Vielleicht hatte Jesus ja gar nix gegen Schwule: das Christentum & Sex
God is odd about sex. The Bible and Christian writings are odder yet. If all this weirdness affected only believers, it would be important enough.
With more than 2bn adherents, Christianity is the world’s largest religion and—though it might not always feel like it in the smugly secularising West—is still growing in many regions.
But Christianity’s sexual hang-ups—on everything from celibacy to contraception, homosexuality and more—carry consequences for more than the faithful. In America abortion could sway the election.
In Russia Vladimir Putin signed legislation against “non-traditional sexual relations”. In Britain a fight over ending restrictions on abortion is brewing. This is a good time to try to understand sex and Christianity.
Any religion is as much almost random accretion as actual doctrine. Christianity’s sexual obsessions are no different.
Much of what people “know” about Christianity is, to put it mildly, hard to find in the Bible. There was, for example, no apple in Eden (it reputedly grew out of a translator’s pun: the words for “apple” and “evil” are almost identical in Latin).
As a fiery place of torture, hell is similarly almost entirely absent from the pages of the New Testament.
And the word “daily” in the Lord’s prayer—often the only Christian prayer that many know—is pure bunkum. (No one has a clue what the Greek word that appears before the word “bread” actually means.)
Christians may have banged on about sex, celibacy and homosexuality for centuries, but, in truth, Jesus had precious little to say about any of them.
Though he was fiery in his condemnation of greedy people, he had absolutely nothing to say about gay ones; yet, as one modern theologian pithily pointed out, “No medieval states burned the greedy at the stake.”
There is, similarly, little in the way of Christian “family values” to be spotted in the life of this man who was rude to his mother and who himself never married.
Why are American conservatives currently crushing women’s reproductive rights? Why is the Russian Orthodox church inveighing against homosexuality? The writings of St Augustine and St Paul offer one answer.
Perhaps a simpler answer is provided by the old saying that everything in the world is about sex, except for sex, which is about power.
The Christian church, which has been described as the most powerful persecuting force that the world has ever seen, knows this well.