Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome back, friends. Please do make sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Leave us a review. We’re looking for five stars, even if you dislike us, but we’d love to get those reviews in. And feel free to join the conversation. You can ask us questions on Twitter. Shadi and I are both out there, and you can leave the hashtag #zealotspod. You can also feel free to email us. Our email address is zealots@comment.org. As you all know, my name is Matthew Kaemingk, Shadi and I are good friends. This is a place where we work out those questions of faith, politics, and culture. And while we are good friends, perhaps, who shouldn’t be. I’m a Christian, Shadi’s a Muslim, I study theology, he studies political science, and yet here we are working out these issues. Today we’ve got a particularly spicy one with a great guest. And so yeah, Shadi, why don’t you introduce our guest and our topic for the day?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, so our guest is Christine Emba. She’s a columnist at the Washington Post. She’s also recently joined us on Wisdom of Crowds, the other podcast that I do as an editor at large. So we’re happy to have her there. She’s also the author of an incredible book, and I mean that I read it last year and I still think about aspects of it. It’s called Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. It is indeed thought-provoking in any number of ways and we’ll get into some of that shortly. Well, I’m excited about this topic because it’s a topic we haven’t really addressed here on Zealots at the Gate up until now. At some level, I guess we’re going to talk about sex, but not sex as sex, but sex as what it means for society, it’s implications for politics. What are Christian or Muslim approaches to sexual ethics. These are all things that we’ll try to unpack.
So I was just thinking a little bit before in preparation for this podcast, and there’s a particular hadith that came to mind as saying of the Prophet Muhammad, which I’d never really thought all that much about. It’s one of those things, you just hear it endlessly and you take it for granted. But the the prophet says, “Whoever marries has achieved half of his religion.” Well, I guess there’s a couple questions there. Is that really meant to be taken literally? Because if so, I should be a bit worried, that definitely means I’m under 50%. But obviously, some Muslims won’t get married. But I think there’s a broader and more important implication here beyond the kind of literal aspect, which is marriage is at the bedrock of religion, of specific religions, I should say. And one way of looking that is to say marriage makes the family possible and families make community possible. And if you have a lot of good communities in a particular geographical territory, presumably that’ll filter its way up into structures of governance perhaps ideally.
Another way of looking at it is to say that single men are basically dangerous if left to their own devices. So there’s also a kind of security and stability argument here. So maybe Christine, just to start off, your book isn’t really a Christian book, but when I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think that your own religious background was figuring into your approach. I think in some ways it’s really difficult to talk about sex in America today, the sexual culture of our country and society without religion coming up in some fashion because we are very divided. Progressives tend to have a more, let’s say, I’m not actually sure how to describe it, but a more open, flexible way of looking at sexual ethics, and then you have the more traditionalist approach. But maybe just to start off, tell us about how much religion matters or how much you think it should matter when it comes to our discussions about sex and marriage and the family. And maybe tell us a little bit about your own Christian background and how that informs your approach.
Christine Emba:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean about me, I can start there. I grew up in a sort of non-denominational evangelical Pentecostal family. Both of my parents are Nigerian immigrants and very devout. And then in college, actually my senior year of college I converted to Catholicism. And so I think both of those faith traditions have had a strong impact on how I think about sex and also how I think about sex but also sort of the larger question of morality and what it looks like to be ethically good and good to other people and what sort of my idea of flourishing looks like, what we’re aiming for when it comes to sex or marriage or kind of anything else about how we live our lives.
But you’re right actually, I did not write… I mean, Rethinking Sex, I wasn’t writing for a Christian audience in some sense because I wanted it to be a book that was legible yes to Christians, but also to many of my closest friends who are secular or not religious, but were still experiencing the sexual landscape as pretty awful in trying to figure out a better way to be. And so I tried… The other thing is that we live in a pluralistic society, right? We live in America. And while I may be Christian and hold certain beliefs about sex, I can’t necessarily impose those beliefs on other people, but-
Shadi Hamid:
I mean, you could, but…
Christine Emba:
Well, we don’t live in a Christian integralist theocracy yet, but I think that the Christian faith and religious traditions have long had a lot to say about healthy sexuality and healthy relationships, and there is wisdom there that can be translated across divides. And so I think I was trying to do that with the book as well to give not just Christians a resource, but to give everyone a resource. But yeah, I think if you know me or know anything about my background, I think you can kind of tell when I start sneaking Thomas Aquinas into things that like, “Oh, okay, this is a bit informed by her religious faith.” But I think these questions of how to be good are questions that everyone is asking. So hopefully, everyone can relate to this search.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So Christine, for those who have not read the book, it really is, as you said, not a Christian book and written for Christians, but actually exploring our contemporary sexual culture and a set of what I would call hauntings or paradoxes within it. I’m wondering if you could give just a brief overview of I guess the sort of haunting questions for the American sexual revolution that you jump after. It seems like the promise of sexual liberty, equality, consent, and consumption seems to be the major sexual values of the current day. And you seem to be saying that this sexual revolution hasn’t quite ended in this sort of sexual nirvana that we were hoping for. But could you talk us through just the core questions or paradoxes that you’re trying to get after?
Christine Emba:
Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it actually. I mean, I wrote the book, I wrote Rethinking Sex kind of as I started thinking about the book and sort of sketching it out at the height of the Me Too moment. I found Me Too to be galvanizing. It showed that many of the problems we thought we had moved past because of the sexual revolution, because of the feminist movement, hadn’t gone away, and in fact, we’re still there. And I wanted to dig into those questions and assumptions more deeply and take stock of where we stood now, what the landscape looked like now. And in that sort of taking stock, I discovered, or I think uncovered what I have described in other interviews as kind of myths about sex and our sexual culture. And I wanted to examine those and see if they held up or if they were in fact harming us rather than hurting us.
