The “Athens-versus-Jerusalem” question, the one that Tertullian really did ask about, is also an important question, and it has rightly occupied a high-priority place on the evangelical agenda in the last several decades. In the aftermath of the fundamentalist-modernist debates of the early part of this century, American fundamentalism had retreated from intellectual concerns, limiting itself for the most part to a sloganeering mentality and to broadsides against science and other forms of “worldly wisdom.” Then, in the 1940s and '50s, a small group of courageous evangelicals, including such men as Carl Henry, Bernard Ramm, E. J. Carnell, Frank Gabelein, and others, accepted the very difficult assignment of attempting to lead an important segment of American evangelicalism away from bitterness and isolation and toward a responsible intellectual and cultural engagement. Under their leadership, evangelicals wrestled profitably with crucial questions concerning the relationship between faith and learning, biblical fidelity and scientific integrity, etc.
These are important concerns and we must not abandon them. Nor must we fail to credit those who labored under "difficult" conditions, incurring the wrath of traditional fundamentalists on the one hand, and being greeted by suspicion from liberalism on the other. But we must continue to build upon their efforts, for there are other crucial matters on the unfinished agenda of the North American evangelical community. We have devoted much energy to the discussion of the so-called “Genesis question,” which has to do with the relation between creation and evolution. But now we must find ways in which we can apply our orthodox beliefs concerning the creation of our first parents in God’s image and their subsequent rebellion against the Creator to an understanding of the heresies that lie at the roots of racism, sexism, militarism, and the exploitation of the natural order. Evangelicals have rightly talked much about the virgin birth of Christ, his deity, and his future return. But now we must also discuss the political and economic lifestyles and strategies that might be appropriate responses to his unique Lordship and Kingship.
Let me stress my conviction that as we discuss these things and act in these areas, that we must do so with a sense of our continuity with evangelical concerns and programs of the past. Indeed, I am convinced that historical consciousness of this sort is necessary if we are to avoid the pitfalls of Protestant liberalism. But how are we, or how ought we to be, different from Protestant liberalism in our approach to social/political issues? Here, I think, is where our historical consciousness is crucial. We will differ from Protestant liberalism in its approach to social/political matters to the degree that we view ourselves as the legitimate heirs of those evangelical Christians who refused to side with theological latitudinarianism in this country during the early decades of the 20th century, and several decades earlier in Europe, e.g., in the Scandinavian countries and in the Netherlands. And in our quest for new forms of social/political engagement today, we must not be thought of as siding with Protestant liberalism, bur rather as expanding the evangelicalism that nurtured and brought us to a saving knowledge of the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Let me cite one example of an area where the difference should be seen. The fundamentalists have talked much about the “blood atonement,” an emphasis that liberals have often mocked, referring to it on occasion as a “slaughterhouse religion.” I admit that I regret some of the excessive imagery that fundamentalists have utilized in speaking of Christ’s atoning death. But my main criticism is not that they did too much with the substitutionary and transactional themes in the doctrine of the atonement, but that they did too little. The payment that Jesus made through his shed blood was a larger payment than many fundamentalists have seemed to think. For even when they have sung the words with zeal, they have not seemed to acknowledge in their social/political lives that Jesus did, indeed, pay it all. He died to remove the stains of political corruption, and of all forms of human manipulation and exploitation. And he calls us to witness to and to enjoy the first fruits of that full redemption.
Liberal Protestantism would do well to understand us on these matters, as would our politically-conservative evangelical colleagues who have been of late expressing fears of Marxism within the household of evangelical faith. We would be greatly misunderstood if we were viewed as merely applying the gloss of an evangelical vocabulary to current liberal and radical theories. It is not a matter of mere words that distinguishes us, but a view of reality. And our view of reality, even of political reality, must center on the facts as revealed in the scriptures, that Christ the incarnate son of God accomplished a work of atonement that no mere human being could accomplish, that he was victorious over death and over all of Satan’s designs, and that he will someday return as a victorious King to bring all things under his rule. If these are not the facts, then our political hopes are in vain, and we are of all political theorists and activists most miserable.
