What Does God Really Think About Sex?

By Richard N. Ostling

"I am disgusted." "An abomination." "This report would remove the Bible as the authoritative Word of God, making it merely a guidebook." One after another, participants at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) rose in the Baltimore Convention Center to attack one of the most radical series of proposals on sexual morality ever to come before a major ) Christian denomination. In essence, the church report, three years in preparation, shattered 19 centuries of tradition and asked the church, for the first time, to bestow acceptance upon sex outside of marriage -- for homosexuals, for adult singles living together and, with less enthusiasm, for teenagers. Adultery would be next, critics charged.

No chance of that. By a 534-to-31 vote the Presbyterians last week rejected the controversial report. They also issued an outright disavowal of the practice of homosexuality and affirmed "the sanctity of the marital covenant between one man and one woman." But the raucous debate that led up to the vote, and that will surely follow it, showed that three decades after the sexual revolution started to percolate through American society, the relationship between God and sex is again throwing some of the country's most important religious denominations into turmoil.

Traditionalists are facing off against liberals, married worshipers against singles, homosexuals against heterosexuals, as the churches try to come to grips with the changing life-styles of their adherents. Just as important, liberals in various denominations are struggling to deal with the sexual preference and morality of those who are no longer attending services, convinced that the churches do not speak to their private needs. Among the imminent sexual confrontations:

-- United Church of Christ (1.6 million members). Next week's national synod will discuss how to deal with clergy who are involved in nonmarital relations.

-- Episcopal Church (2.4 million members). In July a national convention will decide between two conflicting proposals on homosexuality. One would allow ordination of actively gay and lesbian priests by local bishops, a practice that is already occurring. The other would explicitly ban nonmarital sex by all clergy.

-- United Methodist Church (8.9 million members). A special panel will issue a report in August on whether the church should continue to declare that homosexual practice violates Christian teaching. An April straw vote indicated that most of the 24 panelists want a change.

-- Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (5.2 million members). The first draft of a proposed new stand on sexual issues like homosexuality and chastity is due next fall. There are early rumblings that the draft might seek reinterpretation of Bible passages dealing with sex.

-- American Baptist Churches (1.5 million members). This denomination will decide at next week's convention whether to develop a policy statement on sexuality, with specific issues to be defined later.

-- Roman Catholic Church (58 million members). America's biggest denomination is also caught in the debate because of members' continuing resistance to Vatican stands on such matters as homosexuality and premarital sex. Two special problems: allegations that many priests break the celibacy rule, and a recent outbreak of pederasty scandals.

The tenet that sex should be confined to marriage is an age-old one inherited from Judaism. It is under assault because of the pressures of modern reality: the sexual precocity of young Americans, the large number of divorced or unmarried adults who have active sex lives, and the growing strength of the gay-rights movement. The issues are hitting hardest at the moderate and liberal "mainline" Protestant denominations that stress toleration and follow social currents. These groups, which have been steadily losing membership, could face further attrition, even outright schism, over sex.

The churches for years have also been under increasing scholarly pressure to treat traditional understandings of Scripture as cultural expressions, subject to change, rather than as God's eternal strictures. Another important factor is the intellectual influence of feminist groups that see traditional Judeo- Christian morality as an expression of patriarchy. In addition, a trend has been emerging in modern moral theology to base judgments concerning sexuality not on absolute rules but on the relative value of each relationship. This approach was promoted as early as 1966 by Episcopal theologian Joseph Fletcher's Situation Ethics: The New Morality. Among the denominations where the pressures are highest:

PRESBYTERIANS

The 2.9 million-member denomination was the first to face the full implications of the sexual revolution. As far back as 1970, a church panel, echoing Fletcher's approach, declared that "sexual expression . . . cannot be confined to the married and about-to-be-married." Irate traditionalists got that year's assembly to reaffirm the sinfulness of adultery, fornication and homosexual practice, but their motion passed by a paper-thin margin.

