Reaction: Rescuing Sex from the Christians

Sullivan, Clayton. Rescuing Sex from the Christians. New York, Continuum International Publishing Group. 2006.

(Yeah, yeah, not complete Turabian style.)

I picked this text up originally for commentary on Augustine's views on sex while working on a paper for the History of Christianity I course. I've been working through it on-and-off for a while. Sullivan does a very good job deconstructing Christianity's 2 big errors when it comes to sex: misunderstanding Adam and Eve and building the idea of the divided self. However, his later chapters on various sexual taboos and the Harm Principle seem to go in a different direction than where he appeared to be aiming for in the first part. The problem as he sees it is that Christianity adopted the bourgeois social mores about sex and applied them to everyone.

The first big problem with Christians and sex that he sees is that we have continually read the story of Adam and Eve as historical and having to do with sexual knowledge. He goes through the traditional Augustinian interpretation of Genesis 2-3, exploring how Augustine portrayed the Fall as tainting man's seed, and thus sex itself becomes an act of spreading that taint. He then jumps several centuries to modern popular theologians and show how they continue to read the story as our historical ancestors becoming tainted and passing that taint down through the millennia.

The second mistake of the Christians was the adoption of the body/flesh dualism of the Hellenistic world. This also he traces back to Augustine, from there back to Paul, and from there back to Socrates.

From here, he approaches masturbation, homosexuality, fornication (pre-martial sex), and adultery and deconstructs the traditional prohibitions against them from biblical passages. He then applies the harm principle (what does not harm others isn't bad) and finds that only adultery causes harm to others.

My biggest issue with Sullivan's approach is he first deconstructs the traditional interpretations of various passages of scripture and then approaches the moral questions about sex using an entirely different basis of support. He does not explain why one should abandon scripture as a source of authority and move instead to the harm principle. I am uncertain how likely the more conservative voices that might debate his work are going to be willing to change authorities. Thus, the work felt more a piece justifying a more liberal sexual stance than trying to convince those that hold the more conservative position of their fallacies.