He Asked Me the "M" Question

Please Note:  This essay contains material that some of you might find discomfiting.


Regular readers of my blog know that one of my best friends is in prison.

He had been a co-worker, and then a friend, and then he did a truly stupid and illegal thing, and now he's starting his third year behind bars, with about six more to go.

He's unsaved, and he's gay.  Yet we'd forged some common bonds over the way we view our society, and humanity in general.  He respectfully disagrees with the basis of my worldview - faith in Christ - and I respectfully disagree with the basis of his worldview, which is atheism.  Some relationships never get past that vast disparity, but for whatever reason, we've been surprised to find areas of common agreement.

You're likely aware that many gays base their worldview on their sexual orientation.  But this is something both my friend and I agree upon:  we consider sexual orientation to be a woefully undependable and irresponsible focus.  Few heterosexuals base their worldview on their sexual orientation, and the ones who do tend to mimic the same problems gay-centric people display: the objectification of people for their sexual attributes, promiscuity that exposes one to physical and psychological illnesses, and general debauchery that mocks love, interpersonal relationships, and personal integrity.

My friend may be gay, but he's not flaming, because his sexual orientation doesn't define him.  His atheism does.  He's also a graphic designer of Italian descent who loves good food.  Being a lover of good food, he's being driven crazy in prison, where the menu is decidedly marginal.  And speaking of going crazy, although being gay doesn't define him, my friend is still a sexual being, and without being too graphic about it, he's expressed to me that he's developing certain frustrations in that area as well.

Believers in Christ like myself have generally not been raised to discuss sexuality out in the open.  Even in home groups, or in private conversations, if any sexually-related topic ever comes up, we usually end up hurriedly finishing each other's sentences so we can avoid being as explicit as we otherwise could be.  It's not that talking about sexuality is wrong in and of itself, but even when the subject matter is one of objective consideration, and not sordid lewdness, most of us hope the least amount of imprecise words suffices as information.

Meanwhile, believers in Christ are also to maintain a witness to the incarcerated, no matter their crime.  But, since sex comprises a significant portion of prison life - and we're not talking conjugal visits here -  the prisoners to whom we minister are not going to have the same inhibitions with certain topics as you or I might have.

Take masturbation, for example.

OK.  There.  I've said it.  I've typed it out.  A word I never thought I'd put into this blog.

But my friend is struggling with it.  He's joined the "Christian" group in his prison, because being part of that group helps explain to other prisoners why he might act differently than guys in the facility's general population.  It's for his own physical protection, pure and simple.  It's a charade, but so far, he thinks he's been able to pull it off.  He's told me that numerous times, chuckling at the irony of a self-professed atheist taking a Bible to chapel services in jail and singing praise songs he's never heard before.

The problem with being an atheist hiding out in a Christian group in prison is that my friend knows nothing about our theology and doctrine.  So when one of his fellow inmates from chapel told him that masturbation is a sin, and that God would kill him for "spilling his seed on the ground," my friend - apparently covering all his bases - wanted to know the truth.

If God does exist, might He kill my friend for masturbating?  After all, considering his situation...

What would you say?

"Um, ah... we don't talk about that."

"Um, not necessarily, but that's all you need to know."

"Um, I think so, but I really don't want to look into it with you."

Frankly, I don't believe God arranged this friendship for me to backpedal on legitimate questions like this from my incarcerated friend.  If I'm confident that the Gospel of Jesus Christ addresses every area of life, and it is the solid foundation upon which I can build my worldview, then God has an answer for this question.  And I need to know what it is.

So here - after considerable hesitancy on my part - is what I wrote back to him:

Masturbation?

Of all the topics you could have picked, from Heaven to Hell, the Trinity, substitutionary atonement, or women wearing pants in church… you pick masturbation?

Actually, your friend from chapel is somewhat correct, in that the Bible does say a person who “spent his seed” on the ground was killed by God. The passage is Genesis 38, if you want to look it up.

However, upon reading the passage, it’s easy to see that it’s not talking about masturbation, but the custom at the time of a brother performing husbandly duties on the widow of his deceased brother, so that she will have offspring to care for her in her old age. The only Social Security they had back then was one’s children. God killed this man for refusing to perform what, in the complex ways of the Old Testament, was expected of him. This man would go ahead and have sex with his late brother’s wife, but he didn’t want to sire any children through her, so he intentionally and utterly foiled the procreative process.

Now, regarding your question, of all my years attending church, listening to sermons, reading the Bible for myself, and exploring what a variety of evangelical writers have had to say on the subject of sex and sexuality, I’m not aware of anything in the Bible that explicitly says men and women are not to masturbate.

However, how one masturbates could be sinful.

