This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.
Readings
The first reading is from the book Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History by David Allyn, a scholarly history of the sexual revolution in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In this excerpt, Allyn seems to be posing the question, “Whose sexual revolution was it, anyway?” He writes:
‘In the radical organizations of the New Left, women found that they were often taken for granted: they were expected to answer phones, cook meals, do laundry, and provide sexual companionship — in other words, to be secretaries, housekeepers, and concubines. Male radicals were often as sexist as their own fathers were…. [And] male hippies in communes were not much better than their activist counterparts. Former hippie Elizabeth Gipps says, “I remember screaming one day when the men were theoretically meditating while the women were cleaning the floors around them.”…
‘By many accounts, young men in the sixties were indifferent to their female partner’s sexual needs. One woman recalls, “Of course, most guys expected you to ‘put out’ just because they bought you dinner. But every time I had sex I felt like I was dealing with someone from another planet. They guys just didn’t get it. They wanted instant gratification…. Once I asked a guy to [give me an orgasm] while we were making love and he looked at me like I was certifiably insane.”…’
The second reading is from the Bible, the Song of Solomon chapter 7, verses 10-13, a book of the Bible that praises the delights of lovemaking:
I am my beloved’s,
and his desire is for me.Come, my beloved,
let us go forth into the fields,
and lodge in the villages;let us go out early to the vineyards,
and see whether the vines have budded,
whether the grape blossoms have opened
and the pomegranates are in bloom.
There I will give you my love.The mandrakes give forth fragrance,
and over our doors are all choice fruits,
new as well as old,
which I have laid up for you, O my beloved.
SERMON — Which Sexual Revolution?
Those of you who come to church each week may notice that I’ve been doing a series of sermons exploring the dimensions of feminist theology. This is the third sermon in that series.
There’s a joke among Unitarian Universalist ministers that in our churches it’s easier to preach about sex than about money. We do have the reputation of being one religious tradition that is quite willing to talk openly about sex and sexuality. That reputation has a certain amount of truth in it, for we have no religious belief that sex and sexuality are evil. If someone quotes Bible passages that allegedly prove that sex is evil, we Unitarian Universalists are likely to quote other Bible passages that prove that sex is fun and good. We heard one such Bible passage in the second reading this morning, a passage from the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon is one of the sexiest poems in our culture, thus proving our point that the Bible is sex-positive.
Indeed, some of our critics have suggested that once upon a time we were overly enthusiastic in our embrace of the sexual revolution. After all, we feel that women and men should have the right to use the contraception of their choice; we feel that we should rely on individual women to exercise their individual consciences to determine whether or not to have an abortion; we do not believe that premarital sex is a sin; we do not believe that homosexuality is a sin; and we believe that women and girls are just as good as men and boys. Each of these views conflicts with the religious views of some other religious traditions.
When we say that we embraced the sexual revolution, we should really ask ourselves, Which sexual revolution did we embrace? Did we embrace the sexual revolution that says, “When it comes to sex, anything goes”? — and there are people who say, or at least imply, “Well, but if you allow gays and lesbians in your church, next thing you know you’ll be having orgies in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings.”
I must inform you, however, that that isn’t true. I have never seen an orgy in a Unitarian Universalist church. In fact, I have to say that on average the Unitarian Universalists I know are more straight-laced than the North American. Yes, we affirm that sex and sexuality are a normal part of who we are — yes, we affirm that sex and sexuality are an integral part of our religious selves — but affirming these things does not logically lead to the conclusion that we have orgies in church.
At the same time, there is a grain of truth in the accusation that Unitarian Universalists did engage in the part of the sexual revolution that said, “When it comes to sex, anything goes.” Some Unitarian Universalists had some wild times in the 1960’s and 1970’s and, I’m afraid, even into later decades. In this sense, we are no different than the wider population. Yet we are different from the wider population, for one simple reason: feminist theology and feminist thinking have been perhaps the most important force within Unitarian Universalism since the late 1960’s.
So it is that there are many parts of the sexual revolution that we can, indeed, affirm: that individuals have the right to use contraception, that individual women have the right to decide whether to have an abortion, that sex and sexuality are natural and normal, that women and girls are just as good as men and boys, and so on. Feminist theology can give us a good, solid grounding for our views on sex and sexuality. What we have to do is to tease out the several different strands that ran through the sexual revolution, to figure out what it is that we can affirm based on feminist theology, and what we may want to reject based on feminist theology. To make this a little more clear, I’d like to tell you a bit of the story of a typical Unitarian Universalist church, the church that I grew up in, and what happened in that church as it went through the years of the sexual revolution.