Since then the Northern and Southern wings of the church have merged, but liberal-conservative differences have continued to simmer. This year's controversial 200-page morality report, Keeping Body and Soul Together, emanated from an official study committee under the Rev. John Carey, religion chair at Agnes Scott College in Georgia. Two members quit early, and one raised charges that the panel was stacked with liberals.

When the document was released last February, it was read avidly -- more than 42,000 copies have been sold -- and with growing ire. Before the Baltimore assembly, more than half the church's 171 administrative districts and 2,000 local congregations had condemned it. The document helped cause something akin to schism at the second largest congregation in the country: Dallas' Highland Park Presbyterian Church. Already alarmed at liberal trends among the national leadership, Highland Park members voted 2,563 to 2,001 last month to quit the denomination altogether. They fell short of a required two- thirds majority, so the church and its $47 million property remain within the official fold. But 1,000 or more dissenters walked out to start a new congregation. Joining them is physician Grady Crosland, who served on the Body and Soul panel and opposed its work. "The denomination is rotten," he snaps. "No use staying around to shoot a rabid dog."

His reaction is typical of the strong feelings roused by the sweeping revisionism of Body and Soul. Among other things, it declares that "there is no single, consistent biblical ethic of sexuality" and instructs the church to "repent" its oppressive morality, which the document deems to be the work of white patriarchal "heterosexists." Forget "rules about who sleeps with whom," it urges, and do not "restrict sexual activity to marriage alone," but celebrate all forms of sexual intimacy, "marital, premarital or postmarital."

Body and Soul is most unorthodox in condoning sex among unmarried heterosexuals. It states that the church should no longer insist on celibacy as "the only moral option for single persons."

On the delicate topic of teenage sex, the document advises youngsters to make decisions on the basis of "mutuality," "consent" and "maturity." Marilyn Washburn, a clergywoman-physician and dissenting member of the sex panel, considers it "tragic" that the report never tells teens that "there is no perfect means of birth control and that condoms do not prevent sexually transmitted diseases."

The document is ambiguous in its pronouncements on sex within marriage. It redefines fidelity as a learning process in which spouses renegotiate the relationship "as needs and desires change." At the same time, the report omits any mention of the Seventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." This lapse caused conservatives to declare that the document opens the door to extramarital sex, a charge that committee members deny.

In line with trends in other mainline denominations, the Presbyterian report asked church members to repeal legislation from the 1970s that bars sexually active gays and lesbians from the clergy. That too was rejected. Nonetheless, the assembly may have reflected the extent to which the sexual revolution has infiltrated the ranks by refusing to include in its final resolutions a clause that condemned all intercourse outside marriage as "not in conformity with God's will."

EPISCOPALIANS

At next month's convention, an official commission, chaired by Rhode Island's Bishop George Hunt, is proposing that the church endorse the view that homosexuality is a "God-given" state and that gay relationships are "holy, life-giving and grace-filled." The panel wants the church to develop blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples and allow local bishops to ordain actively homosexual clergy.

Some bishops are already doing so. Two weeks ago, Bishop Ronald Haines of Washington ordained the Rev. Elizabeth Carl, 44, who is living openly with a lesbian partner. Haines acted despite pressure from the denomination's Presiding Bishop, Edmond Browning, who is sympathetic to the gay cause but wished to avoid the controversy. The action drew a pained comment from the capital's premier Episcopal churchgoer, President George Bush: "Perhaps I'm a little old-fashioned, but I'm not quite ready for that."

Nor are many others. The Episcopal convention will debate a conservative counterblast from 60 bishops, led by William Frey, dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambler, Pa. The proposal would amend canon law to place all clergy "under the obligation to abstain from sexual relations outside of Holy Matrimony." Observes Frey: "Many of us believe that the sexual revolution has run its course, leaving in its wake thousands of broken marriages, a sharp rise in teenage pregnancies, millions of convenience- motivated abortions, a multibillion-dollar pornography industry and a mushrooming AIDS epidemic. What could be better news than the proclamation that there is a better way?" Bishop Hunt predicts a close vote.

