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Lately as the abortion bans have picked up steam, I’ve seen more and more social conservatives circulating the idea that extramarital sex can be regulated naturally by the threat of pregnancy.
This has always been at the core of Roman Catholic “natural law”: that if sex has “consequences,” people will do it the “right” way. But now it’s being mainstreamed in evangelical circles as well.
In other words, evangelicals want to say on the one hand that humans are depraved, selfish, and irrational, but that these selfish, irrational creatures will suddenly temper the strongest natural urge that we have because of a rational consideration of practical consequences.
Augustine, the OG of conservative Christian sexuality, had a child out of wedlock before he became a priest and kicked his concubine to the curb when it was time to be a priest. Premarital sex didn’t start in the 60’s.
This line of thinking, that pregnancy deters extramarital sex, is rooted in cultural nostalgia rather than actual biblical theology.
Yes, it is true that extramarital sex was taboo in the 50’s for upper middle class white people but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
The social conservative fallacy is to project an idyllic past in which society was well-ordered because everyone knew their place and stayed in line. In this thinking, morality is defined as behavior that confirms to the vision of this idyllic past order.
There’s no reason for Christianity to be innately antithetical to the evolution of how sexuality looks in our culture; the commitment to an idyllic past order is not actually a commitment to Christian theological orthodoxy.
It doesn’t have to be a tragedy for sex not to have a purely procreative purpose that happens in a patriarchal order where fathers’ shotguns (in theory) keep horny boys away from their daughters.
We can have a theology of sex that isn’t patriarchal and anti-pleasure which accounts for the dangers of idolatry and celebrates the gift that complete physical vulnerability and intimacy can be.
Blaming college rape culture on the birth control pill is not only toxic patriarchal bullshit; it’s theologically incoherent even from a conservative evangelical understanding of human nature.
I’d much rather see my students live in a consensual sex-positive reality than one in which taboo is supposed to control behavior and babies are born into dysfunctional circumstances.
