The Disconnect Between Faith and Sex

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Driving across Nebraska recently, I tuned to a local radio station featuring a conservative religious program. A caller told the radio host how grateful she was for the “prayer before the marriage act” the host had composed.

"Yikes!” I thought. “What better way to throw cold water on ‘the marriage act’ than to say a prayer beforehand!”

My reaction is an example of the obvious disconnect between faith and sex many of us display. (Like many Catholic families, my wife and I have crucifixes hanging above the beds in our bedrooms. Some who sleep there may have a reaction similar to mine about the “prayer-before-the-marriage-act.”)

Many young people identify sex as one of the areas that most turns them off about religion, but when is the last time those of us who go to church have heard the subject mentioned in a homily? Most homilists and professional religious people avoid the topic like they would a poke in the eye.

All-encompassing
So I’m writing about this topic again, not because I’m any kind of expert on sex but because I believe it’s so important in people’s lives and because faith can’t be excluded from any human activity. You can’t have a faith drawer, a work drawer, a play drawer and a sex drawer, as if they were socks or underwear. Faith is all-encompassing.

Among the works to which I’ve referred in past posts on this topic is Donna Freitas’ 2008 book, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses. Its main topic is the “hookup culture” and its effect on students’ “love lives.” She has now published a sequel. I believe much of what she has discovered on college campuses applies to many of us.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the hookup culture involves the practice of casual sex among students, often fueled by alcohol. Freitas’ works result from extensive interviews on college campuses, secular and religious, Catholic and Protestant. Hookups, she found, are pervasive as is students' dissatisfaction with the hookup culture, especially among women.

Donna Freitas

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In a recent article in America Magazine, Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz is quoted as saying that “middle-class heterosexual women have ‘never been so sovereign in terms of their body and emotions’ but ‘emotionally dominated by men in new and unprecedented ways.’”

Student participants in the hookup culture complain about the loss of romance, freedom and dignity it entails. Though many students cite freedom among the benefits of non-participation in religion, the hookup culture has brought little of it. Many students feel compelled into hookups, fearful that they will be considered prudes and irrelevant if maintaining their virginity. Many, Freitas found, long for meaningful, lasting relationships. 

The absence of communication is key to the hookup culture, Freitas writes, just as it often is in the failure of marriages and long-term relationships. Communication creates intimacy and attachment. The more you communicate, the less likely you are to see the other person merely as a sex object. And heavy drinking is a great help in limiting communication.

As I’ve mentioned in past posts on the subject, if religious views on sexuality are messed up, it doesn’t compare to the degree that they’re messed up in society. Casual, gratuitous sex - and all that Freitas in her college interviews found that goes with it – is more and more evident in movies, TV and streaming video and we ignore the obvious consequences, especially for those who are emotionally immature.

Saturated with Sexual Images
We turn our back on the depravity of pornography, ignoring its exploitation of women while pretending to be a generation that honors women. We allow ourselves to be saturated with sexual images in advertising, books and magazines, but get upset out-of-proportion when people with sexual mental health problems violate the confusing signals society sends. As with other mental health problems, instead of helping people, we lock them up and throw away the key.

Is this any less hypocritical than the hypocrisy about which so many complain regarding religion’s view of sexuality?

The bottom line is that people searching for God must include their sexual lives in whatever faith they find. God is not limited to human social or justice issues, politics or human relations. It may not be necessary to pray before “the marriage act,” but it is necessary to view sex as another of God’s incredible gifts and treat it accordingly.