Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (33 page)

Nothing we do is truly moral unless we are free to do otherwise. We must be free to decide what to do before any of our actions even begin to be moral.

No discipline but self-discipline has any moral significance. This applies to sex, politics, or anything else. A moral act is a free act, done because we want to.

Incidentally, but not insignificantly, let me remark that this freedom which is so essential to moral acts can mean freedom
from
premarital sex as well as freedom for it. Not everybody would choose to engage in it. Some will not because it would endanger the sense of personal integrity. Value sentiments or “morals” may be changing (they
are,
obviously), but we are still “living in the overlap” and a sensitive, imaginative person might both well and wisely decide against it. . . .

Many will oppose premarital sex for reasons of the social welfare, others for relationship reasons, and some for simply egoistic reasons. We may rate these reasons differently in our ethical value systems, but the main point morally is to respect the freedom to choose. And short of coitus, young couples can pet
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each other at all levels up to orgasm, just so they are honest enough to recognize that merely technical virgins are no better morally than those who go the whole way. . . .

Just as there are two ethical orientations, theistic and humanistic, so there are two distinct questions to ask ourselves. One is: Should we prohibit and condemn premarital sex? The other is: Should we approve of it? To the first one I promptly reply in the negative. To the second I propose an equivocal answer, “Yes and no—depending on each particular situation.”

The most solid basis for any ethical approach is on the ground common to both the religiously oriented and the humanistically oriented—namely, the concern both feel for persons. They are alike
personalistically
oriented. For example, both Christians and non-Christians can accept the normative principle, “We ought to love people and use things; immorality only occurs when we love things and use people.” They can agree also on a companion maxim: “We ought to love people, not rules or principles; what counts is not any hard and fast moral law but doing what we can for the good of others in every situation.”

The first principle means that no sexual act is ethical if it hurts or exploits others. This is the difference between lust and love: lust treats a sexual partner as an object, love as a subject. Charity is more important than chastity, but there is no such thing as “free love.” There must be some care and commitment in premarital sex acts or they are immoral. Hugh Hefner, the whipping boy of the stuffies, has readily acknowledged in
Playboy
that “personal” sex relations are to be preferred to impersonal. Even though he denies that mutual commitment needs to go the radical lengths of marriage, he sees at least the difference between casual sex and straight callous congress.

The second principle is one of situation ethics—making a moral decision hangs on the particular case. How, here and now, can I act with the most certain concern for the happiness and welfare of those involved—myself and others?

Legalistic moralism, with its absolutes and universals, always thou-shalt-nots, cuts out the middle ground between being a virgin and a sexual profligate. This is an absurd failure to see that morality has to be acted out on a continuum of relativity, like life itself, from situation to situation.

The only independent variable is concern for people; love thy neighbor as thyself. Christians, whether legalistic or situational about their ethics, are agreed that the
ideal
sexually is the combination of marriage and sex. But the ideal gives no reason to demand that others should adopt that ideal or to try to impose it by law, nor is it even any reason to absolutize the ideal in practice for all Christians in all situations. Sex is not always wrong outside marriage, even for Christians; as Paul said, “I know . . . that nothing is unclean in itself” (Rom.

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l u k e t i m o t h y j o h n s o n a n d m a r k d . j o r d a n 14:14). Another way to put it is to say that character shapes sex conduct, sex does not shape character.

As I proposed some years ago in a paper in
Law and Contemporary Problems,
the Duke University law journal, there are only three proper limitations to guide both the civil law and morality on sexual acts. No sexual act between persons competent to give mutual consent should be prohibited, except when it involves either the seduction of minors or an offense against the public order. These are the principles of the Wolfenden Report to the English Parliament, adopted by that body and endorsed by the Anglican and Roman Catholic archbishops. It is time we acknowledged the difference between “sins” (a private judgment) and “crimes” against the public conscience and social consensus.