But evangelicals can and must bring more to political discussion and engagement than a concern for orthodoxy and a high view of the scriptures. We must work at providing others with an example of how it is possible to take politics seriously without treating politics with a sense of ultimate seriousness. The Christian community is a gathering of forgiven sinners who serve a Lord who is, indeed, a political Lord, but who is not merely a political Lord. Evangelical political discussion and debate must be carried on in the awareness that Christ has sent his Comforter as a presence among us to promote in our midst the kind of healing and mutual acceptance that serves as a sign of the Kingdom that is yet to come in its fullness.
In the Christian Century’s account of the November 1973 meetings in Chicago, which produced the Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, it was noted that evangelicals seem to be going through a process of tension between blacks and whites, and men and women of the sort that liberal Protestantism experienced some years earlier. That may be true. But let it also be said clearly that if evangelicals seem to be retracing the steps of liberal Protestants at some points it is because liberal Protestants failed to do the job right. We must deal with these tensions because we must face up to the fact that there are groups within the evangelical community who have been systematically excluded from responsible involvement in our decision-making processes. We must deal with the legitimate frustration and anger that this situation has produced. We began to deal with those matters in Chicago, and we will continue to do so. We do not need to be incapacitated by such confrontations, because we know that beyond our own individual feelings and concerns there is a common loyalty to a personal savior to whom each of us is accountable. We do not even have to despair if we fail to come to complete agreement here and now, for our disagreements are undergirded by our commitment to a redemptive enterprise that is not of our own making, and we can look forward in hope for the day on which we will know even as we are known.
Turning now to my main topic, why is it important to investigate the relationship between politics and sex? For one thing, it seems to be important for an understanding of some significant cultural developments that have been occurring in the past decade or so. We have been experiencing a trend wherein the language of sex and the language of politics are becoming increasingly intermingled. This trend can be seen from two points of view. First, there is the increasing use of sexual terms to describe political phenomena. A mere glance at the political musings of such periodicals as The Village Voice, The Realist or Ramparts--to say nothing of the posters and graffiti of political radicalism, the “rape of the earth” type themes of the ecological critics, and the vocabulary of White House memos during the last presidential campaign--will suffice to impress one with the degree to which sexual metaphors have come to dominate political discussions.
The other aspect is the increasing use of political language in describing sexual relationships. An obvious example here is the term “sexual politics” and perhaps the current use of the ward “chauvinism” is another.
I think that this trend is more than a merely linguistic one. We seem to be going through an era in which we, or our contemporaries, are exploring the conceptual limits of the political sphere. And, whether we like it or not, this exploration may well have important legal, political, and cultural ramifications. I will return to this matter later.
However, the reasons for our discussing the relationship between politics and sex go beyond the need for an understanding of our contemporary culture. Such a study can provide us as well with a case in point for the more general task of understanding the legitimate place of politics in human relationships. My discussion here is also directed toward this fundamental issue, and I want to begin by sketching out some general views concerning the relationship between the social and political bonds.
Alan Gewirth has suggested--helpfully, I think--that the fundamental questions of social and political philosophy are these: (1) Why should human beings live in any society at all? (2) Why should human beings obey any government at all? and (3) By what criteria do we determine the source, locus, limits, and ends of political powers? These questions as listed are in a logical ordering since in order to decide the best patterns for structuring political power we must know something about the point of political arrangements as such and this, in turn, presupposes some account of human nature and human sociality.
To deal, then, with the question of what sorts of political structures and relationships we ought to have, or whether we ought to have them at all, we must necessarily deal with the place of social relationships as such in human nature; only then can we see why certain political patterns do or do not help to solidify or expedite those social relationships.
The question of what justification there might be for human beings to take the social and political bonds upon themselves has been a dominant concern of traditional political philosophers. One way in which they have often dealt with these issues has been by speaking of “the social contract.” In doing so they have told a story, not necessarily a true story, but one they thought might be helpful in focusing on the issues with some clarity. The story begins with human beings living in a “state of nature” unencumbered by social/political commitments. Beginning with such a state, the philosophers have asked what good reasons might human beings have for deciding to take the social and political bonds upon themselves?
