Why Are Christians Obsessed with Sex?

Some people are worried about Christian/evangelical higher education and think the current climate of gay marriage and transgenderism may be the one that forces religious institutions either to conform or to resist. Either way, they lose their identity or their legitimacy.

Near as I can tell, Carl Trueman kicked off the worried blog posts:

Thus, for Christian educational institutions, the way ahead may be very hard. It will not simply be a matter of budgeting without federal loans. It could easily become a matter of budgeting without not-for-profit status. That double whammy is likely to annihilate many of those institutions which refuse to accommodate themselves to the dominant sexual culture. And that means that educators may need to look to new models of pursuing their callings.

Alan Jacobs picked up on Trueman’s warning to express greater alarm:

The people who argue that Christian institutions should support the modern left’s model of sexual ethics or else suffer a comprehensive shunning do not think of themselves as opponents of religion. And they are not, given their definition of religion, which is “a disembodied, Gnostic realm of private worship and thought”. But that is not what Christianity is. Christianity intrinsically, necessarily involves embodied action in the public world. And this the secular left cannot and will not tolerate, if it can help it, because it rightly understands that Christianity stands opposed to the secular left’s own gospel, which, popular opinion notwithstanding, is not essentially about sex but rather may be summed up as: “I am my own.”

All this to say that while I agree with Trueman that Christian institutions need to plan for a dark financial future, I also believe that the Christian community as a whole needs to plan for a future in which most or all of its educational institutions have been forced either to close or to accommodate themselves to Gnostic disembodiment. What does Christian formation — paideia and catechesis — look like in a world in which many of the institutions that have long supported that formation have been shut down or substantively eviscerated?

Then Rod Dreher added his fears:

What is it going to take for us conservative Christians to realize that we can’t keep living like this? Is it going to take watching our college and universities either capitulate or be forced to close? Because Alan Jacobs is right: it is coming.

What will we do then? How will we explain to ourselves why we wasted this time in which we could have been making alternative plans, and getting ready for the time of trial ahead?

Here’s maybe not THE but a thing: the #metoo moment may be one when Christians can make a case for a coherent sexual ethic when it sure looks like the wider society wants one. Consider the plight of Aziz Ansari and the seemingly arbitrary standards his accusers are using, explained by Damon Linker:

In a workplace, expectations regarding interactions among employees are clearly defined by law and binding regulations. That makes it possible to define sexual misconduct with some precision as a violation of those expectations. But Grace didn’t work for Ansari, and they weren’t coworkers. He had no authority over her at all (beyond the authority she may have invested in him by virtue of his celebrity). In that open-ended context of two people who decided to go home together, describing his actions as “sexual misconduct” sounds vaguely Orwellian — as a transgression against norms that are presumed to be binding on all despite the fact that they have yet to be defined.

I am not so delusional as to think that Hollywood or millennials or universities will adopt Christian norms about sex and marriage. But I can well imagine that the institutions that accredit evangelical colleges and universities might in the near term be sympathetic — even amazed — a policies that provide a reasonably stable norm for judging appropriate sexual interaction. If accreditor are already in the business of evaluating schools according to mission statements, why would they be any less amenable — in this environment — to giving evangelical colleges independence to implement moral standards that dovetail with religious mission?

Here the problem is not the terror of sexual libertines, but what success, even flourishing, has done to evangelical schools. Consider what is going on at Moody Bible Institute where officials have resigned over concerns about the direction of the school. As the Underground Pilgim explains:

From Moody and Wheaton to Houghton, BIOLA, Fuller and other institutions, the desire for accreditation and respect has led to certain compromises with the secular academy. To borrow from a chapter heading in Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided there have been certain compromises made in the realm of intellectual respectability and Scripture.

It is inevitable that not only will the tenured faculty be susceptible to cultural influence but unless a rigorous gate-keeping system is erected, those with less than solid views of Scripture would creep in.

. . . Regarding Moody, here is the dilemma. If you’re a conservative Evangelical or someone leaning toward the Fundamentalist spectrum, why would you consider Moody? If they have a reputation for being less than solid, why invest the time and money? Serious students of that stripe are going to affiliate with institutions that will strengthen already existing faith-structures and prepare them to function within that limited ecclesiastical sphere.

For those more broad-minded, which in this case is not necessarily a compliment, for those seeking academic challenge and/or seeking credentials, why pick Moody? Why not go to Duke, Union, Yale or Princeton? If you want your degree to grant you access to wider academic endeavour, Moody is less than impressive.

Then there is the case of Calvin College and the demands that branding place on an institution’s mission:

I will use as my example, and it’s not an exceptional one, my Alma Mater Calvin College. It may be that there was an office of Marketing with Branding guidelines when I was a student there in the 80’s (although I doubt it), but scant attention was paid to it. Professors who were there then have no memory of it now. What we did have when I was a student there were excellent professors who knew their stuff and taught it well. We had a logo we took some pride in, but in the main we went to Calvin because of its tradition. Indeed, I never even visited the campus before matriculating. Some might have considered Calvin “parochial,” immersed in church politics and defending a particular orthodoxy, but it is also what made Calvin “distinctive.”

Did Calvin lose its distinctiveness because it became obsessed with branding or did it become obsessed with branding because it lost its distinctiveness? Or are they unrelated? I can’t really say.

What I can say is that a school that unapologetically sustained a tradition shifted its emphasis to be like all the other schools “with a difference” (which meant a difference that didn’t really matter). The core curriculum got hollowed out. Admissions standards were watered down. A school that had provided an excellent liberal arts education inflated to 127 majors and programs with the concomitant incoherence and balkanization. (That’s one major or program for every 30 students. In general, a liberal arts college should have no more than 20 such majors and programs.)

The point is that success is as threatening if not more so than sex. Shouldn’t the worriers worry more about that?

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