Rhetoric Race and Religion
Recently I was at a clergy conference where I got to have conversations I’ve been longing for. We talked about sex. Not as a part of a plenary, or even a formal small group meeting, but around tables at meal times, and over glasses of wine. We touched on the complicated ethics of sex in the modern world, and what to say when it becomes a pastoral issue. We laughed, we argued, we blushed and fanned ourselves. It was holy.
But even at that gathering of priests, where we were all ostensibly peers, occasionally someone would say, “Well, this conversation doesn’t sound like safe church.” Those comments gave me pause. Our conversations might have made some people uncomfortable, but that’s not the same as unsafe. When we talk about sexual abuse in the church, or even sexual harassment in the church, we are talking about an abuse of power, where someone uses his or her institutional authority inappropriately. It’s a terrible thing, and something the church has a grave history with, but it doesn’t mean sex itself is unsafe, or that is should be off limits as a subject of discussion.
One of the greatest blessings of my ministry has been the duty to talk about sex with adolescents. I’ve blogged about it before. Here it suffices to say that kids are hungry for honest conversations about sex, and ethics. What they glean from popular culture is confusing, astonishing, and often rather exciting to them. I’m in my thirties, and TV and music are radically more explicit than they were even just fifteen or twenty years ago. I’ve had middle school boys make jokes to me about Fifty Shades of Gray. I’ve had parents tell me their high-school aged daughters read that book without them knowing. I am an avid reader and enthusiastic writer in the genre of sexy novels, but I wouldn’t want a teenager reading one without an adult to help contextualize it.
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