When I was a child — this was in the 1960’s — our church had a young, dynamic minister. Although the congregation had been older and graying, this young dynamic minister supposedly attracted younger families, many with children, to the church. On the whole, everyone thought he was a good thing for the church.
At some point in the late 1960’s, however, opinion began to turn against him. Some said they didn’t like him because he had become an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. Others hinted that something darker was going — one woman told my mother, “If only you knew what I know about our minister!…” Whatever the cause, or causes, attendance began to drop. By 1970, when my father was the head usher, he remembers that there would be only forty or so people on a Sunday morning, where there used to have two hundred people. By 1971, that minister had been forced out. All this happened when I was a child, and I don’t remember much of it myself.
In late 1974, my older sister started going to the youth group at the church. By the winter of 1975, she had talked me into attending as well. She hadn’t been going to the youth group before that fall, and I had stayed away as well. I don’t remember exactly why we stayed away from church in those years, but I do remember that prior to 1975 I perceived the youth group as filled with scary kids who did lots and lots of drugs and had lots and lots of sex. I guess if you’re a little older than I, the sudden availability of drugs and sex in the 1960’s might have seemed exotic and liberating; but for many people around my age, drugs and sex also became associated with certain amount of fear. One of my best friends had almost been sucked under by drugs in sixth grade, and I still remember talking to an older girl who had lost her virginity at sixteen and who said, “Sex really isn’t that great,” with a tone of voice that said more than the words themselves.
But back then, my perception was that the sex and drugs had been cleaned out of our church’s high school youth group sometime before 1974, which made it feel safe enough for me to join. The new assistant minister was our youth advisor, and he was the one who told me about the accusations against the minister who had ostensibly been fired for his stance against the Vietnam War. The assistant minister said, “Didn’t you know that he had been having sex with someone in the congregation?” I hadn’t heard that accusation before.
Since then, I have wondered how many of the accusations about the youth group were true. Were those kids really having lots of sex and doing lots of drugs? Or were the teenagers a convenient scapegoat for people to blame when they could not talk about the minister’s alleged indiscretions? I don’t think I’ll ever really know the truth of what went on.
Meanwhile, there was another revolution going on all around me, the women’s liberation movement. I still remember when the little bright green hymnal supplements appeared in the pews. It contained some of our most familiar hymns rewritten to remove gender-specific language. I remember hearing about women ministers for the first time — not women ministers from the musty past, but women ministers who were active right then, in nearby Unitarian Universalist churches. Not only that, but there were two women in our own congregation who were preparing to be ministers, and who were duly ordained by our church — although those ordinations happened after I had left home for college.
And women were taking on increasingly prominent leadership roles in the congregation. When my mother first joined that church, she was invited to be on the Flower Committee, and later was invited to teach Sunday school — traditional women’s roles in that church, and in many churches. (For the record, she tried joining the Flower Committee, but soon quit in a certain amount of disgust — in her own way, Mom was an early feminist.) But fifteen years later, when I was in the church youth group, it was becoming more and more acceptable for women to serve in any leadership role in the church. I should rephrase that: by fifteen years later, women had insisted on breaking down the barriers of discrimination that had existed in church leadership.
So it is that I myself witnessed at least two revolutions within my own church. One sexual revolution centered around what used to be called “free love.” Another revolution, a feminist revolution, centered around women’s liberation. These two revolutions have been linked together in the popular imagination, but as I experienced them they were quite different. The so-called “free love” that I witnessed involved little or no feminist awareness. The feminist revolution, at least the part of it that I witnessed, was not about having lots of sexual intercourse, it was about women fighting to gain some measure of equality with men.
As I said earlier, I’m not telling you this not because you should care that much about my personal experiences, but more because I think that my experiences were not uncommon among people who grew up in liberal churches. Indeed, when I talk to some other people my age who grew up in that time, they have much more outrageous stories than I do — adult youth group advisors who were sleeping with kids in their youth groups, churches where the lay leaders played at “wife-swapping,” ministers who were sleeping with many women and men in their congregations, open marriage workshops at churches, and on and on. I’m afraid we have to admit that our Unitarian Universalist churches, and liberal churches in general, sometimes went past the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior.
