Look to the gospels, not the pope
Celibate men have had too great a say in sexual ethics, yet there are things in the gospels that can help Christians get it right
Some people, many of whom comment regularly here, would say that I don't have a right to an opinion. My own personal life is too strange, alien – and in the eyes of many of them – deeply sinful for anything I might say about sexual ethics or Christianity to be relevant to other people's concerns. My quite conclusive disillusion with the Christian beliefs I once held – my refusal to regard the New Testament as anything more than a book – should oblige me to butt out of the arguments inside Christianity about what a Christian sexual ethic might be.
For such people, anything I might say is going to be self-serving, perverse and just plain wrong. All I can do is point out to them that we are all supposed, according to those texts, to worry about the beam in our own eye, and not the dust in someone else's. And I have found as much loving kindness and as little selfish cruelty among trans people, lesbians and the kink community as among even the better sort of believer – "to live outside the law you must be honest". And one of the best ways for a kink trans dyke atheist – who may for all I know be going straight to hell – to pay attention to my own behaviour is to read the gospels
You don't have to be a believer to know how many phrases, and the clever thoughts behind them, come straight out of the gospels. Fewer and fewer of us are Christians, and yet we still quote the man Jesus. Many good things in our society come historically from that tradition, even if they could equally well have come from elsewhere: individual conscience, compassion for outsiders and so on. That is why it is shocking and shameful that Christians have been responsible for so much that is cruel and degrading in our culture's sexual ethics.
Part of the problem is that celibate male intellectuals – from Paul and Augustine to the current pope – have had far too great a say in it. A sexual ethic that is concerned to be, at the same time, a useful metaphor for the relationship between God and the institution of the church, or for God and the soul, is not going to make a terribly good fist of talking about actual shagging. Especially if the person talking has little or no experience. A sexual ethics that talks of "the theology of the body" is not going to talk very effectively about blow jobs and safe words.
Yet there are things in the gospels that might help Christians get it – if not right – at least less catastrophically wrong than a lot of churchmen seem to. Some of these things involve very simple and uninterpreted applications of Jesus's words – loving your neighbour as yourself probably does not mean trying to get people executed for gay sex, and yet so many professed Christians in Africa think it does, and far too many Christians in the US and UK either cheer them on, or engage in quiet diplomacy. Did Jesus hand rocks to the mob about to stone a woman caught in adultery? No. Was it quiet diplomacy when Jesus drove moneylenders out of the Temple forecourt? Probably not.
Loving your neighbour as yourself – if you really do it – doesn't really go with rape or sexism, for one thing. A sexual ethic that was about a positive empathic and egalitarian habit of mind, rather than a set of acts you are supposed to avoid, might occasionally be muddle-headed, but it would not be cruel or exploitative.
Saying that there are sorts of love that are sinful in themselves – "an intrinsic moral disorder" – is a good way of chivvying people towards despair. People who despair of themselves are more likely to do terrible, selfish things – and leading people towards that despair is making yourself responsible, in part, for what they do.
Jesus thought some sins important – failure to feed the hungry and heal the sick, of course, but also hypocrisy and its mirror image spiritual pride. Setting an intellectualised standard of morality rather than working with the actual likely behaviour of people, condemning sins to which you are not personally tempted – these have been what my catechism teacher taught me to avoid as occasions of sin. Pastors who set their flocks and themselves a standard that even they cannot keep up with are not only making grubby idiots of themselves, they are leading other people towards hatred and violence. Jesus's angry mockery of the Pharisees was not just a rebuke to a sect – he was talking about the self-serving prig in all of us.
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