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The concept of “sexual immorality” plays a HUGE role within the world of high-control American Christianity. But if we take a closer look, we find that it’s not clear what exactly “sexual immorality” even is. And if we think about it, those outside of high-control religious contexts don’t link issues of sexuality and gender together with “immorality” or “morality” is the ways that are typical of high-control religion. Why is that? What’s really going on when adherents of high-control Christianity appeal to “sexual immorality”? Listen to this week’s episode to hear what Dan has to say about these questions and more.
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We now know that Donald Trump is headed back to the White House.
There's a lot to prepare for.
There's a lot to process.
That's why we're gathering on November 21st in Los Angeles, California.
An illustrious group of thought leaders and scholars will be breaking down what happened and helping all of us to prepare for what's to come.
The event is sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Good Faith Media.
It'll include me and Dan, Rachel Lazar, Andrew Seidel, Kyate Joshi, and other scholars and thought leaders.
7pm at St.
John's Episcopal Cathedral in Los Angeles.
We hope you can join us in person.
Doors will open at 6 with book signings and a chance to hang out with me and Dan, talk with Andrew Seidel and Rachel Lazar and others.
And if you can't make it in person, we'd invite you to join us online.
You can find all the info in the show notes.
We hope to see you there.
As always, I want to begin by saying welcome to this series, I want to begin by saying welcome to this series, It's in the Code, part of the podcast, this series, It's in My name is Dan Miller.
I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Delighted, as always, to be with you.
And as always, I want to say thanks to all of you who support us in so many ways.
Subscribers, those who support us just by listening to all the ads, those of you who reach out with insights and comments and feedback.
I want to invite that from everybody.
Please reach out.
Let me know what you think.
If you've got comments about episodes, ideas for upcoming episodes, this is a series that is driven by you and the comments and insights you bring.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj, at gmail.com.
Also check out the Straight White American Jesus Discord, and that's worth a look and participation.
And I want to dive in here.
We're in a series.
I've been calling it, you know, sort of a series within this series.
I've been calling it, we've got to talk about the sex stuff, meaning issues related to sex and sexuality and gender within, you know, conservative, high control American Christianity.
So much feedback from folks about different kinds of topics and ideas and things.
I decided to pull this together.
And we've done two or three episodes into this, and the last couple we looked at conceptions of men's and women's sexuality within conservative American Christianity.
And in this episode, I want to, sort of building off of that and setting the stage for some upcoming episodes, I want to take a look at one of the most central categories in high-control American religion.
If you grew up in a conservative church, especially a conservative Protestant church in the U.S., you'll know this term.
And if you didn't, there's a good chance you'll still know it.
If you've got people in your life who are in high-control religion, if you've got Uncle Ron's that you're going to get together with for Thanksgiving or Christmas or cookouts in the summertime or whatever, you might have heard this term, and it is the idea of sexual immorality.
Okay?
And I bring this up because it would be hard to overstate the significance of this concept within conservative, high-control religious thinking.
Okay?
You can't go long in that context without hearing sermons about this.
If you grew up in a youth group in this religious context, as I did, man, this is like, it's all the time.
Every channel you're on, this is what's playing.
Our warnings about sexual immorality.
If you listen to discourses on the right, whether explicitly religious or, you know, the more...
Sort of general Christian nationalist type or whatever, you will hear this, including ideas that, you know, the reason why the great empires of the past, like the Roman Empire, collapsed was because of rampant sexual immorality.
If you are familiar, we talk about it on the podcast all the time.
I know you listen to other podcasts, you read books, you're educated on this stuff.
If you know how these discourses work in American society, you know that the family understood as the, you know, the cis, hetero, nuclear family is understood as the cornerstone, not just of society.
But of Western civilization, and so sexual immorality is positioned as the threat to the family, which is then going to threaten, you know, literally for them, the entire, you know, sort of Western civilized order will collapse because of sexual immorality.
So sexual immorality functions in a hugely central way within these religious discourses.
And so I want to talk about this concept, this concept of sexual immorality today.
And I want to actually, you know, suggest in some ways that it's strange that it functions so centrally, and yet in other ways it makes complete sense that it plays such a central role within American high-control religion.
So let's dive in here and take a look at this, okay?
So the first thing to say about this, if you've ever engaged with, you know, people coming out of this kind of religious background, or if you grew up in it, again, as I did, or, you know, you've come out of it, whatever, whatever your relation to this is, if you've engaged with high-control American Christians about issues of sex or gender or sexuality, and, you know, you've had a conversation with someone, you ask you why they hold the views that they do.
