January 27, 2009: "Wait, Seriously?"

I received an eloquent, thoughtful and earnest response to last week's essay (January 20, "A Life Incongruent With Who You Are"), and thought that it merited a detailed reply. The response is in italics below; my reply in ordinary font.

Wait, seriously? How are these two things on anything close to the same level? Your description of "blayness" leads me to believe that you think people only value sexual relationships, and that in a moral vacuum, so would you.

I regret having led to you to believe that I think people only value sexual relationships. I really don't believe that. But as I re-read my essay, I realize you raise a good point. Nowhere in speaking of "attraction" do I make it plain that I was only considering physical attraction. The word "physical" just never made it to the page. But I was not denying the value of other attractions so much as I was simply not considering them. So let me say here that I do in fact acknowledge and celebrate - moral vacuum or no - many other kinds of attraction that enable and enliven a relationship. When I spoke, for example, of Farrah Fawcett Majors being more appealing to me when I was 11 than girls my own age, I was only referring to her body. For the really important things like friendship and conversation and fun and help and arguing and fighting and reconciling, even I, back then, would have much preferred my peers. Farrah would have bored me in all those things, even as I would have bored and annoyed her in every conceivable way.

I should clarify too that when I said that a man who stays faithful to his wife for 60 years is living in denial, I only meant the physical denial of his blayness. Presumably (unless the poor man is very unlucky), he would not also have to live in denial of his social, familial, companionable and other instincts.

This might come as a surprise, but most nonreligious people aren't hedonists because we believe that loving, committed relationships are more important than reckless sexuality.

No, no, it doesn't surprise me at all! The majority of people I've known all my life are nonreligious, and they aren't hedonists, and they indeed believe that loving, committed relationships are more important than reckless sexuality. What in the world did I say to make you think this would surprise me? For the record, I have known atheists who practiced a kind of self-denial so strong it struck me as ascetic and prudish, and I have known Christians who indulged their instincts for pleasure in ways that cruelly disregarded other people. My essay said nothing about religious versus non-religious people. The contrast was between decent and indulgent people. I believe the decent ones, religious or not, practice self-denial precisely because they value relationships over sexuality.

We evolved past the clubbing and dragging stage a long time ago.

I should hope so. But I probably have a more pessimistic, "Lord-of-the-Flies" view of human nature than you. So many seemingly respectable people, for example, have tortured or commanded the torture of other human beings that I'm no longer shocked at what people are capable of when they have the power to get away with it.

In this society, most "blay" people have to give up nothing, because for the most part we understand what the consequences of pursuing an abusive, misogynistic lifestyle would be, and we have little reservation about leaving that out as a possibility.

It is not quite clear to me why you say that "blay" people in this society have to give up nothing. Sure they do, if they want to be good husbands and fathers. By "blay" I mean promiscuously horny – having the desire to mate with many comely females. If a blay man wants to be a swinging bachelor, then you're right, he doesn't have to give up anything at all. I mentioned Hugh Hefner as an example. I suppose James Bond would be another. (After 45 years of his cinematic friskiness we are still speaking of "Bond girls" rather than "Mrs. Bond.") But at the altar, a blay man "forsakes all others" and commits to one and only in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, etc. I think that's giving something up. The man has to burn his black book, so to speak. Oh, and I think I disagree with you (if I understand you correctly) that a fully realized blay lifestyle is necessarily "abusive" and "misogynistic." Is Hugh Hefner an abusive misogynist? I suppose a case could be made that he is, but I myself wouldn't go that far. I just think he's really immoral.

Is it fair, then, to say that gay people have to give up something at the very core of their being, and, in the broader sense of love, the human experience, while heterosexuals give up something that they'd probably give up in the first place?

If I am mischaracterizing you, then I ask you to forgive me, but I think I understand you to say here that "gay" is at the very core of someone's being and "blay" is not. This I simply deny. I think they are both core characteristics. We may have to agree to disagree on that. I can only declare to you in good faith that, believe it or not, "blay" is at the core of my being. It is possible - I don't want to put words in your mouth, but let me do so this one time for the sake of a robust and delightfully contentious argument - that you might say, "Oh don't give me that crap! You chose to be blay!" I can only respond, "I swear to God I didn't. It's just the way I am. Oh, to be sure, I'm more than blay - I also value friendship, relationship, intimacy and kind words too - but I'm not less than blay. God help me, I do like lots and lots of hot bods."

As for the fairness of having to give up something at the core of your being - whether blayness or gayness or anything else - my simple position is that I don't have the authority to declare what is fair or unfair. Speaking as a Christian minister in a church tradition that regards the Bible as authoritative, I regard myself as analogous to a baseball umpire who has no power to judge whether the rules of the game are fair, but who simply calls balls and strikes according to the parameters of "ball" and "strike" as determined by a higher authority. To press the metaphor, if I call a strike on a ball that comes over the plate at the knees, and the batter complains, "This is unfair! That ball was unhittable for me!" I can only shrug and say, "Those are the rules. Perhaps a different sport would suit you?" My parishioners can testify that more than once I have said (concerning commandments unrelated to sexual behavior), "Here's what it says. If you don't like that and would rather not abide by it, no problem. Just pick a different religion. Biblical Christianity is not for you."

