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High-control Christian communities in America are critical of “secular” society for being sex-obsessed and for creating a culture of lust. And yet, these communities are actually obsessed with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender. From before people within those communities enter adolescence, all the way through their adult lives, they will be inundated with teachings about these issues. Stated simply, conservative Christians in American simply can’t get enough of talking and thinking about sex. But why? Dan explores this issue in this first episode of a multi-episode series—listen in and check it out!
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AXIS Moondi AXIS Moondi The 2024 elections are upon us, y'all.
And no matter what happens, there's going to be a lot to process and a next chapter to prepare for.
That's why we're holding two live events in order to help you stay informed about what's happening and to get ready for what's coming.
On November 21st, we're holding an event with Americans United for Separation of Church and State at the University of Southern California.
We have an illustrious group of leaders and scholars, including Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazar, Kyate Joshi, Diane Winston, and Dan Miller.
We're going to talk about what happened and prepare for what's next.
On November 22nd, we'll be talking about Christian extremism and the 2024 elections at the San Diego Convention Center.
Matt Taylor will be giving opening remarks, and we'll have a roundtable with familiar faces like Leah Payne and Lloyd Barba, not to mention me and Dan, and a few others.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
Join us in person or online.
As always, I want to welcome everybody.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and this is It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
Pleased, as always, to be with you.
As always, I want to start by saying thank you to those of you who listen, if I can spit the words out.
Those of you who support us in so many ways, the feedback, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Keep the insights coming.
I value them so much and am, as always, behind in responding to them.
But some of you have heard from me.
Some of you have heard your ideas making their way into the podcast.
And as I'm going to say in just a few minutes here, it's very much shaping sort of where we're moving forward for the next several episodes.
And if you have not subscribed, if you're not a subscriber, I would ask you to consider doing so.
Help us to do what we're doing.
We've got a lot of events coming up, as you know, November 21st and 22nd in LA and San Diego, respectively.
You can check those out.
But sort of post-election analysis, election coming right up, and I know that we all have that on our minds.
We want to do that kind of stuff.
We want to do new things.
We want to bring new series.
We're continually talking about new ideas.
Need your support to do that.
So for those of you who subscribe, thank you.
For those of you who might consider doing that, I want to thank you for that as well.
I want to dive in here.
We just finished up a series of episodes that was looking at this card, this little, I guess, kind of information card that was in the church bulletin.
And among other things, a lot of great feedback about that and a number of topics that sort of spin out of that and things that people highlighted.
And one of them has to do very broadly with issues related to sex.
Talked about sex some, smiling wives and strong handshakes and masculine husbands and all that kind of stuff.
I got a lot of feedback from folks who really want to know more, had more to add, had some great insights, wanted to talk about it further, and so forth.
And so I've been thinking about it, and the more I dig into it, the more there is to dig into.
So we're starting another sort of series within the series today.
And I think I'd call the series something like, we've got to talk about the sex stuff.
Like, we just have to.
If you're going to talk about high-control American Christianity, if you're going to talk about conservative Protestantism, you're going to talk about evangelicalism, you're going to talk about other religious expressions as well, you have to talk about sex.
Because as we're going to see here in a few minutes, the sex talk stuff is pervasive in these contexts.
So I'm going to call this episode, They Can't Get Enough.
And I want to sort of situate this, and we're going to dive into other areas as we move forward in coming episodes.
But that's where we're going.
So we're going to take a deeper dive into some issues that have come up elsewhere.
If you were to go through all of the It's in the Code episodes, sometimes there's some topics that we've touched on before that we'll sort of bring together in a new way.
Certainly that we've talked about on Straight White American Jesus and the Weekly Roundup, certainly things that people have talked about who have done podcast series through Access Monday and so forth.
But it's also going to give me a chance to respond, I think, to some of the questions and concerns that you have raised as a result of these prior episodes.
It also means, and this isn't something I usually have to say, but from time to time we'll be talking about things that if you have young listeners, maybe you're listening in the car as you drive, drop your kids off at school, you may not want them hearing everything that we might be talking about.
I'll try to flag those up when they come up.
I'm not planning on getting super detailed or intense or inappropriate or anything like that, but I know that that can be a concern.
Okay?
So let's get started here.
And I want to start with this.
Again, I call this episode, They Can't Get Enough, and here's why.
Conservative evangelicals, conservative Protestants, and conservative Catholics, too, have long positioned themselves as a kind of moral counterculture within America, and really as a kind of counterculture or a counter to the counterculture and really as a kind of counterculture or a counter to the counterculture Okay?