Their answer to the why question is always going to be an appeal to the Bible.
We've talked about biblicism.
We've talked about what it means to be quote-unquote biblical.
We've talked about biblical Christianity.
We talked about the Bible a lot in this series.
And you know that just rhetorically speaking, that just comes with the territory of engaging conservative Protestantism in America is the Bible.
Well, the Bible, the Bible, the Bible, the Bible.
They'll always appeal to the Bible.
So if you ask questions like, hey, you know, Uncle Ron, why do you think there are only two genders?
Or why do you think people have to abstain from sex until they're married?
Or why do you think that gay people shouldn't be allowed to get married?
Or why are you so convinced that polyamory is not a thing or that it's wrong?
The answer will, or within the framework of this Christianity, the answer should be, right?
Because the Bible says so.
Their answer will be the Bible.
And so if you were to press further, you're sitting with Uncle Ron, you know, let's say it's Thanksgiving this time, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, so somebody he knows whose kids are involved in a throuple or something, and he's upset about this.
Yeah, Uncle Ron, like, why are you so upset about polyamory?
Like, everybody's on board, they're all communicating, like, what's the problem?
He says, well, the Bible opposes it.
And he says, okay, but like, where?
Like, you know, like, can you show me where in the Bible?
Because I don't think the word polyamory shows up in the Bible.
It doesn't.
And if you press him further, he's going to claim the phrase sexual immorality.
It is sexually immoral.
Okay?
And they will point, Uncle Ron will point you to the Bible on this.
Okay?
And he's going to go to one of a number of verses.
I'm not going to get into the Bible verses today.
I'm not going to try to tie all that together for various reasons.
One is just time.
One is energy.
I just frankly don't have the energy to go trawling through the Bible.
Okay?
But the Bible does use language in a number of places, and especially in the New Testament, primarily in the New Testament.
That is often translated as sexual immorality or something related, like another translation is often the word fornication, that prohibits sexual immorality, tells us to flee from sexual immorality, tells us to avoid sexual immorality, and so forth.
I'm not going to run through the list of this.
If you're bored, go Google it.
Biblical references to sexual immorality or something, it'll come up.
Here's what I do want to point out.
Uncle Ron is going to go and he's going to cite a verse that says not to be sexually immoral.
But here's the issue.
The Bible never actually defines exactly what sexual immorality is.
It gives a few examples.
It links it to some things.
But generally, it just sort of presupposes that readers already know what sexual immorality is.
We're told to flee sexual immorality.
We're told that sexual immorality is a sin committed against our own bodies.
We're told, you know, to be pure and not sexually immoral and so forth.
But it doesn't ever tell you, like, what the hell does that mean exactly?
Like, what are the parameters of sexual immorality?
And this is a really important point for me, and here's why.
If you were to start with the Bible, in other words...
If you were to say, huh, here's this concept of sexual immorality.
Uncle Ron says that it's in the Bible.
So I'm going to do that.
I'm just going to Google search.
I'm going to find references to sexual immorality in the Bible, and I'm going to read them.
I'm going to read them all.
Wouldn't take you long to read them all.
They're not very many, and they're not extended discourses.
And you read them all.
What you're going to find out is that if you're taking the Bible as your starting point, the way that conservative Christians say that the Bible should be used, you're going to have trouble.
Because you're going to say, well, okay, like it tells us not to do that, but it doesn't tell us really kind of what it is or what constitutes sexual immorality.
And it doesn't explicitly link sexual immorality with like some of the things that, you know, Uncle Ron and his conservative Christian friends are going to link it to.
And I've had experience with this.
I've had experience as a committed evangelical and evangelical young person trying to avoid sexual immorality and not being sure exactly what that means.
I have read more accounts than I can tell you, memoirs and other kinds of accounts of people who've experienced the same thing of sort of going to the Bible for guidance the way that they were taught within their religious tradition and I've talked with people in my work as a religion trauma coach, in just informal conversations, just, you know, talking with folks over a couple beers, whatever it is.
I have talked with people who've experienced this.
Who basically say, yeah, like, I was told that I was supposed to do these things, or this is what the Bible says, or in this case, to avoid sexual immorality.
So I went and I read it, and I looked up all these references, and like, I came away, number one, not having a clear sense of what it's supposed to be, but number two, seeing a gap opening up between what the Bible doesn't say...
And what my high-control religious context always told me sexual immorality was.
