Sexuality and Salvation in Protestant Evangelical Sex Manuals, 1950S to the Present Author(S): Amy Derogatis Source: Church History, Vol
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American Society of Church History What Would Jesus Do? Sexuality and Salvation in Protestant Evangelical Sex Manuals, 1950s to the Present Author(s): Amy DeRogatis Source: Church History, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 97-137 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4146314 . Accessed: 18/02/2015 08:05 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press and American Society of Church History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Church History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:05:08 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions What WouldJesus Do? Sexuality and Salvationin ProtestantEvangelical Sex Manuals, 1950s to the Present AMY DEROGATIS God's Word is like His spiritual sperm. Knowing what we do about genetics, we could even say that, like the genes carried in the head of a sperm, God's Word carries God's characteristics. So, for you to be "born again," God's Word, His sperm, must be implanted in your heart by the Holy Spirit. If your heart chooses to receive His Word, a new spirit will be birthed within you.1 When President Bill Clinton testified before a Grand Jury hearing on August 17, 1998 that he "did not have sexual intercourse with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," the American public learned at least two important lessons.2 First, the definition of sex was debatable and second, the authority to define sex as sexual intercourse was the crucial factor in the meaning of that pesky verb "is." The questions of what is sex and, more importantly, who defines it have been studied and discussed thoroughly by scholars of U.S. history and culture.3 In 1. Terry Wier and Mark Carruth, Holy Sex: God's Purpose and Plan for Our Sexuality (New Kensington, Penn.: Whitaker House, 1999), 111. 2. I would like to express my gratitude to the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion for its financial support of this project through a 2002 summer research grant. I thank the members of the 2001-2 Wabash Center Workshop on Teaching and Learning for Undergraduate Religion Faculty, which was directed by Patricia O'Connell Killen and funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc. I am indebted to Allison Andre for her research assistance and to Peter Berg and the staff of Special Collections at Michigan State University. I am especially grateful to the comments of those who attended my talks that were part of the University Libraries Colloquia Series at Michigan State (October 2002) and the U.S. Literature and Culture Group at the University of Michigan (December 2003). Chris Frilingos, Anna Celenza, Maria Sanchez, Alice Dreger, Matthew Edney, Dagmar Herzog, Martha Finch, Gary Laderman, and Julia Grant have read and commented on this article. 3. Ronald G. Walters, Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974); John R. Betts, "Mind and Body in Early American Thought," Journal of American History 54 (March 1968): 787-805; Michael Gordon and M. Charles Bernstein, "Mate Choice and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Manual," Journal of Marriage and Family 32 (November 1970): 665-74; Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals, and Sex in America:A History of Ideas (New York: Bookman Associates, Amy DeRogatis is an associateprofessor of Religion and American Culture in the Religious Studies Departmentat Michigan State University. @ 2005, The AmericanSociety of ChurchHistory ChurchHistory 74:1 (March2005) 97 This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:05:08 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 98 CHURCHHISTORY American popular culture the social scientific findings published in the Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953) and William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson's Human Sexual Response(1966) provided information (or "scientific facts") for lay people regarding the diversity and possibility of human sexual expression: what sex "is." The growing awareness since the late 1950s that sex is more than one specific act has led many people to question whether sex as we learn it from our parents, teachers, clergy, friends, books, and science is "natural" (a matter of biological response) or socially constructed (a matter of cultural con- trol). Opinions vary, tempers flare, and the mountain of sex advice manuals available at local bookstores attests to the U.S. public's insatiable appetite for knowledge about sex. It might be surprising that evangelical Protestants have been among the most vocal participants in this ongoing definitional debate. Con- trary to popular stereotypes that characterize conservative Christians as sexually repressed, Protestant evangelicals did not turn away from the sexual liberation movement begun in the 1960s; they have simply made it their own, publishing sex manuals, running sex workshops 1953); David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973); John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Elizabeth Reis, ed., American Sexual Histories (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001); Merril D. Smith, ed., Sex and Sexuality in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Sally Banes, Sheldon Frank, and Tem Horwitz, eds., Our National Passion: 200 Yearsof Sex in America (Chicago: Follett, 1976); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002); Jess F. Battan, "'The Word Made Flesh': Language, Authority, and Sexual Desire in Late Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3:2 (October 1992): 223-44; Carl N. Degler, "What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth-Century," The American Historical Review 79:5 (December 1974): 1467-90; Peter Gardella, Innocent Ecstasy: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Vern L. Bullough, "Early American Sex Manual, Or, Aristotle Who?" Early American Literature 7:3 (winter 1973): 236-46; Thomas A. Foster, "Deficient Husbands: Manhood, Sexual Incapacity, and Male Marital Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century New England," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56:4 (October 1999): 723-44; Michael Gordon, "Sex Manuals: Past and Present," Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality 5:9 (September 1971): 20-37; Janice M. Irvine, Disor- ders and Desire: Sex and Genderin Modern American Sexology (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University Press, 1990). 4. Some of the most provocative scholarly work suggests that even the notion of typical genitals and the category of sex (male or female) is the result of a given society's need to arrange people into two categories of male and female. On this topic it is compulsory to cite Judith Butler's groundbreaking text, Gender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). I have also benefited greatly from the insights provided by Alice D. Dreger, Hermaphroditesand the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000). This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:05:08 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions EVANGELICALSEX MANUALS 99 and holding counseling sessions to instruct husbands and wives on the best techniques for a sexually satisfied marriage. The sex manuals run the gamut from suggesting loving language to put your spouse in the mood to providing information about STDs "sexually transmitted demons." As Americans continue to grapple with the definition of what sex is, Protestant evangelicals have provided an answer. Sex is natural, biblically sanctioned, and if practiced in the proper arena of marriage, sex can be salvific.5 Evangelical sex manuals provide more than information about the logistics of orgasm; they present a uniquely Protestant approach to sex. The most authoritative text on sexuality, the authors claim, is the Bible. Scripture contains everything a believer needs to know about sex. Although the authors focus on bodily functions and bodily fluids, they are careful to remove representations of the body from their texts. The images chosen to accompany text are clinical, fragmented diagrams disconnected from human bodies. Evangelical sex manual authors defend their advice as the authentic Christian approach un- sullied by distorted visions of sexuality that arose from misinterpre- tation of Scripture or false Christian traditions that have erroneously emphasized celibacy or denigrated the body. The manuals are de- voted to providing in excruciating detail instructions about sexual bodies, but the authors are simultaneously committed to larger theo- logical and social issues of Sola Scriptura,defining themselves against other Christian and secular approaches to sex, and witnessing that long-term sexual satisfaction is only possible when the Bible and the Protestant Christ are also in the marriage. I. A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEX MANUALS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1950S TO THE PRESENT The sex manual industry exploded in the early 1970s as part of larger shifts happening in American culture.