But when you walk a well-worn path, hardly having to think about what it is you are doing or where you are going, a serpent can trip you up. That’s what happened to Joe when he was thirty-four and began to ask questions. Is God kind and good? And if he is, how can it be that his grace and mercy are bestowed only on Church of Christ believers and not on Catholics or Presbyterians? How has the church evolved into that? What does it mean if one of your daughters is mentally retarded for no apparent reason? Surely God’s mercy has to be broader and more complex than he could ever have imagined.
So one day Joe Beam stood up in front of a Church of Christ gathering and said, “I’m submitting to you, my brothers and sisters, and I hope you’ll prayerfully consider it, that any individual who’s been baptized ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus,’ based on his faith, is a child of God. What I’m saying is there’s a lot of people in this religious world who’ve submitted to baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus based on their faith who accomplished remission of sins whether they realized it or not.”
Joe Beam did not feel like a heretic but he was called one, and the experience of being called one raised even more questions until one day he began to feel unhitched from the very thing on which he had constructed his life. Preaching no longer made sense. So he started building houses. He nearly went bankrupt.
You know where this is going, don’t you? It’s an old story in fundamentalism, especially among preachers. There is the defeated walk through the doors of a saloon, the women you find there, the divorce from your true love. One day you realize you are truly a fallen man. Joe spent three years in Satan’s icy grip, a period he calls his “drinkin’ and druggin’” phase. He became a regular at strip clubs, a pathetic figure telling jokes to the girls at night, working on a paving crew for a relative during the day, and aside from hell itself, there isn’t anything quite as hot as laying asphalt during a southern summer. The drinkin’ and druggin’, the porn, the strippers. They all congealed into one giant sin until God finally figured Joe had had enough. One night he almost killed himself in a car and he could have killed other people, too, if not for God’s guiding hand, and when he woke up in a hospital he did not even know where he was exactly until an old friend said, “What the hell are you doing?”
Joe Beam got mighty humble after that, crawled back to his wife, begged for forgiveness, and tried to make a new start. By some miracle, the grace of God, or maybe just because he was lucky enough to know a woman like Alice, she took him back and he became a different human being because he had just experienced the power and glory of redemption. When Joe Beam tells this story to somebody who asks him about the power of redemption, somebody who wants to know if maybe this is what his mission is all about, he thinks of Alice and tears up and his chin quivers, and Joe Beam is not even a crying sort of man.
This can seem like the Jimmy Swaggart moment, the Jim Bakker moment, the Ted Haggard moment, the tearful confession, the verbal prostration, the forgiveness and salvation. I won’t blame you if you’re skeptical, if you think Joe Beam’s watery eyes are just a way of saying, “Look at me! I am you! God loves me! He’ll do it for you, too, no matter what you’ve done. Pull back from the brink. There’s a home for you here.”
Listening to him, though, I have my doubts Joe Beam is any Jimmy Swaggart. Sure, he uses the shtick, but he also says he learned a few things out there in the wilderness of sin. The awful fact is, Joe liked some of the strippers. He liked bedding different people. He liked sex, and the view he got of sex outside that stained-glass tower sure was a lot more interesting than the view inside it.
He returned home to Alice understanding that sex, even sinful sex that made you feel guilty later, could be fun. As he and Alice worked on their reborn life together, they thought they might be able to help others avoid their pain by having that kind of sex in their marriages. He and Alice reasoned that Christians have been blocked. Whom can they turn to if they want to ask if they were sinning when a man stuck his finger in his wife’s anus? Not Dr. Ruth. A lot of Christians, Joe knew, figured Dr. Ruth was just another sick unbeliever. No, there had to be somebody from the evangelical inside, somebody who would say, Heck no, my friend, you are not sinning and as a matter of fact here are a few tricks you can perform with that finger, and then they could enjoy the sweet wicked moment of having that forbidden door open before they drove home to said wife and said anus. That’s what Joe wanted to give. So in 1994 Joe and Alice started Family Dynamics, partly to tell Christians that all the great sex, all the erotic excitement, he had outside his marriage, just about all the nasty, licentious temptation they saw outside their own marriages, can be, should be, and must be available inside theirs. No need to leave the fundamentalist fold and go exploring.
So there he is launching into a mini-lecture on smooth muscle in the penis, blood flow, and female lubrication. “For men, sex is a reaction,” he says. Then: “How long do you think it takes her to get ready for sex?”
“Hour and a half!” a man shouts from the back.
“Hour and a half? Well, I can tell you won’t get any sex today!”
We all laugh.
“See, this is what I hear from women all the time. They say, ‘How can I get my husband to quit going for the touchdown until’”—Joe’s voice drops dramatically—“‘he’s called a few plays?’”
More laughing. Deidra nudges Morris.