Therefore, we can welcome the recent decision of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to provide birth control assistance to un-married women who desire it. It is a policy that puts into effect the principles of the President’s Health Message to Congress of March 1, 1966. If the motive is a truly moral one, it will be concerned not only with relief budgets but with the welfare of the women and a concern to prevent unwanted babies. Why wait for even
one
illegitimate child to be born? . . .

[Joseph Fletcher,
Moral Responsibility
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), pp. 132–140]

A WOMANIST CRITIQUE OF FAMILY THEOLOGY

Delores S. Williams stands in the forefront of “womanist” theology, which seeks to articulate and foster the experience in faith of African American women.

Her
Sisters in the Wilderness
(1993) is regularly cited as one of the works that defined the movement’s concerns, especially in its biblical reinterpretations of marriage, child rearing, and extended family. Womanist theology intends to supplement and to critique feminist theology so far as feminists unknowingly presume that the experience of women of certain races or classes are universal.

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d e l o r e s w i l l i a m s , s i s t e r s i n t h e w i l d e r n e s s Where would I begin in order to construct Christian theology (or god-talk) from the point of view of African-American women? I pondered this question for over a year. Then one day my professor responded to my complaint about the absence of black women’s experience from
all
Christian theology (black liberation and feminist theologies included). He suggested that my anxiety might lessen if my exploration of African-American cultural sources was consciously informed by the statement “I am a black WOMAN.” He was right.

I had not realized before that I read African-American sources from a black male perspective. I assumed black women were included. I had not noticed
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that what the sources presented as “black experience” was really black male experience. . . .

Nevertheless, when I began reading available black female and black male sources with my female identity fixed firmly in my consciousness, I made a startling discovery. I discovered that even though black liberation theologians used biblical paradigms supporting an androcentric bias in their theological statements, the African-American community had used the Bible quite differently. For over a hundred years, the community had appropriated the Bible in such a way that black women’s experience figured just as eminently as black men’s in the community’s memory, in its self-understanding and in its understanding of God’s relation to its life. As I read deeper in black American sources from my female perspective, I began to see that it was possible to identify at least two traditions of African-American biblical appropriation that were useful for the construction of black theology in North America.

One of these traditions of biblical appropriation emphasized liberation of the oppressed and showed God relating to men in the liberation struggles. . . .

My discovery of the second tradition of African-American biblical appropriation excited me greatly. This tradition emphasized female activity and de-emphasized male authority. It lifted up from the Bible the story of a female slave of African descent who was forced to be a surrogate mother, reproducing a child by her slave master because the slave master’s wife was barren. For more than a hundred years Hagar—the African slave of the Hebrew woman Sarah— has appeared in the deposits of African-American culture. Sculptors, writers, poets, scholars, preachers and just plain folks have passed along the biblical figure Hagar to generation after generation of black folks.

As I encountered Hagar again and again in African-American sources, I reread her story in the Hebrew testament and Paul’s reference to her in the Christian testament. I slowly realized there were striking similarities between Hagar’s story and the story of African-American women. Hagar’s heritage was African as was black women’s. Hagar was a slave. Black American women had emerged from a slave heritage and still lived in light of it. Hagar was brutalized by her slave owner, the Hebrew woman Sarah. The slave narratives of African-American women and some of the narratives of contemporary day-workers tell of the brutal or cruel treatment black women have received from the wives of slave masters and from contemporary white female employers. Hagar had no control over her body. It belonged to her slave owner, whose husband, Abraham, ravished Hagar. A child Ishmael was born; mother and child were eventually cast out of Abraham’s and Sarah’s home without resources for survival. The bodies of African-American slave women were owned by their masters. Time after time they were raped by their owners and bore children whom the masters seldom claimed—children who were slaves—children and their mothers whom slave-master fathers often cast out by selling them to other slave holders. Hagar resisted the brutalities of slavery by running away. Black American women have 144

l u k e t i m o t h y j o h n s o n a n d m a r k d . j o r d a n a long resistance history that includes running away from slavery in the ante-bellum era. Like Hagar and her child Ishmael, African-American female slaves and their children, after slavery, were expelled from the homes of many slave holders and given no resources for survival. Hagar, like many women throughout African-American women’s history, was a single parent. But she had serious personal and salvific encounters with God—encounters which aided Hagar in the survival struggle of herself and her son. Over and over again, black women in the churches have testified about their serious personal and salvific encounters with God, encounters that helped them and their families survive.

