Christian Soldier Sexuality
It's about Jesus. But the fact that so much of the language used to discuss Christ is homoerotic is no coincidence. The first miracle of Jesus to believers is that his appeal crossed so many boundaries of the ancient world. Rich and poor, Jew and gentile, men and women — every kind of person loved him, and what's more, desired him. Theologians of far greater subtlety than Eldredge and Lundy suggest that while Christ was biologically male, his gender is harder to fix, since he held a literally erotic power over followers of all persuasions….
What's sad about books like God's Gift to Women is that they translate sexuality into codes of combat, and clichéd ones at that. The "enemy," of course, is Satan, but his names are legion: pornography, homosexuality, feminism, humanism, the monolithic foe Christian conservatives call, simply, "the culture."
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But more shocking is Hagee's announcement that nearly every woman he's counseled over the years has told him that "It's really no big deal if I never have sex again with my husband." This makes sense only if one accepts the division of identity increasingly popular in evangelicaldom: young men are knights and young women are virginal maidens, and even after marriage that formula, in a sense, continues: Men must get dirty in battle, women must stay pure at home. Sex is for the fellas.
Some fellas respond to that "spiritual reality" by seeking out other fellas; guys, the thinking goes, are always up for a good time. The oversexed female as public enemy has been replaced by the oversexed male; and in the worst case scenario, he is gay. Or perhaps it is, for the Christian right, the best case scenario — as the 2004 election proved in the eleven states where conservative activists put anti-gay rights laws up for popular voting, rhetorical gay bashing has proven one of the most effective organizing tools in recent American political history.
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Christian conservatives loathe all forms of homo- and bisexuality, of course, but it is the gay man (singular; he's an archetype) who looms largest in their books and sermons and blogs and cell group meetings. Not, for the most part, as a figure of evil, but one to be almost envied. "The gay man" is the new seductress sent by Satan to tempt the men of Christendom. He takes what he wants and loves whom he will and his life, in the imagination of Christian men's groups, is an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. He is thought to exist in the purest state of "manhood," which is boyhood, before there were girls.
["Sex as a Weapon: Decoding the Literature of the Christian Men's Movement", by Jeff Sharlet, 25 April 2005.]