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The Puritan’s Case Against Sexuality
Have you ever wondered what the Puritans and Evangelicals have against sex?
Religious groups have been all over the adult entertainment business for as long as any of us can remember. We’ve heard their claims. Porn is sinful. Gay men are going to hell. Pre-marital sex pisses off God. Masturbation is unhealthy. And when it comes to dealing with those of us who work in the adult entertainment field, only the strictest laws will suffice. Lock us up. Punish us. Make an example out of anyone who would produce pornography. Just why is it that these people have come to hold such a rigid opposition to human sexuality?
You might think the Bible is the foundation for all of this madness. If you thought that, however, you’d probably be wrong. There is very little mention of sex in the Bible. That’s not to say that there is no mention whatsoever, but given the scope of the Bible it’s pretty clear that sexuality is not one of its primary concerns. Additionally, the Bible contradicts itself on the topic of adultery – the one aspect of sexuality that it does occasionally, though rarely, take up. For example, the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus Christ contrast notably with those of the Old Testament and the laws of Moses.
In the New Testament, one of the most famous of these few sexuality-themed passages tells of Jesus Christ shielding and protecting a prostitute from an attempted community stoning. Yup, the son of God actually stopped a community from delivering a severe punishment in response to a “sexual crime.” So from where did Puritans/Evangelicals get this utter intolerance? Certainly not from the son of God.
Now the Old Testament does have one particular passage that you might point out which deals with adultery directly (aside from the seventh commandment, of course). Essentially it calls for the death penalty for offenders. Stoning is the preferred method of execution in these hard criminal cases. And adultery in this instance is defined as the ravaging of someone else’s wife, fiancée or daughter. Why the concern about keeping women out of the hands of sinful men and their lustful ways?
Until quite recently in human history Western women were just passed on from the rule of their father straight to the rule of their husband, so having sex with an unmarried young maid was devaluing a father’s potentially valuable piece of property, leaving him with the burden of caring for damaged goods, and making a mockery of his familial control. This was not to be tolerated. Marriage throughout history has not been an arrangement made for love or for the happiness of the people involved in the marriage, but instead marriage has traditionally been a kind of social arrangement made between men and with little input from the woman to be married off; marriage was a means of social or financial advancement. A man might negotiate with a father for the hand of a daughter in order to inherit land or perhaps a healthy dowry that could then be used in business. A father might arrange a marriage with a certain individual because the marital bond enhanced his family’s social standing. It’s the old “my daughter is married to a doctor” boast and the fringe benefits that come with it. These are just a few examples, of course, and marriages were arranged for all kinds of practical reasons. But the idea of marriage for love wasn’t a mainstream consideration until quite recently. Women simply married whom they were told to marry in the vast majority of instances.
So the Old Testament’s concern with keeping women pure was more of a property concern. A woman who had been “spoiled” with sexual activity would have a hard time finding a husband, leaving her to be either a burdensome drain on her family or a useless freeloader sucking off the tit of the community’s hard (and virtuous) workers. It was a father’s job to keep that from happening. Once the daughter was married off, it was a husband’s job to keep from unknowingly raising the child of another man and becoming the laughing stock of the community.
But you’re probably wondering who would take this whole idea of stoning someone to death for adultery seriously, right? After all, even if you’re Christian, Jesus himself has a much different message in the New Testament. Well, meet the Puritans. Before being driven out of England and eventually setting up shop in America, Puritans made the death penalty for fornication one of their biggest ambitions. For years they pressured Parliament, arguing that if the death penalty could be handed out for stealing then certainly it could be used to deal with fornicators, whose damage to society was far greater (in their view) than that caused by a simple thief. At first the idea was rejected, but over the years and through a persistent effort the Puritans finally convinced the British government to enact a law that made death the penalty for fornication. Repeat, people were put to death for having sex, courtesy of the Puritans who would eventually establish many of the early colonies in America.
Sex was targeted by the Puritans because they were suspicious of anything associated with pleasure. Dancing, drinking, gambling… all of these activities were problems for the Puritan mind. In fact, they were problems for our last Attorney General as well. Some trace this attitude back to the Bible itself, pointing to passages where Jesus seems to suggest (if one reads the passage literally) that laughing can lead to eternal damnation while crying can lead to eternal salvation. Others have suggested that this suspicion of pleasure actually dates back to philosopher Plato’s work The Laws, which argues amongst other things, and to make a complex argument simple, that absolute conformity of thought and the shunning of pleasure-centered activities is the surest path to a healthy and productive community.
Plato’s text, the first Western text to suggest that the community at large ought to have a say over the private sexual activities of individuals, also argues that the reason why a brother and sister can live together in the same house and not have sex is because they are taught by their parents from the earliest age possible (and reinforced through the community at large) that any ideas of sexual activity between them is plain unthinkable. In other words, any serious thoughts of sexual activity being a real possibility don’t even enter into their minds. Plato believed that if the same pressures were to be applied to pre-marital sex – making it unthinkable – that any two people could live together regardless of gender without any risk of them getting busy when someone turned off the lights. In order to maintain this perfect Platonic community, however, governing bodies would need to be put in place to make sure that no “free thinkers” entered into the picture and questioned the status quo. Plato even went so far as to suggest “woman inspectors” and government officials who would monitor the activities of married couples to make sure that they engaged only in approved interactions, which was namely the creation of children for the good of the state. Plato reduced the human body to a factory assembly line that could pump out good soldiers and hard workers for the greater community good rather than the individual good.
Many parallels can be drawn between Plato’s philosophy as explained in The Laws and that of the Puritan mind. But of course I’m oversimplifying the connection since a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this article. A more detailed look at this connection can be found in a fascinating book titled Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure, which served as my source material for the Platonic portion of this discussion.
The bottom line, however, is that when you consider the history of the Puritan mind and its roots in American culture it should come as little surprise that modern-day Puritans – some call them Evangelicals – have little tolerance for the sex industry. Forty years in a federal prison for producing porn may seem a little absurd to the average pornographer, but the Puritan mind has advocated far worse punishments for the unashamed and the sexually liberal. How have Puritans handled fornicators in the past? They’ve been hanged, stoned to death, beheaded, and even burned alive. So what’s forty years?
My suggestion here is that the Puritans of yesteryear and the Evangelicals of today are not that far off in their sexual philosophies, and that both groups have an unhealthy problem with pleasure-based activities. This is the reason why they have chosen to target the adult industry for extermination. If you think these people are a pain in the ass, that’s only because they have appointed themselves as a counterbalance to any occurrences of pleasure in modern-day America.
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Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of YNOT News. He has been involved with the online adult entertainment business since 1997, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors for the Internet Freedom Association (i-freedom.org); He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine. Connor can be reached at [email protected].
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