Shame, Sexuality, and Presbyterians

My Presbytery met recently, as it does on a semi-regular basis, to go over items of business and approve and affirm various and sundry overtures to the General Assembly.  Those overtures are a semi-annual process that determines the direction and policy statements of the church.  Generally, these are as interesting to those outside of our shrinking fold as the census of tribal membership in Numbers 2.

The overtures before the body were four, and four was their number, and I read all of them, just as I always read every single action item all the way through.  Two dealt with matters of investment policy and grantmaking, together pushing for a reallocation of resources into sustainable and renewable energy production.  One was a paean to regenerative agriculture, encouraging Presbyterians to engage with systems of food production that don't rely on industrial and extractive methodologies.  These were all well and good, if a teensy little bit on the dry side.

The fourth was...unsettling.   I wrestled with it mightily, and struggled to process it.  

It is my responsibility, as the pastor, to report back on Presbytery goings-on to the elders who lead my little congregation.  When we met last week, I don't think I did the most effective job of it.  I hemmed.  I hawed.  I equivocated, struggling to find words that worked.  It was an awkward moment.

“On Confession, Repentance and Renewed Theological Engagement Regarding HIV/AIDS and Human Sexuality," or so it was named by the folks who want it adopted as the official policy of the church.  The essence of it is veiled in the circuitous semiotics of contemporary progressive language, but there were two primary action points.

Action point number one was a call for the church...by which the authors mean the PC(USA)...to formally confess culpability for causing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The logic behind this is a weensy bit convoluted, but as I grasp it, goes as follows:  In 1967, the PC(USA) formally affirmed that entropy in sexual relationships was destructive of human personhood, and that the culture of the "sexual revolution" was antithetical to human thriving.  This was defined using binary and heterosexual language.  This explicit heteronormativity shamed queer folk whose sexuality and desire for sexual expression was neither heterosexual or binary in nature, and the trauma of that shame led to actions that made them vulnerable to AIDS.  Therefore and quod erat demonstrandum, the Presbyterian Church USA and its moral theology are responsible for the AIDS epidemic, and must formally repent for all of the trauma, suffering, and death that it caused.

Action point number two was grounded in the first, and called for a revisiting of the nature of relationship itself, and a formal theological re-imagining of our understanding of the "...full spectrum of relational and family structures, exploring ethical approaches to consent, mutuality, and care."  This action point is a little more linguistically veiled, far less direct than the first.  It involves charging two General Assembly committees with establishing frameworks for the acceptance of "relationship structures beyond traditional monogamy" and "diverse intimate arrangements."

This, to the best of my capacity, is my reflecting back what I read.

To be utterly honest, one part of the reason I struggled to verbally convey this to the good souls on my Session was that the whole thing both alarmed and bugged the crap out of me.   

The call to covenant fidelity in relationship in a confession that's fundamentally about social justice is responsible for the AIDS epidemic?  The Book of Confessions, Section 9, paragraph 47, subsection D is the reason people were infected by HIV?  A denomination that sweated blood and tears and worked for decades to become a place of gracious inclusion of Queer folk must now repent in sackcloth and ashes for inflicting the spiritual trauma that caused AIDS?   Sweet Mary and Joseph, what a wild causal stretch all of that is.   

That most of it is argued using contemporary therapeutic trauma language and Newspeak was equally unsettling.  It doesn't read like theology.  It reads like carefully calibrated psychological manipulation, and in a very particular direction.

That first action point has a particular intent rhetorically.  It is, in design and argumentation, preparing the subject to accept the second action point as the necessary outcome.  Given the language used, the goal is not to get the denomination to affirm the covenant fidelity of Queer folk in their life partnerships.  There'd be no point in that, as that's what the PC(USA) already does.  This is pressing for something more.

The authors of this overture appear to be utilizing a trauma-forward shaming framework as the pretext for a wholesale re-imagining of the concepts of marriage, covenant and fidelity.  Or, to put it as my anger would put it, they're engaging in some weapons-grade gaslighting to coerce the church into blessing open, non-dyadic, and polyamorous relationships.  If you speak Presbyterian, that's what it says, depending on whether you're feeling more neutral or royally pissed off.

So, nothing controversial.  Can't imagine this proving disruptive to my community in any way.  Ahem.

And all of this got dropped on the meeting website just days before the meeting, and on which we were supposed to vote on over...Zoom.  Zoom, where discourse is constrained, and engagement is minimized, and tone and the reality of incarnate presence are missing.

