4.16 – Two Hauerwas Essays on Sex

“Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christians Are Doing It” (1978)

  1. On Speaking Candidly and as a Christian about Sex

In speaking candidly, Hauerwas admits that he has no “adequate ethic to deal with sex” (481). Instead, he implies that the church has relied on social mores to sustain its ethics, but those mores are changing.

In lieu of any social mores, the church has lost its ability to, for example, explain sexual fidelity (cf. 482).

“For it is my thesis that the development of a sexual ethic and practice appropriate to basic Christian convictions must be part of a broader political understanding of the church. Put bluntly, there is no way that the traditional Christian insistence that marriage must be characterized by unitive and procreative ends can be made intelligible unless the political function of marriage in the Christian community is understood” (483).

We cannot use natural law to do this for us. This is because: “The attempt to base an ethic of sex on ‘nature’ results in abstracting sex from those institutions that are necessary to make any ethic of sex intelligible” (483).

  • It is worth considering what he means when he says “those institutions that are necessary to make any ethic of sex intelligible.” He is implying that sex makes sense only within certain “institutions” (e.g. church, society, marriage, family, etc) and not within “nature,” per se.

The really difficult – and yet simultaneously freeing – point comes shortly after: “…a Christian ethic of sex cannot be an ethic for all people, but only for those who share the purposes of the community gathered by God and the subsequent understanding of marriage” (483).

  • Once sex is removed from this covenantal institution, that is, the church, it cannot be made sense of generally. In short, for non-Christians to behave sexually the way Christians do, but to do so apart from the church, is to court confusion.

He acknowledges that stating that sex is a pubic and political issue can seem odd because we’ve been taught that sex is a private affair between two (or, even, more) people. However, as he notes: “What we have failed to note is that the claim that sex is a matter of private morality is a political claim dependent upon a liberal political ethos” (484).

  • A good example of this is when – typically liberal – people make the claim that the government shouldn’t make rules about gay marriage because “who a person wants to love is their own business” or “what happens in someone’s bedroom is none of my business.” These arguments about personal privacy are used to justify public change, which demonstrates just how public these private acts really are!
  • Also, important note, when Hauerwas says “liberal political ethos,” he does not mean “liberal” as “Democrat.” All American politics participates – as he’ll make more clear later – in a liberal political agenda. Here, “liberal” means a certain philosophical assumption that undergirds American, democratic politics. For example, the assumption that there is something called a “private life” is a liberal assumption (as is, for more example, the notion of private ownership of property, private rights, etc.). So, when Hauerwas uses “liberal” he means “the philosophy that assumes a thing called ‘private.’” If this seems odd to you, it may be because we’ve lived in such a thorough-going “liberal” society, that is, a society that believes in private anything and everything. As a mental exercise, consider why you believe in private ownership of the contents of your book bag? Who says that this is your stuff? Why do they say that? How do the justify that belief? You’ll find that there is no “proof” of private ownership, except that we’ve all agreed to such an idea.

As a final note to this opening section, Hauerwas notes that “Realism” and “Romanticism” are the two main cultural options for discussing sex and both participate in this “liberal political ethos.”

1.1Realism

The realist – as their name indicates – just tries to deal with the reality of our sexual situation (Hauerwas notes that at that time two out of ten girls in New Jersey would get pregnant in their teen years). In response, realists want to “demystify” sex (cf. 485). The problem with this, though, is – as Hauerwas says: “Realists cannot help but assume that the ways things are is the ways things ought to be” (485). And that “… realists accept as morally normative the liberal assumption that sexual activity should be determined by what each individual feels is good for him or her” (485).

  • NOTE: Again, “liberal” does not mean “Democrat,” but based upon a view of private ownership and private self. This sense of a “private self” is particularly important to understand because it undergirds the assumption that “what each individual feels is good for him or her” is a valid litmus for determining something’s ethic.
  • NOTE: “Normative” means what should be made the societal norm.

1.2Romanticism

“The basic assumption of romanticism is that love is the necessary condition for sex and marriage” (485). Hauerwas chooses to use Nena and George O’Neill’s book, Open Marriage, as an example of romanticism. It is worth reading the series of quotes that he provides from that book (cf. 486-487). However, his major concern is not with the extramarital affairs that will result in an open marriage, but rather the sort of character each person in an open marriage needs to have, independent of their actual sex acts. As he writes: “Hidden in the question of What ought we to do? is always the prior question What ought we to be? The most disturbing thing about such proposals as the O’Neills’ is the kind of person they wish each of us to be. On analysis, the ideal candidate for an open marriage turns out to be the self-interested individual presupposed and encouraged by our liberal political structure and our capitalist consumer economy” (487).