Let us consider briefly the version of this story Thomas Hobbes gives in his Leviathan. In the state of nature, according to Hobbes, every person is completely selfish and consistently acts in accordance with their self-serving instincts. Human beings are not naturally friendly nor sympathetic to the needs of others. Living outside of the social and political bonds each person has not obligations to anyone but oneself. There is no such thing as property, i.e. legitimate ownership; each person has a right to all and everything that can be brought into one’s possession. What, then, might induce humans to leave this natural state? Hobbes answers: a recognition of the threatening instability of such a condition. In the state of nature, the condition in which the “war of everyman against everyman” prevails, each person must compete against others who are roughly their equals in their cunning. Thus, human beings come to realize that in the state of nature life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Having recognized this, each individual realizes that there is good reason to sacrifice the right to all and everything, which is theirs in the state of nature, in exchange for a reduction of the threatening conditions that continually confront them. But because each person is thoroughly selfish, human beings cannot be expected simply to take the needs of others into account; they will only do so if it can be shown to be to each person’s advantage. Thus, there must be some guarantees built into the social bond. This can only happen, Hobbes insists, if each person is required to submit to the governance of an all-powerful “sovereign” who will punish an individual if their part of the social bargain is not kept. For, as Hobbes puts it, “covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.” Since human beings are naturally a-social and will relate to each other only if it is to their selfish advantage, there can be no social bond without a political bond. Even the most superficial of social relationships must be undergirded by a coercive political force.
This notion that politics is necessarily a matter of coercion is a familiar one. As I noted in my book, Political Evangelism, it is implicit in Kate Millett’s understanding of the phrase, “sexual politics.” Some repetition will, hopefully, be forgiven here and in what follows as a necessary means for expanding upon, and clarifying, some of the issues I raised there.
By way of introducing her discussion, Millett offers several examples of the way in which the novelist Henry Miller describes sexual intercourse in coercive, manipulative terms; then she remarks: “What the reader is experiencing at this juncture is a nearly supernatural sense of power--should the reader be a male” and she concludes: “It is a case of sexual politics at the fundamental level of copulation.” Millett’s thesis is that politics is a dirty business, and when sex becomes political, i.e., coercive and manipulative, it too becomes dirty.
Like Hobbes, Millett sees politics as essentially a matter of coercion; but unlike Hobbes she does not see politics as a necessary evil, as an essential force for cementing the social bond. For in a tender moment toward the end of her book she expresses the hope that we might all be brought “a great deal closer to humanity” so that “we shall be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics,” thus envisioning a sexuality that is social without being political, a sexuality that can be an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” relationship. In this emphasis Millett is very much of a Marxist, for the Marxist vision of “the withering away of the state” is also a hope for a non-political, i.e., non-coercive, sociality.
So, we have two options already before us. One, that the political bond is a coercive one, and as such something to be regretted, but that it is nonetheless necessary to cement any social relationships. The other that the political bond is coercive and as such is regrettable, and that furthermore it is not necessary to undergird social relationships. On a Hobbesian view of sexual politics, then all sexual relationships would be political-coercive ones--whereas, on the Millett-Marx view, not all sexual relationships need to be so.
But a third option has been occasionally suggested, namely that politics itself is not essentially, or necessarily, a matter of coercion. This option is put forth by Paul Goodman, for one, in his provocative essay, “Getting into Power,” although in so suggesting Goodman allows that he is questioning an assumption that is so widely accepted today that he wonders whether he is “living on the right planet” when he dissents. Goodman argues that the politics-as-coercion line views the political relationship as one in which someone has control over another. We have come to the point, he thinks, where we view it as inevitable that societies must be run in accordance with the “top-down management model,” so that it is assumed that the business of a society can get done only where some have the power to coerce others into doing their will, so that
lively social functioning (is) saddled, exploited, prevented, perverted, drained dry, paternalized by an imposed system of power and management that preempts the means and makes decisions as extra. And the damnable thing is that of course, everybody believes that except in this pattern nothing could possibly be accomplished: if there were no marriage license and no tax, none could properly mate and no children be born and raised; if there were no tolls there would be no bridges; if there were no university charters, there would be no higher learning; if there were no usury and no Iron Law of Wages, there would be no capital; if there were no markup of drug prices there would be no scientific research. Once a society has this style of thought, that every activity requires licensing, underwriting, deciding by abstract power, it becomes inevitably desirable for an ambitious man to seek power and for a vigorous nation to try to be a Great Power.