I know you want to be blunt, and I suppose little of what I say would offend you. So here goes: the reason God did not design the normal penis or vagina to provide unilateral sexual satisfaction for its owner is because these organs function as procreative elements of biology, as well as pleasure centers. They’re supposed to be used solely within the intimacy of a one-man-one-woman marriage to not only produce offspring, but provide a unique bonding experience that only those two people will share their entire lifetime. In other words, you will derive some pleasure from “beating off,” as you say, but not as much pleasure as God intends for conventional sex between a husband and his wife.

This is one reason why many evangelicals not only oppose homosexuality, but think they have the right to be rude and hurtful towards gays. We’ve talked about this before: while I believe that homosexuality is a sin because it goes against God’s design for our sexuality, there are many sexual sins within heterosexuality that are equally bad, dangerous, and offensive to God, yet evangelicals treat those far more lightly.

One of those sins is pornography. Like I said, it’s not clear in the Bible that masturbation itself is wrong. But how you masturbate could be. And pornography, which is the debasement of the human body and God’s purpose for sex, not to mention the objectification of people for their looks rather than their personhood (sexuality is not intended to define people), is a sinful way of achieving arousal.

Arousal, stimulation, ecstasy, and all the other emotions and physical manifestations of sex are not wrong in and of themselves. But God made them to be used and enjoyed within the confines of the Biblical marriage bed. Or countertop, or sofa, or back seat. It’s how one achieves that arousal that could be wrong.

Unfortunately, few of us know how to achieve arousal unilaterally without some form of sexual perversion, like pornography, or lusting after somebody we find attractive, or with whom we desire to have sex but shouldn’t. I suppose a spouse could masturbate in their hotel room if they’re on a trip and fantasizing about their spouse who isn’t physically with them. And I suppose a single, never-married person could masturbate simply by learning how to maneuver their organ in just the right way – but without sinful thoughts as stimulation. But I’m not stupid enough to think these non-sinful ways are how most people achieve satisfaction from masturbation.

Does that answer your question?  I hope so, because thinking through and writing this explanation has really exhausted me! 

Oy vey!

Deception, Thy Name Is Nostalgia

Ahh, nostalgia!

It sure can be deceptive.

Looking back over our memories tends to create the illusion that things were better then than they really were.  Such selective memory gets particularly bad if something today really bothers us, and we imagine that previous generations must have been far more proficient than the bozos running things today are.

Take, for example, the standard many Americans use for our country's glory years:  the post-war 1950's, during our epic baby boom.  Life seemed so much more vibrant then.  Opportunity was in the air.  We were inventing and growing and exploring and rocking and rolling and driving and building.  You didn't even have to be rich to enjoy the bounty in lifestyle advancements that have become a hallmark of that unique period of time.

But you did have to be white.

And indeed, it was, as we're soberly discovering, simply a unique period of time.  A period of time that, despite being as productive as it was, probably wasn't as great overall as we like to imagine it was.

What A Ride

Still, even for those of us who were born much later, the 20th Century's middle decade represents a quintessential period of socioeconomic exuberance and optimism.  Consider all of the measures by which the 1950's are fondly - if not entirely accurately - referred:

• Designs of the American automobile, such as the Cadillac fin, the '57 Chevrolets, and the Ford Thunderbird
• Epic cinematic spectaculars and iconic TV shows, such as Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, I Love Lucy, and Superman
• Big cities were still economic engines, even as suburbia was gaining momentum
• Public education was considered safe, efficient, and admirable
• Rock and roll was still in its infancy, and its audience almost as naive
• Dads went to work, moms stayed home, and their kids were wholesome (or, so Leave it to Beaver says)
• Interstate highways were brand-new and uncongested
• Passenger train service was then what air travel is today, only more pleasant
• Only the Army had annoying government regulations
• The incredible shrinking nuclear family was early in its evolution; extended family still lived close by, not across the country
• Divorce was rare
• Sundays were for church
• Baseball was America's game
• ... and on and on...

It Wasn't All Fabulous

In retrospect, however, despite how nice it all may sound to you - and, yes, some of it sounds nice to me, too - I have to admit:  I wouldn't want to go back and live in the 1950's.

For one thing, medical care was woefully inferior to the standards we expect today.  Think of how far we've come in the fight against cancer, the repair - and replacement - of broken bones and malfunctioning organs, and basic life expectancy.  Would you want to relinquish the advancements in health science that have been made in the past 60 years?

We also didn't know much about how badly we were corrupting our ecosystems with the massive amounts of pollution our economic engine was belching into the air, water, and landscape.  Unfortunately, it took about three decades for us to realize the amount of toxic residue "progress" creates.  Even today, much of the pollution we think we've removed from our society we've simply relocated to poorer and less politically powerful parts of our world, where people who can't complain as loudly about environmental degradation suffer from the byproducts of our plastic universe.