  • I suspect that Hauerwas believes (and to whatever degree this is important, I concur) that the result of a liberal political ethos is one of extreme, privatized, individualism. This is what he means when he talks about the ideal candidate being “self-interested.”

Hauerwas continues this line of thought about the importance of character (and “character” should remind you of all the lessons we had on the virtues because the virtues train you to be a certain sort of person, not necessarily a rule book of the right and wrong things to do). As he notes, for two people to be in an open marriage, they have to “develop” (488) themselves for this openness. This implies that an open marriage is not implicit or “natural.” It has to be made, constructed, built, enacted just like any other “virtue.” (NOTE: I’m not implying adultery is a virtue; neither would Aristotle).

The final blow comes when Hauerwas notes: “The irony is that romanticism, which began as an attempt to recapture the power of intimate relation as opposed to the ‘formal’ or institutionalized relationship implied by marriage, now finds itself recommending the development of people who are actually incapable of sustaining intimate relationships” (488).

  1. The Current State of Christian Reflection about Sexual Ethics

In this section, Hauerwas critiques the ways that Christian ethicists inadvertently fall into either the Realist or the Romanticist traps. Instead, he reiterates his thesis that “The issue is what kind of marriage Christians want to encourage as essential to the purposes of their community” (490).

  • NOTE: “the purposes of their community” is another, simpler way of saying “the church’s politics.” In short, the Christian community has a purpose and every aspect of life must drive toward serving that purpose. This isn’t only about sex, but includes sex. So the question an attentive reader might be asking now is: “Okay, what’s this purpose?”
  1. One Catholic Attempt at Sexual Ethics

This section continues to help support Hauerwas’ critique of Realist/Romanticist, but does not add much more new information. His snarky comment about bestiality on p. 492 is funny in its own twisted way.

  1. The Public Character of Sex: Marriage as a Heroic Institution

In this section we finally get to move from critique (not that the critiques were bad or unnecessary) to more constructive arguments. Constructively, Hauerwas wants us to see the “public character” of Christian sex ethics (or, really, what should be the public character of any sex ethic). As he writes, “Whereas most recent theories about sexual ethics are individualistic, since they focus primarily on how persons should deal with their bodies and private actions, William Everett has argued that we must see that sexuality is shaped by humanly created institutions and this this formation works for good as well as for evil” (494).

Hauerwas then gives the example – via Everett – of how priests came to be required celibates. Their celibacy was a “counterfamily” to the biological families of the princes and was necessary if the Church was ever to be anything more than a mouthpiece for royal power. He gives us this history to help us think critically about who and what the family is today, in our context. And who and what it is, he describes when he writes, “…increasingly the family becomes understood as a voluntary society justified by its ability to contribute to the personal enhancement of each of its members” (495). He intentionally uses this language, because “personal enhancement” was part of the purpose for open marriages earlier in this essay.

So, today, Everett (and Hauerwas) argues that re-imaging sex ethics requires us to re-imagine the nature of the family, the influences upon it, and the role and purpose of the church. But this won’t happen if the church, too, is understood as “a voluntary association that exists for the spiritual enrichment of the individuals composing it” (496). Again, if the church only exists for “spiritual enrichment” (which sounds a lot like “personal enhancement”), then it’s purpose is the exact same as that purpose that substantiated the earlier claims for open marriages. And, to be clear here, Hauerwas is not saying that the church exists for “spiritual enrichment”; he’s merely noting that this tends to be the incorrect assumption – even amongst church-goers.

All of this leads clearly to the next subsection…

4.1Sex and the Church’s Mission

In the church, according to Hauerwas, the legitimation of singleness as a form of Christian life is important in understanding marriage in the Christian life. He supports this claim by looking toward I Corinthians 7, in which singleness is held up as more ideal for the mission of the church than marriage. Moreover, the major thrust of scriptural teachings on marriage say very little about anyone having to be happy or satisfied in marriage. That just wasn’t the primary focus on scripture when discussing marriage and sex.

