Reflections on Holy Sexuality Week, part 1
To the LGBTQ+ community, on behalf of my alma mater, I'm truly sorry.
On a day where Pope Francis formally permitted Catholic priests to give blessings for same sex couples, my alma mater, Abilene Christian University, a small school in west Texas, is going in a different direction.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post, picked up the story “Abilene Christian University to revisit sexual policy after Holy Sexuality Week”.
At the core of this is the Sexual Stewardship Policy. Kathryn Post, author of the article, writes:
That policy calls for “chastity outside of marriage between a man and a woman” and for the university “to create an inclusive environment for all students — even those who disagree with ACU’s beliefs — so long as they refrain from sexual activity outside of marriage between a man and woman.”
“We don’t have a neutral position on this,” [ACU President Phil] Schubert said in response to concerns about one-sided messaging at the event. “We’re a faith-based institution of higher learning that is governed by a board of trustees that is deeply faith committed. And so they’ve chosen to provide some guidance on this. So I understand that some would like there to be equal representation of affirming and traditional views of marriage, but that’s not where the university sits today. And it’s not what we feel is the responsibility we have to teach and mentor students according to what we believe the Bible instructs.”
The Sexual Stewardship Policy, and other manifestations of Purity Culture, culminating in the Title V Abstinence Only Until Marriage that required public educators to teach only about the harmful effects of premarital sexual activity, are the reasons that Sexvangelicals exist.
The Sexual Stewardship Policy doesn’t teach you how to solve problems relationally.
The Sexual Stewardship Policy doesn’t teach you how to effectively communicate what you need and how to listen to your partner without caving in, dismissing, or blowing up at your partner’s own requests and experience.
The Sexual Stewardship Policy doesn’t teach you how to navigate differences.
The Sexual Stewardship Policy doesn’t teach you how to negotiate how you spend time together and time apart, and how to renegotiate those based on any number of predicted and unpredictable transitions that life throws your way.
If the final product of a Christian system is “healthy, monogamous, long-term marriage”, the Sexual Stewardship Policy, and other manifestations of Purity Culture, do absolutely nothing to help people develop the skills to navigate the challenges of long-term relationships.
As Julia and I turn our specialty toward working with couples who grew up in Christian environments, we are working with couples who are relationally illiterate, and it’s not because they didn’t turn toward God. They weren’t taught to read by the systems who promised to teach them. In fact, those who find relational and sexual literacy commonly discover it outside the church through experts like Emily Nagoski, John Gottman, and Sue Johnson.
Which brings us to Holy Sexuality Week. To quote ACU’s website:
Abilene Christian University is launching Holy Sexuality Week Nov. 6-10, a series cultivating discussion and biblically-guided teachings on relationships and sexuality featuring special guest speakers. The series will bring the campus together for an intentional focus on what the Bible teaches about human sexuality, marriage and relationships.
In 2010s and 2020s lingo, the usage of “biblically” as an adjective typically connotes an alignment with American conservative family values, rooted in the desired outcomes of Title V Abstinence Only Until Marriage, driven by the performance of gender roles.
However, I don’t want to make assumptions. I want to figure out what 19, 20, and 21 year olds are being taught at the institution that played a significant role in forming me, in good ways, and not so good ways.
So I decided to listen to the lectures from Holy Sexuality Week; ACU made these videos public on Youtube, and wisely turned off the comments section, leaving ongoing dialogue and rebuttals to be left to an alumni group like Wildcats for Inclusion, which I joined (and invite you to sign), and independent publications, like our Substack, Relationship 101.
And we’ll work backwards, because how a presenter chooses to end their presentation speaks volumes about what they want their audience to take home and do with the information.
ACU invited Christopher Yuan, co-author of Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son’s Journey to God; A Broken Mother’s Search for Hope, Giving Voice to the Voiceless and Holy Sexuality and the Bible. Giving Voice to the Voiceless is a qualitative study where he asks students and graduates from Christian universities about how they navigated queerness during their time on said Christian campus. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention this book during the presentation I listened to; rather, he focuses his speech on his autobiography, including:
Mom and Dad are Chinese immigrants who converted to Christianity after moving to Chicago. Dad is a dentist.
An intense substance use (he doesn’t mention what kinds of drugs) and selling of marijuana (among other things?) in Atlanta, resulting in an arrest and prison time in a penitentiary
A diagnosis of AIDS, which we obliquely references in the middle of his speech.
A “redemption” story that includes an early release from prison and an educational career at Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College (yikes!!), and Bethel Seminary, where he received a Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Sexuality, a specialization that, according to Bethel’s website, does not exist anymore.
I have not read any of his works, so this was the first time that I’ve heard him speak. As I read through my notes, there are five key themes that stood out.
Moody Bible Institute
Okay, so this is a super niche comment, but Moody Bible Institute is…a mess. Though not quite the bastion of ecumenical conservative rhetoric as its neighbor, Wheaton College, its graduates still produce and propagate some of the most damaging principles of American Evangelical theological thought: Calvinism (the idea that God has a plan for every person), dispensationalism (Biblical literalism, and the paradox that the character of God unfolds itself throughout Scripture, at the expense of Mosaic law), and the extremely low view of humankind.
