Oh God! The Enthusiastic Evangelical Yes!
Kelsy Burke’s groundbreaking study Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet weaves an erotics where sin and pleasure perform for the perversion of the Lord. What happens in the “marriage bed” is personal as one’s faith.
And beyond the bedroom? There exists a robust online world where Christian sexuality websites, which include sex toy companies, create intimate spaces to safely fantasize, collaboratively belong, and reinforce a specific kind of sexual advice that repurposes secular sexual scripts into religiously appropriate carnal delights. As Burke rightly states, “Sexual acts are physical, but they absorb meaning in social contexts.”
For “good” Christian sex to occur, arousal needs to be part of one’s holy practice. The bedroom is a sacred place where one can play out strict monogamous roles (no emotional affairs tolerated) within the constraints of normative heterosexual state-sanctioned unions, or the “spiritually exceptional relationship.” It’s important to note that Burke’s ethnographic study is focused on Evangelical Christians.
Evangelical Christians believe:
- Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.
- The Bible is the ultimate source of truth (it’s literally the word of God).
- They have a personal, 1:1 direct relationship with God.
This third point on Evangelical Christian’s unique relationship to Christ is the crux of Burke’s hypothesis that the “logic of godly sex” has been able to resiliently contort itself into a queered contemporary desire for full body sexual fulfillment.
In this particular religious expression, it requires a God who can subjectively take ancient beliefs and extend those boundaries to a 21st century Christian sexual desire. An entire chapter is devoted to the self-rationalization of husbands, with a green light from their Savior, requesting their wives peg them. Another chapter is dedicated to wives’ sexual awakenings, a submissive narrative to God’s will paired with the orgasmic power of redemptive agency. While not mentioned in Christians Under Covers, this gendered awakening unknowingly borrows from Audre Lorde’s framework that the erotic is a source of power and information. It’s unlikely this Lorde reference would show up on a Christian message board, yet the mechanics of creating an erotic knowledge inform in mysterious ways.
Godly logic can extend into subjective rationalizations of all stripes — from the politics of why Christians had a divine mandate to vote for Trump to the never ending war on Christmas — but Burke keeps her focus tight on the Christian practice of physical marital worship. This “submissive grace” allows for an ironic bending of gender norms in what Burke coins as gender omniscience. This is the privileged internal knowledge of one’s “true” gender based on a triaged relationship with the self, one’s spouse, and God, to guiltlessly engage in pegging, light BDSM, and other assumed to be non-normative Christian behaviors. Only after much consultation with God, and spouse, is such deviance blessed.
All of the Christian sexuality websites Burke studied are “collective representations of reality.” These sites inform and create specific community interactions while an individual’s sexual and religious identity are continuously reshaped and recoded. This partnership is predicated on unstable and contested desires yet remains remarkably resilient in its passion for corporeal redemption.
These private/public spaces of possibilities perform in ways that make Christians Under Covers a fascinating expose into an ever-evolving and highly contextualized Evangelical Christian sexuality.
