People of faith believe that God is the Creator, and that the creation in some way reflects God’s nature/design. In the Christian worldview, beauty, creativity, reason and love are all human attributes that speak to a higher reality perfected in the divine. Just as creativity and reason are purposeful, and fundamental to being human, so, too, is the sex nature. The second strongest drive for a human adult, behind the drive to eat and drink, is the drive to have sex. Without libido operative in the world, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it. One of the earliest verses in the Bible, “Be fruitful and multiply,” was a command, among other things, to procreate (Genesis 1:28).
Why, then, does sexuality get such a bad rap in some circles, spiritual and otherwise?
Sexual Perversion
In the first place, the sexual area is one of the primary arenas where human pride, greed, lust, violence, and selfishness have manifested throughout history. It is quite alarming, in fact, when one reads about the massive number of sex crimes that were committed throughout history. However, corruption in the sexual area isn’t limited to criminal behavior, like human trafficking and abuse. Pornography and promiscuity may be legal, but they are serious issues in their own right that contribute to sex’s tarnished reputation on a grassroots level.
When I look at the world, and examine the lives of the people I know, including myself, I see a lot of pain that resulted from sexuality practiced outside the divine order–promiscuity, pornography, infidelity, and so on. Broken hearts, broken relationships, sexually transmitted diseases, problematic emotional ties, children born into adverse circumstances, financial hardship, etc. When I was younger, I would have had to take someone’s word for it. As an adult in my mid-twenties, nobody can convince me otherwise, because I’ve lived long enough to see the same story repeat itself a thousand times. And, unfortunately, it’s affected many people very close to me, including myself on some level.
The Virtue Of Sex
There is a saying, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Apparently, bathwater used to be so dirty that you could lose sight of the baby, and might accidentally discard them in the process of emptying out the tub. If the tub represents sexuality in the world, then the baby represents the positive good we arrive at simply by getting rid of the pollution. The corruption of beauty, the corruption of creativity, the corruption of reason, the corruption of food, the corruption of power, and so on, does not invalidate the virtue of these things in and of themselves.
For more, see the complete archive of articles on integrity.