As a relationship therapist, these three principles have caused a ton of havoc on relationships, from the compulsiveness that comes with trying to discover and interpret God’s will to the extreme amount of distrust in self and other, resulting in relational patterns of avoidance, control, and anxiety.
Substance Use
We haven’t written much about recovery from substance use on Relationship 101, but, put succinctly, recovery from substance use is a terrifying process. There’s substantial research on how substance use impacts partner-partner and parent-child communication, emotional regulation, sexuality, and communal involvement. The therapeutic process takes years, and family and couples therapy is typically predicated on the individual maintaining sobriety and taking accountability for their own actions for an extended amount of time before moving into relational work. A lot of couples don’t make it to this stage, and those that do face a year(s) long process of trust building, discovery of wants and needs, and discussing residual grief, anxiety, and resentment.
It was interesting that Christopher Yuan spoke very little about this. The catalyzing energy for his recovery story was “turn to Jesus”. Turn to Jesus, or the Jesus Card™, says incredibly little about the steps actually required to live a fulfilling, ethical life (Christian or otherwise). He says, “When we have a correct diagnosis, Jesus Christ is the answer. Do not blame your past for your own sin behavior.”
Except the subject of this comment wasn’t his substance use. He actually communicated very little remorse for his engagement in substance use, and the ways that it impacted the relationships with his family, or his former partners. While the AA 12-Step Model has its own challenges, it at least suggests that healing happens in relationship from people taking accountability for their own behavior and listening and receiving the harm caused.
Rather, he directed that toward a different subject:
LGBTQ and HIV+
Another quick note. Yuan doesn’t give a timeline for his experiences. I discovered online that he graduated from undergraduate in 2005. (Thanks LinkedIn!) He did reference that he started college after anywhere between 3 and 7 years after he graduated high school.
Yuan disclosed that he received an HIV+ diagnosis at some point during the 90s, which must have insanely terrifying, especially as a gay man during that time period, given the multitude of ways that gay men were ignored and violated by the Reagan administration and law enforcement in the decade prior.
Yuan is still alive, so he must be on an antiretroviral, though he didn’t disclose that information during the presentation. But you’ve got an opportunity, as a gay man, to talk about PrEP or condom usage, as a way of practicing the sexual health principle of discussing contraceptions and protection against STIs, something that Jenelle Pierce talked with us about regarding other STIs.
Yuan goes the opposite direction, routinely referring to queerness as sinful. Which is abhorrent all by itself (more on the specifics of this later), but also begs the question, “What is not sinful?”
He gives a summary to Holy Sexuality and the Gospel (which is good, because I didn’t want to read it anyway), in which he says that “God’s yes” is “chastity in singleness” and “faithfulness in marriage”.
Julia and I want to reenvision an effective, healthy sexual ethic as well. But if we rely on “faithfulness in marriage” as the primary strategy for “God’s yes”, we’re missing out a lot of important information:
How does sex get discussed between two people in a way that both people’s needs and wants are being heard?
How do two people talk about fantasy and desire, especially after being told during their adolescence that desire is sinful and to be avoided?
How do two people talk about the diversity of options they have for engaging in a sexual encounter?
How do two people create enough distance in their relationship to develop the eroticism, something that the enmeshment of “the two shall become one” doesn’t allow for?
How do two people take care of each other after a sexual experience?
Yuan misses on an opportunity to provide relationship advice and structures to an organization that claims to support life-long marriage, perpetuating the paradox of the Sexual Stewardship Policy and every other manifestation of Purity Culture. He creates a false two-choice dilemma, rooted in the ethics of the Dualist culture that Paul wrote to in first-century western Mediterranean cultures, and not necessarily the Hebrew one that Jesus ascribed to:
“I could abandon God and live as a gay man, using sexual attractions to dictate who I was but how I lived. Or I could abandon monogamous homosexuality, not allowing desires to control who I am, and live as a follower of Jesus.”
Identity
I’ll give Yuan some credit. He makes some really important comments about identity. “My sexuality doesn’t have to be the core of who I am.”
I want to make a quick comment about the concept of compulsory sexuality, which Kristina Gupta, professor of sexuality at Wake Forest, defines as:
“The assumption that all people are sexual and the description of social norms and practices that both marginalize various forms of nonsexuality and compel people to experience themselves as desiring subjects, take up sexual identities, and engage in sexual activity.”
Sexual identity is only one component of who I am, and orientation is only one component of my sexual identity. I am sexually attracted to women, invested in having emotional connections with men and women, and am typically more likely to move into an intimate connection with someone following either a non-professional emotional disclosure or a stimulating intellectual conversation.
That’s all important data. And it’s only a microcosm of what makes me me.
Yuan rightly says, “Sexuality is not who we are but how we are and how we feel.” The how is often more important than the what, and a hyper-focus on identity prevents us from exploring the how. For instance, identity and values are different; regardless of what the gender of a person I have sex with is, I want to initiate those sexual interactions with the same relational process: consent, curiosity, a desire for mutuality. Those values inform the behaviors that happen within the actual sexual interaction, as well as everything that leads up to and follows the experience.
