Your Body Matters

By Robin Phillips

The dust was hardly able to settle on the same-sex ‘marriage’ debate before activists began preparing for the next set of battles.

It is hard to predict what will come first: will it be calls to legalize polyamory, or perhaps paedophilia (which Wikipedia says is “similar to a heterosexual or homosexual sexual orientation”)?

We can’t say for sure, but Andy Crouch believes that the next battle may hinge on the Christian claim that our bodies matter.

Mr. Crouch’s comments were made in a recent Christianity Today editorial, ‘Sex Without Bodies The church’s response to the LGBT movement must be that matter matters.’

In surveying the ever-growing array of emerging sexualities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, trans-sexual, queer, questioning, asexual, etc.) Crouch concluded that “There is really only one conviction that can hold this coalition of disparate human experiences together. And it is the irrelevance of bodies—specifically, the irrelevance of biological sexual differentiation in how we use our bodies.”

The irrelevance of what we do with our bodies features in homosexual polemics against monogomy and against sexual exclusiveness, as we showed in our earlier article  ‘Why Gay Marriage is a Public Threat‘. Indeed, advocates of gay ‘marriage’ will frequently downplay the physical aspects of marriage, urging instead that committed relationships are not primarily about becoming one-flesh physically, but are about spiritual and emotional connection. This Gnostic view of allows them to accommodate various models of non-exclusivity. As Crouch observes,

Indeed, sex itself is markedly different for gays and lesbians, research shows. Men in stable, committed gay relationships readily “[make] open arrangements for sex outside the couple,” as a recent New York Times article put it; indeed, more than 40 percent have done so.

Meanwhile, large numbers of women in committed lesbian relationships seem to cease sexual activity altogether over time. These are not just male and female versions of a single simple thing called “homosexuality,” let alone merely “homosexual” versions of a single simple thing called “sexuality”—they are profoundly different human experiences.

Crouch continues and shows that behind the preference for “open” relationships among homosexuals is a fundamental antipathy to the importance of matter. This is in marked contrast to the Christian understanding of the body.

…the created givenness of bodies must give way to the achievement of ascertaining, announcing, and fulfilling one’s own internally discerned desires, with no normative reference to the body one happens to inhabit. It is no accident that as normative sexuality has been redefined, from an essentially exterior reality uniting male and female bodies to an essentially interior reality expressing one’s heart, the charges of bigotry have been heard more fiercely against those who hold the traditional Christian view. How dare we Christians speak against any person’s heart?

Marriage, which has always been “unequal,” yoking together two very different kinds of bodies, must now be “equal,” measured only by the sincerity of one’s love and commitment. To insist on the importance of bodies is to challenge the sovereign self, to suggest that our ethical options are limited by something we did not choose.

There is one other consistent position that Christians can hold, though we will hold it at great social cost, at least for the foreseeable future: that bodies matter. Indeed, that both male and female bodies are of ultimate value and dignity—not a small thing given the continuing denigration of women around the world.

Indeed, that matter matters. For behind the dismissal of bodies is ultimately a gnostic distaste for embodiment in general. To uphold a biblical ethic on marriage is to affirm the sweeping scriptural witness—hardly a matter of a few isolated “thou shalt not” verses—that male and female together image God, that the creation of humanity as male and female is “very good,” and that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18, NRSV).

 

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