And so I think there are a couple of them and I have chapters that sort of address them in turn. But one was the idea that I think this is a myth that actually the best sex is sex with no feelings. This idea that like, “Oh, you don’t want to catch feelings during sex. You don’t want to be tied down by a relationship.” The idea that that was the healthiest attitude to have during sex, I wanted to challenge that myth. You know the myth that men and women are basically the same and experience sex in the same way. And so women can and should have sex men, and that is sort of normal and natural. And I wanted to push back on that and say, “Actually, men and women are not the same. They’re different in their approaches to sex. And it is unhealthy to deny that.”
There’s also the myth that sex doesn’t mean anything, that it’s just an activity like any other, like a handshake or skiing. Something fun, that if you take the proper precautions, it goes great and you don’t have to think about it anymore. And I wanted to suggest that in fact, sex is serious. And then there were also kind of larger questions about whether all desire should be respected or whether that all desires should be accepted. And I suggested actually some desires are ethically worse than others and should not be indulged. Total freedom isn’t necessarily the best goal to reach for. And the idea that sex is totally private and whatever happens between two consenting adults is their business, no one has to worry about it, I suggest that no, actually in some ways sex is a public affair. What you do in private can spill out and have an impact in your day-to-day life, in your relationships with other people, in the way that our society is shaped overall.
And I get into each of those myths with different stories and in different chapters, but I think those were the major ones. I think actually above all, I think I wanted to challenge, and we’ve talked about this elsewhere, Shadi, a sort of general myth that has pervaded our society, the myth of total autonomy and individualism that “I alone, I, the individual, matter the most. I need to get my needs met and fulfilled and it doesn’t matter what other people think. It doesn’t matter what effect I have on other people.” And I just challenged that idea, I think, over and over again that we should only be pursuing total and personal freedom. I suggest that we all are bound to each other and we all owe each other something.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It does seem like this book is particularly targeted at a section of Americana, which is sort of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are somewhat upwardly mobile, who are on dating apps, who are sort of very much within the Boston to DC corridor. But I’m broadly more urban or as I like to call Shadi an urban elite.
Christine Emba:
The Acela corridor.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’m out here in the Midwest. I’m with the real America out here in St. Louis. But I think one of the things that comes up in the book and some of the interviews that I’ve seen with you is this sense of there are whispers amongst this progressive sexual culture that everything isn’t going quite as we thought it would. This liberty hasn’t quite brought the happiness and fulfillment. And the provocation is maybe this isn’t working. Some of your reviewers seems to seem very uncomfortable with this, that it’s not working. But it’s very interesting to me how throughout your book you have these anecdotes of these quiet conversations that like, “This isn’t quite working out.” I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about why it is that it’s whispered that this isn’t working and what’s going on there.
Shadi Hamid:
And maybe just for my benefit because I haven’t read a lot of the reviews or the negative ones, but maybe Matt, what was your sense of what the major criticisms are of what Christine has said up until now? Because at least to me, it all sounds quite reasonable. And even if people disagree, it doesn’t feel like it should be seen as an attack on the alternative. But what’s going on there would you say, and why people maybe have some of that instinctive reaction?
Matthew Kaemingk:
I want to give Christine, the expert a chance to speak on this first before I show my cards. I’d love her to think about like, “Yeah, what are they pushing back against? What’s really going on and why are they whispering about it rather than saying it out loud that, this total liberation of sex, total commodification, the ability to exchange and quickly move on from partner to partner that it’s not working?” I’d love Christine to try first at what’s going on here.
Christine Emba:
Yeah. Well, so a couple thoughts I had while listening to both of your questions. The second chapter in the book is actually titled We’re Liberated, But We’re Miserable. I think you hit that point on the head in your description of people just being surprisingly dissatisfied by getting what they thought they wanted from the sexual revolution. I’ll also point out that I did interview a lot of upwardly mobile urban professionals, but I was actually out in the Midwest just last week talking to college students about the book in St. Louis and in Fargo, North Dakota. I think these are the questions that are facing kind of anywhere that young people gather right now, actually to different degrees.
But yeah, so to the question of why people are whispering, one of the first things I say in the book and part of what I wanted the book to be was a kind of reassurance. I say, “You are not crazy reader. That thing that you think is wrong is wrong. You’re not nuts. You’re not the only person who feels that the vibes are very off. They are off.” And when I talked to women especially, there was sometimes a sense of almost guilt that they weren’t enjoying the scene because they had inherited what I think is actually a sort of twisted definition of feminism, an inaccurate definition of feminism that suggested that to be a good feminist or to be a good modern person, to be a real liberal urban city dweller, you should be having casual sex. You should be having all these crazy times, you should be enjoying it. And if you’re not enjoying it, you’re repressed or you’re secretly conservative, or there’s something wrong with you, not the scene.
And so I think that’s why these questions have kind of been whispered because nobody wants to out themselves as like, “Oh, the lame prude in the group or the bad feminist.” And so they just kind of keep it to themselves and think that they’re the problem, not that the broader world is the problem.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’ll follow up on one other thing. The language of the marketplace and economics actually shows up a lot in your book speaking about sexual competition and sexual products. I’m wondering if you could talk to us just a little bit about how you see American sexual culture being commodified, embodies being commodified, and how economic categories can help us understand what’s happening.