Men are blowing it, Joe says, because we don’t fully appreciate the sexual power of women. A woman can come, climb back down onto a plateau of pleasure, then come again. Men take time to recover. We’ve got a single-shot pistol. All this is standard sex counseling, not much different from the stuff I’ve heard at sexology conventions or can read in any popular secular magazine or my own column for that matter. The difference is that Joe tosses in references to God and the Bible.
“Why can women be multiply orgasmic and men not? Well”—he addresses the women—“I think God just likes you better!”
See, if men did it right, we could give women one orgasm after another and he can prove it. God said so. It’s right there in the Bible, in the Song of Solomon: “My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or young hart upon the mountains of Bether.”
“What does that tell you about Solomon if he makes love to her all night long, until the daybreak?” Joe waits a beat. “That he’s the king and doesn’t have to go to work in the morning!”
General cracking up.
No, seriously, he asks us, what’s going on here? None of us gets it.
“‘Feedeth among the lilies’? ‘Like a roe or young hart’?”
“Oh,” one man says, his face lighting up. “He’s going down where the sun don’t shine!”
Yes, Joe says. It’s oral sex. Cunnilingus. The mountains of Bether are her pubic mound. Solomon is going down on his wife and making it last a long, long time. “I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate”? Holy cow!
“If you do it right, it takes longer than half an hour,” Joe scolds the men, “unless you go like this: Slthfpthfslthpf.” He slurps his tongue like an overheated Dalmatian. Deidra is staring at Morris.
Not only are oral sex and orgasms biblical, they can be important.
“Christians should be having great sex lives. We should be having better sex than anybody else!”
A few of us have gone wide-eyed. Others are excited, smiling wide grins that have nothing to do with salvation and the welcoming arms of Jesus. Not only has Beam talked about oral sex right out in the open, he approves. He’s encouraging! This is the first time some of us, including me, have ever heard this message from a self-described man of God. The big room has gone buoyant with relief, enthusiasm, joy.
Joe builds on the swelling mood. You might be surprised, he says, how many commonly assumed sins aren’t really sins at all! “You can have fun!”
“Amen!” somebody shouts.
This is the crux of Beam’s message. The secular world has nothing to offer you that you cannot have within the sacred bonds of your marriage. Joe believes that “one of two things is happening in evangelical marriages. One or the other wants to do something they are not doing because they are scared God is going to zap them, so they live with this frustration, or they are doing it and feeling guilty about it. When someone who is considered to be a Christian authority says, ‘Hey, it’s okay,’ they have peace. They can enjoy it and not think they are going to die and go to hell in the middle of it. They assume they are wrong because they have been taught everything is bad. So they go outside their marriage to get it and say, ‘Oral sex is pretty cool. I enjoyed the way that felt’ and that’s so frustrating to me. Why can’t we get that kind of freedom inside marriage?”
We learn just how much freedom we can have in marriage when Joe tells us to turn to page 32 in our workbooks. He throws up a slide summarizing the page, a list of God’s prohibitions. “A great deal of what the Bible teaches about sex comes in the form of prohibitions,” the book states. “Don’t let that make you think God is against sex. He made it! But he made it to be enjoyed in His design—not in any human aberration of that design.”
I’m not really surprised when I read down the list. God is pretty firmly opposed to having sex with your mother. You can’t have it with your father’s new wife, either, though I once knew a kid who dreamed of doing exactly that because his dad’s new wife was about thirty and very sexy, which was, of course, why she was his dad’s new wife. No sex with stepsisters or sisters or the grandkids, your aunt, sisters-in-law, daughters, or granddaughters.
No homosexuality. In the Bible you get the death penalty. No shock there, but Joe seems very sensitive about this when he says it, almost apologetic. He’s bound by the Bible, he insists. It’s not a political choice or a prejudice. “If you are a literalist, you have to understand the Bible says you cannot do that.” Then he moves on quickly as if walking on hot coals.
No adultery, fornication, rape, prostitution, or sex with animals or women having periods. Joe says that this particular law was created for Old Testament–era health reasons that no longer apply and so maybe you can have sex with a menstruating woman, but “others feel that it lists God’s view of the sanctity of blood and should still be observed by Christians who respect God’s feelings.”
Even though Joe has given this seminar hundreds of times, he seems to struggle with two entries on the list. The first is from St. Paul the Apostle again, who told the Corinthians, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor your God with your body.”
Well, he asks us, what does that mean? What could harm the body?
“Whips and chains?”
“Well, yes.”
“Anal sex?” somebody asks.
Joe appears grateful for the segue from whips and chains. “Anal sex? Well, let’s talk about that a minute. All the doctors have told me anal sex does irreparable harm to the anus. Remember, it’s only wrong if it harms the body. Now the vagina can be stretched. It’s made for that, for childbirth, and men, if you want to understand the effect childbirth has on the vagina, all you have to do is take a Ping-Pong ball and force it up your penis!”
The women seem to think this is very funny.
