Just Say No To Sex

Thursday, May 03, 2007 @ 07:44 AM

I've been a Catholic all my life. I've been baptized, received first communion, and confirmation, and married in the Catholic church. I'll never forget attending the obligatory pre-marital counseling sessions in which the priest explained the "official" Catholic teaching about sex. According to church doctrine, marriage is the only acceptable form of sexual release, and there were even limits within marriage. It was even suggested that a husband who made love to often to his wife could be labeled an adulterer! I had visions in my head about the all the nasty black spots on my soul from the sex I had been enjoying up to then that had included contraception, oral sex, and sex between myself and other women.

And there was also a little voice in the back of my head that kept saying "Is THIS the definition between right and wrong; crotch-based moral values? Why does it always seem to begin and end with sex? As a Christian, it seems to me that the conservatives have turned Jesus into something else; something that Barbara Ehrenreich spoke about in her best selling book about the working class in the United States. She went to a revival meeting attended primarily by poor people at which the preacher emphasized going to heaven by believing in the substitutionary atonement of Jesus and comments:

"It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth."

She concludes: "I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher's metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole."

I keep seeing that picture of Jesus gagged and tethered in my head, while the fundies and the conservative Catholics preach on and on, with a background chorus of "Oh Mary conceived without sin" playing. And I keep wondering; is the Social Gospel completely dead among most Christians? Has religion been turned on it's head by the religious right?