The Christian Right, as both Dagmar Herzog and the Republican nomination of
Sarah Palin make abundantly clear, is not anti-sex. “We are the ones with
the babe on the ticket”, gushes the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.
“Run to the arms of your prince and enter your dream”, advises the author,
media star and abstinence-before-marriage advocate Lisa Bevere in her book
Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry, on sale at Palin’s old Pentecostal
church in Wasilla. Evangelical conservatives have outflanked their enemies:
“Christian sex”, and not what the revolutionaries of the 1960s had to offer,
turns out to be “the most amazing sex on God’s Green earth”.
All of this is not really surprising. Protestantism from the very beginning
defined itself as being, roughly speaking, on the side of sexuality. Being
married, the Reformers argued, was not second best; the putative celibacy of
Catholic priests, monks and nuns was not only theologically misguided but
also a front for hypocrisy and perversion. Methodism was attacked in the
eighteenth century for being too sexy; what else was one to make of all its
excited talk about “love feasts”? And even if, in early twentieth-century
America, the peccadilloes of preachers were not exactly condoned, they were
explicable as the all too human failures of men in a world where passion
might well break its bounds. God forgives sinners. Still, there was
something new going on in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
The Bible Belt South of Herzog’s youth (she is the daughter and granddaughter
of Protestant pastors) was, for her, “a sensual and beautiful place” in
which sexuality was treated with tolerant indulgence and generosity. In
general she is right that there has been a radical change in how these
matters enter the public sphere: from being questions of private morality,
they have become the province of psychology, physiology and sociology. For
the Evangelical Right, premarital intercourse and adultery and even
homosexuality have become not so much wrong as injurious to mind, body and
society. Even the Right’s arguments about abortion are often now less about
whether it is an act of murder than about whether social science finds it
harmful. Despite there being “no reliable data to measure the phenomenon”,
Justice Kennedy supported his vote to weaken Roe vs Wade with the
observation that “severe depression and loss of esteem can follow” from
ending a pregnancy.
In other words, the religious Right created late twentieth-century sexual
politics on the coat tails of the secular Enlightenment’s ways of arguing.
Even if the state could not be asked to legislate morality – although in the
view of the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this is precisely what it
is and should be doing when, for example, it makes sodomy illegal – it did
have a clear role in furthering the psychological and physical well-being of
its citizens and, indeed, of people all over the world. It is by
secularizing sex that the religious Right made it so central to politics.
Fragments of Herzog’s story are well known, but, put together, the sheer mass
of “intrusive and insidious”, “mean and manipulative” regulatory
interventions in matters that seem, in another register, to be so intimate
and individual, is, as she says, unnerving. This is a book by an anguished
Christian looking at what some aspects of her faith have wrought.
The promise of “soulgasm” – seemingly endless, barely disguised soft-core
pornographic incitements to desire that fuel the politics of sex – is at the
heart of this book. Timothy LaHaye, the bestselling author of the Rapture
novels about how the righteous will suddenly be lifted off the earth,
leaving the rest of us behind – and puzzled – had an earlier life selling
millions of copies of a book that held out the “titanic emotional and
physical explosion” of the act of marriage for those who followed its
advice. Many Evangelicals tout the Song of Solomon as a guide to genital
stimulation. There are bookshelves of this stuff. One volume of the popular
“Every Man” series tells men to “starve your eyes and eliminate ‘junk sex’”
so that they will more deeply crave “‘real food’ – your wife”, while another
advocates “equity orgasm” and teaches the exercises women can do to obtain
it. (Equity pay is not on the agenda.) None of this is very different from
what can be read in the magazines at any supermarket checkout counter,
except that it so blatantly produces what it then attempts to manage. A
teenage boy in one tract confesses how he was home alone with his
sister-in-law who had fallen asleep on her belly while watching television.
The crease of her buttocks peeks out of her tight jeans. His imagination
gets the better of him; he masturbates. Then the warning: he is spoiling his
chances for future happy marital orgasm. This is all, in some measure,
familiar eighteenth-century stuff, but it is now mobilized far more
extensively, systematically and in the public sphere.
Homosexuality, for example, becomes for the Evangelical Right the “disgusting
opposite” of the luridly attractive marital pleasures of soulgasm. The
shrillness of its homophobia can still shock: the prominent preacher Pat
Robinson warned that disaster would befall Orlando, Florida, because its
city council allowed the “rainbow flag” to be flown in God’s face (“You’re
right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving
those flags in God’s face if I were you”); the problem with homosexuality,
declared the chief of staff of a prominent senator, is that sperm “swim into
feces during anal sex”. Few people go as far as the Primitive Baptist
preacher Fred Phelps, who carries signs saying that “God hates Fags”,
because evangelical leaders had decided explicitly at a series of meetings
in 1992 that they would have to “de-religify” their prejudices and express
them in the language of psychology: homosexuality is an addiction, increases
promiscuity and hence the spread of disease, causes depression, is
associated with substance abuse, and so on. It is curable. And even if it is
not, those “biologically” programmed to be gay are still responsible for
their actions just as criminals are, if it were to turn out that anti-social
behaviour is genetically determined. The Defense of Marriage Act in 1997 was
the high-water mark of the right-wing wave on this topic.
