ESSAY

By Richard Brookhiser

The Protestant churches seem obsessed with sex these days. Not that their interest in the subject is new. Puritan disquisitions on sex were so plainspoken that early 20th century editions of them had to be bowdlerized. But the terms of today's discussion are revolutionary -- not Why do men sin? but Why shouldn't they party? Traditional strictures against homosexuality, premarital sex (once called fornication), even adultery, are up for theological debate. The Presbyterians in conclave assembled gave thumbs down to the new morality; the Episcopalians gave thumbs sideways; the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will not be far behind in giving their thumb signals. Bees do it; do Wasps?

Roman Catholics have caught the bug too (as in so many other areas, liberal American Catholics find themselves playing catch-up with their Protestant soul mates). Their arguments over sex are complicated by the fact that the Vatican, the ultimate source of authority in their church, is not known for taking its cues on matters of discipline from Gallup polls or what it hears on Oprah. Or from Protestants.

The obvious secular explanation for this hubbub is that America's churches are internalizing the mores of a developed society. Once the automobile, the college dorm and the Pill became almost universally available, it was inevitable that men and women would start their sexual careers earlier and build up longer and more varied resumes. It was also inevitable that the churches would adjust to the new reality. If that meant adjusting traditional interpretations of the Ten Commandments, so be it.

Like most obvious secular explanations, this one is shallow. American churches don't just passively receive ideas from the general culture. They also stimulate them. (Thomas Jefferson wrote about the "wall of separation" between church and state in a letter to a group of Baptist political allies.) If America's pews ring with debate about America's bedrooms, that is because the churches have their own reasons for grappling with the subject.

What we are witnessing is in fact a clash between two earnest and articulated theological impulses. Traditionalists and innovators disagree about sex because they disagree about the universe, and about God.

Defenders of tradition are often accused of blindly upholding the social status quo. That is selling them short. Even the most conservative American churches have assailed aspects of the status quo, from dueling to saloons to the 12-hour workday. Instead the sexual conservatives see themselves as defending divinely given guides to human behavior. Fundamentalists look for these instructions primarily in scripture, such as St. Paul's comments on homosexuality. Conservatives who are not fundamentalists can agree that the God who made covenants with ancient Israel and with the church wants sexuality to be restricted to the covenant of matrimony.

The sexual radicals, on the other hand, are not simply looking for divine justifications to make whoopee. They represent the latest phase of a 200-year evolution of German and American Romantic theology, which sees God not as a transcendent Other, giving us texts or examples, but as the ground of our being. God, the Romantics believe, is within us; the purpose of religion is to enable us to make contact with him (or her). As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Unitarian minister turned essayist and lecturer, put it, "That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen." A century after Emerson, his heirs have decided that self-fortification can come through sex -- gay or straight, married or un-. Today's Romantics say, with Walt Whitman, "God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night."

These two positions are not intellectual fashion statements that track rises or falls in the incidence of sleeping around. Nor are they matters of degree, which can be compromised by living and letting live. Their proponents face each other across a fissure in philosophical bedrock.

Each side also faces internal contradictions in its own position. The question the radicals must answer is, Why are they Christians at all? Many radicals argue that the way to religious empowerment was pioneered by Jesus as if he were a kind of Kit Carson of the soul. But who needs pioneers once the frontier is opened? It often seems that the radicals cling to Jesus for the sake of the name ID and some pretty 19th century buildings erected in his name.

Traditionalists, meanwhile, must realize (and some do) that even if they are willing to defy the spirit of the age, they cannot ignore it. Churches that tell their flocks to live a traditional sexual life, without helping them find alternatives to the singles scene or the gay subculture, are meeting their responsibilities less than halfway.

Unbelievers have an interest in this religious faction fight, if only because so much social policy revolves around sex and its consequences. Are America's Christians (still more than 85% of the population, according to a recent survey) going to order their erotic lives by rules and their inevitable accompaniment, guilt? Are they going to order their erotic lives at all? Samuel Johnson once contrasted preachers who deplored intoxication because it "debases reason, the noblest faculty of man," with preachers who warned drinkers that "they may die in a fit of drunkenness." (Johnson preferred the preachers who did not mince words.) If America gets a generation of preachers who boost sex because it gets you close to God, how will that affect the number of single-parent families or of AIDS cases?

Meanwhile, the disputants are primarily motivated not by policy considerations, but by what they believe to be right. That is what makes this fight so all-American, and so angry.