Love me do: secular sex as a family value

Q:Do your religious beliefs exalt or stigmatize sex (or both)? Is religion a useful tool for helping young people navigate the treacherous world of sex, love and relationships? Does religion present an alternative view of sex and sexual relationships to the culture at large? Should it?

First of all, I don't have all the answers to questions of love, sex, and relationships. Nobody does, so beware anyone who claims to. There is no one, no perspective--neither religious nor secular, neither theological nor scientific-- that can tell you everything you need to know about whom to love, when to have sex, or how to make relationships work. Anyone who claims that kind of authority is lying. To you, or to themselves, or both.

That's why, as much as I try to encourage Humanists and secularists like myself to avoid attacking religion for the sake of attacking, some of the religious sex scandals of recent days have to be considered fair game. Yes, there are a billion Catholics who have good reason to be proud of their culture and heritage, not to mention their sincere efforts to build and raise loving families. But is it really surprising that shameful abuse and even more shameful cover-up have emerged within an enormous institution whose leadership claims absolute, infallible knowledge that lifelong celibacy is the absolute right way for community leaders to live, or that that contraception, sexual experimentation, or homosexuality are absolute moral evils? I want to have a positive relationship with my Catholic friends and neighbors, but my conscience calls me to these questions just as much as yours might call you to protest abortion.

And as for the recent suggestion by an important Iranian leader that women's sexuality causes earthquakes and that prayer and obedience to the mullahs are the only ways to avoid a repeat of what happened in Haiti? I'll just say, as someone who has written that theism and atheism can peacefully co-exist, that nothing could be better advertising for books denouncing religion as a delusion and calling for an end to it all.

It's not that Humanists and other progressives shouldn't criticize such craziness. But our criticism of others will always carry more weight if we also reflect self-critically. Sexuality is more complex today than ever. The greater freedom secularism affords--which we would and should never give up--leads to greater confusion about what we should do. My students need to make so many decisions about sex that it's dizzying--who to hook up with (with nobody of any gender or background off limits); whether to commit; whether commitments have any hope of lasting from age 28 (not to mention 18) to 80 in a world where they'll be expected to take jobs and internships in different countries, and reinvent everything else about their lives multiple times. I feel for them...for us. And while determining there is no God doesn't hurt, it also doesn't get us very far in this area of life. So it shouldn't be surprising that young people would be tempted to look for confident, forceful answers to free them from the agonizing process of working all of this out. If we want to be subjected to fewer lectures about family values, it will help if we can better articulate what we value in our own families.

On an individual level, secular or what I call Humanist family life is built on the foundation of loving behavior. The word behavior here is the key. Both Humanism's supporters and its critics tend to understand that we are against rigidly predetermined roles for men and women. But Humanists and anti-Humanists alike also tend to assume that the alternative we propose is a life based on love--romantic love, the kind the Beatles sang "Love Me Do" about, the kind Hollywood seems to make one bad movie after another about. They don't see that such love is only part of the equation, and this is not only why some of our conservative enemies hate us so much, it is probably why so many of our marriages struggle to the point of breaking. Because to base our entire family life, and thus our entire society, which after all is made up of family units, on an emotion that changes, appears, and disappears so often that sometimes it seems we're able to employ an entire Greenwich Village full of artists, novelists, and musicians trying to pin love down and describe what the hell it is and where it goes when it's gone, is, to say the least, risky.

I don't care how "rational" you consider yourself when it comes to religion, if you expect to find a feeling of passionate love for another person, regardless of gender, and based solely on that feeling conceive children and raise them from needy infancy to well-adjusted adulthood while maintaining an active, maybe even lightly and playfully kinky sex life, a lovely home with a well-manicured lawn, a balanced checkbook, a successful career, and great shoes, you're most likely running on the steam of a delusion far stronger than the stuff they bake into run-of-the-mill belief-in-God brownies. Feelings change, and their changes are not entirely under our control. It isn't possible to feel the same way about one person for your entire life. Novelty, variety, and mystery will always be tempting. That is the scary news.

The good news, however, is that our need for companionship, touch, compassion, and trust does not change. These are things we can best enjoy by maintaining long-term monogamous partnerships.

We choose partners because we feel a sense of excitement around them, a thrill to be near them, but we also recognize that these feelings are not magical and are certainly possible to feel for multiple people. So we choose wisely: not someone who can meet all of our needs, because no such person exists, but one who can complement us for the long term as well as the short term--and then we choose to continue to nurture that partner both when the feelings of passion are there and when they are harder to find. Passion is not magic or God-given. It may seem to vanish. But it's funny how when two people continue to communicate about and accept one another's evolving feelings, reaching out in tenderness rather than recoiling in fear and anger at the slightest hint of change, passion seems to return a lot more often. Maybe it's not the stuff of some junk-food-sweet fairy tale, but it's the truth. And that's what I call "true love."

(Adapted in part from the author's book "Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe".)

By Greg M. Epstein  |  April 22, 2010; 8:53 AM ET Save & Share:                 
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