I realized I had stumbled upon the beginning of an answer to my question: Where was I to begin in my effort to construct theology from the point of view of black women’s experience? I was to begin with the black community (composed of females and males) and its understanding of God’s historic relation to black female life. And, inasmuch as Hagar’s story had been appropriated so extensively and for such a long time by the African-American community, I reasoned that her story must be the community’s analogue for African-American women’s historic experience. My reasoning was supported, I thought, by the striking similarities between Hagar’s story and African-American women’s history in North America. But what would I name this Hagar-centered tradition of African-American biblical appropriation? I did not feel that it belonged to the liberation tradition of African-American biblical appropriation. My expo-sure to feminist studies had convinced me that women must claim their experience, which has for so long been submerged by the overlay of oppressive, patriarchal cultural forms. And one way to claim experience is to name it.

Naming also establishes some permanence and visibility for women’s experience in history.

At this point, my effort to name the women-centered tradition was facilitated by the work of anthropologist Lawrence Levine. He concluded that African Americans (especially during slavery) did not accommodate themselves to the Bible. Rather, they accommodated the Bible to the urgent necessities of their lives. But in this business of accommodating the Bible to life, I knew that the black American religious community had not traditionally put final emphasis upon the hopelessness of the painful aspects of black history, whether paralleled in the Bible or not. Rather, black people used the Bible to put primary emphasis upon God’s response to the community’s situations of pain and bondage. So I asked myself: What was God’s response to Hagar’s predicament? Were her pain and God’s response to it congruent with African-American women’s predicament and their understanding of God’s response to black women’s suffering?

Perhaps by answering these questions I could arrive at a name for this Hagar-centered tradition of African-American biblical appropriation.

A very superficial reading of Genesis 16:1–16 and 21:9–21 in the Hebrew testament revealed that Hagar’s predicament involved slavery, poverty, ethnicity, sexual and economic exploitation, surrogacy, rape, domestic violence, home-Christianity 145

lessness, motherhood, single-parenting and radical encounters with God. Another aspect of Hagar’s predicament was made clear in the Christian testament when Paul (Galatians 4:21–5:1) relegated her and her progeny to a position outside of and antagonistic to the great promise Paul says Christ brought to humankind. Thus in Paul’s text Hagar bears only negative relation to the new creation Christ represents. In the Christian context of Paul, then, Hagar and her descendants represent the outsider position par excellence. So alienation is also part of the predicament of Hagar and her progeny.

God’s response to Hagar’s story in the Hebrew testament is not liberation.

Rather, God participates in Hagar’s and her child’s survival on two occasions.

When she was a run-away slave, God met her in the wilderness and told her to resubmit herself to her oppressor Sarah, that is, to return to bondage. Latin American biblical scholar Elsa Tamez may be correct when she interprets God’s action here to be on behalf of the survival of Hagar and child. Hagar could not give birth in the wilderness. Perhaps neither she nor the child could survive such an ordeal. Perhaps the best resources for assuring the life of mother and child were in the home of Abraham and Sarah. Then, when Hagar and her child were finally cast out of the home of their oppressors and were not given proper resources for survival, God provided Hagar with a resource. God gave her new vision to see survival resources where she had seen none before. Liberation in the Hagar stories is not given by God; it finds its source in human initiative. Finally, in Hagar’s story there is the suggestion that God will be instrumental in the development of Ishmael’s and Hagar’s quality of life, for “God was with the boy. He grew up and made his home in the desert [wilderness], and he became an archer” (Genesis 21:20).