And this, just as kind of a broader point, this is a common point of departure from high-control religion.
Many of the people who leave high-control religion were some of the most committed adherents to it.
And one of the things, again, I encounter it personally when I talk to people.
I've read other accounts.
It's just so common for people to say that part of what moved them out of the tradition was actually reading the Bible.
Because they just did not see it giving the kind of guidance that they had grown up their entire life being told that it gave.
Okay?
So that's the first point.
If you start with the Bible, you're going to come up dry.
And I want to give just one example of this.
Okay?
And it's an example that somebody could point to.
Let's say I say that to Uncle Ron, and Uncle Ron says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You need to go look at Hebrews 13, verse 4.
That tells you something concrete about it.
Okay.
So here's what Hebrews 13.4 says.
I'm not sure which translation I'm reading here, but it's a common translation.
Okay.
Okay.
Uncle Ron says, see, right there, it gives you a concrete example.
Don't tell me the Bible doesn't tell us what sexual immorality is.
You look at that and say, well, okay, but here's a couple questions I got, Uncle Ron.
First, it says not to be adulterous.
It links it with adultery.
It links it with marriage and not to defile the marriage bed.
But what if somebody is in a polyamorous or open relationship?
You're not defiling the marriage bed because it's part of your marriage relationship.
It's not considered adultery, surely, if everybody's on board with this, right?
You're not committing adultery.
That's part of it.
Sure, if one is in a committed, monogamous, exclusive relationship, and you're stepping out on your partner and you're sleeping with other people, yeah, that's an issue.
And sure, I guess let's call that sexual immorality.
But it's not the blanket statement, Uncle Ron, that you seem to think that it is.
I can punch holes all over that.
What if people aren't married?
What does that mean about sexual immorality?
There's way more stuff that we need to know for that verse to do the work that a biblicist Christian thinks it does that's just not there.
It's just not there in the text.
So I give that as one example, and I can't take the time to show up, but here's the thing.
I'd put money down and say, That you or Uncle Ron can throw all the Bible verses at me you want, and I can highlight the shortcomings of an appeal to the Bible to settle this issue.
Time after time after time after time, I will show you that it doesn't say what it actually means.
We can think of all kinds of questions or lack of clarification and everything else.
Okay?
That's my point.
So I say this to just illustrate that point.
And I should also note, because I can feel the emails coming now, I should also say even if the Bible was clear, if it gave like, I don't know, some modern-day legal definition of what will constitute sexual immorality, I should point out that that also wouldn't be any reason to take it as an authority.
I'm not trying to get into an argument about the Bible.
I'm not trying to defer to the Bible here.
All I'm trying to say is that for the Christians who do, Who say that their views are based on the Bible, this concept of sexual immorality is way less defined and less clear than they think it is.
Okay?
And that's the point that I'm trying to make.
The concept of sexual immorality is radically underdetermined by the Bible.
Again, what I mean by that is, if somebody said, okay, let's go to the Bible and work up a definition, it's going to be very vague, it's going to be very abstract, and even the points where it links to something concrete like marriage, you're going to say, well, but what about this?
What about this?
What about this?
You're going to come up with a whole bunch of additional questions that it's just not suited to deal with, okay?
This is part of how biblicist Christianity works.
This is one of the reasons why I don't think it works when Christians make the claim that everything they do is based on the Bible, okay?
Because what I'm calling this, this underdetermination of these concepts, I think, folks, it runs deep, and most of the things that Christians want to claim are quote-unquote biblical are way more ambiguous than I think that they are, okay?
But within this worldview, the Bible is supposed to be the source of such concepts, okay?
That is supposed to be where we get our answers.
That's where we're supposed to get what they mean.
But in practice, the Bible doesn't actually do that.
So that opens up a gap.
So if you say, okay, wait a minute, I grew up in this tradition.
And I heard all this stuff about sexual immorality, and man, the pastor had no doubt what it appealed to.
My youth pastor would talk about it.
We'd get into, like, nitty-gritty details about all the things that fall under sexual immorality.
My parents taught this stuff to me.
But I go and look at the Bible, and it doesn't actually say that stuff, or you're sitting here saying that it doesn't say that stuff.
So, like, where do they get all that information?
Well, this is how it works.
This underdetermined concept of sexual immorality, it has to be sort of filled in by the people who read and interpret the Bible.
In other words, we hit those gaps in the text, those places where it doesn't tell us exactly what it means.
And we fill in those gaps with meaning.
We define what goes in there.
We define what the boundaries of sexual immorality are.
