In last week’s Week in Wisdom, Brad commented on a recent study by two Toronto researchers, Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson, that revealed states with higher levels of religiosity and conservatism have higher rates of online search for words like sex, sex images, gay sex, gay porn, and sexual content. Brad wisely pointed out that it is easy but not at all helpful to simply hurl charges of hypocrisy at conservatives or to make jokes about the Bible belt being the Porn belt.
I appreciate Brad compassionately shifting the focus on the story from the typical attacks of hypocrisy (after all, who among us isn’t hypocritical about some things) to trying to understand people’s desperate struggle for balance. But as someone who was sexually abused in a traditional conservative religious setting (along with more than a hundred others at Yeshiva University High School in the early 1970’s and 80’s), I want to suggest that beyond illuminating the general struggle for balance we all go through, there is an important issue particular to conservative religious communities.
The fact is that in America, religiosity and conservatism are generally associated with opposition to non-traditional sexual behavior. But this opposition is more than simply an internal communal matter creating a struggle for balance. Over the past few decades, religious conservatives have attempted to shape public policy and impose their values on the rest of the country and they have done so, more often than not, by impugning the morality of the majority with whom they have disagreed. Psychology 101 teaches that the sexual behaviors that righteous believers criticize and try so hard to shut down may be a projection of their own sexual urges and impulses. Every psychosocial position has its own Achilles heels: It appears that the respect conservatives have for the power of sexuality easily morphs into a mix of fear and shame about sexual feelings. These feelings are then too often denied, repressed, disassociated, and projected on others, all the while creating a private attraction for the very behavior conservatives demonize.
I don’t know whether conservative religious and political leaders have more sexual scandals – I don’t have the statistics – but this study invites us to be alert to the psychological drama underlying conservative’s obsession with controlling other people’s sexual lives. Rather than be entertained (or comforted) by the likes of Rush Limbaugh accusing a woman of being a slut when disturbed by her support for women’s access to birth control or demonizing gay people seeking the right to marry as endangering our children, conservatives need to reflect on how their fierce “beliefs” about sexuality might actually augment the very feelings they don’t want to act upon.
Religious traditionalists and conservatives understand in ways liberals often do not the non-rational quality and exploitative potential of our sexual desires – just look at our problems of sexual assault on predominately liberal campuses. They do understand that with all the openness, seeming transparency and egalitarianism about sex in our public culture, our sexual desires and urges remain an awkward, complicated and sometimes embarrassing if not dark reality and this includes the fact that most of us really, really like sex.
But at the same time, there are a range of factors connected with traditional conservative worldviews – patriarchy, the surrender to and trust in authority, the sense that “God is with me,” the belief that prayer and confession can replace psychological awareness, the aversion to believing distasteful truth about religious leaders, and the communal pressure not to air its dirty laundry – that may well create painful and nasty distortions in people’s sexual lives.
None of us live up to our best intentions or deepest values, but this study invites particular reflection on the part of those who claim with most certainty and fierceness to know God’s will (especially about our sexual behavior) and those who “know” most clearly what God wants, and seem to act in ways that embarrass the God they claim to know far more often than those they deem morally suspect.
Rabbi Irwin Kula is a 7th generation rabbi and a disruptive spiritual innovator. A rogue thinker, author of the award-winning book, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, and President-Emeritus of Clal – The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, he works at the intersection of religion, innovation, and human flourishing. A popular commentator in both new and traditional media, he is co-founder with Craig Hatkoff and the late Professor Clay Christensen of The Disruptor Foundation whose mission is to advance disruptive innovation theory and its application in societal critical domains. He serves as a consultant to a wide range of foundations, organizations, think tanks, and businesses and is on the leadership team of Coburn Ventures, where he offers uncommon inputs on cultural and societal change to institutional investors across sectors and companies worldwide.