THE DEAFENING SILENCE or
What Christianity Teaches about Sacred Sexuality

Amazing though it may seem, any real understanding of and teaching about 'sacred sexuality' is virtually non-existent among practising Christians.

I have spent my entire fifty-four years within the evangelical/charismatic branch of the Christian church. Sixteen of those years, including my four years at theological college, were in fulltime study or pastoral ministry within the New Zealand Baptist Church. Never over that time did I come across anything from a Christian source that addressed the spiritual and sacred aspects of sexuality. Not in the hundreds, maybe thousands of books and articles I read. Not in the sermons I heard preached, nor in the sermons I myself preached. The occasional sermons on sex that I did preach were, as far as they went, thoughtful and positive efforts to promote the idea that sex was God-given and, if used rightly, a wonderful thing which helped bring a couple into closer relationship. Yet it never occurred to me that sex was, for all practical purposes, anything more than a purely physical thing.

In fact, like most evangelicals, I was extremely dubious about the whole idea of 'sacred sexuality'. The very term conjured up negative feelings. We associated it with eastern tantric sexual practices and the some of the hippie commune-based 'group sex' experiments of the seventies. Rather than seek to discover for ourselves the sacredness of sex from a Christian perspective, we 'threw the baby out with the bath water' and virtually made the sign of the cross every time we heard the expression 'sacred sexuality'. Then, safe in the usual frightening certainty that we evangelicals knew everything that needs to be known about everything that matters, we settled back down with our newly liberated but totally physical understandings and experience of sex, convinced that as far as sex went we had reclaimed all there was to reclaim. And as far as I can determine, thirty years on nothing much has changed! Ask the average Christian or even theologically literate minister, "What about the sacredness of sex?" and the reply will almost certainly be a bemused if not dismissive, "Well I suppose sex has to be sacred, because God made us and we are in that sense sacred." End of story. This answer also highlights another blind spot of evangelical theology, namely its lack of any developed view of sacredness that extends beyond human beings to encompass the entirety of God's amazing natural world and vast cosmos. These more cosmic understandings of sacredness we have left to the New Age community, only to then churlishly and roundly criticise it for them.