We all know that the growing

evangelical movement is one (with a few left-leaning pockets exempted)

obsessed with sex. Controlling it. Punishing it. Using

it to control women. Stomping out most versions of it completely.

Shaming people who enjoy it. And now, believe it or not, promoting

it as an important part of healthy marriages.

Wait, come again? Sex-positive

evangelicals? Well, sort of. While they’re not bringing

in enough numbers to drown out the dominant attitude of shaming, there

does seem to be a trend in the evangelical community of promoting more

and better sex within marriage — for the good of the marriages. There are now Christian

sex shops, Christian sex advice columns, and Christian

sex blogs.

Most of it is tame compared to secular counterparts, but the fact that it exists at all gives pause to those

of us who spend quite a bit of time wrangling with evangelicals who

want to ban abortion, restrict contraception, put virginity rings on

girls, and teach nothing but abstinence-until-marriage.

But should this trend surprise

us? Upon further reflection, the whole thing makes perfect sense.

One of the favorite selling points for abstinence-only, reiterated endlessly

by abstinence-only "educators," is that waiting until marriage means

that the sex will be even better, with the implication often being that

it works seamlessly without the learning period the rest of us have

to go through, and that it’s so hot that others couldn’t even imagine

it. (It’s a false promise — just listen to reports

from couples who waited, only to find out that they had compatibility

issues. But it’s never been beyond fundamentalists to treat the truth

as disposable in pursuit of a larger agenda.) Evangelicals have an

investment in making sure that married sex is hot, so they can push

the abstinence-only line with more confidence.

But there’s another aspect

to it that’s even more important–people come to evangelical churches

because they need help running their lives, and if the churches want

to keep members, they need to offer that help. In fact, one of

the most remarkable aspects of the modern evangelical movement is how

self-help-y it is. Matt

Taibbi discovered this when he went undercover at James Hagee’s San

Antonio megachurch.

Most of the work done in the church borrowed heavily from the dreck

of the self-help world, except with demons thrown in as a twist.

Certainly Rick Warren has exploited the melding of Christianity with

the self-help section of the bookstore with his book "The Purpose-Driven

Life," which, from the title alone, sounds just like a self-help book.

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Since the evangelical movement

is basically competing with self-help for an audience, it makes sense

that they’d have to branch out into one of the most popular forms

of self-help, which is advice on how to make sex better inside relationships.

This kind of thing isn’t exactly new to evangelical Christianity.

In the 70s, the right wing power couple Beverly and Tim LaHaye co-authored a sex

manual that at

least said female orgasms were important — but scolded people who used

the popular oral sex method to get there. Modern sex-positive

evangelicals are a lot more open-minded about oral sex, I discovered

as I perused various Christian websites.

What I found in my research

was a surprising diversity in attitudes about what sex acts were acceptable,

though a shared fondness for obsessing over the potential sinfulness

of each act. Of all the people pushing the "more sex for marrieds"

message, I found Joy

Wilson , who owns

the sex shop Book

22 , the most pleasant

person who really seemed happy to be helping people have more and better

sex. Like the rest of the sites I read, Book 22 had the same nit-picking

"sin or not?" specificity–dildos are out–but on the whole, her

website sells the same kind of products that feminist sex shops do,

with the same goal of making sure that women are getting as much pleasure

out of sex as men do. She

blogs about sex in a blunt, generous style that I found appealing.

The

Marriage Bed is

co-authored by a married couple, and while it’s refreshingly positive

about things like oral sex and even spanking, it’s homophobic and

sexist, like pretty much all the sites I visited. Women are characterized

as wanting more snuggles and men as wanting more sex, and it’s not

even hinted that it might be reversed in some marriages, or even that

snuggles might not be a chore for some men. What I found most amusing

was their acceptance of fantasy was contingent upon making sure that you

only fantasized about sex between married people. Like most of the sites,

they demonstrate hostility towards female-controlled hormonal contraception.

Christian

Nymphos had a refreshingly

explicit nature, which is what people go to sex advice websites for.

If you don’t have details, you haven’t learned enough to do it yourself.

Unlike Book 22 or the Marriage Bed, they don’t seem to have any problems

with dildos or anal sex, so point in their favor. Like Book 22,

they consider their mission mainly to make sex more fun for women, who

they assume have strong sexual desires. They even avoid the fear-mongering

about female-controlled

hormonal contraception.

Despite refreshingly sex-positive views, though, they maintained the

same disappointing levels of sexism, telling women to suck it up if

they are left unsatisfied by sex

or promoting

female submission as romance.

What I discovered was that

women’s influence on the message made it, if far from perfect and

often downright offensive, much more positive than the sex

advice and help that came straight from male ministers. By contrast, look at Paul Wirth

of the Relevant Church, who recently made headlines with his 30 day sex challenge. Unlike the female-run sites

that thrived more on suggestions and discussion, the 30 day sex challenge

comes across like a dictate. You’re to have sex (if you’re

married, of course) for 30 days whether you’re in the mood or not.

The reason Wirth gives for this is unsurprisingly sexist: "Every man’s

fantasy: 30 days of sex!" "Every woman’s dream: 30 days of intimacy!"

This idea–that the sex part of sex is for men, and women just want

the intimacy–threads through many sites, unsurprisingly showing up

more when men are doing more of the writing. The challenge just

struck me as another way to use sex as a tool to control, the flip side

of abstinence-only.

Minister

Mark Driscoll of Seattle is

positively obsessed with sex, and belongs to this category, even though

there’s something unnerving about it. A big proponent of wifely

submission, and just generally bagging on women ( Driscoll blamed

Ted Haggard’s wife Gayle for Ted’s infidelities with male prostitutes, claiming that she had let herself

go), Driscoll also offers a video series in which he answers people’s

questions about sex. These

videos are pretty hard to take ,

since he’s arrogant and pushy and just a little too interested in

what’s going on in the bedrooms of his parishioners for comfort.

I suspect if the pro-sex movement in Christianity starts to really take

off, we’re going to see more men like Driscoll take over, and the

control will be wrested away from the women who are currently

out there writing a kinder, gentler form of evangelical sex advice.