If you were like me, you grew up with strong
elements of Purity Culture taught by the Evangelical, Fundamentalist, or
sometimes by just traditional mainline churches. It wasn’t exactly taught to me by my local
church, but the religious culture around me told me that sex and my body were
to be observed with all kinds of guilt and shame. It was thick in little, old Metamora,
Illinois. That Purity Culture left me
sufficiently broken around issues like sexuality. I have a hard time accepting myself as a
sexual being, seeing my body as a beautiful thing, knowing sensuality and sex
as good and right and an incredible gift.
I grew up believing that all things
involving sex were the ultimate sins.
Linda Kay Klein is an author who has
spent much of her adult life trying to help individuals break free and recover
from Purity Culture. Here is how she
defines it:
In purity culture,
gender expectations are based on a strict, stereotype-based binary. Men are
expected to be strong, “masculine” leaders of the household, church, and (to a
lesser extent) society. Women are expected to support them—to be pretty,
“feminine,” sweet, supportive wives and mothers.
Sexual expectations vary
by gender. Everyone is expected to maintain absolute sexlessness before
marriage (that means no sexual thoughts, feelings, or actions). And upon
marriage, they are expected to flip their sexuality on like a light switch.
However, men are taught their minds are evil, whereas women are taught their
bodies are evil. That is to say, men’s thoughts and actions are said to be
either pure or impure, while women themselves are
said to be either pure or impure. Sexual metaphors abound: A “pure” woman is
compared to a brand new shiny car while an “impure” one is compared to a used
car that everyone around town has already driven and that isn’t worth much
anymore; a “pure” woman is compared to a delicious hamburger just set down on
the table while an “impure” woman is compared to the last slobbery bite of that
hamburger, etc.
Purity culture also
teaches that women are responsible for the sexual thoughts, feelings and
choices men make, and so must dress, walk and talk in just the right way so as
not to “inspire” sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions in them. If they do
“inspire” such thoughts, they are said to be a “stumbling block” – literally a
thing over which men trip on their pathway to God. To avoid stumbling blocks,
men are taught to train their minds using strategies such as “bouncing their
eyes” when they see something that brings out a sexual thought or feeling—such
as a woman’s cleavage in an advertisement or the knee of the woman sitting
beside them at church.[1]
Klein goes on to say that this Purity Culture is
deeply rooted in nationalistic and white supremacist assumptions. As we see Purity Culture play out, we see how
manipulative, controlling, and violent it can be—particularly over and against
women’s bodies. Never was this made so
apparent than in Calvin University Professor, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s
ground-breaking book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted
a Faith and Fractured a Nation. I
believe this book is required reading.
Over 20 years ago, I had just joined the group
Witness for Peace New England, and one of my first meetings was with a group of
young college women who had recently returned from Cuba. The first thing they wanted to share with us
was the experience they all had when they got off the plane and began traveling
around
A couple of these young women—independent, strong, tough
college women--were both smiling and crying as they told us how they had never
realized how much that message is pounded into their own heads, day after day
through a media that is ever-present. In
their home country, day after day they heard that their bodies were just
another commercial product. Until they
lived outside of that system for even a day, they did not how realize how
insistent and demanding that message was on their own psyches, and how much it
had become a part of them.
How much does the human body cost? In 4th grade, I remember being
told that my body, the sum total of its parts was worth less than a
dollar. Now I’ve heard anything between
$4.50 and $160, depending on stock market fluctuations. Really?
Truly? In liberation, freedom,
and balance, I believe the Living God does not even fathom us in those terms,
cannot even imagine our bodies with a price tag. We are the beloved Children of God!
Sometimes we all need a different
lens not only to see the world, but also to see ourselves living in the
world. The world becomes a mirror, or a
prism, by which we see ourselves, so that when we are removed from our
surroundings and put in a different place, we become aware of our freedom to be
different, to maybe even see ourselves in the way God sees us. We have so long interpreted ourselves by our
surroundings that we cannot imagine another way.
The Song of Solomon, or the title the author really gives to us, the Most Excellent of Songs, is the only unmediated woman's voice we have in Scripture.2
One of the more interesting translation issues the book presents is a small Hebrew conjunction that can be translated as "and" or "but." It is used by the woman to say that she is "black and beautiful" or "black but beautiful" in the first few verses of the book. Regardless of the conjunction, someone, presumably the surrounding culture, is telling this woman that the color of her black skin does not go along with the word "beautiful." And this woman is objecting.