Christine Emba:
You’re right. The idea of the market comes up a lot. I talk a lot in the book about how in many ways I think the tools that we use to go about dating and relationships now, dating apps and websites, are explicitly set up to encourage the commodification of people. Tinder was originally conceived as it was supposed to look like a deck of cards that you can just swipe through and pick who you like and discard who you don’t like and that you just have to make yourself a marketable, wantable product to succeed on an app like that. And by succeed, I mean get picked and go on dates.
I think that dating apps, but also the way that sex has been talked about and portrayed in media, especially the media that younger people grew up on, whether it’s Sex in the City or those kind of frat bro esque comedies that were huge in the ’90s and the 2000s, sex was treated like something you got from someone else, that you were getting something, a good product or someone was giving something up. And so there was sort of a push to think of sex of the other person as something that you get or you trade up or you get a better model or something. I think that’s a really unhealthy way to think about sex and to think about relationships. But in some ways, because America is just such a capitalist society, such a market-based society, that mindset leaks into almost every facet of our lives, including our relationships.
Shadi Hamid:
So on this question of autonomy, which I think is really at the heart of this discussion, there is this idea that if we feel something, it must be true, that we have to follow our heart’s desires and live our truth. And things that now sound kind of silly, although I guess people still say it unironically, what do I know, but that kind of rhetoric is part of what we grew up with and have experienced. I think it’s worth asking, do we have immediate access to our own desires? Can we really trust ourselves to know what we want at a deeper level? I think this gets to the role of religion here because I think at some basic level, religion, or at least the Abrahamic faiths to various degrees tell us that we can trust what seem to be our own desires, that we have to look at our own desires with a certain kind of skepticism that the self can be deceiving.
It brought to mind a verse in the Quran that I tend to hear a lot. It’s actually the verse that people will cite to you if you’re going through something bad in your life. It’s the classic like post breakup verse. It’s verse 2 to 16, I think. It says that it is possible that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you love a thing which is bad for you. Pretty obvious. It’s something that I think we intuitively know, that be careful what you wish for because you might actually get it. But as obvious as it might seem to us, the three of us, I think it really does go against some of the core presumptions of our pro autonomy culture, which is about following what you feel.
So Christine, I’m just wondering, how central do you think this is? And if that’s really at the heart of this, that does seem to be a pretty fundamental divide. Because if you don’t have religion, if you don’t have something that tells you to submit to an authority that is higher than you, who else can you trust but yourself? You should trust your own feelings if that’s all you have, if you are the primary unit of society. And it does worry me because if there isn’t a way to resolve that or if there isn’t a way to encourage non-religious folks to see it in this way, then you’re pretty much stuck.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. If I could just jump in on top of that, because I had a comment later on that was very much related to this is this sense as I was reading the book thinking about we have today the freedom to create and make our own sexual identity, to create and make our own sexual ethic, and to create and make our own sexual practice and to share that with others and to brand it. There can be something very liberating about that. There can also be something very exhausting about that in that we have to make it up as we go, whereas traditionally religions have provided us with a sexual identity, have given us a sexual ethic, have given us certain boundaries within which we can play.
There is a little bit of an exhaustion to this. And I think one of the things that I heard, you tell the story of this woman, it’s a disturbing story who comes up to you at a party and she says, “I was having sex with this man and he started to choke me,” and she didn’t know what to do with that. She knew she didn’t like it, but she felt like she kind of had to go along with it or she felt guilty about judging him or saying no. But really all of the pressure was on her to deal with this problem. There was no sort of larger cultural set of rules or systems beyond just consent. And so it puts a lot of weight on her to say, “These are all the things that are okay for me. These are all the things that are not okay for me. This is my sexual identity. This is my ethic. This is my practice.”
I guess Shadi and I are both kind of wrestling with these questions of personal freedom and constraint around sexual identity. I think the word that comes to me is exhaustion, that when people are whispering to one another, it’s this, “I’m exhausted. This feels brutal. This feels dehumanizing. This feels like a meat grinder.” Anyway. So yeah, any reflections on that?
Christine Emba:
Yeah, no, I think both of you are making great points here. I love the idea of the breakup verse. I feel like there are a lot of breakup verses in the Bible. Perhaps too many one might think, thinking about how many my mom has told me after a breakup, I’m like, “Please stop telling me that. It’s not helpful.” But the verse that came to mind is-
Matthew Kaemingk:
“God has a plan for you. It’s okay, sweetie. Stop crying.”
Christine Emba:
I don’t like the plan. But the heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it? I think that’s really true actually. That seems to come up a lot. I guess to Shadi’s point, I think that, and I write about this in the book, the 20th and 21st century, there was kind of a drift towards a sort of Freudian view of the self in which repression was the worst possible thing. And if you repressed your feelings or repressed any desire that you had, it would sort of cuddle within you. And so to be sort of a healthy self-actualized person, that meant expressing your desires and pursuing them and seeing them through whatever your desire happened to be.
Freud was wrong about a lot of things, including this one, I think. But the idea that it’s dangerous to repress any part of yourself, it’s like one of the leading laws of our current sexual culture. And that often means that you have a sort of out there desire. You shouldn’t be judged for that desire actually. In fact, you should just find a healthy way to pursue it with consent, and that will actually be good for you. And I suggest in the book that actually there are some desires that you might have that you don’t need to pursue actually. It would be better in fact if you didn’t pursue them. I think we see the evidence of that in some of the stories that we hear about women being sort of victimized by men and also men being victimized by people whose desires are really extreme and they kind of can bully someone into participating, but it’s not good for them.
Matthew Kaemingk:
The exhaustion of creating your own ethics, yeah.
