Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!

Rod Dreher will just lurv this one. In a general sign of the horribleness of Time magazine and the culture at large, the hot new story is the mainstreaming of wild, nasty sex (with your husband or wife, of course) in Christian churches. For fans of crazy hot sex on the one hand and Christianity on the other, the following should be an equal turn-off:

Superior sex can be difficult for some couples to discuss with each other, let alone with their pastor. But having taken on almost every other aspect of their congregants’ lives, churches oriented toward young adults and Gen Xers have begun promoting not just better sex, but more of it. Well, not just promoting it but penciling it in. When New Direction launched its “40 Nights of Grrreat Sex” program, the Spencers gave participants daily planners. A typical week is marked “Sun: Worship together”; “Mon: Give your wife a full body massage”; “Tues: Quickie in any room besides the bedroom”; “Wed: Pleasure your partner”; “Thurs: Read 1 Corinthians 7–How can I please you more?”; and so on.

[…] In February, Paul Wirth, pastor of the Relevant Church in Tampa, Fla., issued what he called “The 30-Day Sex Challenge.” The program featured an extensive questionnaire, a Bible verse a day and the assumption that participants would engage in some kind of sex each night. Wirth says he has received calls from eight pastors asking about his program’s guidelines. A megachurch in Texas, the Fellowship of the Woodlands, holds semiannual Sacred Sex Weekends (“Learn how you can experience a fulfilling sex life with God’s blessing”).

Wow. I read things like this and I wonder why must we make things so hard on ourselves? Shouldn’t it be obvious that “a fulfilling sex life with God’s blessing” can be achieved without church supervision, or even without church instruction? Indeed, wouldn’t your sex life be worsened and made totally weird by conforming it to some kind of pastor-approved checklist? How is this happening? What is it that drives people to want every element of their lives to be managed from above according to one trusty set of rules? Why must the Bible contain the answer to which room and which orifice ought to be the designated pleasure center of the day?

This isn’t a psycho religious impulse. It’s a psycho modern impulse. It pops up everywhere — in churches, in workplaces, in self-help aisles of the bookstore, in politics (where ‘principle’ means a top-down ideology that never leaves you in the uncomfortable position of having to agonize over a policy option). We free and equal moderns want single standards that can organize and bless all manner of trivial little details. Without some kind of all-encompassing bubble, the prospect of sorting through the zillions of options, temptations, and hobgoblins of everyday life becomes a horror. ‘Scheduling in sex’ — in Weberian bureaucracy-speak, routinizing it — makes just as much ‘sense’ as a Call from God as it does a Rule for Health:

For instance, a husband can expect smoother sailing at night if he helps his wife clear her “to do” list that evening, Spencer said in a conference call with his wife, who added, “Otherwise he’s just another thing on that list.”

After all, why would God want us to be unhealthy? And how can we be healthy in a smithereens of constantly changing details without little habits to oscillate around? But, yikes, as I suggest below, there’s something unhealthy about manic planning, about the management fetish we develop and turn back on ourselves. The real problem, I think, is that modern management as therapeutic way to eliminate agony and anxiety depends on transparency. And transparency about one’s sex life is pretty unappealing in or out of church:

“After more than 20 yrs of marriage, this has been ‘a shot in the arm,'” one New Direction congregant wrote on the Spencers’ blog. “In the past month we have been to Victoria’s Secret 4 times (the secret is out!!). Thanks Pastor and 1st Lady for your openness, and obediences to God.”

Obedience to God (and the lesser deities of Taste, Decorum, and Propriety) involves at least a minimum of closedness. Any concept of human dignity we want to develop must center on the integral identity of our particular selves, and our particular selves lose that identity when everything about us, including our most intimate, exclusive practices, becomes common knowledge and common property. Before I start raving about sexual socialism, let me finish glibly in the parlance of our times by offering to pit the Unity Church of OMG against the congregation I have founded, the First Church of TMI.

(Pic courtesy Flickrer Erika wears Cortez.)