. This part of your brain picks one person and makes you emphasize their positive qualities while overlooking their flaws. (In other words, this part of your brain lies to the rest of your brain.) It wants you to pick one person to have babies with.
• Attachment. This part of your brain makes you stay with the people you're most familiar with. It wants you to stick around and raise the babies.
  

Most people are going to feel all three of these at different points in their lives, for different people, in varying intensities on different days. This is perfectly normal.

But where does love enter into that picture?

American culture (and presumably many others) have this story we tell ourselves, about being in love. People who are in love have some certain high level of feelings for each other. It's difficult to quantify, so we need songs and poets and movies and about half of extant media to talk about it. It's clearly very important to us.

But it's difficult to quantify specifically because there's no in love button in your brain. Being in love, as we often use the term, is not an objective phenomenon. It's a story our culture tells, and sometimes it's a story we choose to tell about ourselves. This does not make being in love fake, or wrong, or unreal. Sometimes real things only exist subjectively, and that's okay! But it does mean that we can't use being "in love" as a standard of behavior, because it's different for every person, every couple.

Remember, when we're talking about love in this virtue context, we're not talking about anything romantic or sexual. We're talking about the willingness to put someone else's needs before your own. As we'll discus soon, that kind of love isn't something you grow into, or a finish line beyond which some levels of intimacy are hidden. This love is fundamentally necessary for any virtuous, functioning relationship.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.3: Relationship Ethics

As we discussed previously, it's impossible to grow in integrity and self-control without self-imposed boundaries on your actions. A subset of this is your actions within relationships, including sex. These boundaries are your relationship ethic.

Your relationship ethic defines many things, and your sexual behavior is not the most important of them, by any means. But it does include the set of circumstances where you consider it acceptable to engage in sexual activity of various kinds. The overlap between your relationship ethic and that of your (potential) partner is the set of circumstances where you can have sex, or indeed engage in any mutual behavior, and both behave ethically.

Some people already have well-thought-out boundaries for their own activities. Others have vague ideas they've never really thought through. Some (particularly the young) have literally never considered the idea.

So what does a relationship ethic look like? Consider each possible mutual activity you could perform with a partner. Include sexual activities, but also things we don't usually consider sexual like kissing or hand-holding or cuddling, or like cohabitation or joint bank accounts or lending money, or maybe something really important like attending church together. It's a very big list!

Now, for each activity, think about how a relationship might progress in stages towards that activity. Consider how the virtues we've been discussing would apply to that activity, and how they all interrelate. I'll list them below, with some suggested thoughts. This is by no means a complete list! It is a starting point for conversation.

• Humility before God
• At what point in a relationship do you start comparing your beliefs and practices and relationship ethic with those of your partner? Is this conversation zero for you? A few dates in? How many stages does this go in?
  
• If you have some specific milestones in mind, you definitely need to start this discussion before hitting one, or you risk disappointment somewhere.
  
• Embrace of knowledge and truth
• At what points in a relationship do you exchange which information about emotional and sexual needs, desires, and history? How many stages does this go in?
  
• This would require that both parties have some understanding of their own needs, desires, and history.
  
• You should be familiar with general anatomy, physiology, and safe sex practices long before entering any relationship where it might matter.
  
• Love and respect
• Love and respect needs to be present from day one, all the time, but there are certainly degrees of self-sacrifice. There's a difference between the kind of love that drops personal plans one day to help with an emergency, and the kind of love that will gladly do that every single day for the rest of time. What stages do you think exist?
  
• Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude
• You may have expectations and goals for a relationship. Your relationship may not meet all those expectations. If it doesn't, how willing and able are you to be content with that? At what point do you terminate the relationship rather than continue?
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• What levels of covenant could exist between you and your partner? How do you progress through them?
  
• Patience and hope
• Do all these stages of a relationship have a natural progression and definite end-goal? What is the minimum time you will stay at a particular stage? What is the maximum time? What happens if the maximum time is exceeded? Is age a factor in this progression?
  