Christine Emba:
Yes. The exhaustion of creating your own ethic. Yeah, I think that this was a question that I wrestled with in a lot of different circumstances in writing this book. I think that exhaustion is a thing that’s happening. So I spoke to the ethicist, Fannie Bialek, she’s at Washington University. She gave me sort of a great metaphor for this problem of the dinner party. One of the reasons why people enjoy dinner parties is because you kind of know what you’re getting into, but there’s enough space that exciting things could happen, but you know nothing terrible is going to happen. There’s space… You’re going to go there, you’re going to eat food, you’re going to use a knife in fork. You might get to talk to interesting people. The food might be different from what you expected, but you can feel pretty safe in knowing that nobody’s going to suddenly stab you in the heart with a knife because that’s not what you do at dinner parties.
And so that sort of sense of knowing what the norms are makes it possible for you to have enjoyment in that setting. She contrasts that to our sexual landscape, which suddenly seems like a dinner party with no rules or no norms at all. Anything could happen when you go into an encounter with someone. It could be really nice. Maybe they’ll kiss you, but maybe they’ll also strangle you while you’re having sex. And that’s really frightening actually. And so there’s always a little bit of a sense of like, “I don’t know what I’m getting into. I’m a little bit worried. I don’t know where this is going,” because there are no guardrails. There are no rules to depend on. And that is exhausting. Kind of constantly having to rebuild the sexual landscape for yourself in every encounter is a lot of work, frankly.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That leads to another paradox that I think you point out that sex is more available, it’s more free, it’s more accessible via technology than it’s ever been before and yet we read stories about this sexual recession that we’re actually having less sex now. Can you talk a little bit about why that might be, or what are your leading theories on why we’re having less sex?
Christine Emba:
Yeah. Well, I mean, actually, I’ll go back to this open landscape metaphor a little bit more. I think that this idea of like there being no norms and sort of no guardrails and that being exhausting I think is actually particularly exhausting for women and young people in some sense. When there were stronger cultural norms or religious norms around sex, it was easier to say no in some ways, to something that you didn’t want because there was kind of an easy fallback excuse like, “No, I don’t want to have sex because I might get pregnant. Sorry, I don’t want to do it.” But that’s not really… It’s felt that there’s contraception now, so that’s not really an option. Or I could say-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right. Or, “My parents will get mad at me.” Or the town, “What will the town think?”
Christine Emba:
Exactly.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Whatever. There’s a variety of other people you can blame.
Christine Emba:
Yeah, “I don’t want to have sex because I’m religious.”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Or God. You said, “God doesn’t want me to. God will get mad at me.” There’s other people you can point to say no. It’s not all on you and your personal preference, I guess.
Christine Emba:
Right. And it is actually I think a big ask to ask a younger person especially to be fully on top of their desire and able to speak up in every circumstance and recreate guardrails for themselves in every instance. That can be really hard. I think that’s part of what we’re seeing. I do think that that does lead to a sex recession in a sense, because if the idea of having sex has begun to feel really fraught and potentially unpleasant, like you’re always walking into a situation, you don’t know what’s going to happen but if it’s anything like last time, it’s going to be crazy and uncomfortable, why would you do that? It makes more sense to just kind of sit it out. But unfortunately, that also means people are not getting into relationships and they don’t end up forming the families that they really want and they end up lonely.
Shadi Hamid:
I think there’s also… Just to kind of use the capitalism metaphor, in a free economic marketplace, there are the haves and the have-nots and a lot of the benefits accrue to an elite at the top of the pyramid, and then other people don’t get as much and then you have a real gap. I mean, there’s a number of studies to this effect that the people who are most successful on dating apps, it’s a relatively small percentage of men. And then there’s the people who don’t seem to really get a lot of matches and that sort of thing. You create these gaps between people who are participating in the sexual marketplace, and some of them decide to withdraw entirely or give up and so forth.
But I want to just maybe push on the point about what to do about autonomy and desire, because it seems to me that religion is the only way to… It’s the only thing that allows people to move beyond themselves. I mean, you could just decide to move beyond yourself, but I don’t know if that’s going to be very effective on a mass scale. I want to just push you, Christine, a little bit to kind of see how willing you are to center religion or Christianity in this. Do people need Christianity or whatever else minority religion in America, to actually move beyond their own desires and find a way to constrain themselves?
Christine Emba:
Huh. So I don’t think that one has to be a practicing religious person to be good, to behave in a moral and ethical manner. I think there are lots of secular people who are trying to do the right thing and trying to care about other people. I do think though that the sort of religious framework helps to give people a reason for behaving well and a reason why they should do something that’s hard instead of taking the easy way out. I think it can help give that action much more of a grounding force and support.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I mean, as we look at the statistics about how America is becoming more secular and religion is losing its cultural power in a variety of different sectors of common life, it’s sort of a hanging question of how will secular culture contribute to more healthy patterns of sex that contribute towards the sort of self-giving generosity?
Shadi Hamid:
And there’s a word that hasn’t come up in this discussion that I would just want to note, the word sin. I don’t think we’ve mentioned it up until now, because it’s not just a question of aspiring towards good ethics or a better way of being. There’s also the punitive aspect, which we don’t love to talk about in terms of religion as much anymore, but it used to be quite central. And I would say in Islam, it still is central when talking about sex that one of the major sins in Islam is what’s called zinā, which is extramarital sex. There are distinctions between premarital and then fornication or adultery. Obviously one’s worse than the other there.
But generally, there are these admonitions towards believers that if they pursue these activities, there are going to be consequences. There are going to be potential punishment or heavy accumulation of bad deeds. Obviously in the Christian context, Matt and I have talked about how sin in the Christian imagination is just really fundamentally different in some ways. But I’d be curious if either of you have reflections on the role that sin plays in Christian sexual ethics.