Now racism, as we know it, was not a
part of the ancient world.[3] But what this woman may be declaring is that
she is of a different social class, becoming darker through long hours working
under the sun. Or, perhaps this woman
is a different ethnicity than her beloved.[4]
I am black and beautiful. I am black but beautiful. Yes.
Right. True. But if interpreting Scripture is to listen to
one end of a phone conversation and ask what is going on at the other end, then
we should ask why the only unmediated female voice in Scripture is objecting or
protesting. Who is denying her beauty,
her ability to make her own choice, her willingness to declare romantic, sexual
love without fear? For the woman almost
sounds argumentative, she is so insistent.[5] Who is disagreeing with the powerful and
passionate love throughout this book?
Either way, it is that strange and foreign woman who
keeps showing up in Wisdom Literature who has the agency over her own body, her
own choices, to initiate lovemaking with someone who is probably not like her. Here she is arguing against her presumed protagonists.
She says to the daughters of
How in the heck did the Most
Excellent of Songs get in the Bible?
Doesn’t the Bible seem to get that people of faith don’t have sex? They certainly don’t bring it up in their
places of worship. I mean . . . have you
ever read this book before? There is no
mention of the God in the entire book!
Sacrilege! The book is filled
with sexual acts that have nothing to do with pro-creation and everything to do
with pleasure! For example, vivid detail
around oral sex is given. Blasphemy! Almost every part of the human anatomy is
described in vivid detail! For shame!
And what page number was that?
The book is about intimate human
experience, particularly a woman’s experience, that suggests a woman, without
fear, has every right to use her body out of a way of knowing that is not
otherworldly or lofty in contemplation, but through her senses—through fruits,
flowers, and animals; through taste, touch, smell, or the sound of the other’s
voice.[6] This Most Excellent of Songs conveys the
agency of this woman. She enjoys her own
body, all of her senses, without fear, and enjoys the body of her lover and all
of the sensory things that come with that.
The book conveys the fullest sense of the Biblical way of knowing and a
deep, sensual love.
The strength of that love is
undeniable. At the end of the book, in
chapter eight, verses six and seven, the woman says, “For love is strong as
death, passion fierce as the grave. Its
flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
The phrase, “raging flame,” is produced by combining the word “flame” in
Hebrew with a form of the Divine or God’s name.[7]
Biblical scholar, Roland Murphy,
suggests that the phrase “expresses a relationship between the flames of human
and the flames of divine love.”[8] Murphy indicates that this could be
interpreted to mean that sensual, sexual human love is in some way a
participation in divine love.[9]
Today’s Responsive Affirmation, from Christian mystic
In reality though, we know this
story, don’t we? Women are forever being
told by their families, culture, or tradition that they have no agency or power
over their own choices, bodies, or romantic partners. They are not to cross boundaries. It is Montagues and Capulets, taught by the
love of Romeo and Juliet. It is the Jets
and Sharks, taught by the love of Tony and Maria. It is Angie Tucci and Flipper Purify, told by
the story of Jungle Fever. Why even
Disney changed history to suggest that Pocahantas and John Smith crossed the
great cultural divide through a romantic love that would not be denied. In real life, such stories were chronicled in
a 1992 movie which talked about the forbidden love within the lesbian community
through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.[10] Instead of forbidding power’s excess and
violence, we use forbid and outlaw and preach over and against consensual,
consenting adults.
This Scriptural story is of a
passionate, sexual, intimate knowing and divine love that crosses boundaries
set by human culture or tradition or institution. Sexual intimacy found in deep, romantic love
has a deeper wisdom about connection that is considered forbidden by those who
wish to deny the humanity or agency of someone they do not consider their
equal. Society seeks to keep the lovers
apart but this love will not be denied.
Head knowledge tells us that this love is all wrong, but the senses, all
of creation, bursts with the knowledge that this love must ripen into full
bloom.
