Religion and Sexuality: Passionate Debates by C. K. Robertson, Editor

Religion and Sexuality: Passionate Debates C. K. Robertson, Editor. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. The title of this book may suggest a cross-cultural treatment that encompasses Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, traditional religions, and perhaps the secular hedonisms aiming to liberate sexual experience from any institutional faith. Not so, as the territory here is basically Anglo-American variants of Christianity and some of their roots in the classical and medieval worlds. Most the authors have strong church affiliations and write from perspectives that are variously apologetic, reformist, or neutrally descriptive. As the "passionate debates" are not organized into dialectically opposing viewpoints, the range of divergence will thus seem muted. Despite such limitations, this book enlightened me about the unending wrangles in American churches over whether, how, when, and with whom to be sexually intimate. In his provocative coda, C. K. Robertson suggests that sexual ethics in the Judeo-Christian tradition was formed among people striving to maintain fertility within cultural boundaries designed to preserve their distinctive group identity. Among 300 million Americans today, the old imperative to reproduce certainly seems gone, but the emphasis on boundaries for group identity remains as a theme of religious interpretation of sexuality. Many current disputes differentiate between the righteous self and the sinful other. Douglas C. Mohrmann's chapter on "the waning voice of the Bible" as culturally authoritative in America lists important trends that counter the popular impression of a surging theocracy led by organizations like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family: declining church membership, especially among young adults; reduced attention to the Bible, even among adults who maintain church affiliations; the growing acceptance of cohabitation, pornography, and homosexuality; and the increasingly sophisticated linguistic and historically contextual analyses of the Bible that have marginalized many of the proscriptions previously imputed to it. For example, the "sin of Sodom" has been reconstructed as deficient hospitality to strangers rather than homosexuality per se. While Mohrmann laments these "undeniable and regrettable" trends, B. J. Oropeza offers affirmations with a Christian ethic of monogamy, mutuality, and heterosexual coitus within marriage alone-while shunning pornography. Grounding his argument in biblical texts and scholarship, Oropeza nonetheless moves with changing times and comes to conclusions never heard in your grandpa's sermons. For example, fellatio and cunnilingus are not merely acceptable, but perhaps normative. Georgia Newman's overview of women's fight for equality concisely reviews initiatives and resistances in the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches since the 1960s. Here the decision not to speak ill of other groups understates the "passionate debate" on such issues, as the much larger Catholic Church and Southern Baptist Convention have taken aggressive, principled positions from the top against gender equality within their churches. David Peak offers a sympathetic account of plural marriage's tumultuous history among Mormons. Based on the revelations recorded in Section 132 of Joseph Smith's Doctrines and Covenants (1843), the teaching caused internal conflict as well as the ferocious social and political persecutions that finally led the church leaders to prudently abandon it. …