Christine Emba:
I think one of the underlying ways in which, not just Christianity, but any religious tradition is actually has been really helpful and important in trying to set up our ground rules and guardrails around things like sex is that they are moral traditions and they sort of give an explanation for why some desires are worse than others or why you should treat people a certain way.
The idea that every human person has dignity and is made in the image of God, if you believe that, then like, “Oh, it does make sense that I shouldn’t treat other humans badly because I am disrespecting that fact. And the path is pretty tight and clear there.” I do think that it’s harder to come up with a justification for why you should do one thing and not the other if you don’t have kind of the backdrop beliefs that religion can give you in that sense, that there is a good and a bad, that humans are a certain kind of thing, that sex say actually has a certain telos, and there is a specific good associated with sex. I think in a secular context, people kind of try and backfill that or work to backfill that and sometimes end up in similar conclusions as sort of the religious conclusions. But it would be easier, I think, to just start from those basics and work your way forward. So I think you are onto something there.
Shadi Hamid:
And what about sin, Christine? Tell us about sin.
Christine Emba:
What about sin? Yeah, I mean, well, again, that’s sort of a moral concept, right? To be able to say some things are bad, some things are sinful and that’s why you shouldn’t do them is a real justification that I think religious people have and understand and that it’s harder to work your way back to if are you’re not religious.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I think two things on this. One is I feel like we’re kind of bumping up against an unhelpful set of categories around what is religious and what is secular in that sort of an assumption that Islam and Christianity have sexual ethics and the modern secular world is just neutral.
Christine Emba:
Has nothing.
Matthew Kaemingk:
The modern secular world has sexual ethics. It has taboos, it has rules, it has expectations. It’s not as if the sexual revolution just brought about total moral emptiness. It has a “tell us.” It has a set of, “Here’s the picture of a flourishing sexual being and this is what it looks like.” It also has guilt. “So this woman who sort of guiltily shared her disappointment about her sexual life, she’s dealing with guilt.”
And so the word sin, and that brings us to this word sin, I think many non-Christians look at this word sin or evil as this thing that inspires guilt or makes one feel bad about oneself. But from inside the Christian moral imagination, I experience it as incredibly liberating in that the language of sin helps me understand why I feel bad right now, why do I feel guilty. And then I’m provided with a way to deal with that guilt, a way to hand that guilt over, a way to process that where this particular woman who was feeling guilty about her sexual relationship, she didn’t know what to do with that feeling of guilt and she didn’t know how to name it or process it or be unburdened.
And so for Christians, the language of sin helps us say, “Okay, here’s why I’m feeling this way. Here’s why this practice that I’ve been engaged in, whether it being lying or stealing or hitting people or whatever, here’s why it’s not making them happy or me.” And then for Christians, the ability to unburden that by handing that over to Jesus and experiencing a reconciliation and a repentance and a restoration is sort of this ancient Christian process of healing, of naming pain, naming disruption, saying, “It shouldn’t be this way.”
And I think part of Christine’s gift in this book is just like what she said, you’re not crazy if you feel like this sexual marketplace is unfulfilling, is frustrating, is dehumanizing, is a meat grinder. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. And ultimately, a Christian doctrine of evil is that, is sort of saying the way that we experience life right now is not the way it’s supposed to be. We were created for something more. And so it helps you know that you’re not crazy. I guess that’s how I’d enter into that. But Christine, my Catholic sister, you can feel free to edit that if you like.
Christine Emba:
No, I mean, I think that’s really right. One of the things that I talk about in the book a lot is the question of consent and how consent has been set up as the only working ethic that we have around sex and the idea that if two people have consented to something, if they both come to this kind of handshake agreement that nothing that they do is wrong as long as they’ve agreed to it.
And I suggest that consent is actually too impoverished to be an ethic because it’s a legalism, it’s a transactional. There’s no content to consent in a sense. You’re agreeing to something and that’s like a transaction, but it doesn’t say anything or have anything to say to the thing that you’re agreeing to, whether that thing is good or bad or what effect it will have on you. It doesn’t ask you to think about where the other person is or what the other person’s sort of personhood is like, or what is the ethical valence of the thing that you have agreed to do. It stops short of asking those moral questions and giving space to suggest that, “Oh, maybe something is sinful or maybe something is bad, or maybe something is good.” It sort of prevents you from making those distinctions because it stops too soon.
And so if you only have consent as sort of the marker of whether things are good or bad, there is a sensation… And I talk to a lot of young women especially who felt this. They might have consented to something and then it happened and it felt bad to them or it felt immoral. They didn’t like it, but they felt like they had no grounds for complaint in a sense, because like, “Well, consent was given. I can’t judge anything past that. I’m not allowed to.” And so they kind of take that feeling of guilt or hurt into themselves and it’s just like, “Well, I did something wrong. It’s my fault. I didn’t ask enough questions or something.”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. And that leads us to the sort of closing of your book, which is arguing for what I think I termed it as a sexual hospitality, a concern for the other, a desire for a covenantal experience I think what I would argue. I think that what you’re hinting at or haunting at is core to the Christian sexual ethic.
Now, in my own space of Protestantism, you have more right-wing Christians than left-wing Christians. The more right wing ones will speak of sexual ethics in terms of a list of don’ts, a of things that you shouldn’t do, or a list of sins. And those on the left will bless human sexual desires, affirm them, and encourage you to self-actualize that the glory of God is a human person, fully sexually alive. But it seems to me that a core sec to the Christian sexual ethic is that of love, of Caritas, that self-giving. And that’s what I see you hinting at there. And I really appreciate that. So that part of, it’s not so much a question as a thank you.