We define that.
And who is the we here?
It's usually not rank and file Christians.
The reality is, despite all the talk of reading the Bible and all their beliefs coming from the Bible, for rank and file conservative Christians, they aren't the ones reading the Bible and interpreting it.
Instead, that the meaning of the Bible, it is mediated to them by pastors, or parents, or teachers, or seminary professors.
And yes, regular Christians, if they're good and observant, they will go and they will read their Bible, but by the time they actually engage that text, their reading has been over-determined by the interpretations that they have been handed their entire life.
By the time they read the Bible, they are reading it the way they have been taught to read it, which means when you come to a topic like sexual immorality, they are reading it and importing into that concept, imputing to it exactly the things that their pastor said growing up, or their youth pastor said, or their parents said, or their conservative seminary professor or college professor said.
They're not getting their meaning from the text.
They're encountering a text that doesn't offer a clear meaning, and they are filling it in just the way that they have been taught to do.
So I could say way more about that.
I just invite you to go and listen to all the things I've said about the Bible and Biblicism and Bible Church and being biblical and the series on inerrancy and all that stuff.
You'll get more from me than you ever wanted to about sort of what I think about this way of thinking about the Bible, okay?
What I want to do here is focus on two issues that come from this.
The first issue is this.
I want to step back, and I want us just to think for a minute about how weird it actually is to link issues of sex and sexuality and gender to the idea of immorality the way the high-control Christians do.
And what I mean by this is, I want you to just think about it for a minute.
How often would we actually define issues in these domains of life, gender, sexuality, sex, as moral or immoral, or right or wrong?
Now, there are obviously examples.
I said earlier, yes, if you're in a committed monogamous relationship where you're Your partner thinks you are.
And you are having sex with other people.
Sure.
Let's call that immoral.
Let's call that a violation of trust.
Let's call that harm that you're doing to somebody else.
Cool.
We would obviously define exercises of sex or sexual acts that are abusive, that are coercive, that are exploitative as immoral.
Okay?
Obviously.
Sexual assaults, things involving child trafficking, Somebody who takes advantage of somebody who's intoxicated or emotionally insecure and coerces them into doing things.
Just on and on and on.
We could come up with lots of examples.
And yes, happily, I will call those immoral.
Which, by the way, are not things that are listed or called sexually immoral in the Bible.
I'm just going to throw that out there.
But yeah, I would call those immoral.
But I want to think about this because those things are real and they're common, but they're not typical.
They're not how most of us practice or experience sex or sexuality.
And those examples are about it.
If I'm thinking about sex And sexuality and the intersections of this with gender and everything else, I can think of lots of ways where I might use categories like healthy or unhealthy, or safe versus dangerous, or fulfilling or unfulfilling.
I can think about how I might teach my kids to think about sex.
And I would say things like, you know, I want them to be safe.
I want them to be smart.
I do want them to not take advantage of others.
I want them to have...
Fulfilling experiences.
Different kinds of things like that.
The concept of immorality isn't going to creep in very much, and it is certainly not going to creep in all of the times that the conservative Christians will say that it will.
It's not going to creep in about premarital sex.
It's not going to creep in about sex acts with somebody of the same gender.
It's not going to creep in about having multiple sexual partners or participating in sexual events with multiple partners or any of those.
Immorality, in other words, what I'm trying to highlight is it's just not the concept that's usually going to attend that outside of those really obvious examples I noted earlier.
Immoral or moral, they're just not the adjectives that I think we're most likely to assign to expressions of gender and sexuality.
Again, I think terms like healthy or unhealthy or safe or dangerous or fulfilling and unfulfilling, I think those are the adjectives we're going to use.
So, stated really, really simply, and I say this just to set up the contrast, sexual immorality doesn't play the central defining role in our broader society that it plays within high-control Christianity.
Now, if you say, well, that's really obvious, Dan, thanks for that, like newsflash, it brings me to the second point that I want to make, which is that it highlights the fact that it does play such a role within high-control religion.
In other words, the gap that opens up here between the way that people who are not part of high-control religion talk and think about and experience sexuality and gender and sex, And sex, the gap that opens up between that and the way that it is talked about and experienced by so many within high-control religion, that highlights how central it is.
It highlights how significant a role it plays in high-control religion, and it raises the question of why.
Thank you.
Why does it play such a central role within expressions of religion that aim for high control?
And I think there are a few reasons for this.
And the first is this, and this relates to other episodes that I've done, other episodes, discussions that we've had.