It was recommended for concurrence by the committee responsible for such things.  So I realized, Lord help me, am I going to be That Guy in a hundred-plus-participant Zoom where I'm not really personally known, given my increasingly sparse connections to the Presbytery?   Still struggling to process this, I wrestled with participation mightily all day.  On the one hand, I had strong feelings.  On the other, I still had strong feelings.  I got more and more anxious about being That Guy, to where I finally couldn't bring myself to even engage in the meeting.

Which is the other reason I had so much trouble explaining it.  I felt more than a little cowardly, to be honest.

Shame does work, eh?

Artificial Intelligence and Human Sexuality

The news flitted by, as so much does in the torrent:  OpenAI, the parent entity of ChatGPT, announced that the guardrails put in place to restrict it from producing erotic and sexual content have now been removed.  We're "not the elected moral police of the world," or so OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it.  So now, if you want and you spool up the correct prompts, ChatGPT will play the role of your idealized lover.

This is not a good thing.  Not just for kids, either.  It's bad for humans of every age.

An acceptance of porn as "natural" and "sex-positive" seems baked into American progressivism, which hasn't ever made a lick of sense to me.   Why in the name of the sweet Lord Jesus would anyone trust the forces of predatory capitalism with human sexuality?  How is turning physical intimacy into a commodity to be bought and sold a good thing?

Surely, surely we've learned by now that this ain't the case.

We know that corporate social media has supplanted our natural sociality with algorithms designed to addict us, hitting us with little burps of dopamine as we're pushed further and further from genuine human interaction.  Porn is and has always done that too.  Since human beings first learned to scratch a clumsy sexual image onto a cave wall, it's been sexuality as objectification, sexuality as seeing the other as a means to your own pleasure rather than a person, and it was that even before the internet arrived to bring it into our homes and offices and everywhere we go.

In the last three decades, algorithmically-amplified online sexual content has had a catastrophic impact on contemporary sexuality.  It's poisoned a generation of the young, warping their understanding of sex, driving them away from the complex reality of actual flesh-and-blood partners.   This isn't even faintly healthy.

A lover is a person, complex and alive, and requires us to adapt and grow.  If one is Christian, as I am, we also acknowledge that partner as worthy of love, another sentient being whose pleasure is as important as our own.  This is a great deal of fun, and is also organically complex and unpredictable.  It requires us to learn from one another, and to appreciate one another.

But an AI simulacrum does none of those things.  It demands nothing of us as persons, because it is not a person itself.  It has no desires.  It feels nothing.  It needs nothing.  It is...for now...truly and actually an object.

Now that pornography has integrated AI, it can offer up an infinite array of purchasable "partners" that only do and say exactly whatever we want, and look precisely like whatever we lust for in that moment.   AI will adapt to us and indulge us, an erotic sycophant that will shapeshift itself to our solipsistic onanism with the precision of a lab-designed virus overcoming the natural defenses of a cell.

It does not bode well for the future of human physical intimacy.

The Squirrelly Case of Bradley Manning

Just when the world doesn't seem like it can possibly get any stranger, the Bradley Manning trial came to a close this last week.

A few weeks ago, I heard that the core of his defense...by a military lawyer...was gender dysphoria.  I thought, huh?  The whole Wikileaks thing is about gender dysphoria?  Manning wanted to be a Womanning, that messed him up, and so as a wreck of a human being, torn and shattered by this fundamental existential crisis, he made some terrible decisions.

True though that may be, this reads strangely.

I know as a good liberal I should now be deeply concerned about how this surfaces issues of justice and solidarity for my LGBTQ sisters and brothers and..um...brother-sisters.  That's where all the broader media chatter is now.   Coverage in the leftist Huffington Post today, for instance, focuses on how "Chelsea" Manning's case highlights problems facing transgender Americans in the military.

Over on the right, FoxNews is today covering the outcome of the case in their health section.  Yes, the health section.  How does gender reassignment work, plumbing wise?  They report, as we decide.

But this "coverage" echoes oddly across my consciousness, because it feels like a convenient distraction, a dangled bit of shiny scandalous chatter-fodder.  "Squirrel!" cries the media, and we go chasing off after it, all else forgotten.

Manning's sexuality has become the conversation.  What is not discussed, not a tiny bit, not a jot, not a tittle, is the substance of what he did, the reason he's doing prison time.  The charges against him, to be blunt, didn't have a damn thing to do with gender dysphoria.