And so it leads me to this question about how you show up as a Christian and public life, which is sort of a core question of this podcast. The voice that you chose for this book and that you often choose in your public presentations is one of you’re quite subtle with your Christian faith in the book itself and in public life. And your Christian faith, I would say it sort of haunts throughout the book in this sort of question of, “Is this sexual ethic working out for you? Maybe we need some constraints. Perhaps there are some sexual desires that are bad.” And in some reviews from Christians that I’ve read, they have criticized you for not being more explicit about your Christian faith, more laying it down, “Here’s what the Bible says. Come to Rome. Convert and be well.”
And so yeah, there’s this yearning for you to be more explicit, more direct. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the choice that you’ve made not only in this book, but in your career as a columnist for the Washington Post to be a bit more subtle, a bit more haunting, a bit more curious. Tell us just a little bit about that choice for you.
Christine Emba:
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, you asked this a little bit earlier in the podcast what have… Or maybe Shadi asked this, like what critics have said. But yeah, that’s actually it. I was kind of surprised that some of, I think, my most negative reviews, there weren’t many, I will say that, were from Christian publication tour like, “Why doesn’t she just come out and state the biblical ethic of marriage?” My response to those critics are sort of like, “I’m not writing just for you actually. I want to reach a broader audience who needs to hear this. That is not necessarily the most helpful approach.”
So I guess in this book, but also in the way that I write about a lot of topics and how I think my faith and the things that I value, the way that I live my life based on faith can be seen in my work, I think I often use the term translation, and I think of it as sort of a mode of translation. How can I ask questions and make legible the commitment of my faith and the way that my faith sort of shapes my values? How can I make that legible to someone who’s not inside my faith and not turn them off, but slowly bring them in?
A Christian sexual ethic, I think I have one, but saying to somebody who’s not Christian, “Well, don’t have sex because Jesus, you believe that, right?” They don’t believe that. So how do I explain a Christian sexual ethic and what’s behind it? What do we mean by the human person? What is a convincing way to talk about dignity and translate that into something that makes sense in a secular context so that other people can understand it? I think that’s what I am trying to do throughout the book and I think what I spend a lot of my other writing doing, actually.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I wonder, what do you enjoy about that challenge of translating and what’s hard? What’s not working?
Christine Emba:
I mean, the first one, maybe most obvious thing is that I like being able to share my faith and beliefs with other people who may not agree with some tenets of Christianity but who I can get to appreciate something like Catholic social teaching or even a Christian sexual ethic. And seeing that makes sense to them brings me a lot of joy. And being able to then have conversations like this, not just in a religious environment, but with anyone, I find that beautiful and also fun.
And also it kind of forces me to look hard at my own faith and not necessarily take my beliefs or belief system for granted. Because if I’m going to try and translate this and explain it to someone else, I have to understand it first. So if I’m trying to explain what a Christian sexual ethic is, that means that I have to go learn what a Christian sexual ethic is and not just take it for granted that like, “This is what we do. I don’t really know why, but we’re just doing it.” But it pushes me to go a bit deeper and I think that’s been really healthy.
What don’t I enjoy about it, sometimes the process of translation can be tedious, I guess, and I can be like, “”Why don’t you get this obvious thing? Why don’t you agree with me?” And people just don’t agree and it doesn’t work. Sometimes I find it frustrating and kind of saddening to try and explain why a Christian worldview on something makes sense, but then there’s so many people who identify as Christian or who call themselves Christian in public who are doing the exact opposite of what our faith demands. And then I’m asked to speak for those people and I’m like, “We’re letting the side down.” I don’t know. It’s unpleasant, it’s embarrassing, and it’s unfortunate.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And as we get into close, I do want to shift a little bit to some broader political implications, which we’ve touched on here and there, but in previous episodes of season two of Zealots at the Gate, we’ve talked about how prayer is political, how fasting is even political. Obviously there’s a risk of saying that everything is political. The personal is political is a phrase that people will often hear. But ultimately the questions around marriage in particular. We’ve talked a lot about sex, but we’ve talked a little bit less about the institution of marriage and what that means for society writ large, but obviously with concerns around population decline, low fertility rates, the kind of standard concerns around the breakdown of the family and the fact that people aren’t even having families in the first place. Christine, you and I have talked in other circumstances about the Antinatalists movement, people who just don’t believe that we should be having kids because the world is falling apart because of climate change and they don’t want to inflict harm on the unborn, if you will.
So all of this is much bigger than people’s own autonomy or lack thereof or what constraints they introduce in their own kind of sexual activity. It’s in some ways, and not to be too over rod here, but it is about the future of civilization. And that’s why Christians and Muslims as kind of creators of empires in the pre-modern period of groups that have fashioned very successful civilizations did see the question of marriage and family as central because they understood that to be a successful civilization, you really had to have something to say and it had to be important. So I don’t know where I’m going with all that just to say that, well, how do we save civilization, I guess. But how political is this to you? Because Christine, we’re friends, and I don’t get the sense that you see yourself as a particularly political person, but what you write about seems to have profound political implications.
Christine Emba:
How do we save the feature of civilization? Thanks for saving the easy question for the end. That was good of you. I feel like one thing that echoes throughout the book is the idea that sort of, think of the joker in your head now. We live in a society. Our actions are not just our own. What we do affects other people. I’m just always pushing people to be aware of that and to think about that. How are these questions political? I mean, it’s a political question whether you think that marriage is valuable or not, because there are political implications, the legislation that you would pass to support marriage and family or the legislation that you won’t pass because you don’t think it’s important.