This Goodman considers to be a “base and impractical, and indeed a neurotic, state of affairs.”
Now much of this would be agreed to by the Marxists, who advocate the eventual de-politicizing of social relationships. But Goodman is not willing to identify the political sphere as such with the “neurotic” patterns that he describes. Instead, he calls for a return to “normal politics.” He even offers an account of what he understands normalcy in politics to be, namely: “the constitutional relations of functional interests and interest groups in the community in which they transact”--but I am not so much interested in his formula as I am in the fact that he allows for a conception of a positive role for politics.
Also important for this discussion are Goodman’s views on how “neurotic” political patterns can come to affect individual psyches:
That occurs when to get into power, to be prestigious and in a position to make decisions, is taken to be the social good itself, apart from any functions that it is thought to make possible. The pattern of dominance-and-submission has then been internalized and, by its clinch, fills up the whole of experience. If a man is not continually proving his potency, his mastery of others and of himself, he becomes prey to a panic of being defeated and victimized. Every vital function must therefore be used as a means of proving or it is felt as a symptom of weakness. Simply to enjoy, produce, learn, give or take, love or be angry (rather than cool), is to be vulnerable.
Goodman’s description here of the “internalization” of the management model of politics can provide further illumination on Millett’s discussion. For it is precisely this pattern of “dominance-and-submission” as applied to sexual relations that she is complaining about. When sex becomes “political,” in her sense sexual relations are reduced to an arena for proving our potency, our capabilities for managing ourselves and others. In such a situation, signs of vulnerability must be avoided by the manager and the degrading posture of submission or victimization must be accepted by the managed. There is little in such a situation for honesty, simple expressions of feeling, uninhibited enjoyment, mutual giving and taking.
To be delivered from the management model in one’s personal relations is to be released from the need to dominate. It is to become capable of what Goodman calls “peaceful functioning,” of placing primary value on persons and relationships rather than on the management of persons and relationships. In “peaceful functioning,” allowing oneself to be vulnerable, to love or be angry without being concerned whether one is “under control” may be a healthy way of building up trust and acceptance between oneself and others. Similarly, according to Goodman, institutional political patterns can be “normalized" if we allow those patterns to serve human functions rather than making human functions subservient to institutional patterns. In “neurotic” institutions, the maintenance of the institutional machinery, i.e., the instruments of management, becomes the primary goal; persons, then, become ”personnel.” Consider an example. Libraries came into being presumably for a rather simple, uncomplicated reason: to make it easier for people to have access to books. In what Goodman might call a “normal” library, the rules and regulations governing the traffic of books would be directed toward the end of providing the freest access possible. Library, cards, systems of classification, neat rows on serviceable shelves--all of these things would be directed toward that end. But on occasion, the maintenance of such things becomes a kind of goal in itself, so that a library comes to have as its primary goals the collection, classification, and storage of books, and the potential borrower, the reader of books--for whom the institution was set up in the first place--becomes an enemy, a threat to the maintenance of neat rows of books on tidy shelves. Thus we have a neurotic institution, one in which the well-being of the intended beneficiaries becomes detrimental to the new goal of managing the institutional structures.
These themes, of course, are not new. Many will recognize those institutions Goodman calls “neurotic” as being the very same ones in which the “peter principle” exerts its influence. Other obvious specimens of organized neurotic sin can be found in the “Playboy philosophy" or the “publish or perish” rule, in which the characteristics that permit one to teach are often the same ones that destroy one’s talents for teaching; religious legalism, in which the laws that were intended to guide one’s growth in faith become weapons of spiritual homicide and suicide--and so on.
