Free The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong Page A

fought represent a major war within the Christian community. In order to place the crisis of our burgeoning human population into a context where it can be discussed meaningfully, we need to look at this contemporary conflict in the light of the history of our cultural understanding of both religion and sexuality. Religious people think that it is a moral battle. Nonreligious people think of it in survival terms. Light needs to be thrown on this debate that today produces mostly heat.
    Historically, the leadership of the Christian church has always attacked vigorously any procedure that might separate sexuality from procreation. That leadership has consistently stated that if this separation were ever allowed to occur, the door to moral anarchy would be opened so wide that it could never again be shut. The only constraining power, they have argued, capable of keeping sex in line and therefore moral is the fear of pregnancy. Out of this belief has arisen the prohibition against anything that might come between sexual activity and conception. As the issues facing the world have changed, however, the human birthrate has begun to threaten the survival of the whole ecosystem. As reproducing life has faded in importance across our society it has been replaced by the concern that appears to dictate a compelling need to slow down the human birthrate. Survival replaced morality as the driving emotion in this conflict, and in response the major religious institutions of the West began to experience a dramatic identity crisis. The Christian church, which historically had claimed for itself the right to define and to defend public morality, suddenly discovered itself still supporting the expansion of the human population as the highest good. Christians justified this behavior with the claim that they were preventing the gift of sexuality from becoming “irresponsible” or from being practiced without the “punishing” consequences necessary to secure control over all sexual activity. Today those same Christians fail to understand that this is no longer the substance of the conflict.
    Throughout human history an ancient dance has been conducted between religion and sex. They have been bound together like the yin and the yang. It will be helpful, therefore, to see the present phase of this dance as only one more part in an ancient and long-term relationship.
    Sex and religion have never been separated in human history. It is almost amusing to listen to church leaders, caught up as they are in the debates of this present generation, discussing questions about the acceptability of various changing patterns in sexual behavior. How many times have I heard some form of this pious yearning, “I wish we could quit talking about sex and get back to concentrating on the church’s mission.” They do not seem to recognize that sex is and has always been at the heart of the mission of every religious system. Sex and religion have moved in tandem since the dawn of human self-consciousness. Sex is such a powerful force that religion has always felt it must master and control it in order for religion to have credibility. Organized religion has also related to sexual activity as something to be feared, which in turn has led to enormous efforts throughout history to tame it, incorporate it, deny it or in some manner make it the servant of religion.
    On one side these efforts were seen in those ancient religious systems, shaped by the agricultural cycle, which believed that God was worshiped by co-opting sex to serve the fertility needs of that culture. That was when temple prostitutes, both male and female, became part of religious liturgies. On the other side of this debate has been the Western Catholic tradition which, reacting to loose sexual practices in the Mediterranean world, made the suppression of sex the first prerequisite for the holy life of both the ordained and what they called “the religious”; that is, monks, nuns, sisters and