They were about releasing documents that showed the depth of the human toll of our actions in Iraq.  That included the overall projected death toll, covering up the killing of civilians and surrendering combatants, massacres by American forces, and our acquiescence to the systematic torture and summary executions conducted by our Iraqi "allies."

Those leaks showed a pattern of behavior and action unbefitting the integrity of a republic.  We are imprisoning him to punish him for making that information available.

But that is forgotten.  Instead, the Manning conviction "narrative" becomes about sexuality.  Until we forget about that entirely too, which will be soon.  I give it two or three more days.

There was a time, back in the Soviet Era, when the official media of that benighted state would mask the truth by fabricating salacious and slanderous narratives about dissidents.  In the swirling madness of the 24 hour news and social media chatter cycle, that no longer becomes necessary to mask injustices.

Just find the sex angle, and let the "free" media go at it.

Squirrel.

Pastor Weiner

Yesterday, as I juggled and sorted my coming summer schedule with the boys, I discovered one of those scheduling impossibilities that make life so highly entertaining.

On a well packed day next week, my little guy has an orthodontist appointment.  More significantly, my big guy is getting his braces put in, a non-trivial multi-hour exercise that allows us to continue paying the mortgage on our orthodontist's vacation home in Bermuda.   And the little guy has a three hour School of Rock band practice in the late afternoon.  And the wife will be in Seattle.

And this was the day I'd originally registered for the mandated day-long Presbytery sexual misconduct training, running from 9 in the mornin' to 4 in the afternoon.  Something had to give, and what gave was the training.  It'll happen in the Fall, and that'll work just fine.

This sort of training isn't, of course, something I haven't already done.  Sexual misconduct training was a significant part of the two-day retreat with which I entered into ministry.  It was there in the background as I went through the required psych assessment.  It was front-and-center during a significant portion of the required semester long Pastoral Counseling course in seminary.  In fact, it's so often present that at times it starts feeling redundant and, if I'm in a grumpy mood, a bit oppressive.

Again?  Really?  Sweet Mother of Pearl!

On first blush, it's easy to question this relentless tide of trainings and re-retrainings.  For all of the good heart behind them, the fact remains that trainings and seminars are unlikely to have a significant impact on the behavior of a sexual predator, or on the actions of someone who has no sense of appropriate interpersonal boundaries or propriety.  

Human beings who live into a dysfunctional sexuality will sit through the training, make a few jokes, and then go right back to sending inappropriately personal emails to that young woman who recently came to them for counseling.   Telling someone something is wrong and showing them what is right provides exactly zero guarantee that they'll act appropriately.

The endless stream of political scandals that mass media pitches out there to draw the attention of our nookie-addled culture is clear evidence of this.   Did Anthony Weiner know, rationally, that his tweets were inappropriate and would be disastrous for his career?  Did John Edwards know, rationally, that cheating on his cancer-stricken wife was wrong and would destroy his credibility?  What about Gov. Sanford?  Gov. Swartzenegger?  Senator Ensign?  How many trainings and counselings and consciousness-raising sessions do we suppose would have gotten them thinking with something other than their little brain?

I'm not fool enough to believe it makes a difference to them's who are inclined to act inappropriately.  Knowledge of the right is not doing of the right.

So are these sessions a waste of time?  If the predators and those who have a poorly developed sense of sexual self are not going to be changed, and those who are faithful will pay attention to the Gospel anyway, should churches spend so much time on this?

Short answer:  Yes.

They should spend the time because, as I see it, what matters is 1) clearly establishing acceptable norms of respectful behavior within the Beloved Community and 2) empowering those who accept those norms to both identify and defend them.

The purpose of these trainings, honestly, is more for those who aren't violating pastoral trust.  It's a reminder to remain constantly vigilant.  That includes empowering folk to be aware of inappropriate behavior in others, but also giving the awareness that if you're not attending to your own faith and maintaining balance in life, unChristlike things can happen.  Even to good people.  

It's a reminder that the integrity of the Good News is at issue.  It's a reminder that the church needs to attend continually to insuring that our communities are places where everyone is safe and welcomed.

Too much is at stake to neglect it.  And that is more than worth a refresh now and again.

