The Delightful Secrets of Sex
Juli Loesch Wiley on Fertility & Contraception
With all the incessant media drooling over the sexual options smorgasbord, with the Gay Summer of 2003 still flickering blue on our TV screens, and with even the Girl Scouts and the YWCA endorsing “safe-sex” training for young girls, people plugged into the mass culture have heard few discordant notes about the sexual revolution—and some have heard, perhaps, only one. Namely, that “the pope” is against it. To whom is sometimes added “the Christian right.” And, especially maddening to the Socially Responsible, “the pope” is even for some reason bizarrely, unaccountably opposed to what even most churches agree is the best thing since One-A-Day vitamins: contraception.
Secular journalists seem to assume that a comprehensive critique of the agenda and the paraphernalia of the sexual revolution is an idiosyncrasy of “the pope” alone. They are unaware that such opposition is only the latest expression of the continuous Judeo-Christian concern for sexual integrity going back to the New Testament and the church fathers, going back in fact to Genesis.
Who bothers to explain, even superficially, the rationale for the (until this century) universal Christian teaching against contraception? The implication is that there are no reasons for the historic Christian position: nothing worth examining, nothing even worth refuting. The believers who do accept the traditional teaching—mostly Catholics, and a minority of them at that—accept it on “blind faith,” and that’s that.
Yet the sexual revolution—the disjointing and dismembering of human sexuality into a heap of fragments to be rearranged into any shape at will—rests upon certain underlying assumptions about the nature and ends of sexuality. It relies upon contraceptive paraphernalia as its necessary technology. I am no professional philosopher, but I can see the urgency of examining the assumptions before taking any stance at all with regard to the technique.
Beyond Primates
Sexually, we resemble baboons. This is, and to a certain extent ought to be, true. But saying it seems like a dig, a put-down.
We know that human sexuality is something like other mammalian sexuality, and at the same time something more. For us, as for apes, mating fulfills an appetitive drive and satisfies an itch. Like other primates, we reproduce sexually. Again like other primates, we use sexual gestures to express affinity or “matedness” or belonging on some level: Our mating patterns order our herd, our group, our community.
But there is still something more than affinity, progeny, and itch. The sacramental view of sexuality was never based on studies of baboon communities or squints at barnyard sex. Christians believe that, first, since we were made in the image and likeness of God, our design is both revelatory and providential. Second, the “honor of the marriage bed” is rooted in the scriptural view of the marital union as showing forth, mysteriously, the love-union of Christ and the Church.
If human sexuality had no designer, then vain is an appeal to honor the design. Furthermore, if there is a design, and the design is already perfectly reflected in our instincts, drives, and appetites, then “honoring the design” should need no special appeal at all: We should expect it to happen automatically.
When Christ, during his ministry here on earth, was asked (in Matthew 19) about the propriety of certain sexual customs, his method was to refer his questioners back to Genesis. He used the argument from design: that the Creator had made the human race male and female, that he had designed them to hold fast together, becoming one flesh. So the design of male and female is a sign of different-sex alliance and fidelity (Gen. 2:18–24) as well as God’s way of making his human creatures fruitful (Gen. 1:28). This is the way it was to be in Eden (literally, “Delight”).
Juli Loesch Wiley is a freelance writer and long-time pro-life activist. She lives with her husband and two sons in Johnson City, Tennessee. She can be reached at jlw509@earthlink.net.
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more on sex from the online archives
23.5—September/October 2010
The Loss of a Christian Understanding of Virginity Is Pure Tragedy by Eleanor Bourg Donlon
28.2—March/April 2015
Man, Woman & the Mystery of Christ
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