So that has long been a part of the self-understanding and the articulation of that kind of conservative Christianity.
Now, in recent years, there's been so much focus on politics and political identity and culture war issues and so forth that I think that dimension of the tradition has been more muted than it used to be, or at least the part that breaks into public view has been more muted.
The stuff we're going to see on CNN, the debates we're going to have about, you know, I don't know, Trump rallies and Madison Square Gardens and Christian support for that or whatever, those are different.
But I think if you were to talk to rank-and-file churchgoers, lots of Americans who go to these kinds of churches and, you know, they kind of keep their head down, Maybe they don't talk about politics as much.
Maybe they're just kind of going with the flow when it comes to things like Trump support and so forth.
But if you were to ask them what it is that they find in this tradition, what draws them to it?
This is still an important dimension of their self-understanding, this idea that they are holding firm to a kind of morality or a vision that runs counter to the secular world or the fallen world or however they're going to describe those of us who aren't in their camp, okay?
And a big focus of this countercultural dimension has to do with sex.
Now when I say sex here, that includes sexuality.
Sexuality is obviously part of how one will experience sex, partake in sex.
Gender is implied here as well, and so there's going to be a lot of stuff about gender.
These are distinct categories, but they overlap in key ways, okay?
But white evangelicals have long positioned themselves as a moral alternative specifically to a sex-obsessed secular culture.
They are the alternative to a culture that is governed by lust and by licentiousness.
And there's a word we don't get to use enough, licentiousness.
But that's a word that you would find in a lot of these contexts.
The world, that is the non-Christian world, is fixated with sex.
It's obsessed with it, with sort of satisfying lust and desire and so forth.
And these churches provide an alternative to this.
They provide a kind of godly counterculture that stands in contrast to this.
And I also think that a lot of people on the outside of these communities actually imagine that that's true.
I think if they were talking to some of these rank and file people and they heard this account, they would say, okay, yeah, I can see that.
That's the stereotype.
I encounter people all the time who imagine these kinds of churches to be simply anti-sex, opposed to sex and sexuality as such, as if, you know, that's just something we don't talk about.
That's not something that we spend time with.
We're opposed to it.
Or I encounter maybe more sympathetic outsiders who point out the value of some of this.
And there can be.
The value of a religious culture that claims to challenge things like the objectification of women or the sexualization of underage girls or things like this.
Okay?
That's the perception.
But here's the weird thing.
If you actually spend time within these spaces...
And especially within spaces focused on adolescents and young adults, what in these contexts are called youth groups.
So youth group is usually like middle age, middle school and up.
And then what they'll, you know, they'll call it their college ministry, their singles ministry.
The ministry is sort of aimed at like post-high schools through, say, the mid-20s, maybe 30.
After 30, the expectation is you're going to be married and so forth.
If you spend time within these churches, and especially those spaces that, let's say, are aimed at the 15 to 30-year-olds, you experience something surprising when it comes to this narrative.
And those of you listening, and I know you're out there because I hear from you, those of you listening who have been within these contexts, you know where I'm going with this.
And it's here.
For a subculture that defines itself in opposition to a supposedly oversexed culture, a culture that thinks too much about sex, that talks about sex and gender and sexuality too much, there's a lot of focus on issues of an explicitly secular nature in church.
I hear from people all the time who will say, you know, the youth group I grew up in or the college group that I was in or the campus ministry that I was part of in college or whatever, we talked about sex all the time.
And when I left that behind, I was surprised.
That the secular quote-unquote world that I was going into didn't seem actually nearly as fixated on talking about and thinking about sex all the time as the church world that I was leaving.
And that is the experience of many.
That was my experience.
I think if people went in and sort of observed these contexts, that's what they would see.
And again, this is especially true in the context of adolescents and young adults.
And as I've indicated here, I've experienced this.
This was my experience coming out of these traditions.
I've read about it.
I've studied it.
I've read people who, you know, interview other people who leave these traditions behind and talk about this.
In my coaching work, the trauma resolution work that I do with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, and people working through and processing religious trauma, this is a topic that comes up often.
People coming out of these contexts often highlight what they experience as a deep contradiction, a contradiction of a tradition that tells young people to avoid sex and sexual temptation, to remain pure, to not have sex before they're married and so forth,
a tradition that drives all of this, that we usually lump under the category of purity culture, to not get fixated on sex like the world does, But then in the process of all that messaging, all they talk about is sex.
They talk about sex all the time.
They think about it all the time.
And this was true when I was in a youth group.
