What changed for me was that I stopped seeing the sacred as elusive and fragile, suited only to carefully maintained habitats.
The Christian viewpoint of sex as a sacred thing means it is weighted with devastating meaning; it carries the impact of losing something forever, of altering oneself permanently for good or for ruin. From this point of view, sex is a good thing, a holy thing, but if not done in the right way, with the right person, at the right time, its holiness shatters. It is because it is sacred that experiencing it imperfectly is so bad and profane (and so easy to do).
i have had many friends with a Christian upbringing who think this way. Their expectations about sex are often very unrealistically high, and at the same time, I feel that they deserve to feel more comfortable with their mental concept of sex.
but this post isn’t about sex, not really; it’s about good things and sacred things and holy things and how we’re taught that they are so easy to break. the body is a temple, therefore implicitly profane when treated wrongly, when adorned wrongly, when shared without the proper rites.
why do we think that sacredness, especially the kind of sacredness that relates to the body, is so easily destroyed? the body is remarkable for its resilience, its capacity to care for the spirit that lives in it and to close wounds and to carry scars. I think a scarred body is sacred. I think a tattoo that has no particular special meaning is sacred.
if we believe in the sacredness of life, perhaps we should believe in the endless, tenacious resilience and adaptability of the sacred.
I still think that sex is sacred. I think that handmade blankets are sacred, that meals cooked by people who love you are sacred, that messages scribbled on desks are sacred, and that dandelions growing out of cracks in the sidewalk are sacred too. I think all of our misshapen attempts to love are sacred.
The fact is that no set of moral rules about sex has ever been able to create love, or even preserve it. this is what led me to these thoughts—purity culture wishes to “preserve the sanctity of” sex, but abuse, controlling relationships, sexual trauma, those terrible things are not treated with the same solemnity. Sex before marriage is a deep, corrupting transgression, but it seems no fundamentalist man who has sexually coerced his wife or criticized her body has felt the chill of wild fear from realizing you have desecrated something holy.
and if we thought about this differently, we would realize how it could be, perhaps should be. that a man tearing down his lover’s self esteem or trying to exercise control over her body does not just “fall short” of his obligation to her, he profanes her. When invited into intimacy with her, he is stepping onto holy ground, and when he hurts or coerces her, he is spitting in God’s face.
but no. the thinking of purity culture treats the sanctity of sex as something that must be created under precise circumstances, a specific act that must be done Correctly, rather than a consequence of something deeply sacrosanct about loving and closeness or maybe even about bodies or touch or being alive and experiencing.
it got me thinking about what are the common qualities of things I think are sacred? They are all very ephemeral, very hard to describe. Someone said on this website that tearing apart a loaf of warm bread with your hands is sacred, and I agree. I think certain acts feel like holy rituals not because they are repeated regularly, done in a certain way, or connected to religion, but because they are clear, vivid reminders of being alive in a world where you care and are cared for.
I don’t think ritual should mean symbolism and detachment. I think ritual is an act of maintenance. The maintenance of love or something loved.
What is that quote about how love has to be made and remade every day? It’s like that. I think ritual, love, and bread are very interconnected. Bread was one of Jesus’s favorite metaphors. This is one of those things that makes it difficult to completely turn my back on the Christian faith. It has been corrupted completely in the modern church, but Christian rituals originate mostly as basic acts of care.
Of course we’ve lost a lot of things. One thing we’ve lost—and we probably didn’t notice what we were losing—is the sensuality of ritual, like how communion typically no longer involves tearing apart a warm loaf of bread and instead tiny cups of wine and individualized crackers. We’ve also lost the ability to truly contemplate that Communion is supposed to be eating the flesh of God, who is feeding himself to us. There is no good way to make that feel impersonal and detached and not-intimate. As an artist I never found much inspiration in comparing cannibalism to sex, but I find it resonant to do something worse, which is to compare Communion to both of those things. “Isn’t it weird that Christians are basically cannibalizing God” is actually quite a bit closer to the point than probably anything evangelicals have said about it, because it is in fact very weird. You are eating God, but you are tearing him apart in your hands and he is warm.
The symbolism is not abstract and ephemeral. Eating is an act of love toward the body. An act of being alive in an animal, mammal sort of way. In this light the fundamentalist Christian attitude toward sex comes into a difficult clash with the rest of the basic components of the faith. Under purity culture, remaining “pure” before marriage, “keeping” sex sacred, involves a psychologically damaging level of detachment from the physical wants and needs of the body—not only can you not have sex, you can barely permit yourself to think about it, or to explore and get to know your own body.
