Here’s what it sounded like to visit this blog when it first began.
From February 10, 2013, “The problem with evangelical sexual ethics is that we haven’t got any“:
We have a rule, but no ethic. That one rule speaks to good and bad, but cannot speak to better or worse. An ethic needs to be able to guide us about better and worse, and it needs to be able to guide us about why better is better and why worse is worse. It needs to tell us what kind of people we are to become, not just what rules we need to obey. It needs to inform our decisions, not just to demand our compliance.
The clearest indication of the current lack of a coherent sexual ethic is the response of The Enforcers whenever that reasonable and necessary question — why? — is raised. The response is simply to reassert The Rule. That doesn’t answer the question. Nor does it address the reasons for the question. Rules without why — rules without a clear ethic guiding them, explaining them, undergirding and supporting them — cannot produce ethical people, only people who are either obedient or disobedient. Such rules may produce compliance, but cannot produce virtue.
Virtue is even less likely due to the enforcement mechanism that evangelicalism has come to rely on for the single sexual rule it has adopted in lieu of sexual ethics. That enforcement mechanism is “purity culture.”
And there is nothing virtuous, or ethical, about purity culture. There is nothing pure about purity culture. It’s predatory. It’s vicious. It promotes and defends and elevates sin.
Evangelical purity culture and its attendant cult of “modesty” enthrones male lust, inverting what Jesus taught us. “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away,” Jesus said. But purity culture says male eyes are inviolable, so if a man’s eye causes him to sin, then women’s bodies must be torn out and thrown away — or at least covered up and shut away.
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