“Now, my belief system says you should not do anal sex because it harms the body, but you should check with your doctor about that. If it doesn’t harm the body, then my argument falls apart.” Joe leaves no doubt that he would prefer everybody under the tent stay out of each other’s butts. As I look around, though, I see faces giving this some serious consideration.
Lust also appears to create a problem. Our workbooks read, “Jesus said it like this: ‘You have heard that it was said, Do not commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’”
That seems straightforward enough until Joe looks at us and says, “Look at what’s not up there. What would you expect to see?”
“Why isn’t masturbation up there?” somebody asks.
Onan was struck down by God after “spilling his seed upon the ground,” which would seem to be a rather definite sign of disapproval. But that’s not what God was doing, Joe teaches us. God struck Onan down because Onan disobeyed God by not impregnating his dead brother’s wife as God had commanded. There is nothing in the Bible that says you can’t masturbate. “You cannot say this is a sin,” he insists.
I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or to argue with the guy. My entire adolescence was shaped by my belief that wanking was a sin. The sinfulness didn’t stop me, but I built an edifice of reactionary beliefs based on the evils of masturbation. If masturbation wasn’t wrong at all, then I wasted a lot of schoolboy guilt and more complex rationalization of my behavior than Thomas Aquinas.
Just when I think he’s gone far off the deep end, Joe pulls back with a caveat. Masturbation is only sinful if it involves lust for anybody other than your wife or husband. “If you masturbate thinking about somebody else, it’s wrong.”
I am soothed by the reintroduction of sin, but also fascinated that Joe has suggested such a conundrum. You can masturbate, but you can’t think about anybody but your wife? What if you’re twelve years old and don’t have a wife and you can’t help thinking about the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders no matter how hard you try to think of St. Agatha having her breasts cut off? What if you do have a wife and your brain flashes on—I don’t know—Jean Harlow in The Public Enemy or that Versace dress Elizabeth Hurley once wore? What if you start out thinking of your wife in the Versace dress, but she looks a little like Elizabeth Hurley?
As I sit listening to Joe, I begin silently debating him even as I grow fonder of him. He seems to be doing a lot of good preaching the gospel of hot sex in marriage. He gives up to thirty of these seminars per year (his organization also gives talks on other family-life topics) to roughly one hundred people at a time, so he makes a good living talking and selling his books, but he’s not getting rich. I think he is utterly sincere. Still, it sure seems as if his take on the Bible and sex and the prohibitions depends an awful lot on that Song of Solomon.
I think this is a pretty big problem. Relying on scripture, and calling it infallible, is a trap and why, I think, sex and lust have presented such tormenting puzzles to Christians. The Bible is full of contradictions about sex. According to the book of Kings, Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, not exactly the lifestyle that fits Joe’s worldview. And as for not hurting the body, St. Paul wrote, “I chastise my body to bring it into subjection,” a favorite of some nuns I used to know who were experts at chastisement with a yardstick.
The fact is, some early Christian fathers were antisex. The very reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians Joe uses to introduce the sex portion of his seminar begins, “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” That’s a pretty simple declaration. Paul understands that we all have baser natures, however, and so we can’t all be celibate, like he is. So he grants the value of sex grudgingly. Marital sex is permitted as castor oil, bitter medicine we can take to avoid the much greater sin of fornication.
“I speak this by permission and not of commandment,” Paul writes. “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows. It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.”
According to Paul, “He that standeth steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power of his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well. So then he that giveth her in marriage doeth well: but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth
better.”
The early church fathers—Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine—looked at the same scripture Joe is using and preached virginity, the better to hasten the end of the world and call forth the Second Coming. They were suspicious of the erotic power of women, and the role of lust even in marriage, the very thing Joe is celebrating. I’m on Joe’s side when it comes to the value of lust and good sex, believe me. But as I sit and listen, I don’t see how he can base this teaching on the Bible, and honestly, though it pains me to suggest it, I think Joe might be tying himself up in a knot of logic. I’m pretty sure Paul would not have been a fan of going down on your wife, no matter what the Song of Solomon says.
So I wonder if even fundamentalist Christians are having to accommodate, and if all the contradictions in the Bible could be one reason evangelicals long preferred to ignore the topic. Why would they even have to mention it? Every believer knew what was sinful and what was not, and pretty much everything was sinful unless official doctrine explicitly approved it. Actually it was assumed to be sinful because church leaders didn’t address it. Sin was simply the default position. Masturbation wasn’t just sinful, it was bad for you, a sign of perversion, a weak mind, a drain on manly reserves. Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, famously told his youthful acolytes in the first 1908 manual that a masturbating boy “quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind and often ends in a lunatic asylum.”
All that changed around 1970. A few Christian leaders realized that pop culture had changed the dialogue. TV increasingly beamed hints of sex into the homes of America. Playboy was mainstream. Naked hippies mucked around at Woodstock. The church was no longer a refuge. Believers could see for themselves what the unbelievers were up to. Somebody had to say something.
America Unzipped Page 6