I don't want to go too deeply into this.
But the first is that gender and sexuality are, for most of us, they are centrally defining features of our identity.
And if your aim as a religious practitioner is, in fact, to control the beliefs, the behaviors, the perceptions, and the feelings of other people, if control is your aim, gender and sexuality are really useful levers for achieving that aim.
So making gender and sexuality core features of your ideology, it helps get the mechanisms to bring about the social control you desire.
And if you can place these elements of our identity, these central notions of sexuality and gender, and the ways that we express those, if you can put those on a moral register, on a register of right and wrong, this increases the force that they have for us.
So the first reason is simply that they are extremely effective mechanisms for maneuvering people if high control is your aim.
And the second reason why I think it figures so prominently within high-control religion, and this relates to the first, is precisely because it is so underdetermined by the Bible.
The fact that the Bible actually doesn't tell us what the hell sexual immorality is, or how it relates to social context, or what the presumed psychology of such immorality might be, and so forth.
A range of questions that we want to know now that, I don't know, maybe they weren't interested in 2,000 years ago, whatever.
The fact that it is so undetermined, it's not a weakness of the concept for high-control practitioners, it is a strength.
To put it in kind of common parlance, the biblical underdetermination of sexual immorality, it's not a bug, it's a feature for high-control religion.
High-control religious practitioners, because it is underdetermined, that is why they can fill in sexual immorality in any way they need to.
That's what allows them to do that.
If the Bible actually did define the term, if it was really clear about what it is, and better yet, if it was really clear about what sexual immorality is not, its use for control and manipulation would be limited.
But because it is underdetermined, it becomes much more useful for high-control religious practitioners.
And this gives the concept a kind of paradoxical flexibility as high-control practitioners use it.
Because on one hand, the dictates of so-called sexual immorality and the calls to avoid it, they are presented as rigid and fixed in the unchanging expressions of God.
It's not just on the level of morality.
They are given by God.
They are unchanging.
They are permanent.
It gives them an authority that they would otherwise lack.
But in practice, and folks, we can trace this historically, and people have done this.
In practice, the application of the concept and the range of issues to which it supposedly applies, they change over time.
So even while you're busy talking about things that you didn't use to talk to, trans issues are one.
When I grew up within the evangelical context, there was almost no discussion of gender identity.
It just didn't figure prominently.
Now, within these circles, it falls under this broad umbrella of sexual immorality and related issues in a way that it didn't before.
That's flexibility, and yet it is still presented as the immutable, unchanging, invariable teaching of or command of a god.
So you get this dual emphasis on the flexibility to adjust our ideology to maximize social control, all the while claiming that what we're putting forward is unchanging and eternal, it has always been God's will, it is always what Christians have thought and believed and done, and so forth.
So that, the fact that it can be modified and used in new and different ways, Again, because of its underdetermination, maximizes its usefulness as a mechanism of social control.
There's more I could say.
There's always more I could say.
But we're out of time.
The two main takeaways from this, then, are first, that a little reflection illustrates how strange it is, I think, to link sexuality and immorality together in the way that high-control religious adherents do.
And I think that that is worth noting.
And the reason I think that that is worth noting is it just brings into stark relief the control at the heart of the concept.
It brings up the stark really to say, wow, why is there such a gap between what high-control religious adherents do and how they talk about sex and morality and the way that kind of everybody else does?
And folks, I think this is everybody else, you know, not just liberals or something, but lots of other kinds of people too.
It highlights that as is typical in high-control religion, that the aim is controlled.
That is the heart of the concept.
The last point I want to make here is just the irony, and a lot of you will have picked up on this, and I think this irony will come into view as we move forward, but critics of the sexual ethics of high-control Christianity, and I'm one of them, critics like me, could argue, or not even argue, just point out the irony of the fact that the sexual ethic that comes out of this appeal to avoiding sexual immorality is itself an exercise of sexual immorality.
It utilizes sex and gender ideologies in ways that actively harm other people to try to keep them in line socially.
And I would call that an immoral use of sex and sexuality.
What that means is that millions of American Christians who are often well-meaning actively harm other people by enforcing a sexual ethic that is ostensibly about avoiding immorality.
It's a deep irony.
It's an irony with real effects.
We're going to see those as we continue to move forward.
As always, again, thank you for listening.
Thank you for the time.
Thank you for the support.
I am always behind in responding to listeners, and I'm behind right now, but I value your input and your comments so much.
Please keep them coming.
DanielMillerSwag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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