METHODISTS

+ The church's panel on homosexuality is stirring a ruckus even before its report is written. James Holsinger, medical director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, quit the study committee last February because he felt certain its conclusions would follow liberal lines. But "nothing is fixed," says the Rev. Nancy Yamasaki of Spokane, the committee chair, who is publicly noncommittal. The panel's recommendations will undergo administrative review before reaching next year's nationwide General Conference.

Any revolutionary Methodist proposal is likely to rely on the thinking of Victor Paul Furnish of Southern Methodist University and other liberal Bible scholars. According to their various reinterpretations, the Old Testament forbids homosexual behavior as part of a code, including laws and rituals, that Christians no longer observe. As for New Testament abjurations against the practice, particularly St. Paul's strong injunctions, revisionist scholars claim that the prohibitions were aimed only against pederasty and homosexual acts by persons who were naturally heterosexual. In any event, the argument runs, the apostle would have been more understanding if he knew as much about human sexual variance as moderns do.

Holsinger thinks Methodism could lose millions of members if an upheaval in church policy is ever approved. But Julian Rush of Denver, a pioneer gay Methodist minister, says, "I don't expect any change in my lifetime. The church won't lead the way on gays. It has to come from society into the church."

The debate over sexual morality is least strident in the nation's growing Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches, in which literalist interpretations of the Bible are embraced and heterosexual marriage is the only state in which sex is without sin. Nonetheless, these groups are taking part in the debate from the sidelines. Two weeks ago, the 15 million-member Southern Baptist Convention pleaded for "all Christians to uphold the biblical standard of human sexuality against all onslaughts."

No institution has backed traditional morals more ardently than the Roman Catholic Church, particularly under Pope John Paul II. But within the U.S. branch of the church, there are stirrings nonetheless. The most unorthodox to date was a 1977 study commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America. Like this year's Presbyterian panel, the Catholic thinkers who took part declared there could be instances in which homosexual, premarital and unwed sex were moral. The group was even unwilling to outlaw adultery flatly, though it urged "extreme caution" for priests who face the issue. The views flew in the face of Vatican pronouncements made a year earlier, and the doctrine committee of the U.S. bishops later issued an unusual attack on the study. But since the mid-1970s, National Opinion Research Center polls have shown that rank-and-file U.S. Catholics are consistently more liberal than Protestants on the issue of premarital sex. The latest finding: 84% of Catholics do not always find it wrong, vs. 69% of Protestants.

Catholicism, of course, has a unique sex policy for its priests and nuns: celibacy. The debate over that tradition has heated up of late, through the exposure of a variety of sex scandals and admissions that the stricture is widely ignored. A Star Tribune newspaper poll last April, for example, revealed that one-fifth of Minnesota priests admit to violating their vows. But Cincinnati's Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, president of the U.S. hierarchy, still contends, "At a time when the whole of our culture is saying you've got to have sexual fulfillment and sexual activity, I think it's important for the church to give witness that that is not necessary for a productive and full human life."

The notion of the church as a bulwark against America's voracious sexual culture is also taken up by Bishop Frey, leader of the Episcopal traditionalists. In a letter to fellow prelates he argues that "one of the most attractive features of the early Christian communities . . . was their radical sexual ethic and their deep commitment to family values. These things . . . drew many people to them who were disillusioned by the promiscuous excesses of what proved to be a declining culture. Wouldn't it be wonderful for our Church to find such countercultural courage today?"

But as the pressures and practices of modern society continue to evolve, issues of right and wrong in sex, that most intricate aspect of human existence, are likely to become even more perplexing to most Americans. And now churches that once served as sources of clear moral guidance are likewise grappling uncertainly with these issues as they try to decide whether their sexual standards will derive from biblical tradition or the fluid folkways of modernity.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Charts

From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on June 4-5 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.

CAPTION: Question asked of people who worship:

Is It always wrong for. . .

. . . an unmarried adult to have sex?

. . . an unmarried teenager to have sex?

. . . a married person to have sex with someone other than his or her spouse?

Should religious groups bar sexually active gays or lesbians from the clergy?

Is it always wrong for two men to have sex with each other?

With reporting by Barbara Dolan/Chicago, Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta and Leslie Whitaker/New York