Romeo and Juliet, Maria and Tony,
Angie and Flipper, “Forbidden Love”—we have been told this story so many times
we know this story by now, don’t we? And
yet, we seemingly have to tell the story over and over so that we remind
ourselves in a world that seeks to put a price tag on women’s bodies, wants
women to recoil in fear, not come out of their own homes, stay within their own
group or tribe or ethnicity or race, and to not claim their own skin and bodies
as locations of divine love and pleasure . . . we have to tell ourselves love
is a raging flame that will not be denied.
In our world, we exchange the agency
and strength of a woman’s sexuality with objectification and commodification. If we doubt the truth of that sinfulness, that
the adaptation Margaret Atwood’s, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is so popular and seen
as such a recollection of what has been, what is, and a warning of what may be reflects
something deep in our culture. Once
again, the truth of that sinfulness was made painfully obvious when we recently
re-visited Larry Nassar continually violating U.S. Olympic gymnasts and, even
when the young women spoke out, nobody believed them. Think about that. We applaud their Olympic medals. We don’t want to hear their voices. The Most Excellent of Songs says there is a
deeper wisdom. The Most Excellent of Songs treasures the
voice of a woman who is in charge of her own sexuality.
What would it look like to walk
around without fear—as a woman who is black and beautiful? I end with a quote from the late author Toni
Morrison, who imagines what it might be like to walk around the world as a
black woman without fear.
And I
want to inhabit, walk around, a site clear of racist detritus (erosion); a
place where race both matters and is rendered impotent; a place "already
made for me, both snug and wide open. With a doorway never needing to be
closed, a view slanted for light and bright autumn leaves but not rain. Where
moonlight can be counted on if the sky is clear and stars no matter what. And
below, just yonder, a river called Treason to rely on." I want to imagine
not the threat of freedom, or its tentative panting fragility, but the concrete
thrill of borderlessness--a kind of out of doors safety where "a sleepless
woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit
on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the
yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of
the road would never scare her because what ever it was that made that sound,
it wasn't something creeping up on her. Nothing for miles around thought she
was prey. She could stroll as slowly as she liked, thinking of food
preparations, of family things, or lift her eyes to stars and think of war or
nothing at all. Lampless and without fear she could make her way. And if a
light shone from a window up a ways and the cry of a colicky baby caught her
attention, she might step over to the house and call out softly to the woman
inside trying to soothe the baby. The two of them might take turns massaging
the infant stomach, rocking, or trying to get a little soda water down. When
the baby quieted they could sit together for a spell, gossiping, chuckling low so
as not to wake anybody else. The woman could decide to go back to her bed then,
refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might stay her direction and walk further
down the road--on out, beyond, because nothing around or beyond considered her
prey.[11]
May
all of us, from our children to our seniors, know our skin and bodies to be
worthy, priceless, and beautiful and full of agency for God’s work in the
world—that all of our senses would explode with a love that is as strong as
death. May we take full pleasure in that
skin and in those bodies, by ourselves or with a trusted partner. May we may be found crying and smiling with
the full knowledge of how God sees us—sensually, sexually. And may we live in that knowledge without
fear, knowing that nothing around thinks that we have a price or that we are
prey. May we know a deeper wisdom. Amen.
[1] Linda Kay Klein, “What is
Purity Culture?” https://lindakayklein.com/what-is-purity-culture/. I think this definition is so right on but
does miss layers upon layers associated with racism. Klein may even be referencing Hardee’s
commercials where sex is being sold by an actress in platform, high heels
eating a massive Thickburger. How men
and women are referenced can also be seen in archaic school dress codes that do
not recognize major differences. Young
women are told not to wear things off shoulder, skirts too high, and yoga
pants. No such detail is provided for
young men. Young men are regularly found
in tight apparel with shirts off with few objections. The disparity is breathtaking.
[2] Renita Weems, Lecture at United Theological
Seminary,
[3] Ibid.
[4] Anthony R. Ceresko,
O.S.F.S., Introduction to Old Testament
Wisdom: A Spirituality for
Liberation (Maryknoll, New
York: Orbis Books, 1999), p. 167.
[5] Weems, Lecture.
[6] Weems, Lecture.
[7] Ceresko, Introduction, p. 166.
[8] Ibid; Roland Murphy (cf. 1
John 4:7-8) Anchor Bible Dictionary,
6:154.
[9] Ibid.
[10] “Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives”
[11] The
House that Race Built. Editor Wahneema Lubiano.
No comments:
Post a Comment