I don't know how many times in a youth group session something about sex and avoiding sexual temptation and so forth would come up.
And again, it's not limited to youth groups.
It would come up in sermons.
Pastors talk about this stuff all the time.
I've had numerous conversations, again, with folks who say that they never talked about sex with as much regularity outside of the church as they did within.
Okay?
To the uninitiated, somebody who didn't grow up in that tradition, but maybe they know somebody who did, and they sort of hear them talking about it, or maybe they get the opportunity to go and observe this, It looks like an absolute fixation that rivals anything the supposedly secular world has to offer.
So that's the sort of setting.
That's what I'm going to start with.
When I say they can't get enough, these churches, they can't get enough of talking about sex, of fixating on sex.
And we could expand that out to the weird websites, like the Christian parenting websites that will tell you what shows kids should and shouldn't watch, and they'll count the number of sex scenes.
They'll be like, there were 15 sexual incidents in this series, whatever.
And you're like, that's weird.
Why would you watch it that closely?
And map every specific instance instead of just saying, yeah, there's some adult content that's probably not appropriate for young kids.
That's the point.
The sort of fixation.
And the question is, what gives?
Why?
Why this kind of fixation for a group that positions itself as opposed to a kind of fixation on sex?
And I think there are a lot of dynamics here.
But the one that I'm interested in, and this is not going to surprise you at all if you've listened to this series for any period of time, is the issue of social control.
Because the same Christian spaces that focus on discussions of sex and sexuality the most are also those that are high control.
I have been in Christian contexts that are not high control.
And they will say things like, you know, God accepts you no matter who you love.
God accepts you no matter what kind of body you have.
And that's it.
We don't get into the kind of details and specificity and sort of rules and obligations and social roles and all the stuff that you get into, the detail that you get into if you're talking about sex and sexuality and gender within a high-control Christian context.
High-control Christianity, and I think any other high-control religious articulation that comes to mind, is invariably patriarchal.
And if you've got exceptions to this, if you've got in your mind some sort of high-control religious context that is not patriarchal, let me know, because the ones that come to mind for me, patriarchy is like a standard feature.
They are patriarchal and they are also misogynistic.
Now, those within these contexts, conservative Christians, they will accept that their tradition is patriarchal.
They will deny that it's misogynistic.
I, of course, am saying that it's both.
So if you want to impose a patriarchal, misogynistic social order, you need to regulate sexuality and gender.
There are a lot of identity dimensions that go into providing us with a sense of who we are.
It may be ethnicity.
Religion is one.
It may be relationships.
It may matter to us deeply that we're a parent or that we're a daughter or a son or a sibling or that we are somebody's child or caregiver or auntie or whatever it is.
There are lots of identity dimensions that provide us with a sense of who we are, but for most of us, Gender and sexuality are two of the most central of these.
And when I say gender here, I'm including all experiences and expressions of gender, including people who are agendered, people who are genderfluid, people who are genderqueer, and so forth, okay?
For most of us, gender and sexuality are two of those most core elements of our social identity.
So if you want to control others, If you want to regulate not just their behaviors or their beliefs, two core elements within religion, but their very sense of self, you have to control how they think about sexuality and gender.
You have to control how they experience sexuality and gender.
You have to control how they feel sexuality and gender.
Sexuality and gender are like the steering mechanism of a car.
If you have the steering mechanism in place, you can take it and direct it wherever you need it to go.
Once you've got that lined out, once you've socialized somebody into particular conceptions of sexuality and gender, you have their core identity.
You can control it, you can manipulate it, you can manage it.
Social control is the key.
So if we understand that, it shouldn't be surprising that high-control American Christianity is absolutely sex-obsessed.
If you can shape someone's fundamental experience not only of other people's sexuality and gender, their understanding of other people and theirs, but their own experience of sexuality and gender, you've got a running start at implementing the social order that high-control Christians imagine.
And you begin with the patriarchal family, Not even the family.
You begin with the patriarchal couple.
You begin with the cis-heteronormative model of a man and wife with a man as the head of household and so forth.
You begin with the patriarchal couple.
You build that into the patriarchal family.
And as we talk about a lot on Straight White American Jesus, and as others have talked about as well, within that high-control religious worldview, The patriarchal family is the model for society.
So if you have patriarchal people who form patriarchal families, those families become the basis for a properly ordered patriarchal society.
That is the aim.
So if you can shape individuals, especially women, but also men, and we're going to talk about this because there's a lot of focus on this and the effects on female-identified people, rightfully so.
But this is really crucial for shaping men into what they are supposed to be as well, okay?
