COME, ALL YE FAITHFUL

Michael McMahon on how American evangelicals are turning the lights low and consulting sex manuals

ALL over America this Christmas, evan- gelical Christian couples will be putting their children to bed, switching off the television, letting out the cat, locking their bedroom door, turning down the lights and prayerfully getting down to conjugal activi- ties, which, their pastors boast, will bring them ecstasies rarely reached by the irreli- gious. This sexual manifestation of their sanctity is not achieved by chance, For the last quarter of the century, those of them with eyes to see and ears to hear have been able to enjoy the benefits of a pub- lishing phenomenon that has sent shud- ders of pleasure rippling through booksellers and believers alike: the Chris- tian sex manuals that sell in millions.

One of the best-known works in the genre is a 25-year-old classic which has recently been updated and expanded: The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, by the Baptist minister and prophetic nov- elist Tim LaHaye, assisted dutifully by his wife. With sales in excess of two and a half million, it is a work which is nothing if not seminal, and at the heart of it is a truth which is perhaps most delicately unveiled through one of the pastor's own anecdotes.

A young American dentist and his new wife were deeply in love, but difficulties in the physical aspects of their relationship had led to frustration and conflict. Near to des- peration, they started going to church, and became born-again Christians. (`But, of course, this still did not resolve their prob- lem of orgasmic malfunction?) Then came their epiphany. They were invited to a party.

Being the first to arrive, they were ushered into the family room to await the arrival of the other guests. They were no sooner seated than another couple came in and sat ... behind them, a large floral arrangement preventing them from being seen by the new arrivals. Thinking they were alone, this san- guine husband put his arm around his wife and exclaimed, 'Hasn't our relationship been beautiful since we discovered clitoral stimula- tion?' The dentist silently glanced at his wife and thought, 'We have never tried that.' That night they did, and ... that simple technique was like the key that opened the door to a beautiful relationship.

While we can only marvel at the provi- dential aspects of these events, it is not the kind of exemplum that we can imagine St Thomas Aquinas choosing to illustrate his observation that Grace works through Nature. But to Pastor LaHaye, it is just that: a story that 'shows evidence of God's abundant grace' in that the Heavenly Father of the unfortunate couple 'guided them to the right place at the right time to hear the information that He wanted them to know'.

It is also a story that takes us to the very heart of the pastor's mission to the mar- ried, at the epicentre of which is 'the most keenly sensitive organ in a woman's body', which 'your Heavenly Father placed there for your enjoyment'. His is a very intimate apostolate. It is not, however, unique. While in the sinful, secular world maga- zines such as Cosmopolitan have been offering to show women how to get them- selves to Heaven and back again through a better appreciation of their privities, Amer- ican evangelical Christians have been learning how to use similar methods not just to get there, but to stay there, too, along with their partners in marriage.

One result of this movement is that the 'Family and Relationships' shelves of Ameri- can Christian bookshops now groan under the weight of works such as Sexual Happiness in Maniage, Sex Without Fear, How to be Happy Though [sic] Married and the classic, co-authored by Dr and Mrs Ed Wheat, of Springdale, Arkansas, Intended for Pleasure: Sex Techniques and Sexual Fulfilment in Christian Marriage. Complementary audio- tapes available include 'How to Have Holy Sex', 'How to Have Hot Married Sex' and 'Hot Sexual Stimulation & the Chiistian Woman'. If you can't stand the heat, it seems, you should keep out of the bedroom.

Those who find the traditional Christian virtue of modesty an impediment to appre- ciating titles such as these should consider the fate of one young bride-to-be who dared to interrupt Pastor LaHaye during his usual talk on intimate relationships before marrying a couple:

Pastor LaHaye, do we have to talk about this? It embarrasses me. It will work out by itself.' No wonder this naive young lady

became pregnant during the first month of her marriage, and I would be surprised if she has yet learned sexual satisfaction.

It would be indelicate to imagine what the pastor thought that this innocent Christian virgin was missing when she was thrown to the loins on her wedding night, but something of its intensity is perhaps conveyed in the following testimonial to The Act of Marriage that was recently post- ed on the Internet:

Our Christian marriage is now hotter than a FIRECRACKER! • .. I had always been afraid to ask my husband to do what I wanted in the bedroom, thinking, foolishly, that he would come to think of me as one of the prostitutes he regularly ministers to as part of our outreach program. Well, did this book change my mind! I have learned that 'crotch- less' does Nov equal 'unsaved' ... Thank you, thank you!

While this is probably not a paragraph that the pastor's publishers will be putting on the cover of a future printing of one of his books, it certainly underlines his claim that Christians (and, more to the point, born-again Christians) 'enjoy the sublimi- ties of the act of marriage more than oth- ers in our culture'. Independent, secular surveys confirm that conservative protes- tant women claim to have more orgasms than do women of other denominations: 32 per cent of them 'every time', according to figures produced by the University of Chicago in 1994. And, of the wives who have attended Pastor LaHaye's family-life seminars down the years, 64 per cent claim such an achievement 'regularly or always'. Either his flock are loyally telling him what he wants to hear, or he really has got his finger (and theirs) on the button.

More important than the reliability of such statistics is the urgency with which their significance is asserted. The Act of Marriage devotes a whole chapter ('Sex Survey Report') to doing just that. Sexual satisfaction in marriage, it would seem, has joined visible material wealth as an indica- tor of one's membership of the Elect. But prayerful success in the boardroom is edi-

fyingly obvious; that in the bedroom needs to be boasted of to be noticed, and to bare one's success there is now a way of bearing witness to one's faith. 'Good' sex can save the marriages of the saved, making their unions stronger and leaving extramarital temptations to wither untasted on the vine. For, as one 'satisfied husband' quoted by Pastor LaHaye puts it, 'When you have a Cadillac in the garage, how can you be tempted to steal a Volkswagen off the street?'

Contemporary testimonies like this are mere grace notes; it is on Scripture that the evangelical crusade for conjugal ecsta- sy is based: The husband should fulfil his marital duty to his own wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (I Corinthians 7) St Paul here provides a firm footing for our contemporary evangelists' apostolate, but it is not long before their fundamental- ism and naivety cause them to tumble rapidly into absurdity. LaHaye's claim (on the very first page of The Act of Maniage) that 'although we lack any written report for proof, it is reasonable to conclude that Adam and Eve made love before sin entered the garden' is one thing; Dr Her- bert J. Miles's gloss on the Song of Solomon in Sexual Happiness in Marriage (which LaHaye quotes with approval) is, as they say, something else: The position of sexual arousal is described in the Bible in the Song of Solomon ii 6 and viii 3. These two verses are identical. They read as follows: 'Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me.' The word 'embrace' could be translated 'fondle', or 'stimulate'. Here, in the Bible, in a book dealing with pure married love, a married woman expresses herself with longing that her husband put his left arm under her head and that he use his right hand to stimulate her clitoris.

Books that contain nonsense like this are not only flawed, but flawed fundamen- tally. Below the Bible Belt, such works might enjoy (forgive me) mounting suc- cess, but they are unlikely to be respected anywhere by the critically alert, or by any- one with a developed sense of irony. And they are doubly foreign to Roman Catholics like me, who have to make our own weak way heavenward in a Church which has sexual struggles of a different kind. If ever I find myself suffering the sort of difficulties upon which the likes of LaHaye offer their clitorocentric counsel, I shall probably resort to my rosary. At least I don't need to be told where to find it.