There’s a new sexual revolution going on: young men and women getting off on not getting it on. Meet the Christian soldiers who are fighting the fire down below
Robin Power in this Brooklyn apartment he shares with Bryan Powell , smoking tobacco from their hookah, and Matt Dunbar . The conquests they brag about are the women they don't sleep with. On his right wrist, Power wears a "masturband," symbolizing one's control over carnal urges.WHAT IF THE TRUE FACE OF THE CHRISTIAN
“The world hasn’t yet seen what God can do with an army of young men free of sexual fevers,” write the authors of Every Young Man’s Battle, one volume in a hugely popular series of “purity” manuals. “You can remain pure so that you might qualify for such an army.” When I first meet Power, he’s working a gutter-punk look, a thick, dark beard and layers of ratty hoodies and buttons advertising deeply obscure bands. Faith, to him, is an ascetic discipline, its purity polished by constant self-criticism. “I can get aroused looking at a stoplight,” he says, his giant eyes leaving mine and following a woman down Broadway. They snap back to me and he says, “Anything can be inappropriate.
Since then, the Christian right has steadily reinvented itself by co-opting the language of the sexual revolution. Pastor Nelson Searcy, a roly-poly thirty-three-year-old Jimmy Buffett fan who moved from California, “called” by God as a pastor to New York, preaches not in a suit or a collar but in a hipster’s bowling shirt, and he references his Bible as often as he shows trailer clips from contemporary movies like The Stepford Wives and The Notebook.
Dunbar and Power at a recent party in their Williamsburg apartment, where their glam-goth band entertained guests with Eighties hits. Their brand of evangelical Christianity does not forbid dancing and drinking. Only premarital sex. Photo by Gillian Laub The Clearing-house has been working with the federal Centers for Disease Control, in part to establish a “gold standard” for abstinence-only sex-education programs in public schools. Meanwhile, this year the Bush administration is backing the movement with $167 million in public funds. By statute, these programs are secular, but Unruh considers herself broadminded enough to work within those guidelines.
The Every Man premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don’t stand a chance of resisting temptation in the form of premarital sex, masturbation and straying eyes. I first heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at the Journey, a twenty-five-year-old man who said he’d slept with forty women before he re-virgined with the help of the series.
They also offer a two-day “outpatient program” for women, Every Heart Restored, to help wives deal with their husbands’ depravity. The message there is that women are inherently more pure than men and thus simpler, and yet their sexuality is complicated and subtle. Husband and wife must play carefully scripted roles. “True manhood,” promises one Christian manhood guide, gets “polished by the hand of God.
Rushford giggles. “Ephesians 5:3,” she says — the signal verse for Christians who prize chastity.” ‘But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality.“Do you ever wonder what you’re missing?” I ask.Not knowing, he explains, is the best part, the biggest selling point of virginity for both Riley and Rushford.
Broadway poured her frustration into her blog, “Sexless in the City,” and revisions of a dense essay on John Cusack movies she’d written in graduate school, “The Cult of the Orgasm as Romantic Mysticism.” “In a world that functionally operates on atheistic terms throughout most of its supposedly separate and autonomous spheres,” she writes.
The world, she says, is pulsing with sex. Some of it ugly; some of it, like the Song of Solomon, very beautiful; and most of it stupid and sad. Most people, she says, can’t help but look at the world through what she calls the “flesh-colored lens.” But Christians, she says, see a different reality. Like The Matrix, she claims.
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