There are arguments about fertility rates and whether we should be having more or fewer children. The political implications of that are exactly what you say, the political implications of what our sexual culture looks like. They show up in the sorts of people that we elect, the sort of behavior that we tolerate or encourage. The personal is very political, especially and I think, the space of reproduction, sex and family life. Sex and marriage are the ways in which we continue to produce society, make sure our society continues. So of course, they’re political questions. I think that it’s not always healthy to put everything into a directly political stance, I guess, because that is just not how people sort of live their lives. When you’re asking someone out on a date, you’re not thinking about like, “Oh, what are the implications? What are the political implications of me taking this girl out for a drink?”, right?
Shadi Hamid:
Speak for yourself, Christine.
Christine Emba:
Fair enough. Fair enough. I’m not you, Shadi.
Matthew Kaemingk:
The future of humanity depends upon us consummating this relationship, right?
Christine Emba:
Oh yeah. Don’t say that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s a pickup line that’ll not work.
Christine Emba:
Say that for at least the third date. I don’t think that the political has to be at the forefront of every question. But I don’t know, all these questions are political.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I mean, just to hop in here, I think there’s a number of theologians who’ve argued that the family, that having children is fundamentally an act of hope. It has tell us, a belief in the future. When a culture loses hope, when it loses a deep belief in the future, families and children, that sort of shows up. And I think there’s something to be connected to that, to our sort of sexual recession that has happened as well. So I think that there is a search for, I would say, sexual hope. It leads me to this deeper question I’ve been asking as I read your book, Christine, about is sex too important to Americans or not important enough and how you think about that? Are we too obsessed with sex? Do we expect too much from it or not enough? How do you think about that?
Christine Emba:
I think we both care too much and too little about sex actually. On the caring too much side, I think that this is a flaw in both sort of religious and non-religious circles, this idea that to be a fully realized human adult, you ought to be having sex. And not just sex, but the best sex of all time. You’ve got to be out there doing it. And if you’re not doing it, something’s wrong with you. And even in some ways, like in a mindset that I’ve unfortunately seen in Christian circles where space is not necessarily made for single people and it’s kind of like, “Well, if you’re married, once you’re married, then you are a real member of the community and you’re having sex and it’s blessed and it’s awesome. But until then, we don’t really have anything to say to you.” That kind of really overweights the importance of sex.
Also, the idea, and I think some religious space that, “If you do one thing wrong in sex, if you fornicate one time, you’re going to hell.” I think that puts a little bit too much weight on a thing that isn’t actually necessarily the most important thing in life or in your relationship to God. On the other hand, do people take it unseriously? Yeah, there’s this idea I was mentioning before, this idea like, “Sex means nothing, right? It’s just like a hug that lasts extra long. It doesn’t have any content. There’s no telos to it” is sort of downplaying the importance of what sex actually is, which is something serious and in fact sacred and meaningful.
Shadi Hamid:
You said, Christine, that fornication isn’t the most important thing in the world, but it is pretty important in the context of a marriage, which is why oftentimes marriages will fall apart when a spouse cheats. And so I’m just curious what you meant by that. Because I mean, there’s also a risk of going in the other direction. If no particular act is decisive, then it could have the risk of giving people a green light or a yellow light because they might say, “Well, it isn’t the most important thing in the world. God will forgive me. This is just a one moment of weakness.” Maybe this is directing us in a little bit of a different direction, but can you just maybe say more about how you would view the role of fornication in the context of marriage and to what extent people should actually feel really strongly about it versus having… I don’t know if you were suggesting a more kind of forgiving approach, but of course, forgiveness is part of our respective traditions in some fashion.
Christine Emba:
Yeah, no, I mean, think what I was saying is that there are a lot of sins. There are a lot of things that people should be doing that they don’t or do that they shouldn’t. Elevating sex and questions of sex like the most important, like this is the most important thing to focus on, means that you can leave a lot of other things by the wayside. A church that only cares about sort of sexual sin and its members, but it doesn’t really care about how we treat the poor, how we care for children. Are we supporting the widow and the orphan? They’re just caught up in only thinking about sex. That’s a problem unfortunately. That’s overweighting sex to the detriment of the many other things that a faithful person or a community should care about.
Shadi Hamid:
Makes sense.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I think you were also hearing sort of this… I find a lovely paradox within the Christian sexual ethic. We’re hearing it from Christine in that you do want to take your partner seriously as someone who is made in the image of God who is deeply valuable as someone for whom God would give anything for. You want to hold that person as valuable and that act as valuable. And yet also a Christian sexual ethic should involve a lightheartedness, a playfulness, a joy. We Christians will say, “I have freedom in Christ. Jesus has set me free.” And that has implications for how Christians approach sex in that it is right and good for there to be a playfulness to sex. And so you have those two things going on at once in a Christian sexual ethic, this sense of, “My partner matters. My marriage matters. And this sexual act is meaningful.It has purpose and value, and so it has weight to it. And yet also I’ve been created to play and have delight and joy.”
I would argue that a healthy Christian sexual ethic is able to do both of those things. So you’re not so serious about sex, right? It’s like this heavy, weighty thing, but in Jesus, you are made human again to be. And part of being human is sexual delight and play and a sort of lightheartedness that sin and guilt kind of weighs us down. And so we ought to have both of those things. Christine, maybe you can help me think about this, but I see within secular progressive sexual ethics, a desire for both of those things. We want to take women seriously and their value and their bodies and their agency and their rights not to be abused and assaulted. We want to take that seriously. We also really want sex to be fun and we don’t know how to hold those things together in a sort of progressive secular culture. I personally find the Christian sexual ethic helps me hold those things together. But I kind of hear my secular neighbors wrestling with that. I don’t know if you hear that as well.