And don't get me started on equating loving behavior between consenting adults to cannibalism and pedophilia.

I won't start you on that; in fact, I'd like to stop you on that, because I have not, would not, and never will equate loving behavior between consenting adults to cannibalism and pedophilia. I suspect here you're just wielding a rhetorical blade for a passing slice, and I won't begrudge you that - but seriously, you didn't actually think I was equating these practices, did you? Be assured that what I was comparing was not substance and substance but characteristic and characteristic. It's a logical device as old as the hills and we all use it all the time, as in Luke 18:1-6, where Jesus compared God to an unjust judge. Even an absolute dunce recognizes immediately that God was not being equated with an unjust judge. The point of contact between the two touched only on the matter of their authority, and left billions of other things appropriately and obviously disparate. Likewise, the point of contact where I connected gayness, blayness, pedophilia, fraud-mongering and cannibalism was the matter of their all being "natural" inclinations unchosen by those who exhibited their tendencies. Far be it from me to equate them in other areas too.

In terms of inherent physical attraction, many of us may be blay, but we choose not to pursue that not out of some religiously ascetic sense of self-denial, but because we've found something better.

I agree wholeheartedly that a lasting, faithful relationship with one individual is indeed better than a promiscuous lifestyle, even for a person who is inherently blay. What I don't understand is why (as it seems to me) you present the motivations of "self-denial" and "because we've found something better" as exclusionary - as "not 'A' but rather 'B'." In my experience the motivations are overlapping and complementary - and few people are so naturally good that they don't have to knuckle down and practice elementary self-denial at some point. If a man said to me, "I never have to practice self-denial in my marriage! I am utterly faithful because I want to be, because I've found something so much better," I guess I'd say, "Well, I'm happy for you, bud. Really I am. But some of us poor schlubs at the bottom of the moral food chain do get tempted sometimes, and find that to remain faithful we just have to grind it out and religiously, ascetically deny ourselves the forbidden fruit."

The psychologist was bang on; between consenting adults, let people love who they want.

Two points: In principle, I basically agree that between consenting adults, let people love whom they want. Just as we should let people eat what they want and drink what they want. But if a person belongs to a Vegan Club or a Temperance Union, it is rather odd if he says, "I should be allowed to eat pork and drink vodka!" Well, yes, of course he can - but then he's not a vegetarian or a teetotaler, is he? The issue is not what is allowable to the public but what standards of behavior will govern those in voluntary association. As a Christian pastor, I tell people what behavior is commanded of those who choose to join the association of Bible-believing followers of Jesus Christ. I really don't expect those outside our association of believers to listen much to what we say or pay heed to these rules at all. I'm actually very surprised (and honored and pleased!) when they happen to listen in and offer a comment.

Secondly, I think that even those outside our "Christian Union" might want to qualify their conviction that, between consenting adults, people should be allowed to love whom they want. Suppose the one who says this is male, heterosexual, married. And suppose that his wife - whom he loves dearly, and to whom he has been faithful, and for whom he has sacrificed much - decides (by her free consent) that she wants to sleep with lots and lots of men who also freely consent to sleep with her. If the husband truly and vigorously believes that "Consenting adults should be allowed to love anyone they want," it is hard to see on what ground he could object to her behavior. But I think most men would object, and would be heartbroken by her unfaithfulness.

I sincerely hope that there are few like you, because if any of them happen to deconvert, they seem to no longer have any reason to live as decent human beings.

You have no idea how much I agree with your basic sentiment here! I myself have said many times that the scariest, most selfish, most chillingly evil people I know are the ones who used to be Christians! I have known moral atheists; I don't believe I have ever known a moral ex-Christian. You are absolutely right when you say "they seem to no longer have any reason to live as decent human beings." I have seen that with my own eyes, and have borne the sad consequences of it. I myself was abandoned after 20 years of marriage by someone who "deconverted" - and then I had to find a way to manage as a distraught, poor, lonely single dad. Listen, friend, though we may be poles apart, please do me the honor of praying or offering a wish to whatever god or force you believe in that I do not deconvert – for then, admittedly, there is no telling what wickedness I might be capable of.

But having said that, I assure you and all others that I will not deconvert. I am a follower of Jesus Christ, now and forevermore, and that is all there is to it.

Listen, if you are ever in Naperville, Illinois, look me up and I'll buy you a drink. For me it will have to be a Coke though, because – as you might guess - I'm a self-denying (and celibate) teetotaler.

God bless,
Paul Lundquist