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
• What degrees of kindness, pleasure and comfort can two people give each other? At what stage of a relationship should they apply?
• This definitely includes physical contact and sex in all its variety, but also includes things like lending money, running errands, and providing medical care.
  
• Integrity and self-control
• Do you engage in self-control practices particular to each stage of the relationship? Or particular to each transition? 
• Faithfulness and endurance
  
• What other covenants are each of you bound by? How do each of you interact with each other's covenants at each stage of the relationship?
• Think obligations to parents, existing children, mortgages, military service...
  

You might think there are three stages to any relationship. You might think there are fifty. You might think sexual intimacy progresses gradually along with everything else, or you might think it comes only with a degree of long-term or permanent covenant commitment. I'm not sure there are any objectively right answers here.

Whatever stages you come up with, plan to progress through them slowly and deliberately. Don't skip stages just to "get XX over with." The actions must flow from the relationship, not the relationship from the desired actions. Particularly consider including regular periods of abstinence (from whatever, not just sex) throughout, especially before progressing to a new stage. Maybe that will be stressful, but if not kissing for two weeks means your relationship is over, well, it's a good thing you didn't go further than that.

I can't tell you what kind of ethic to have. But have one. Define some principles, so you can hold to them, and thereby grow in self-control.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.2: Integrity and Self-Control

I want to spend some time focusing on one of the Christian virtue clusters we identified earlier. I labeled it as Integrity and self-control. Part of this cluster is purity, a very common word in the New Testament. We've often read this as being sexual purity, but there's no indication of that from the text. This makes more sense as the virtue of being only one thing, of consistency between your beliefs and actions. Hypocrisy would be opposed to this virtue.

The virtue of Integrity and self-control is only meaningful if there are boundaries on your actions that you choose to stay within. We build this virtue by acting in a fashion consistent with our statements of what is right and best, a fashion consistent with our ethics.

But where do we get such ethics? Since we reject legalism, are the other virtues the only source? No! We can create boundaries for ourselves. By living within those boundaries, and by constantly pushing ourselves to do better, we can develop the strength of character needed to resist temptation.

For example, I love cake. My wife's gluten-free lemon curd cake is one of the best things on the face of the earth. There's usually nothing morally wrong with me eating that cake, but circumstances are imaginable when it might be unkind or unloving for me to eat it. But it's such good cake! I might not have the strength of character to resist it!

The perfected me, the Christ-like me, would be able to resist that cake, perfectly, every day, forever. The me of today needs exercise to become the me that can resist temptation. So we put limits on our behavior to build the virtue of self-control, not to avoid sinful or unvirtuous actions today, but so we can become the kind of people who can avoid them in the future.

All this means that your self-created ethical boundaries must exist before the action that might challenge them. That means planning ahead for what situations you expect to put yourself in, and creating some idea of what limits you want to place on your own behavior. Think of it like an exercise plan; if you don't have goals, you can't achieve anything. And like an exercise plan, if you fail, you get back up and try again. Shame does not help.

But what if your goals are wrong? What if you create an ethic, and it just isn't working for you? Your circumstances have changed, you've changed, it's too easy, or you're constantly failing. You can't possibly be stuck with the same ethic you came up with thirty years ago, with no possibility of alteration. You need a means of amending your ethic, without abandoning it. You need a defined process for doing that. But you also can't just change your ethic too rapidly, or it may as well not exist.

My suggestion is, don't do any of this work alone. Find someone you trust to work through it with you. I would suggest someone disconnected from your personal life, perhaps a faith leader of some kind. Someone who won't be as easily swayed by your personal emotional reactions, and someone whose advice you respect and will voluntarily follow. Any change in your ethic should take at least a week, perhaps several weeks. In the meantime, not violating your prior ethic builds self-control.

A subset of all this is, of course, relationships and sex. In order to build the virtue of integrity and self-control within our relationships, we need to purposefully limit our behavior, and develop a relationship ethic. We'll talk about those in more detail later.