Rev. Rowland Croucher provides a critique of The Liberated Christian website. […and exposes how deeply compromised some religious individuals have become.]
In “Dirt, Greed, And Sex,” Professor of New Testament Rev. Countryman points out, “nowhere does the Bible make monogamy a clear and explicit standard” (quoted several times on the Liberated Christians’ Website).
‘The Internet is full of sex.’ Right, it is. Mostly erotic sex, bad sex, exploitative sex, kinky sex – on websites that are often brilliantly creative. Anything you can imagine (and much you haven’t) is on the ‘Net somewhere.
The Liberated Christians Website is professionally presented devoted to the ‘freeing up’ of conventional Christian attitudes regarding sexuality, nudity, monogamy, etc. Thousands visit the site daily. It’s a website that encourages Christians to be open to ‘swinging’ – and claims the Bible isn’t against a lifestyle of sexual freedom with multiple partners.
The aim of the Liberated Christians Website: ‘Promoting Positive Intimacy and Sexuality Including Responsible Nonmonogamy or Polyamory as a legitimate CHOICE for Christians and others / Exposing false traditions of sexual repression that have no biblical basis. Promoting Intimacy & Other-Centered, Loving Sexuality’
Its thesis: ‘Our Culture & Traditional Christianity Wounds People Emotionally & Sexually. Our culture is full of tease, titillation, sexual repression and guilt. We lack especially women-centered, meaningful intimacy skills, sensual or sexual education. The result is often sexual abuse and sexual “wounding” of people.
Its goal: ‘Our goal at Liberated Christians is to try and offer a safe, loving place for those wounded to explore healing and communications as well as liberation from the sexual repression of our culture. Healing can be both emotional and spiritual. Recovery from the wounds of repressive anti-sex religious views is just as important as healing from physical sexual abuse. The results of both kinds of abuse are often the same.’
‘Liberated Christians is a practical educational group for Christians and others who are interested in exploring liberation from the traditional body negativity and false sexual repression of traditional Christian teachings. We support responsible non-monogamy in a way that honors and respects others and ourselves, with integrity but without guilt, blame or shame. Participation is open to both Christians and non-Christians. Traditional Christian values have set the stage for sexual repression toward everyone.’
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‘Dave’, ‘Bill’ and others here consider themselves ‘biblical Christians,’ ‘who take the Hebrew and Christian scriptures seriously as the word of God.’ They believe there’s a ‘biblical case for polyamory’ [love with multiple partners].
One problem they want to address: ‘Occasionally, monogamous marriages last a lifetime; more often, they give way to multiple partners (acknowledged or not), divorce and/or serial polygamy (also known as serial monogamy), wherein a person is married and monogamous with one person, then divorces and becomes monogamous with another. Repeat as boredom or incompatibility (or lack of desire to work on problems) requires.’ Solution? ‘The European way is to have “liaisons” as long as it is done with discretion. It’s much like the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays in the military. In America the term “cheating” is usually used.’
A newspaper article puts it this way: ‘The product of a “repressive Christian background” Dave jokes, “If my parents knew what I was doing, they’d die. In fact, one of them already did.” The 49-year-old bachelor now claims he wasn’t even aware of the lifestyle he now espouses until his marriage broke up in the early ’80s. When “re-singled,” after an unhappy marriage, the future non-monogamist took a long, hard look into the figurative mirror mounted over his onetime marital bed. He didn’t like what he saw. That prompted the intense self-awareness odyssey that’s taken him from theological debates and nude encounter groups on through sex surrogate workshops and practically every touchy-feely movement of the past 25 years.’
The main point: “The guys in the pulpit have been telling us that God says only one-on-one couple relationships are right,” explains Dave. “But if you go back to Hebrew times, that’s not how it was practiced.” “Responsible nonmonogamy” — “is totally compatible with true Christianity and Christ’s love.”
But what about the seventh commandment, the one that takes a dim view of adultery?
No problem, says Dave. He explains that, as originally written, the edict “was understood only to apply to women, because back then they were understood to be the property rights of man.” And, he reasons, since men no longer “own” their wives, the commandment theoretically doesn’t apply to anyone.
4. A key question here is the hermeneutical one. Dave’s and Bill’s approach to biblical interpretation follow the more liberal line. Hence a long diatribe on the website against the notion of biblical inerrancy. At the liberal end of the Christian spectrum, Bishop Spong, for example, prefers midrash (‘traditions always changing’ as he puts it in several of his books) to ‘hysterical literalism’. He wants to ‘free [Scripture] from its literalistic imprisonment’ (Living in Sin?). As I understand him, he believes Scripture is authoritative only as the Christian community gives it authority. It’s not that the old orthodoxies or traditions were wrong: they’re now mostly irrelevant. When any part of Scripture is inappropriate to a community’s reasoning (my word), it has the power to render those bits inoperative: our quest is to understand Jesus as a Jew, then be free to comprehend him within the thought-forms of our day. So where is the Word of God? In Christ, Spong says. (Ah, but whose/which Christ? I want to ask). The incongruity of all this, for me, lies in Spong’s avowed love for Scripture and his cavalier attitude towards it. On the other hand, a literalistic legalistic view of sexual behavior which isn’t cognizant of the ancient near-eastern cultural background is equally disastrous. Most biblical references to fornication and orgies, for example, are given in the context of pagan rituals which were forbidden to God’s people. The difficulty today is that the notion of a non-religious ‘secular’ setting for considering sexual promiscuity is foreign to ancient thinking.
5. So we have, essentially, a conservative/liberal divide on these issues. The problem with conservative approaches is their assumption that a sexual act is a sin simply in terms of defining it in terms of an act. So many young people I counsel from these churches assume that just about anything goes in terms of sexual behavior, short of sexual penetration/intercourse. Such a mechanical, legalistic mind-set, leads to all sorts of confusion and guilt. Liberal approaches define ‘sin’ (though they might not use the word) in terms of the participant’s relationship, not by the act itself. They prefer to ask: ‘Is the relationship functioning according to principles of justice and dignity? Does the partnership demonstrate mutual trust and compassion?’ My main problem with the liberal approach is in its naive approach to the perversity of human nature. Humans can’t be trusted sometimes (mostly?) to make a good moral judgment about ‘holy sex’ as Spong describes it, for example. We’re too prone, without the moral boundaries set by precedent/law, to make value-judgments based on selfishness (the Bible calls it ‘sin’).