Christine Emba:
Yeah, I mean, just if sex means everything, then there’s constant pressure to be having it and getting it right each time and living up to some expectation that is high, but sort of unclear. And if sex means nothing, then that is often an excuse that people can use to treat people badly because it’s just another act. It doesn’t really matter that much. And I just think that neither extreme is true.
But I mean, Shadi you asks about foreign patient in a marriage, and yeah, that is important. But I think an example I would use there is that, is it a healthy marriage if you only think about your sex lives and you make sure that your sex life is really good, but you’re not paying attention to your finances, you have kids and you ignore them, you don’t know if you can pay the rent next month, you haven’t decided where to live, but the sex is good? That’s not actually an ideal marriage. An ideal marriage is one which that is a very important part of your relationship, but there are also many other aspects of the relationship that are important too and you don’t only focus on one to the detriment of the others.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, makes sense. And if you’ll just indulge me, Christine, I have maybe just a final question, and then Matt can bring us to the Promised Land after. But we’ve talked a lot about sex without necessarily saying much about abortion. And we’ve talked about our secular neighbors and how they might perceive some of these arguments. And it makes me wonder. If you’re reaching out to these audiences and you’re trying to tell them something about Catholic social teaching or the Christian sexual ethic more broadly, they might say, “Oh, Christine, this is all well and good. But if I embrace Catholic social teaching, it means that I have to betray something very important to me on the question of reproductive rights and access to abortion.”
And I think for a growing number of young people in this country, particularly young women, this is a non-negotiable. Catholic doctrine does seem to be somewhat inflexible when it comes to at least parts of this debate. And with evangelicals, it wasn’t always this way, and that’s a broader conversation. But today, most evangelical traditions also take a pretty restrictive line. What would you say to those people if they want part of what you’re talking about, but they can’t go as far as they might go because of the abortion question really?
Christine Emba:
I think it’s important to meet people where they are. Moving them a couple steps down the path to a better sexual ethic even if they don’t get all the way there to embracing every Catholic teaching is still better than not moving them at all for sure.
I actually do think that there is… I don’t know if I would say growing awareness, but it is interesting to think how sort of the Vatican maybe got it right on the question of contraception and abortion. If you look at how the availability of contraception has made it that much harder for, as we talked about before, women to say no, if it’s made it that much easier for sort of men to skip out on their responsibilities because they assume that like, “Well, if something happens, she’ll get an abortion.” It doesn’t have to be my problem, it’s on her,” or “She wasn’t taking birth control, that’s kind of her fault” or be very casual about something that is actually pretty serious, I think some people are becoming a little bit more sort of awake to the downstream consequences that those decisions might have, they weren’t before.
Shadi Hamid:
But pre-Roe v. Wade was also pretty dark in some other ways in terms of not having options, forced pregnancies. I mean, there is also considerable social fallout to the previous sexual regime, if you will.
Christine Emba:
Oh, yeah. To be clear, I am not actually… I think the feminist movement was really important and needed to happen. I identify as a feminist and I think that there were a lot of moralizing problems that need to be faced and overturned, but sometimes you do have to wonder how far the pendulum has swung and the delta between what we thought the feminist movement and the sexual revolution would achieve versus what the delta between what we thought they’d achieve and where we actually ended up and kind of trying to figure out what happened in between.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Matt, final thoughts?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Oh, man. I’m just so appreciative, Christine, of this. I think as we said, this is our first foray into sexual politics. There are some important distinctions between talking about sexuality and sexual practice and of course politics and political practice. But ultimately, it seems to me what we’re reaching for here is what do we owe one another and how are we to handle our neighbors. The casualness with which we handle our neighbors sexually or politically has a real fallout for our cultural life together.
And as we continue to… This has been just a wonderful sort of microcosm of the sorts of things that Shadi and I are wrestling with in terms of exploring what are ancient resources that are available to us, sort of wells that we might draw some water from in this fraught political and sexual moment. I think that your book, Christine, is just this beautiful example of engaging our popular culture in a way that’s generous, that’s courageous, and inviting to all of our neighbors to ask, “What is your sexual tell us? What is it that you are seeking? And how is that working out? And how might we live together better?” And so Christine, I just wanted to say thank you so much for jumping in this conversation with us today.
Shadi Hamid:
Amen. Thank you, Christine.
Christine Emba:
Thanks for having me, guys.
Shadi Hamid:
We’ll definitely include a link to Christine’s book in the show notes, so make sure to check it out. I was going to say it might actually change your life. And it might, but even if it doesn’t, you’ll definitely enjoy it. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. If you want to read more of Christine’s work, we’ll also include a link to her Washington Post columns. You should add that to your commentary op-ed column regimen.
And thanks, Christine. But thanks to all of you for listening to Zealots at the Gate. If you like what you heard, check out our other episodes and also check out our host and sponsor, Comment magazine at comment.org. We want to hear from you as well. You can find us on Twitter at @shadihamid, my name, and @matthewkaemingk. Please note the Dutch spelling. Or you can use the hashtag #zealotspod. Also feel free to send us an email at zealots@comment.org and don’t forget to review us if you enjoyed this episode.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Our thanks as well to our sponsor, Fuller Seminary’s, Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment magazine. It’s produced by the wonderful Allie Crummy, audience strategy by the almost wonderful Matt Crummy, editorial direction by Ms. Anne Snyder. I am Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Thanks for joining us.