This is very particularly harmful toward women, of course, for whom deep-seated anxiety and lack of knowledge about one’s own body is likely to make sex un-enjoyable at best and painful at worst. But when you tell teenagers that they cannot masturbate, you are telling them that their lover must figure out what forms of touch are pleasurable before they themselves can. Not only is this just depressingly inefficient, and vaguely traumatizing in its implications, it is so much the opposite of what intimacy is that the words to explain it barely exist.
Purity culture, in accepting exclusivity as the primary characteristic of “sacred” sexuality, cannot escape seeing bodies as property and sex as territorial, related to ownership. Though it would deny that “your body is meant for sexual intimacy with one person under one circumstance” implies ownership, it shows intimacy outside of that person and circumstance as denying them something.
Sex and sexual pleasure is referred to with language that implies it is a resource. The language of “sharing” or “giving away” intimacy, or of “saving” it, is complete nonsense when you try to apply it to anything else. How can you “save” or “give away” being hugged by your friends, or staying up late with them laughing?
I once sat with a friend in a Waffle House at 10pm, when the place was totally empty and we could talk freely with the lady behind the counter. And this is, interestingly enough, one of those experiences that I identify as “sacred” but can’t explain why. Waffles are sweet and dense and soaked in butter, and the world outside is icy and dark, and the lady behind the counter sends me home with an extra tall cup of orange juice, for free.
Have I “spent” that experience, like currency, by experiencing it? Have I lost something by having had it, in the same way that someone “loses” their virginity, supposedly? I know for sure that whatever is gone now that the experience is over was something I never “had” in the first place, and none of us was “giving” anything to anyone else (even though I was given the orange juice)—again, because what part of it did any of us firmly own?
When something is sacred, even if you’re very clearly doing something for someone else, it is something you or you both or you all are simply there for, like being caught outside in a thunderstorm.
Teaching that an orgasm not given to you by your future life-partner is somehow stolen from them really denigrates the orgasm. And teaching that enjoying (or really, knowing anything about) your body on your own is denying something from your future life partner is nonsense.
“Virginity” is an idea with a very gendered history, typically, a woman “loses” her virginity” to a man, not the other way around. It is, of course, a nonsense concept; there are jokes about what happens to a person’s virginity when it is “lost,” but the jokes actually raise very good questions. If the person you are having sex with “takes” your virginity, that should mean they now have it, and the total number of virginities in the world never increases or decreases relative to population. But instead, they just disappear. Not only is it sexist, it’s vaguely reminiscent of the stock market.
The whole idea of the desire to have a say or involvement in your partner’s entire experience of pleasure and intimate love is frankly revolting to me now. If I viewed my partner as tainted because I was not the first to have sex with him, I would have to believe that whatever he can share with me is somehow finite. I would have to view that intimacy as a linear transaction. I would have to view sexual intimacy as a quantity of thing rather than an experience, and the feelings my lover’s body can feel as basically possessions.
How could I claim exclusive ownership of my future lover’s pleasure, their enjoyment and understanding of their physical body, their experience of love, their desire for love? Why the hell would I want to do that? Recognizing that they are a whole person means realizing I can’t “have” or “possess” any of them. That would—ironically enough—be treating my lover as an object.
The conclusion is this: the viewpoint of sex that supposedly preserves its sacredness does the opposite by treating it as a limited, transactional quantity contained within specific acts, and as something that is valuable based on its technical adherence to rules.
Sex is supposed to say something about our relationship with God, a living symbol of how God loves humans, is what they will say—but I can think of nothing more damning than trying to imagine what idea of God someone would get if all they had was the way Christians talk about sex.
They would conclude that there isn’t very much of God to go around, and that God is only interested in a handful of people who do everything right. God is fragile as spun glass and to even approach him should be frightening, should make you question your worthiness, because you might shatter the only connection with God you will ever have into a million pieces if you touch him wrong.
I do not believe that. I have no answers, only questions, but my major break away from the mainstream Christian faith must have come when I saw sacredness as existing in things that grow back and things that scar and heal and things that bloom again, rather than in things that break once.
Love is not something that breaks once. You are not something that breaks once. You are a dandelion in sidewalk cracks that will relentlessly grow back, and so is the love that is out there, coming to us ineffably in the shape of orgasms, waffles, and thunderstorms and leaving us changed, but not less.
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