Clothes Make the Woman

As Washington DC smothers under a blanket of intense heat and humidity, my little family has been sheltering in place from the ongoing heat tsunami. We've spent the last few evenings in the cool comfort of our basement, watching movies together. Through the joys of streaming Netflix, we've been indulging in some blast-from-the-past cinema, delving into some of the best that the 1980s had to offer.

The boys, particularly my tweener, are often reluctant to explore the cinema of this era. It's old! It's stupid! The music is terrible! Their hair frightens me, Dad!

As I've not seen most of these movies in twenty years, I'm always a little reluctant to trust my memories of their quality. Sometimes, I'm pleasantly surprised, as when we watched the still delightfully entertaining "Little Shop of Horrors." Sometimes, I can't believe I paid money to see a particularly wretched movie, as in the case of the stinktacular "Conan the Destroyer." We ended up having to turn that one off when our brains started to bleed. Usually, though, I'm able to successfully predict whether the kids will like a film or not.

Last night, we settled in with "Short Circuit," a amiable bit of 80s fluff about a robot that comes to life. I'd predicted that the boys would love it, and I was dead on. The humor was right up their alley. But what struck both me and the missus was the lead actress. Yeah, it was Ally Sheedy, which was a blast from the past, but that wasn't what got us.

It was the way she was dressed.

She was the love interest. From the dialogue, it was clear that the men around her...and the robot...thought she was attractive. And she was. But her clothing was remarkable in it's modesty. Long flowing skirts. Comfortable, loose-fitting blouses. Long slacks. This was not a prudish movie, either. It had rather more profanity than I'd recalled. It's humor was indistinguishable from the humor in a contemporary action comedy.

Yet the female lead wore clothes that nowadays would identify her as a Mennonite.

The image portrayed of women and what constitutes dressing attractively was radically different less than a generation ago. I watched a smidge of Top Gun the other day. In that 80s-fest, Kelly McGillis was supposed to be over-the-top sexy. But she mostly dressed...well...rather demurely by today's standards. When I go back to pictures of that era, the yearbook images of the girls I knew who were wild , provocative, and a tiny bit dangerous...the clothing that at the time was so...err...intriguing...looks like a burqua compared to what I encountered the last time I went to the mall.

Back in the 80s, the area around my home church was one of the seediest places in DC, a meat market of porn shops, drug dealers, and prostitutes. The clothes that teen girls wear today to go out..and sometimes even to go to church...show more skin than those on the streetwalkers who'd sometimes solicit me on my way back to my car after I left the church. I don't say that by way of judging the character of the young women who wear them. It is simply an objective assessment of the amount of fabric involved.

I do wonder what impact the significantly increased sexualization of women has on our culture. Even a significant portion of modern feminism seems to have conceptually acquiesced to the market-driven idea that women are primarily sexual beings. Sex is, or so the argument goes, an integral part of a woman's empowerment. That it is useful for selling product is just a side effect.

I don't quite buy that. I think...and not just because I'm an old fuddy duddy, dagnabbit...that the sea change in cultural expectations about women's appearance isn't a positive development for 1) the psyche of women and girls and 2) the way in which men and boys learn to view the women around them.

Sex and Intimacy

We just got Fios TV. Not just regular Fios TV, but the EXTREEEEME HD version. I'd been fighting it for years. I'm not a big TV fan generally, choosing instead to squander my free time meandering around the blogosphere. Many moons ago, we did have cable, but when we moved into our current residence, we ditched it.

I didn't miss it. Not having it saved us money, and with two young boys in the house, it meant one less negative input to worry about.

After years of gentle pressure, I finally decided to give fiber optic tee vee to my wife for her birthday. This last week, late in the night after it had been installed, she and I waded into the endless depths of pay tv.

Those depths went down to some rather darker places than I'd anticipated, places that provided some pretty compelling motivation to figure out and engage the parental controls.

The wife and I were particularly struck by what appeared to be an ongoing graphic documentary series on the various manifestations of human sexuality. I will not be providing a link here, much to your undoubted disappointment. What was most interesting was how...well...utterly unarousing the show was. It was engaging on an anthropological level, but it was about as erotic as watching someone gut a flounder.

That wasn't because of the absence of nekkid people. There were plenty of nekkid people, sometimes large piles of nekkid people. There were nekkid people on stage, nekkid people in boxes, nekkid people hanging from the ceiling, all while doing the things one would expect, and occasionally things one would not.

