Sex & Common Sense

No longer do embarrassed parents have to explain the Facts of Life to embarrassed children. And if anxious young Christians do seek advice on sexual morality from their elders it is all too often expressed in lofty doublethink about the "liberating power of the Gospel" and "freedom from myth and law through Christ." All of which suggests that religion is not saying anything helpful about morality for teenagers, who consequently have to fall back on their common sense. To Dean Robert Fitch of the Pacific School of Religion, that seems to be the best solution after all. In the current issue of the Christian Century, Congregationalist Fitch advocates a code of sexual morality with its roots in reason, not revelation. His five-point argument:

sbEither you control sex or sex controls you. "Currently young people have a respectful awareness that they must curb their appetites for food, drink and tobacco. Surely there is something ludicrous in the notion that sex, on the contrary, is something to which you may help yourself when, as and if you please."

sbSex is for human beings. Easygoing sex may be fine for the idyllic South Sea islander, Fitch argues, but when a member of a more complex culture tries to ease back into the patterns of a simpler life, he doesn't become idyllic--only less human. "We must take sex according to the order and degree of our own humanity. Sex for us as human beings has to be blended with intelligence and with love. Intelligence as disciplined inquiry into truth, and love as the highest spiritual excellence, are something more than a mere impulse of curiosity or a sudden leap of lust."

sbSexual compatibility is not the essential in a happy marriage. "Any marriage counsellor knows that there are happily married couples whose experience of sexual intercourse is limited or infrequent. Here we are at one point where premarital sexual experiments are radically misleading. Happiness in marriage depends on other factors. It depends on a love and a loyalty which can stand the long-range test for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. No premarital relationship can test these things."

sbSex is social. "There is no society whatsoever that does not regulate sexual conduct by its folkways. Love is not just a matter of the feeling of emotional sincerity or of the experience of a beautiful relationship consummated furtively in a motel. Nor does love even know itself as love until it has entered into community with groceries, the rent, a salary, taxes, civic responsibilities and religious forms of association."

sbSex is for persons. "Being a person implies the full social context and also involves the genuine emotion of love. And that surely is the heart of the matter. Sex must be a part of the self as a person. Nor shall we get the most out of it, or out of ourselves, unless we mingle it with those elements that are moral and spiritual and social, that call forth the highest in our humanity."

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