I submit that Christians should be sympathetic to Goodman’s refusal to allow politics to be characterized purely in terms of coercion and manipulation, and we would do well to look for a more adequate account of the political sphere than the one that is so widely assumed.
Another area in which Goodman’s emphasis is illuminating for a Christian perspective is in his stress on the close interaction between institutional models and personal models for decision-making, although we will have to revise his view of the chronological order of that interaction. Goodman sees the internalization of the management model as taking place under the pressure of institutional acceptance of that model. The biblical story, however, begins with the acceptance of the management model as taking place on a personal level. Our first parents succumbed to the Tempter’s promise, “You will be like gods,” thereby pretending to the throne that belongs to the Creator alone. Sin, then, can be seen as an illegitimate compulsion to manage, regardless of the consequences. This destructive, disintegrating project that was taken up at the fall came to have its effects in all mankind’s activities, both personal and institutional. Thus, while accepting Goodman’s emphasis on the close relationship between personal and institutional projects, we must view the latter as an externalization of the former.
Now let us apply these general thoughts directly to the current discussions of sexual politics. I think it quite clear that sexual relationships can often be coercive ones, occasions for the management of persons and relationships. This is the thesis of a provocative article by Dr. Seymour Halleck, entitled “Sex and Power,” in the October 1969 issue of Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality. Halleck writes:
Most behavioral scientists view the high incidence of sexual disorder in our society in terms of conflict between normal impulses and social restraints. Such conflict models of sexual disturbance have had great clinical usefulness, but they do not fully consider the manner in which the sex act is profoundly influenced by nonsexual needs of man. The sex act is more than a mere physical fulfillment of sexual needs. Sex can be used to relieve tension, to gain status, to obtain reassurance, to flatter one’s vanity, to express love, and to gain a certain amount of control over the behavior of others. In short, it is not only a loving act but can also be a vehicle for establishing one’s sense of power ... (this) suggests that the bedroom, in addition to being a place for the expression of tenderness toward another human being, can also be an area or battlefield in which the participants are striving to strengthen their position in a social system.
Furthermore, I think it fair to say that the kind of “power struggle” that can take place in sexual relationships is of the sort that we often carry on without being fully aware of that dimension. Here it seems appropriate to think of sexual patterns in terms of institutionalized roles and expectations that are transmitted to us via stereotypes and often-unspoken prejudices. These, roughly, are the structures of our sexual politics.
There is some evidence that these structures and patterns are more refined than we might think. As an example, Nancy M. Henley, in her essay, “The Politics of Touch,” argues quite convincingly that there are patterns for “non-reciprocal touching” that is an act that is often used as a “subtle physical threat used to remind persons of their status, and (that) is particularly used by men against women.” She offers these examples:
An older woman told me of an incident in which, at a party one evening, a male friend of her and her husband sat often with his arm around her in what she took to be a friendly gesture. When she reciprocated the gesture, with only friendly intent, he soon got her alone and suggested sleeping together; she showed surprise at the suggestion, but he said, “Wasn’t that what you were trying to tell me all evening?” In other words, women do not interpret a man’s touch as necessarily implying sexual intent, but men interpret a woman’s touch in that way .... My favorite anecdote involves myself, the Vice Chancellor, and Chancellor of my own university. After a large meeting last spring, the Vice Chancellor came over to me and took my upper arms in his two hands, saying he wanted to tell me something; he continued holding me in this restrictive fashion as he proceeded to talk with me. After he finished, and he had finally let go, I grabbed him back (something I try to do now whenever men lay their hands on me--really scares them), then remarked that I would have to tell him sometime about my thesis which is the subject of this paper. He expressed interest, so I began telling him about it, and since he is an intelligent man he saw some truth in it; at this moment the Chancellor approached, the only man on campus in higher authority, laid his hand of the arm of the Vice Chancellor, and urged him to accompany him to their next meeting. The Vice Chancellor and I were both struck by the aptness of this action, and I think I made my point.
These examples do lend support to Henley’s thesis, and they suggest that there may be a complex and subtle dimension to the patterns of our interpersonal relationships that we should all become more sensitive to.