So where are those acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior? That is a question that I am just beginning to answer. One thing that helped me make sense out of the sexual revolution was a scholarly study called Make Love, Not War, the book by David Allyn that was the source of the first reading this morning. One of Allyn’s most interesting insights is that the sexual revolution can mean different things to different people. Some of the sexual revolutions that Allyn identifies include:
— wide availability of birth control pills, thus allowing women to have more control over whether or not to have children;
— a growing acceptance of premarital sex;
— a series of legal decisions that broadened First Amendment protections to include works previously defined as “obscene”;
— experiments in free sex, group sex, open marriages, and group marriages;
— the end of laws banning interracial marriages;
— growing acceptance of masturbation as a normal expression of sexuality;
— the increasing commercialization of sex and sexuality;
— the erosion of the “double standard” that said that men could sleep around but women were supposed to remain monogamous;
— homosexuality getting changed from something that was considered shameful into gay liberation and gay pride.
When I began to look for acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior, I realized that women experienced the sexual revolution differently than men did, as we heard in the first reading this morning. Improved birth control supposedly freed women to enjoy sex in new ways — yet, as often as not, women remained mired in traditional, repressive gender roles, providing sex, and doing the cleaning while the men were supposedly meditating.
So when I began to look for acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior, I realized that a good question to ask is this: How did the different aspects of the sexual revolution affect women and girls? Some aspects of the sexual revolution improved the lives of women (and really the lives of men too): access to birth control, the end of interracial marriage, acceptance of masturbation as normal, broadened First Amendment rights, equal rights for gays and lesbians, the end of the double standard. Other aspects of the sexual revolution did not improve the lives of women and girls. The ever-increasing commercialization of sex and sexuality has not made women’s lives better; instead, commercialization of sex has tended to dehumanize women, to turn women into commodities, into things. Free love and open relationships may have made some women’s lives better, but all too often free love and open relationships have been used as excuses by men to have sexual escapades. Back in the 1970’s, when they called it “wife-swapping,” the fact that it wasn’t called “husband-swapping” pretty much lets you know that it was the men who ran that show. Free love and open relationships have often proved to be harmful to the well-being of women and children in other ways: when free love and open relationships lead to the break up of stable homes, children can suffer emotionally, and women can suffer financially.
So it is that not every aspect of the sexual revolution has been good for women. And the insights of feminism and feminist theology can help us sort out which parts of the sexual revolution we might want to affirm, and which parts of the sexual revolution we may choose to be more critical of.
Sex is a beautiful, wonderful thing. We could say with equal correctness that sex and sexuality are gifts given from God; or say that sex and sexuality are a natural part of human experience and are affirmed in the most ancient religious traditions. However you choose to word it, sex and sexuality cannot be considered evil; they are good. When you read religious texts about sex, like the Song of Solomon, you also realize the incredible power in sex and sexuality.
It is a power that we have to continually learn to use for good: a power that can bring us closer to the ultimate truths of the universe. As is true with anything that powerful, it can also be used for evil. From the perspective of feminist theology, sex and sexuality are evil when they are used to control or harm another person. Thus, sex and sexuality are evil when they cause one person to ignore another person’s humanity; they are evil when they are used to hurt or injure another person.
Then we can move beyond a narrowly woman-centered theology to draw wider conclusions. When homosexuality is used as an excuse to beat up and shoot gay men, as happened last winter at Puzzles Lounge here in New Bedford, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. When marriage between people of different skin colors is illegal, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. When same sex marriage is made illegal, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. In each case, the sexual revolution has worked to end evil, has worked as a force of good in the world.
Drawing inspiration from parts of our religious tradition like the Song of Solomon, and drawing inspiration from our own positive sexual experiences, I’d like to be able to say that we have a sex-positive religion. We can affirm sex and sexuality as an essential part of our selves. We can affirm sex and sexuality when it makes us more fully human. We can go further, and affirm sex and sexuality that go so far as to provide divine experiences. Yet feminist theology also helps us to understand where we can draw firm boundaries, so that sex and sexuality remain positive, life-affirming experiences for all person, no matter what your gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation; no matter who you are.
So may it be.