But then, his argument runs into the same issue that many Evangelical theologians run into when discussing sexuality.
About midway through his speech, Yuan asks the question, “How can we discuss with someone a sinful behavior if they don’t view it as behavior?”
And again, I’ll save the comments about the “sinfulness” of queerness for the end. But for this section, if left-leaning folks get stuck in identity, right-leaning Evangelical folks get stuck in behavior, which is especially frustrating because minutes before, Yuan said that the important part of sexuality is the how, not the what.
Disappointingly, in answering his question, Yuan replaces one identity, “queerness”, with another “identity”, Jesus Christ, all the while failing to communicate how a person can actually align with the values of Jesus, who actually had very little to say about sexuality, but a ton to say about hospitality, compassion, not throwing the first stone, and building relationships with marginalized communities.
You were so close, Christopher Yuan, but you had to make The Jesus Move™, and in doing so, said nothing of substance in the process.
He does, however, double down on a more disturbing practice:
Homophobia
A quick note about Yuan’s theology (and the theology commonly being spouted at Moody, Wheaton, and other Evangelical universities).
The flesh (he actually used that word) is not to be trusted. Our desires lead us astray. And, to directly quote Yuan, “The ultimate issue is that I yearn after God in complete surrender and ultimate submission.”
This worldview creates simple answers—a wrong and a right, alleviates the participant from engaging in more advanced processes, like critical thought and nuance, and deprioritizes the values of autonomy, exploration, and variance.
This worldview pushes the “wrong” to the margins, and allows people on the inside to people who sit in the inner circle to make the decision, through threats of violence and/or through diagnostic language like “sinful” or any number of homophobic, racist, or sexist euphemisms.
In the examples he uses to talk about the mistrust of human and sexual desire, Yuan starts with queer people, reinforcing the stereotype that queer people (especially gay men) have different, more dangerous kinds of sexual desire. This trope has been used to demonize gay men in our country for decades (if not longer). He tries to correct himself, saying “If I became straight, the more of a Christian I would be. He would still need to flee temptation and sin.” But it’s too late. The damage has been done. He communicates that queer people have a different responsibility over their desires than straight people do, pushing queer folks once again to the margins.
And that’s after twenty minutes of returning to shades of, “Love the sinner, hate the sin”, which psychological studies remind us (and churches reinforce) is virtually impossible, especially when:
The community is so invested in communicating that something is a sin, and
The thing that’s communicated is a sin, a queer identity and sexual activity between two consenting adults, isn’t actually harmful to society.
And then he locks LGBTQ folks to the periphery by conflating two unrelated concepts: orientation and mental health. He’s attempting to build on the idea that your sexuality isn’t the totality of your identity, which is a fair point, but in doing so, says:
“I am gay. Does that make up the totality of you? No.”
“I am depressed. Does that make up the totality of you? No.”
“If you were abused as a child, does that excuse the sin in your life? To blame our sin on our childhood is from Freud.”
Orientation and mental health diagnoses are two completely different continuums. Orientation is about attraction, fantasy, imagination, and preferences. Depression is about mood, resulting in a persistent state of sadness and loss of interest, and usually the result of a culmination of a bunch of bad, unexpected things happening to you.
Orientation and abuse are two completely different planets. Abuse is about a severe imbalance of power, an exploitation of another individual.
It’s a devastating, all-too-common false equivalency that Evangelical writers make when trying to justify their position that queerness is a sin. Julia and I talked about this in deconstructing Joshua Butler’s Beautiful Union. And it’s a false equivalency that needs to stop.
Conclusion
There’s something else fishy going on in the nonexistent waters of Abilene. Adam Laats wrote the following about Moody Bible Institute on the amazingly named blog I Love You But You’re Going to Hell:
Like all evangelical institutions, MBI is in an impossible situation. It exists as a school dedicated to a certain vision of eternal truth, yet it can only survive if it also changes periodically. For example, few members of today’s MBI community would encourage racial segregation on campus, but in the 1930s it was part of an MBI education. All schools need to change, but this can be difficult for evangelical schools that promise to be purveyors of God’s eternal Truth.
Too often, leaders at evangelical schools fudge this dilemma by making back-room decisions about changes, hoping the evangelical public does not complain too loudly. Every once in a while, however, influential board members, faculty, students, or alumni shout out a protest, like the one we hear today from Chicago.
Abilene Christian appears to be going through something similar. The highest profile donors seem to also be the most conservative, threatening to suspend money for the presence of allegedly liberal structures, like divisions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which recently got merged with another department. But to see Abilene Christian, despite its structural flaws, move away from its attempts to connect with its historical siblings, the Disciples of Christ, and instead align itself firmly with a Calvinistic, hyper-evangelical tradition, Biblical literalist tradition (Church of Christ theologians have historically been all over the map in regards to positions on Biblical literalism) is deeply disappointing, and really scary for the future of the organization.
I’m eager, yet terrified to listen to and write about the other lectures from “Holy Sexuality Week”.