What We Do In The Bedroom

Sir Mark Tully has just had published a book called India's Unending Journey: Finding Balance in a Time of Change (Rider, 2007) in which he ticks off the Christian Churches for their adherence to traditional teaching. 'Christianity', he observes, 'has been on the decline in Britain for many years now. If that decline is to be reversed... the Churches have to be more willing to accept uncertainty about some of their moral teachings, to acknowledge that the ways in which people live their lives have changed and that... the Churches must change if they are to remain relevant.' (p.91).

Sir Mark's principle concern in this context is evidently with sex, in which he thinks the Churches are unhealthily interested. 'Even today,' he says. 'I meet people who ask me, ' Why is the Church so concerned about what we do in bed? Why doesn't it care more about what we do when we are out of bed?' This, for Sir Mark, is a rhetorical question, and he offers it no answer: instead he suggests that if the Anglicans were to 'find a way of accommodating the modern research that shows that homosexuality is not a disorder, it would help dispel the image of an institution obsessed by sex. It would also surely bring the Church more into line with the message of a loving God that it preaches. Similarly the Roman Catholic Church must also question its certainty about birth-control and about the celibacy of the clergy. 'What modern people are looking for religion of experience.'

The problem with this kind of preaching is that it tries conclusions with premises. I have no doubt that if the Churches did revise their teachings on certain subjects, they would find themselves more in line with the prejudices of contemporary secular society. The same would no doubt have been true in the days when Christians were a persecuted minority in the pagan Roman Empire. But I am much more doubtful whether the abandonment of principle would reverse the decline in Christianity, since those whom it is designed to impress would probably be indifferent to it, and the only people likely to be alienated would be those who had previously taken the Churches teachings on these matters seriously. The history of the Churches in the last half century has been characterised by initiatives designed to make modern man more at ease within it, and it is at least doubtful whether the adoption of those initiatives have done anything more than to dismay the traditionalists. But the prior question is whether the Churches can or should abandon a large part of their moral teaching and claim, at the same time, to be following in the footsteps of the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Church Fathers.

It seems to me that in every decision the Churches make they have to refer not to the exigencies of contemporary fashion, but to the demands of faith. This means that in every decison of moral principle, the issue is to be considered not from the perspective of Man, but from the perspective God. The centrality of this requirement is perfectly apparently from the first of the two great commandments, which requires us to love God, with all our hearts, and all our souls and all our might. The words are well known, but the passage in which they appear goes on to emphasise them in a number of startlingly detailed provisons that are a lot less so. The words of the commandment, writes the Deuteronomist, are to be constantly in a person's heart; they are to be taught diligently to that person's children; they are to be the subject of their discourse both at home, and abroad, and at rising and at going to bed; they are to be bound as symbols to a person's hands, and upon a person's forehead; and they are to be written on the gates and the doorframes of houses, as, among orthodox Jews, they still are (Deuteronomy 6:5-10).

By contrast, the second of the great commandments, which requires that we love our neighbours as ourselves, is by no means so emphatically expressed, but is tucked away in two half verses (see Leviticus, 19.18, 34). It was Jesus himself who gave this commandment its special emphasis, and he did so in a way that clearly demonstrates its subordination to the first. In Matthew and in Mark Jesus says that the second of the greatest commandments 'is like unto' the first (Matthew 22.39, Mark 12.31), whilst in in St John, Jesus describes as a 'new' the commandment that 'ye love one another, as I have loved you;' thereby expressly linking, our love for our neighbour to, and making it dependent on, God's love for us (John 13.34).

If this is the logic, then our love for our neighbour is to be part and parcel of our love of God, and it is natural that it should be so, for God has created each of us in his image, and it is not right or respectful that we should prefer ourselves to others, or either ourselves or our chosen partners to God. It follows from this that we cannot simply hive off the area of sexual morality, and say that the Churches have no business to pronounce upon the issues which sexual morality raises, nor complain when the teachings which it upholds are based on considerations other than those which are prevalent in the transitory social systems in which we find ourselves.

Of all the generations of men that have ever lived, our generation puts the heaviest emphasis on love as the proper foundation for sexual morality. And yet this emphasis has some ludicrously paradoxical results when viewed from a Christian point of view. So overwhelming has the secular emphasis on love become, that an appeal to it is used to justify adultery, to condone the abandonment of unions sanctified by vows of permanence made before God, and to sacrifice the emotional interests of children to the emotional needs of the supposedly grown up.

When Dante placed the adulterous Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo in the Second Circle of Hell (a punishment that mystified where it did not revolt a number of Romantic poets and composers), his theology was spot on, and so was the punishment, which is to be blown about endlessly in a vortex which reflects the hellish vagaries of undisciplined passion (see Inferno, Canto V, Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento/ enno dannati i peccator carnali,/ che la ragion sommettono al talento').

To a person who accepts the true force of the first commandment, the idea that God has no business in the bedroom is a curious departure from reality - after all, one assumes that one of the doorjambs on which the Deuteronomist would have us pin its text is the one that leads to that very room. The Church's teachings on virginity, celibacy and continence have their roots in the teachings of the Saviour (aee Matthew, 19.12), and of St.Paul (1.Cor.7.7-8, 32-34), and the Church's teachings on birth control and homosexuality, while imposing restraints on sexual intercourse ar certain times or in certain cases, do not actually prohibit love, or non-physical forms of its expression. One may accept such teachings may be inconvenient, in the case of contraception, and make for unhappiness, or even misery, in the case of abortion or homosexuality, but to argue that the teaching should be abandoned simply for that reason carries no spiritual or intellectual weight whatsoever. And it is worth remembering that those to whom the first commandment is a guiding light are more likely to perceive the consitency of the Churches teachings on these matters than those who regard them as little more than an expression of ecclesiastical tyranny in the first place.