Plastic universe, indeed.  Our economy was rebuilding itself by becoming a consumer-driven one.  Driven to consume a lot of cheaply-made stuff we really don't need.  Instead of farming, the manufacture of basic utensils and equipment, and other industries we'd consider primitive by today's standards, our version of capitalism flopped into dependency mode after World War II, a mode in which products needed to be designed, sold, and purchased in a pattern that sustained companies that otherwise provided little upon which human life is based.  Things like striped toothpaste, Wiffle balls, hairspray, powdered milk, Frisbees and hula hoops, frozen French fries, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  In terms of raw economics, as long as you have customers willing to pay market price, all of these commodities can only help improve a society's economy.  But people of faith should know that contentment is not based on acquiring or consuming things; those are two lifestyle patterns a consumer-based economy wantonly encourages.

Then there's the whole crisis with racial segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism that raged just beneath the surface of the 1950's, finally to erupt in the 1960's.  Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing "separate but equal," came in 1954.  The ugly Little Rock Integration Crisis at that Arkansas city's main high school took place in 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education had been decided.

I still remember the first time I saw a photo of one of the black female students being taunted by a crowd of white kids outside Little Rock High School (photo at right).  I was reading a textbook in Mrs. Wolf's sixth grade class in upstate New York, where the only black family in town lived in one of the nicest homes in town, and I had no idea why anybody would dislike black people.  I looked behind the tall, dignified black girl in the white dress and sunglasses, to the short white girl with the short hair directly behind her.  Her mouth galvanized into a loud snarl, her eyes dark with vitriol... had this black girl done something to inflict physical pain on her?  The leering law enforcement men in the background, the other white woman clucking her tongue; none of it made sense to me then.  I'm glad I didn't have to live through it - either as a black person, or a white one.

Can We Move Forward By Selectively Idolizing the Past?

Turns out, that evil episode in Little Rock back in 1957 served as a stepping stone upon which race relations in America made its way across a sea change in how blacks participate in modern, 21st Century life.  Things still aren't perfect, just as they aren't perfect in our economy, which, although vastly expanded from even its 1950's robustness, has been struggling for years to accommodate swings and trends in the buying patterns of consumers.  Healthcare, too, has become so complex, its costs have exploded, and we've yet to determine how the overwhelming majority of us can afford to pay for it.

At least the Cold War is over.  Or is it?  During the 1950's, Americans lived in increasing degrees of fear, a mindset that helped precipitate the vase military-industrial complex that the decade's signature president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned an otherwise cavalier country against.  While diplomatic relations with Russia and China may now be on a low boil, and as Communism has petered out virtually everyplace else - with bothersome last-gasps from North Korea and Cuba, the international politics of the Cold War may be history.  Meanwhile, however, our country is grappling with staggering responsibilities for all of that redundant weaponry whose nuclear components won't evaporate like political dogma.  Then there are the millions of private sector jobs created by a misguided patriotic zeal from Cold War arms race industrialists, and sustained today by hawkish advocates for unparalleled military superiority.

As Britain's Lord Acton wrote in 1887, "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Have we become so dependant on a taxpayer-funded military-industrial complex that we're like frogs placed in a pot of cold water?  As the heat from our military's demands on our Treasury gets turned up, we acclimate to the rising costs until we're boiled to death.  All in the cause of protecting ourselves more extensively than any other society in history.

Which, actually, is where this whole infatuation with the 1950's comes full circle.  "Sure, we had the Cold War then," we allow, "but look at how much else in our country was going so well."

I suspect that part of our national commitment to Eisenhower's dreaded military-industrial complex comes from a desire to live in a simpler time, when we knew who our enemies were, and what it took to at least keep them in checkmate.  The USSR had as much to lose from a nuclear holocaust as we did, and we both pretty much used the same playbook when it came to securing our respective nation's interests.

These days, our fiercest enemy isn't a state as much as it is an ideology.  An ideology with capricious splinter factions within it.  They don't want the same things we want.  They don't live like we do.  Our cultures have little in common.  In the face of such contentious unconventionality, it can be enticing to try and revert to the 1950's and somehow capture its mojo in a bottle, à la Back to the Future.  But not only can we not go back, it's really only in nostalgic retrospect - and only if you're Caucasian - that the 50's were idyllic.

Charles Dickens says it best in A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

With selective perception, we can still relish through nostalgia the good things our country experienced during the 1950's.

But not only can we not go back, how does it help our nation's current woes to try?