Anonymous asked: I don't mean this question rudely so I've been hesitating to ask but your bathhouse post made me wonder - how do you reconcile the idea of casual sex with the fact that most Christians seem to have a consensus that casual sex is Bad, since you're a theologian and all? (honestly there's a lot of cute girls on Tinder but I want to figure whether it's on the theological up-and-up)

let me get this straight, anon….. if i answer this well enough, you’ll be able to lose ur virginity? holy shit this is more pressure than any of my final papers

Ok, this is going to be a longer post, so…. yeah

I guess first of all I’d trouble the notion that consensus *necessarily* means that a particular belief is definitive. Since at least the advent of Constantinian Christianity with the Edict of Milan, where the Church became explicitly tied to empire, most Christians have had many a consensus that, when it comes down to it, is diametrically opposed to Christ’s teachings. Consensus doesn’t automatically mean that something *is* or *should be.* It merely means that it has become a hegemonic or near-hegemonic view. And all hegemonic views, particularly when they concern life-and-death, eternally-significant beliefs, need to be constantly challenged and examined lest we find our belief exploited for violent human ends.

Having gotten that out of the way, the way that I would approach the question you’re asking is to ask just who/what we are theologically, because that is very significant in determining ways to have right relations. The model I subscribe to is that we are humans, made to be in fellowship with God and to receive at Dei’s hands the gifts which it is Dei’s nature to give. Through the incarnation, we, although possessing no way in ourselves to relate truly nonviolently to each other (following Derrida, even the assigning of a proper name or an identity category is a violence insofar as it reduces the radically unique individual into merely a signifier that can in no way properly describe the individual), are called into being as persons in the way that the persons of the Trinity are persons, a radically transcendent system of difference that is fundamentally nonviolent, though as such remaining outside our understanding. To understand who we are as persons, then, is a kind of negative theology, it is identifying all those things that our personhood is not.

Our personhood is not violent, however incapable we are of fully living into it and living as persons and not as humans enmeshed in a human epistemology. Nothing violent, then, can be said to be proper to our personhood, and forsaking violence can never be in violation of that personhood.

Our personhood does not consist of the identity categories that structure our human existence. Galatians 3:28 speaks of the impermanence of class, race, and gender/sex. Critical reflection, whether Marxist theory, critical race theory, or feminist/gender/queer theory, clue us in on why. Because each of those identities are historically contingent, and are premised upon violence. The emergence of race as we know it was explicitly tied to the justification of slavery. Gender/sex as we know it exists solely to justify the domination of women. The existence of the rich is premised upon the violation of the poor.

In a similar vein, Jesus himself said that marriage is not an eschatological category in Matthew 22:30. Marriage is explicitly tied to the system of gender/sex, and facilitates the domination of women. It is a human social contract, and, as such, a violent relation. Even if we view God as instituting marriage in Genesis, we are confronted with the realization that the relation that God ordained between Adam and Eve bears only the most abstract of resemblances to what marriage has come to be. The restrictions placed on who can marry, the coercion of the state in a thousand different ways, the preclusion of disabled people from the institution, the tying of marriage to the tax code, these all should tell us that what we know as “marriage” is a wholly human construct. A violent institution.

Our moral responsibility is to seek to live our human lives in the best approximation of personhood as we can. We are embroiled in violences, but we must attempt to reject it wherever it appears. This understanding of responsibility puts less weight on sexual chastity than most Christians, but puts a much greater weight on understanding the way that our relations facilitate or attempt to reject violence. The flip-side of the conservative position on sex outside of marriage, remember, is that all sex inside of marriage is good. The institution becomes the measure of morality, and abuse proliferates. That is not the kind of relation we are called to.

It doesn’t matter what your standing is with regard to a particular state-issued license. What matters is that the relations you foster are premised upon an acknowledgement of the possibility of violence, and an explicit turning away from it. By all means, be as promiscuous as you want, but ground that promiscuity in a respect and full embrace of the other person, remembering whose image you both are.