To become aware of these subtle political patterns is not, of course, to denigrate them completely. University chancellors may well have to prod vice chancellors on occasion, and it is not immediately obvious that non-verbal codes and cues are intrinsically oppressive. But they can be, and that is the actor that necessitates “consciousness raising” in this area. In the Goodman-type framework that I have been appropriating, we must hold out the possibility of good politics, even good sexual politics. In relation to this possibility, let us briefly explore some biblical data.
The account, in Genesis 2, of the creation of woman gives us a picture of the genuinely human need for an interpersonal relationship that transcends the “political,” in even the best sense of that term. In the first account, in Genesis 1, of the creation of human beings, the persons--male and female--God created in God's own image are given a mandate to occupy an office that was to be exercised over all else that God had put on the earth; they were not only to “be fruitful” and “increase,” but also to “subdue” and “rule” over the rest of creation. Then in the second account, recorded in chapter 2, Adam, who is yet the only human being, is reminded that his authority is not an absolute one--for while the rest of creation is to be under his rule, he himself must submit to God’s rule, as in the command not to eat from one of the trees.
And so we have here a picture of the first man, aware of the authority patterns of the creation-order, but as yet incomplete. And "The Lord God said, 'It is not good for man to be alone. I will provide a partner for him.' " It is in this context--the search for a partner for Adam--that the naming of the animals occurs; and while Adam calls out many names as various members of the animal kingdom are paraded before him, there is one name that he is not moved to cry out; namely, “flesh of my flesh.” “But for the man himself no partner had yet been found.” And God creates the woman and brings her to the man, and Adam says "... at last ...." "And they were both naked, ... but they had no feeling of shame."
In the Garden with its already existing network of rulers and ruled there had to be a time when human beings could say “at last” when confronting the possibility of fellowship with an equal. I do not see in the creation of woman out of the rib of the man a picture of male supremacy, but rather a vision of human oneness, a oneness that can only be found in communion with one’s own kind. Adam’s uninhibited delight upon seeing Eve was not glee over having found someone to dominate and subdue--after all, that had been the somewhat disappointing business of his first day of work--but rather, a joy over having found someone else--neither a sovereign God nor a lowly animal--but someone else with whom the categories of “ruler” and “ruled” were inappropriate, someone else--“flesh of my flesh” and “bone of my bone”--who could share in the unique and hitherto unfulfilling business of being a human, someone who could be partner in the condition of being under God and over the rest of creation, but with whom there would be no question of status.
The political patterns of the Garden are clearly spelled out as they pertain to the relationship between God and human beings and human beings and the rest of creation. Now it may also be that there was something like a political relationship between the man and the woman, e.g., that there were patterns of shared decision-making. But the first encounter between the man and the woman indicates that the creation of human beings was not complete until the man found the spontaneity of fellowship with his own kind.
But am I not suggesting in all of this that the relationship between God and human beings and human beings and the animals are purely “political” ones? This is a difficult question and I will only comment on the way it bears on the relationship between human persons and God. My first observation is that the awareness of status and roles, and lines of authority, is an important element of our relationship to God. The fellowship that can exist between ourselves and God must never be thought of as a communion between equals. But secondly, it is significant that the sense in which the relationship between human beings and God can be legitimately “de-politicized” relates directly to the Incarnation. It is not by accident that when Freud Erich Fromm, Kate Millett, and others speak of God as an oppressive “political” figure that they focus on the Old Testament. I do not mean to suggest that their critiques are wholly, or even largely, correct when limited to that focus. But, however we spell out our theories of “progressive revelation” and similar notions, this much seems clear: it took a long period of dealings with human beings on the part of God before they were capable of an uninhibited use of terms such as “friend,” “brother,” and “Abba, father,” in describing God. Ultimately, it took the Cross. And it is significant that when men and women come to know the liberating power of the Cross, thereby ending their desperate attempts to find meaning and salvation in the worship of false gods, that they often express their sense of liberation in terms not unlike those of the first man when he found his partner. For when God finally broke through the futile power struggle that human beings had initiated through their shared rebellion, he did so in such a way that it is not completely inappropriate to say of the God who has drawn near to us in a special and decisive way on the cross, “... at last ... flesh of my flesh ... bone of my bone.”