If you can shape individuals into the necessary prototype when it comes to sex and sexuality, you can shape society from there.
So, far from being something extraneous or simply worldly, sex and sexuality and gender are core elements of the high-control religious agenda, and that is why they just can't get enough.
It is why, if you are in these spaces, you will hear a focus on sex and sexuality and gender that, again, I would say rivals what most people experience in any non-church context.
Outside of maybe specific advocacy groups focused on those areas.
Now there's one final point about all of this that I want to mention.
And let's say, I don't know, you listen to this, and you're like, wow, that's really interesting.
And maybe you go read some stuff, or you talk to some other people, and you get this perspective of how these contexts just focus on sex so much.
But then you go and you have a conversation with a rank-and-file member of one of these church contexts.
It might even be Uncle Ron.
Some of you know, the true believer, the kind of member who finds that spiritual vision fulfilling, the kind of person who does not experience high control religion as abusive, they haven't been traumatized by it.
They find value in what is taught and what they do.
They have probably grown up within that tradition.
And you were to sort of throw these ideas out to them, right?
I don't know, maybe you say, hey, go listen to this podcast I listen to, and they listen to this episode.
You might be confronted with a range of responses from them, but one of them would be sincere shock and bewilderment.
And I've had this conversation with people, too, where I express my concerns, my views about sexuality and high-control religion and evangelicalism and so forth, and somebody within that tradition is sincerely taken aback and shocked that I would suggest that they focus on sex a lot.
Many who have been socialized in these contexts, People who have grown up and come of age, often getting married and having families of their own within these contexts, they have spent their entire lives learning that their religion marks a departure from the sex-obsessed secular world.
When confronted with this very different perspective I'm trying to put forward, they will be shocked and bewildered that you could suggest such a thing.
They might get defensive as well, obviously.
And I think a lot of us coming out of these traditions can recognize that because for many of us, it took a long time for us to come to this perspective, for this dimension of high-control religion to really come fully into view.
And I think that this phenomenon is important, this kind of what we might call the cultural blindness or the experiential blindness to this dimension within those high-control contexts.
I think it's significant and illustrates a few things.
The first is how thoroughly we can become conditioned to the tenets of high-control religion and how naturalized those conceptions of sex and sexuality can become.
That we are not even aware that we are socialized into perspectives on sex and sexuality.
We simply come to experience those perspectives as nature itself, as the way that things are.
And I think it also highlights how normal it can become to reduce people to issues of sex and sexuality.
If you talk, again, those rank and file issues, so many people that they oppose in the world, so many things they oppose, trans people, queer people, unmarried people, women who have abortions, so many things related to sex and sexuality, they often reduce entire segments of the population to these issues.
They define them and reduce them and categorize them and judge them solely on the basis of sex.
Or sexuality or gender or sexual behaviors or whatever, reduce them to those while simultaneously claiming that they are the ones who don't focus on sex or are not obsessed with it.
That's the kind of blindness that you can encounter.
Honest bewilderment that masks these very deep, very emblematic, very problematic dimensions.
So where are we going from here?
I've got to wrap this up.
This episode is intended to kind of set things up and just to highlight, to put in front of us that conservative American Christianity is obsessed with sex, talks about it all the time, it figures prominently.
And as we move forward, I'm going to explore some of the ways that that is the case.
If you're sitting and listening to me like, Hello, Dan.
I'm not convinced.
Cool.
Tune in for future episodes and let's talk about this.
We're going to talk about things like the different understandings of male and female sexuality.
We're going to talk about the fixation on virginity, especially women's virginity.
We're going to talk about the concept of sexual immorality that figures a hugely, huge, prominent place within high-control religion.
Sexual immorality.
We're going to talk about what I'm going to call the sex-positive purity movement.
I'm going to talk about the fixation on pornography, the sort of apocalyptic ways that pornography is understood within these.
We will talk about, briefly, because this could turn into, you know, there have been entire books written about this, the lack of any place for queer folk.
And we're also going to talk some about the traumatizing effects.
Of this evangelical sex culture.
So we're going to talk about a lot of different things as we move forward.
I'm going to try to tease this out and put my money where my mouth is in saying that sex and sexuality are things that figure prominently within these traditions.
Please check out upcoming episodes.
Please give me feedback.
Let me know what you think.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always value the insights.
Look forward to moving forward in this kind of series within this series with you.
And as always, until we get to talk again, please be well.
Don't forget, y'all.
Two live events coming in November.
Some straight white American Jesus.
One at the University of Southern California and LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