It was because of a total absence of intimacy. Human sexuality is a complex thing, and something deeply hardwired into our nature. It's part of our animal nature, but it's also part of the way that we relate to other beings. Though "having relations" is inherently relational, much of the way our culture approaches sexuality now is utterly depersonalized. Oh, desire is there, in a meat-self sort of way. But the desire is utterly indiscriminate, disconnected from any interest in the person inhabiting the flesh. Folks who engage in this sort of sexual expression will argue that they are liberating sexuality from shame. Do what you want! Whenever you want! We're free!

But while the ethic of shame has no place in a healthy sexuality, our society is well on the way to losing a sense of the importance of intimacy. Though we've found all sorts of ways to "know one another Biblically," we increasingly decouple this intense, passionate, and fundamentally creative experience from healthy emotional and spiritual connections with others. We are not interested in knowing them.

In doing so, we haven't freed sexuality. We've rendered it meaningless. And that's a significant loss.

My Milkshakes Bring the Boys to the Church

As a progressive pastor, I struggle mightily with how to respond to the incursion of certain cultural expectations of appearance and dress into the life of a congregation. I tend to believe that church should be an informal place, in which we do not strive and struggle with one another to "dress right." This is partly theological, and partly because I have apparently inherited the fashion sense of my British forebears. Recently, for instance, I wore a tan shirt and khaki pants, meaning I'd disappear completely in some desert settings. My fashion sensibility is painful to behold.

But my complete lack of fashion sense is not at issue here. The question I've been mulling over for a bit was stirred by a recent post over at FreeThinker777: Is there even such a thing as inappropriate attire for women in the church?

Men..even Christian men..have trouble not thinking with Mr. Johnson. An attractive woman will still draw the attention of a man's little brain even if she dresses like an Amishwoman.

If you're a Christian man, and a woman's appearance inspires you to violate Matthew 5:28 in surprisingly creative ways, you've just got to look past it. Get over it. Do not judge her, and see past that halter top...past, not through, sinner...to the child of God that she is. It takes some effort, but if you're going to claim to be a Jesus follower, the responsibility lies entirely with you, my friend.

Then again, what is culturally expected of young women in our [begin bad Russian accent] decadent capitalist society [end bad Russian accent] is that...well...they need to be "hawtt." Or perhaps that's "sexii." I can never keep up with the lingo these days.

Wearing clothes that are specifically intended to draw physical interest is something deeply and intensely socialized into most females of the species. I'm convinced that the relentless media bombardment of gyrating pop tarts, airbrushed celebrities, and product spokesmodels has taken that deeper, to a point at which "casual" for many American women and girls doesn't mean "casual" at all, unless casual means uncomfortable. Many will then dress into that societal expectation, which is reinforced by their peers and by those of us with XY chromosomes.

I'm never sure how to respond to that when it manifests itself in a congregational context. On the one hand, I uncategorically refuse to be judgmental. What you wear does not make you more or less loved by God, and if God is omniscient and omnipresent, we're all nekkid before the Lord all the time anyway.

On the other, I've already told my praise team I'd rather they not sing Hillsong's "My Milkshakes Bring the Boys to the Church." Yeah, I know it's catchy. I don't care. When someone shows up at church showing a whole bunch of leg...and by that I don't mean me, because the psychological trauma that would inflict on my congregation would be deep and lasting...I do struggle with how to respond. Can I even mention it without coming across as somehow belittling them or singling them out for condemnation?

That our consumer culture has hypersexualized women don't make it ok, and at a pretty deep level, I want church to counterculturally resist the relentless marketization of womanflesh. The answer to that is not some Christian version of the hijab. The era of gendered oppression within the Body of Christ needs to be put well behind us.

The answer is also not the peculiar embrace of consumer sexualization that comes from some corners of the progressive movement. Those academic feminists who view aggressive sexuality (for women) as a means of empowerment seem, at some pretty fundamental level, to be articulating a sexuality that is fundamentally at odds with the agape love ethic articulated in the Gospels.

I would suggest that the goal for Christians is not to be judgmental towards individuals who are simply reflecting their culture...but rather, to ask the community as a whole to consider the depth to which our society has driven women to carefully, assiduously present themselves as having primarily surface-level value.

How individuals respond to that realization is entirely up to them.

Sex Before Marriage

I've been reflecting on the latest editorial fulmination from the good brothers over at the Layman. That organization, in case you're not familiar with Presbyterian in-group politicking, is a group of folks committed to renewing my denomination by first driving everyone from it.