Homophobia has not gone away, but the Evangelical Right’s energies have
shifted to a new cause: abstinence, domestic and foreign. At home, the
emphasis has been on “abstinence education”, now taught in 50 per cent of
public schools – and many private schools as well – at a cost of several
hundred million federal dollars each year and more from individual states.
Its claim on the public purse is, once again, made on generally secular
grounds: premarital abstinence prevents disease and births out of wedlock to
unprepared parents as well as preserving boys and girls for the true
pleasures of marital love. Sex is worth waiting for. And for teens who fail,
it holds out “secondary virginity”, which can just about restore hormones
and the body to good health. Abstinence education abroad means, basically,
not allowing US foreign assistance to be spent on distributing condoms in
the battle against AIDS, instead offering good advice to not have sex and to
avoid prostitutes. The Right is helped in its endeavours by people such as
Janet Museveni, First Lady of Uganda, who gives her Evangelical beliefs an
anti-imperialist twist: the West rejects abstinence education because it
doesn’t believe Africans can control their sexual urges. Some Evangelicals,
Rick Warren for example, who recently quizzed both presidential candidates
on their religious views, send thousands of missionaries to Africa who offer
medicines, care and counsel, but still no condoms to prevent disease.
Herzog does a brilliant job in putting together an ugly and complex picture of
“the new sexual revolution” of the Christian Right and especially of its
impact in the public sphere. One understands why the evidence she brings to
light has unnerved her as a Christian and a citizen. But why, exactly, sex
is more deeply enmeshed now in the political life of America than at any
time in its history remains puzzling. The four reasons she offers do not
quite work, and she herself does not seem committed to them.
It is not the case, as Herzog suggests briefly at the beginning of her book,
that the revolution she writes about is fuelled by repression. The soft-porn
confessional advice literature she quotes is an incitement of desire on an
unprecedented scale. The supposed crisis of sexuality in society more
generally does not offer much of an answer either. Maybe the endless parade
of articles about twenty proven techniques towards better fellatio or the
pleasures of sex in the age of Viagra that fill ordinary magazines in every
corner of ordinary life does reflect – or create – a new level of anxiety.
But there has never been a time when people – at least the literate who
wrote and read about these matters – weren’t anxious about sex. Even
heightened anxiety in society at large does not account for a parallel
universe of sexual politics on the Evangelical Right.
Sex is also not an easy way to manipulate politics, as Herzog suggests. She
showed in a clever earlier book, Sex After Fascism: Memory and morality in
twentieth-century Germany (2005), that even those master manipulators the
Nazis did not have much success in shaping the libidos of their subjects,
however much the German generation of the 1960s might have thought
otherwise. Finally, I do not think that the blame can be laid at the feet of
liberals who have supposedly failed to mount a strong defence of individual
rights. Liberals – progressives might be a better term – were the ones to
put sexual education on school curricula in the first place, on the grounds
that knowing about sex was in the interests of hygiene and public health.
One can argue, as Herzog effectively does, that abstinence education or
prohibiting the distribution of condoms as a means of preventing HIV
infection is bad public policy. Study after study supports this view:
telling teenagers to wait until marriage is ineffective; condoms do prevent
AIDS. But those of us who supported sex education in middle school (my
daughter was shown how to put a condom on a cucumber in seventh grade)
cannot claim that these matters are of only individual concern. At issue
here – abortion rights and gay marriage are another matter – are not
individual rights but a view of what children should be taught and how a
disease should be managed. The case cannot be made on principle.
Europe, as Herzog notes with a sense of longing and envy, is mercifully free
of the disputes about sexual morality that embroil the United States. No
right-wing leader in Europe would touch the issues that are daily fare on
the political pages in the US. Margaret Thatcher may have used her
femininity to further her cause, but “Hoosiers for Hot Chicks” – a sign held
by the Indiana delegation at the Republican Convention – is untranslatable
into any other political culture’s language.
Nevertheless, liberal, laicized Europe has its sexual disputes, and they are
not always pretty. Muslims are blamed for the rise of homophobic attacks in
the Netherlands, while those seeking citizenship are required to acclimatize
themselves to local mores by watching gay men kissing. Views about Islam and
about sexuality, and not just the separation of Church and state, lie at the
core of the fierce French debates about headscarves and veils.