In a general sort of way we can see that while what I have called the “political” dimensions legitimately enter into intimate human relationships, and the relationship between human persons and God, they must never be the ultimate, or primary, characteristic of these relationships. In each case, the “political” dimension is a means of structuring and expediting the more important elements of fellowship, communion, community, and mutual servanthood. When the political dimension is absolutized and management becomes the primary goal, the possibility of attaining these other goals is severely hindered.
In the husband-wife relationship, then, and in the larger family situation, politics must be a way of structuring, and/or expediting relationships that are more than political. Similarly for “church politics” in the good sense of that term, which I discussed in Political Evangelism. In the state, however, we do find an institution the primary goal or function of which is political, if we are looking at the state without considering the context in which it functions. But even here it must be stressed that the state functions properly only when it in turn promotes the beyond-the-political goals of the larger community it serves. The state’s purpose is not, e.g., to manage the affairs of the church or the family, but rather to promote the conditions under which the church and the family may pursue those goals of their own that in turn are more than political goals, as well as to serve as a “referee” who insures that the relationship between diverse families, churches, and other sub-communities are characterized by justice.
I can now explain the sense in which I, like Millett, want to go beyond “sexual politics.” I agree that sex can, and has, become politicized, and I suspect that a sexual relationship that is primarily political is not sexuality at its best. To say this is of course to assume some definite notions about when sexuality is at its best. My notions include the belief that sexuality is meant to be experienced within the context of a long-range commitment between two persons in a relationship of trust and fidelity. In such a relationship, sexuality and the larger set of intimate dimensions of which it is an integral part is capable of being experienced in ways that make the formality of political relationships seem inadequate. Politics involves regulations, agreed-to patterns, rules, and codes governing patterns of authority and decision-making. Such things have their place, on occasion, in sexual relationships, or at least in the formation of our attitudes toward sexual relationships. But the desire for a loving, shared sexuality, for the “at last” of the Garden, should lead us to place great value on an intimacy that goes beyond politics.
These notions, which lie behind my antipathy toward sexual politics, even a sexual politics that is good politics, do not always seem to be assumed in contemporary discussions. Those who would tolerate, even encourage, the development of a sexuality that is increasingly public and group-oriented would do well to accept the need for an omnipresent sexual politics. For when an individual insists on experiencing a plurality of sexual relationships he, or she, is inevitably contributing to the continual politicizing of sex. The marital bed might have a hope of becoming apolitical, but the orgy is doomed to politics.
Of course, changing the patterns of the politics of sex in the Christian home as well as in the pagan orgy may necessitate our moving from bad politics to a concern for good politics before we can go beyond politics. We may all have to go through a phase in which we talk much, for a time, about “equal rights” and “shared decision-making” in marriage. But hopefully we will find this to be a route through and beyond politics.
I must conclude. In all of this I do not mean to pretend that I have spoken the last word, or even a very articulate first word, about sexual politics. I suppose that there are some who would insist that I have already relinquished too much of human sexuality to the sphere of politics; others may argue that I have not relinquished enough. At the very least I hope that I have pointed to some fascinating questions that have hitherto gone unnoticed by some of us.
I commend these issues as worthy of our further discussion. Our communal life together cannot be separated cleanly from our theoretical endeavors. To witness to the liberating power of Jesus Christ for the political sphere requires that we be sensitized to the scope of that liberation, and to the extent to "which the curse" of sin has afflicted us, and continues to do so. It is worth noting that a theoretical awareness of our political patterns as they affect our interpersonal relationships is not enough to lift the curse; for it is quite possible that a new sensitivity to the dimensions of sexual or, e.g., racial politics can become just one more manipulative tool that we can employ in order to oppress our oppressors.
A thorough discussion of these issues will be to our profit only if they contribute to the growing consciousness of the total scope of our sinful predicament, a consciousness that will be complete only on that day when we will understand the full implications of the hymn that we will sing before the throne:
Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created ...
Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.
When this article appeared, Richard Mouw, author of Political Evangelism, was a professor of philosophy at Calvin College.
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