Faith Integration and the Outrageous Ethic of Sex Only in Male-Female Marriage: Towards an Anthropology of Sex and Marriage for the Christian Community

Abstract

This article identifies two competing paradigms of sexual ethics in the student handbooks and codes of conduct at American residential colleges and universities. Sexual misconduct is either defined exclusively in terms of consent violation or, regardless of consent, as any sex outside of male-female marriage—the latter found solely in faith communities.Based on survey results, this article examines faculty convictions related to the above two paradigms at religiously affiliated universities. It finds strong support for both paradigms. Among faculty who reject the “sex only in male-female marriage” paradigm, many consider the paradigm “outrageous” (irrational, extremist, motivated by malice, and productive of human harm)—meriting government sanctions.However, this article suggests that the most repudiated portion of the Christian sexual and marital ethic, its cross-sex nature, turns out to be in the mainstream of marriage cultures around the world—as studied by anthropologists. In world history, it is the ethic of mere consent that is the extremist outlier. Marriage, as studied by anthropologists, constitutes both a conjugal bond and a biparental bond—attaching men to the social reproduction project, and giving each child a father as well as a mother. The article ends by inviting a comparison of the two paradigms in terms of harms being guarded against, and in terms of the extent to which they are morally oriented towards the good of the next generation.

Towards a missiology of marriage and sexuality: A review of Timothy Tennent’s theology of the body

“…Marriage constitutes both a conjugal and a biparental bond—attaching men to the social reproduction project and giving each child a father as well as a mother. Only recently, and in response to recently emergent same-sex ideologies and lifeways of modern societies, have anthropologists begun to change their definitions of marriage to accommodate the new trends (Priest, 2022a: 14–22).…”

“…But if the “only meaningful” purpose of male–female marriage is to communicate a distinctively Christian truth about “Christ and his church,” then why exactly did pre-Christian societies the world over historically practice marriage as a male–female institution (see Priest 2022a, 2022b; Girgis, Anderson, & George 2012)? This argument hardly seems like one that exemplifies Tennent’s own stated ideal of articulating a “proper moral argument in the public square” (201), proper and compelling, in part, because of an appeal to “general revelation” (201) or natural law—and framed in terms of purposes explicitly tied to human flourishing.…”

“… 2. Tennent’s claim that one’s understandings of biblical authority is epistemologically a watershed issue influencing Christian views on sexuality has strong empirical support. In a survey of undergraduate faculty at universities identified as Roman Catholic, evangelical, and mainline Protestant, among Christian church attendees, the belief that the Bible is “without error in what it affirms” (question wording taken from the Lausanne Covenant) was strongly correlated with affirming an ethic of sex only in marriage, with marriage understood as a cross-sex union (Priest, 2022a: 10). Even after controlling for tradition of university, sex, age faculty rank, ethnicity/race, academic discipline, and size of institution the correlation remained strong [r(1287) = .702, p < .001].…”