The unprecedented centrality of sexual politics in contemporary America has
both local and more general causes. In the first place, the resurgence of
biblical fundamentalism as a quasi-autonomous movement has a part in this:
the Southern Baptist Convention declared that homosexuality was
“unbiblical”, not unhealthy. Of course, this claim (like the arguments from
Scripture deployed against the theory of evolution during the twentieth
century), was not made in a social vacuum, but it was not made in a
theological vacuum either. Fundamentalism is the other side of a debate
about interpretive strategies that are at the heart of liberal
Protestantism.
Of course we might wonder why homosexuality has become so central to many
conservatives when in fact Jesus was entirely silent on the subject, St Paul
has only a few cryptic references, and the Old Testament’s one injunction
against gay sex is among hundreds that Christians ignore. But this is not
the first time in the history of Protestantism that a relatively obscure and
little-noticed passage of Scripture has assumed what outsiders might regard
as undue importance. If one is to argue against fundamentalist readings, one
has to do it from within, as many Southern Baptists and others are indeed
doing.
It is a myth that the Evangelical Right had its origins in opposition to Roe
vs Wade. Fears about church taxation and about efforts to abolish school
prayers were there from the start. But there is no doubt that the question
of abortion, as part of a more widespread reaction to what Evangelicals call
“secular humanism”, has enormously fuelled debate about sex more generally.
And there is also little question that sexual morality hs come to play a far
larger part in contemporary Christianity worldwide than it has played for
centuries. It would have seemed inconceivable twenty years ago that the
Anglican communion, with African bishops leading the forces of schism, would
be tearing itself apart over the ordination of homosexual bishops, although
it did get a taste of things to come during the crisis over the ordination
of women during the 1970s and subsequently.
Why this is the case might be understood in two further contexts. The first –
the foundation of what Herzog describes as the oddly instrumental as opposed
to moral arguments of the evangelical Right – goes back to Thomas Malthus.
He argued that sexual desire was irrepressible and indescribably
pleasurable, but at the same time that it was deadly unless very carefully
managed. Sex meant children; children added to “population”; population grew
geometrically; resources arithmetically; death would right the balance.
Malthus was the one who put reproduction at the very heart of social policy,
where Herzog finds it.
Nineteenth-century thinkers proposed two ways out of the “Malthusian scissors”
(whether endless economic growth remains a third was and is still not
clear). The first – what Malthus himself called “moral restraint”, ie not
having sex – was less than attractive to the average man or woman. The
second, inconceivable to him but the core of the neo-Malthusian programme,
meant separating sex from reproduction and, arguably, even from marriage. In
other words, break what had long seemed a connection writ in nature and at
the heart of human communities. Sex could exist for private pleasure and be
simply a private matter: reproducing the social order was another matter.
This is a view of enormous consequence. The American liberal commentator
Walter Lippmann wrote in 1929 that “birth control was the most revolutionary
practice in the history of sexual morals”, and conservatives of his day
agreed. Today’s battles over abstinence and homosexual marriage are arguably
less shrill than the fierce battles over birth control in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, when civilization itself seemed to
hang in the balance.
Sex has, over the past two centuries, become much more of a private matter
than it ever had been before, and the politics of the 1960s did its part in
clearing the legal ground to make this so. But the Evangelical Right
recognized that it was also, and always had been, a profoundly public
matter. It is, and was, that aspect of our common human existence on which
tectonic shifts in Western and perhaps global history are and were
represented and fought through. In late antiquity, in the Reformation, and
perhaps today, great changes are writ on and through the body.
The problem with the Evangelical agenda that Herzog exposes in all its detail
is not primarily, as she suggests, that it will reverse or has already
reversed the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Americans are having as much or
more premarital and extramarital sex as they ever were; what people do in
bed is remarkably resilient in the face of all but the most concerted state
efforts. (Pro-natalism, for example, almost never works; an anti-natalist
campaign with the full panoply of punitive measures, as in China, perhaps
does.) At the core of Sex in Crisis is a debate about what kind of a world
Americans want to live in. An Evangelical “babe” on the ticket of a major
political party as a candidate to be “a heartbeat away” from the presidency
suggests that the debate is going in one direction. The fact that
Proposition 8, an effort to amend the California constitution so as to
prohibit gay marriage, is failing in the polls – especially now that it has
been rephrased on the ballot as a question of taking away a right that
people already have – gives hope that it is tilting in the other. Dagmar
Herzog’s book really is about what her subtitle claims: “the future of
American politics”.
Dagmar Herzog
SEX IN CRISIS
The new sexual revolution and the future of American politics
320pp. Basic Books. $26.95; distributed in the UK by Grantham Book Services.
£15.99.
978 0 465 00214 6
Thomas Laqueur teaches History at the University of California,
Berkeley. His book Solitary Sex: A cultural history of masturbation was
published in 2003.
