More about "the Judeo-Christian tradition of marriage." I should note that, when I sent this passage to a theologian friend of mine asking for comments, he wrote back saying this was the clumsiest, most unsubtle view of the history of Christianity that he'd ever seen. So know that this isn't endorsed by your local anybody. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true.
Before I started writing this, my understanding of the Christian perspective on marriage was: Sex is bad.
I was not surprised to learn that the truth is a little more nuanced than this.
It’s true, it turns out, that the early Christians weren’t so hot on sex and that they regarded marriage as a consummation not particularly devoutly to be wished. In his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes, “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide [celibate] even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” and, though most modern translations disingenuously render this as “than to burn with passion,” even a cursory examination of the relevant texts makes it clear that the smoke of hellfire was in Paul’s nostrils. A century or two later, St. Jerome, one of Paul’s biggest cheerleaders, writes, “He who is in the merely animal state, and does not receive the things pertaining to the Spirit of God . . . is not fed with the food of perfect chastity, but with the coarse milk of marriage. . . . Corruption attaches to all intercourse, and . . . the rewards of chastity cannot belong to marriage.”
Reading these sentiments expressed by the guys who started this whole thing didn’t surprise me a great deal. What did surprise me was finding out what they were really after: they wanted, if I understand correctly, to destroy the world. Jesus’ buddies lived in the midst of a bunch of pagans whose society was chugging along as stably as ever, which they found really annoying, because Jesus had said he wasn’t planning another visit until everything was irreparably fucked up, and they missed him. So they figured that if they just never had sex, they wouldn’t have any kids, and if people stopped having kids altogether, then society would fall apart, the world would end, and Jesus would come back.
In other words, when the Romans sent Christians to the lions, it wasn’t just because it was fun to watch the lions rip the Christians apart, though I’m sure it was; the Romans were protecting their country from terrorists.
After a while, though, everybody’s “The end of the world is at hand!” signs started getting pretty tattered, and the longer the apocalypse kept failing to materialize the more difficult it was for Christians to believe that it would. They couldn’t just say, oh, well, guess we were wrong, however, because by this time there were a lot of them, and their increasing numbers were giving them something they’d never had before: power. Rather than give it up, therefore, Christian theologians just developed another justification for all this celibacy, which was that sex is bad. (They were particularly upset by non-vanilla sex—saying things like, “It is better for a wife to permit herself to copulate with her own father in a natural way than with her husband against nature [orally or anally],” for example—but really they didn’t seem happy about any of it.) Of course most of the people becoming Christians weren’t so interested in celibacy; they just wanted to keep living their lives the way they always had, and the Church—forgetting apparently that its original intent had been not to take over society but to destroy it—turned a blind eye to their infractions (sexual and otherwise), which meant it was easier for more people to become Christians, which meant that the Church had to turn a blinder eye, and eventually the religion that had begun as a revolution established itself as the most powerful protector of the status quo in history.
Protecting the status quo at the time meant, among many other things, that the Church licensed prostitutes, and that priests, while officially celibate, could have as many concubines and kids as they wanted provided they paid the officially established fees. Eventually, though, Martin Luther and his friends were like, we’ve had enough, and one of the things of which they’d had enough was the hypocrisy of the Church’s hoity-toity attitude toward marriage and sex compared with its actual practices, so they said, you know what, we’re taking our marbles and starting our own club, and in our club, marriage is good, though only with pure vanilla sex, because marriage is a “hospital for lust”; any other kind of sex within marriage (and any kind of sex at all outside) is “dreadful, scabby, stinking, loathsome, and syphilitic.” Once Luther had fractured the Church, moreover, there was really no way to unify it again, and disagreeing sects and denominations multiplied over generations, with the result that when the Puritans came over to America a little later—remember, they left England because they wanted the religious freedom to be uptight—American Protestant Christianity was born as a religion that hated sex, the body, and women, but thought marriage was a fine idea.
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