They and some fellow travellers are deeply concerned that the progressives and moderates within our denomination are utterly gutting the sexual ethic we get from scripture. By being open to "adulterers and homosexuals" being a part of our church, we're consigning ourselves to collapse and failure, as the Lord God Almighty shifts his divine endorsement to nondenominational Bible-believing megachurches.

I've discussed my scriptural response to homosexuality...but what about where I feel scripture stands on premarital sexuality?

To that question, the Bible read in a literal sense doesn't give you much wiggle room. There are many folks on my side of the aisle who will try to point to the variety of acceptable sexual expressions in the Old Testament as permission. Did David sin with his many, many wives, or when he tried and failed to get Abishag to *cough* warm him up? Ruth and her possible seduction of a tipsy Boaz invariably surfaces, although I would contend that seminary grads who argue that "feet" are a euphemism for a particular part of the male anatomy need to never, ever be put in charge of a foot washing service. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, people.

They'll point to the folk tale that gleefully and approvingly recounts Tamar's sexual trickery of her father-in-law Judah. If pretending to be a ho, getting pregnant, and blackmailing your family to get revenge can make the Torah proclaim you "righteous," well, golly, all bets are off. Or so the argument goes.

I don't generally find those arguments compelling. They presume that the Christian moral imperative is somehow bound to the folk ethics of an ancient near-Eastern culture. While we have our moral foundation in that culture, I don't think you can reasonably say that such stories represent the highest governing principles of that culture. They don't really capture the moral ethos of that society, or of a Christ-centered faith.

The Apostle Paul, while no great fan of marriage, makes a sustained and consistent argument against non-connubial nookie. Paul makes it clear in a range of different places...and particularly in 1 Corinthians 7...that he expects Christians to contain their sexuality within the bounds of a covenant union.

I don't tend to view this as Paul being oppressive. He's just being consistent with his repeated articulation of the core Golden Rule teaching of Christian faith. It's better to commit to another than to use another for one's own pleasure. Marriage, even in the rather more amorphous form that existed in 1st Century Rome, could give a clear framework for that commitment. It could also, of course, just be another way of securing worldly power over another child of God. It's conflation with property rights in the ancient world certainly didn't help.

While not rejecting Paul's gracious intent, I tend to go directly to our Man in Nazareth for advice on the issue. When we listen for Christ's sexual ethic, we get something that is...to be frank...even more challenging than Paul. Jesus makes it clear that Christians aren't called to just attend to the law. We're called to go well beyond it. Mechanistic chastity or by-the-book fidelity within the bounds of a marriage between a man and a woman means exactly jack to Jesus. Thinking that's our unbreachable bulwark against sin is the error of Pharisees, because Jesus here turns it up to eleven.

It's not just our practice. It's our desire. If you look at Halle Berry with lust in your heart, you are an adulterer. That is equally true of Scarlett Johannsen. It is exponentially more true of some creative combination of the both.

Um.

Where was I? I seem to have lost my train of thought. Oh yes...

What Jesus lays before us is a sexual ethic that both affirms marriage and transcends marriage. It affirms commitment to another, but it also forces us to admit that the reason that commitment is meaningful rests in our love for the other and an honoring of the other that goes to our purpose as human and sexual beings. Ultimately, I think that's where the heart of scripture leads us. The boundary that defines acceptable sexuality is love.

When I say that, though, I'm not saying that this is an easier standard. The "love" I describe is not to be confused with erotic desire. It also isn't fervid romance-novel emoting or the we're-celebrating-our-two-week-anniversary puppyness of adolescent infatuation. It is agape love, Essential Nature of the Almighty God love, Our God is a Consuming Fire love. It is an awareness that the way in which we interact with other souls has eternal weight. We are each accountable for how our actions impact the other, and if you have even the tiniest sliver of awareness of the nature of God's love, it can scare the pants right back on you.

I would hold that our actions as sexual beings are judged against the same essential standard as our other social and interpersonal relations. That means absolute injunctions against sexuality in it's predatory form or any sexual expression in which the other becomes primarily an object and not a Thou. Any authentic Christian sexual expression is fundamentally opposed to the culture of the hookup and the culture of sexual objectification.

Can sexual expression exist outside of marriage and not be inherently sin? I believe so. But if we take our role as disciples seriously, we're not going to take this intense and intimate part of our created nature lightly.