I was moving into my dorm room freshmen year. I was nervous. My parents were anxious. My R.A. was trying to talk to me about dorm life, specifically some of the conservation efforts they were implementing.
"And you know, to conserve water you can always shower with a friend," he said fairly casually.
"YOU BETTER NOT!" jumped in my anxious mom.
"I know, mom, I know," I said.
And I did. By the time I left for college at age 18 I clearly understood the differences in how the culture around me talked about sexuality and sexual conduct and what the expectations were from the Scriptures. I had been fully indoctrinated in a sexual ethic that, I think, genuinely blessed me, the women I dated in college, and ultimately my wife and kids. I managed to get out of college having taken only solo showers. Too bad for the environment, good for me.
"When we talk about issues of justice or race in my classes or in the media, it feels like black people or women can say just about anything they want and as a white man I just have to sort of take it. That's one reason why it's hard for me to get excited about dealing with this in IV."
I had this conversation with a number of men this past year on campus. And what I think is crucial here is that there is not a parallel understanding of issues of justice and race from a distinctly Christian viewpoint as there is regarding issues of sexuality. There is no de facto understanding that when Christians talk about race or justice, it's on different terms with different rules.
I grew very adept at running issues regarding sexuality from the secular media and the classroom dialogue through a distinctly Christian filter. There is no such filter for issues of race and justice. This is in part because historically, conservative Christians have not placed the same emphasis on issues of race and justice as they have regarding issues of sexuality.
Given the sheer number of Scriptures regarding issues of justice and ethnicity in proportion to the numbers regarding sexual conduct, to say that this is a gross oversight would be a serious understatement. It would be no exaggeration to say that justice verses outnumber issues dealing with sexuality as much as 50 to 1.
I'm not saying that the work done understanding healthy sexuality is not important. I'm very grateful for how that work blessed me through high school, college, and post-college into marriage.
I'm simply saying that we need to expend at least that much energy on justice and race so that we might be able to approach them with a fully "Christian" understanding of what we're talking about...including the ability to see how secular v. Biblical approaches have some overlap and some critically wonderful differences.
I'll post a few thoughts on what that might look like tomorrow...
4 comments:
Preach it, bro - wow!!
thanks, marsh! i hope you'll leave some thoughts on my next post that i just put up to fill in some of my gaps...
I've done a lot of thinking about sexuality lately. I haven't come to any conclusions except that I know I don't want to investigate it through the "Christian filter". There is much in the way of church tradition that I think was not Godly, but made it's way into the "Christian filter" through which we take things for truth and don't investigate truth for ourselves (slavery, for example). I'm not sure if it's that there isn't a distinctly Christian viewpoint of race or justice but rather that the viewpoint is that we just ignore it. I also think it's interesting that a close examination of justice may
challenge much of the church's "Christian filter" regarding sexuality. Maybe our priorties have been out of order?
skipper,
i certainly appreciate that you've got some frustrations with the church's perspective on sexuality. i don't think you're alone in wanting to punt the "christian filter."
but let me encourage you to not give up on it entirely. you mention slavery, but it was a committed Christian (Wilberforce) who was at the forefront of taking down the global slave trade. similarly, i believe that our sexuality can really only be understood from a Christian perspective--that is, from an understanding of what our sexuality is designed for. what is the purpose of our sexuality? if it's only for our personal pleasure and for the survival of the species, then what we do is our own business. but mabye it's bigger than that. in which case we need to hear from the designer of the instrument what the instrument is for.
if someone from outer space arrived and examined my watch, they could do some good work on undestanding the way a watch works. but apart from talking to someone who knew the actual purpose (keeping time is a part of what we earthlings do), they'd have no idea what it really did. similarly with our sexuality. we can examine and know the something of how things work, but we need someone outside of ourselves to tell us the genuine purpose of it.
You said "I'm not sure that there isn't a distinctly Christian viewpoint on race." That's exactly my point. I think that there IS a distinct Christian viewpoint on race and YES, we just haven't developed it as richly and as purposefully as we have our approach to sexuality. I'm not sure that our priorities have been out of order per se as much as the issues of race and justice have been overlooked while other issues have gotten the attention and focus. As I said in my post, I appreciate the ways that my Christian filter blessed me (and now my family) in college and beyond. I just think that we need to do some of the same types of work towards understanding these issues and developing a "theology" of race and justice--it's in the Scriptures, we just need to do the work of bringing it together and understanding it.
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