Hauerwas makes one of his more interesting points when he says that “…singleness is a better indication than marriage of the church’s self-understanding” (498). This is because – simply put – the church was always meant to grow primarily through conversions and not through biological off-spring, so the single witnesses to the world that this church, this faith, will exist not by our own doing (pun intended?) but by Christ’s doing. In the process, singles make the sacrifice – not of sex – but of heirs, that is, children to call their own.

However, Hauerwas claims that both singleness and marriage have important symbolic significance (cf. 499) in the life of the church. As was already noted, singles remind the world that the church grows through the provisions of its God in the form of converts to the faith. Marriage, however, reminds the world (especially marriages with children) that there is still hope. No one would reasonably have a child if they thought there was no hope for the world. But because Christians who marry have children, they testify that there is hope, even if all evidence seems to the contrary.

4.2Marriage as a Heroic Role

So all of this, so far, is leading to Hauerwas’ understanding of marriage, which he begins when he writes, “Marriage so understood is a heroic task that can be accomplished only by people who have developed the virtues and character necessary for such a task” (499).

He does not think that the earlier Realism or Romanticism do much to cultivate these virtues. We need, he thinks, a better story than they tell. In their place, he borrows from Rosemary Haughton the notion of marriage as “heroic” because it understands success not upon one’s personal happiness or enrichment, but upon participating in the church’s mission by witnessing to God’s provision and the hope we have in it.

Haughton especially emphasizes the virtue of fidelity. To the Realist and the Romantic, fidelity does not make sense. The Romantic wants “intensity, not continuity” (500), while the Realist thinks “fidelity seems to contradict the fact that people develop and change, and in doing so it seems unjust that they should remain attached to past commitments” (500). Since both the Realist and the Romantic seem allergic to fidelity, it might be a good place for the church to consider starting in cultivating its own sex ethic.

  1. Practical Implications

“…marriage among Christians involves commitments not readily recognized by the world” (502). By this, he means our commitments to Jesus Christ and His Kingdom in the world, which is – more specifically – a commitment to witnessing to providence and hope.

He does try to explain why chastity is still important, but wants us to remember that chastity isn’t just some state of not having sex, but rather is the cultivation of a particular virtue. Even still, he admits, that’s a lot to hold onto when one is sexually tempted in the backseat of a car. And so he concludes by focusing on what someone in the backseat of a car really does need: “What they, and we, demand is the lure of an adventure that captures the imagination sufficiently that for Christians ‘conquest’ comes to mean something other than the sexual possession of another. I have tried to suggest that marriage and singleness for Christians should represent just such an ‘adventurous conquest,’ which provides us with the skills necessary to know when, how, and with whom to have sex in public” (504).

“Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)” (1993)

To begin, it is worth reading the italicized introduction provided by the book’s editors. As they note, this essay was originally an editorial in a newspaper. It is also quite satirical. That means that Hauerwas is creating a comparison meant to illuminate a specific point, specifically a point about the role of the church in a secular world. His thesis is probably this: “I only wish that Christians could be seen by the military to be as problematic as gays” (519).

Hauerwas points out that it is our own moral confusion that causes us to scapegoat LGBT folks. As he writes, “If nothing is wrong with homosexuality then it seems everything is up for grabs. Of course, everything is already up for grabs, but the condemnation of gays hides that fact from our lives” (520).

So this is terrible, but – Hauerwas claims – it has helped LGBT people see “who they are and who their enemy is” (520), which – he also claims – is more than the church knows quite often. From here, Hauerwas uses what you have learned about Catholic Just War Theory to challenge the prevailing norms of modern American warfare to show how – if Catholic soldiers were really sticking to their Just War Tradition – then they would probably be as well received as gay soldiers.

After he focuses specifically on Just War practices, he also notes other Christian practices that might be off-putting the U.S. military, including:

  • holding hands to pray
  • praying for one’s enemy
  • confession of sins before Lord’s Supper
  • promise-keeping and fidelity
  • taking showers/trying to baptize

He goes – quite clearly – rather tongue-in-cheek, but the point he is driving at is that certain practices of the Church – if they were really followed – would make Christians really terrible soldiers. And since being terrible would mean they would be excluded from the military, Hauerwas employs a little bit of wit by assuming that exclusion from the military is a sign that one is rather virtuous and – if gays are to be excluded – then they must be morally superior (as a group) to Christians (as a group).

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