Sex and the Married Christian

Back in the Dark Ages when I was wandering around the UC Campus trying to corral the leftists I was confronted by a member of the Weather Underground who accused believers of hating sex. I stopped right in front of him and replied that of every religious group Christians were the most romantic. He scoffed loudly and said we were a bunch of prudes who gave us sex for church.

Even back then I knew he was wrong but I had no real data to back me up. Then in 1988 Redbook Magazine did a research study on sex and marriage and discovered, to their shock and chagrin, that the more religious people were more romantic by far. The re-d-d the study ten years later and left off the questions about religious preferences. When the data do not support your thesis dump the data and keep your thesis.

Now Opinion Journal follows up on some dumb statements by a leftist film director.

Christianity and sex have never been good friends," Dutch director Paul Verhoeven said in a story we cited yesterday. We didn't dwell on that quote, but it seems worth doing so now. It seems an odd point, given that in the Bible, God enjoins his creations to "be fruitful." Until we perfect cloning, there's only one way to do that.

A reader calls our attention to this 1999 Slate article:

When University of Chicago researchers set out to discover which religious denominations have the best sex, they learned that the faithful don't do all their shouting in church. Conservative Protestant women, their 1994 survey found, report by far the most orgasms: Thirty-two percent say they achieve orgasm every time they make love. Mainline Protestants and Catholics lagged five points behind. Those with no religious affiliation were at 22 percent. (Unitarians may not wish to read any further.)

The main topic of the Slate piece is the burgeoning market for Christian sex advice books: "Evangelicals may not want their children to study sex ed in school, but they are not afraid of studying a little sex ed in their bedrooms," writes Mark Oppenheimer:

Perhaps the most notable quality of the Christian sex business is that it is evangelical, not puritanical. It is very pro-sex--as long as sex takes place in the context of marriage.

And that's the point. When Verhoeven says "Christianity and sex have never been good friends," what he means by "sex" is not sex but uncommitted sex--the weird anti-ideal of the sexual revolution.

The idea of sex without strings attached has, to be sure, a certain allure. But as a practical matter it is simply unworkable for most people. It's emotionally messy and requires more effort than it's worth. It seems obvious that you'll have more and better sex if you go to bed every night with someone you love. To do that, you don't have to be Christian, but it doesn't hurt.

The Opinion Journal is a free online commentary with some of the best writing and the most interesting articles I know. They consistently punch holes in the pretentious and arrogantly ignorant statements of the loony left.

I hope you see the irony in these guys attacking us for hating sex when it is they that put themselves in bondage for a mess of pottage.