Sex and Sexuality

The next four chapters of Foster and Tennant’s It’s Good to Be a Man focus in the main on sex and sexuality. I’ll be addressing problems with the first three and save the last for tomorrow. The problem here is that the chapters are short but the amount of criticism needed is much longer. So, I’m going to do my best to keep it short (fail!) in this section and maybe I’ll add other posts later on for things I just don’t get to in this first pass.

Foster and Tennant are working with a definition of dominion as “fruitfully ordering the world in God’s stead”. The problem with this definition is manifold. For one thing, God isn’t absent from the world and we’re not really acting in his place per se. He is present everywhere, sees all, and is all-powerful to both support and implement his dominion and ours in the earth both with us and through us. We don’t act in God’s stead, we act on his behalf in cooperation with his ongoing work. This is an important point we can’t miss because it helps us avoid the sort of rank error that sex in the main is what drives dominion rather than the many other things our Lord involves us in seeing the mandate come to fruition. God’s dominion and the dominion he offers mankind is not premised even in the main on physical procreation and saying sex is the engine of dominion is yet again reducing the variegated nature of what God has given us in dominion.

Foster and Tennant would have us believe that sex is the “union of male and female in one flesh” that “drives man forward in their created purpose of bringing heaven to earth by establishing God’s rule”. No biblical Christian denies the legitimate role of sexual union and having children as it pertains to the dominion mandate, but is sex itself really the engine that drives this car? How then does sex figure into the expansive dominion mandate we have in Christ to see all the nations come to him and live as they should?

No, the real engine of dominion is love expressed in God’s grace. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son’ who then worked to save it and establish Christ as King over all. We love him because he first loved us and that love expresses itself in everything we do. We shouldn’t even have to say this, but no sex was in play between Mary and her husband for the incarnation to occur and yet the Second Adam both established dominion for mankind in a way that the original Adam couldn’t and extended it far beyond the natural physical relationships of households and families. We’re seated in the heavenlies in Christ ruling with him already and not because sex drove us there.

Thirty percent of this book is on sex in one way or another and that’s probably a conservative estimate. But, does sex make up 30% of any man’s life? Does sex make up the primary focus of dominion sufficient to call libido the engine driving it? Here also is where Foster and Tennant remain thoroughly postmodern, perhaps even Freudian, because it’s the very lever of sexuality that Marcuse et al. use to corrupt our society in an effort to tear it down.

Further, for Foster and Tennant, sex is a matter of exercising power given their definition of what dominion actually is in establishing a household. For the authors, sex and more specifically the sex drive of men establishes households which establishes cities and eventually nations. Anyone who has read Foucault ought to be hearing alarm bells going off right about now! This isn’t Christian as much as it is a Foucauldian merry-go-round and only plays into a mindset that looks at power and relationships in a systemic way absent other pressing concerns. Foucault addressed how power works and not really the what or the why of it. Foster and Tennant are doing much the same with a very similar reductive approach and it’s no accident that both Foucault and Foster/Tennant find themselves concentrating in the main on sex.

Note that Foster and Tennant state that “union is not the end goal: it is the means to fruitfulness and productivity”. The instrumental view of union via sex Foster and Tennant hold here even excises love (what they call sentimentality) out of the equation. The word love between these chapters on sex only appears eleven times and six of them refer to what Satan loves! But, what does the Bible teach? The Scriptures speak about marital union in places like Genesis 2, Matthew 19, and Ephesians 5 and most certainly do not consider it merely a means to an end nor is love absent from its pages. A man is to love his own wife as he loves his own body, not divorce her, giving himself up entirely for her as they become one together. This is so much the case that Paul in Ephesians 5 invokes the language of marital union in reference to the church as Christ’s Bride. Are we really going to say that union with Christ is somehow only the means and not the telos of the church in coming to him? That doesn’t make any sense but that’s ultimately the conclusion Foster/Tennant would have to provide if they were consistent in how they look at this.

One of the most curious aspects of this book is all the Satan talk by Foster and Tennant. Satan is introduced as a foil to what they consider to be the right way to proceed especially when sex is being discussed. This too is a bit of a postmodern hat trick, ultimately providing an opposing dialectic rather than an actual biblical argument. Most of this talk about Satan, however, is speculation as to what Satan feels, thinks, and does and has very little in the way of biblical support. Foster and Tennant more than once claim that Satan’s chief desire is his own dominion and that his strategy is an attempt to tear down God’s hierarchy. Satan’s desire is set against man’s sexual desire here and that’s why it’s important to see the dialectic in play rather than an actual biblical argument. So, for Foster/Tennant, Satan presents androgyny as his key target and ideal whereas men’s libido is natural and desirable.

But, is this what we really find in the Scriptures about Satan? Was Satan after God’s hierarchy or redrawing gender lines in afflicting Job? There is a kernel of truth in the basic notion that Satan works against God and what he has established, but we’re dealing with a large movie popcorn here, complete with loads of butter and salt, and all of it cooked up for you to eat while you watch their version of the battle of the ages on Foster and Tennant’s big screen. Satan according to Foster/Tennant hates sex and “hates the whole system of biological sex…He is an enemy of male and female…He hates God’s kingdom, and the millions of atoms it is built up from: households”. But, the Bible doesn’t teach this about Satan or speak of him in this way.

Notice how a household for Foster/Tennant is ultimately something built physically. The chapter after this quote then proceeds to tell the reader that the war between patriarchies is ultimately spiritual. Foster/Tennant enforce a dualism here that is problematic and ultimately Gnostic. They then attempt to demonstrate that Satan’s plan and paganism’s original project was about establishing androgyny while God’s plan has been dominating power via proper sex all along. The problem with invoking paganism as a witness here is twofold. First, paganism was much more diverse, complex, and all-encompassing in the ancient world than whatever it wrongly did with sexuality. Really, the amateur level anthropological and sociological claims being made remain one of the worst features of this book.

The crowning sacrament of paganism as Foster/Tennant claim was not in fact misguided sexuality or blurring those lines but rather human sacrifice. So, again, Foster/Tennant are merely dealing in reductive glosses invoked to argue for something that is less than biblical. Secondly, Romans 1:28-32 makes it very clear that God gives men over to a depraved mind as a result of their sinfulness and not by virtue of some cosmic near deity working against him as the great villain of all things sexually pure.

Don’t get me wrong. Satan exists, paganism was bad, and there is real spiritual evil at work in this world. I’d submit, however, that Satan’s work is bigger and more widely felt than what one man might experience in his life. Yet, Satan also isn’t omniscient or omnipresent nor is he the master villain behind every corner. He’s not God and we shouldn’t pretend he’s only just short of being so. He roams about looking for people to devour, but in a planet of 2.5 billion Christians his influence has to be something different than individually directing each of us especially after the victory Christ has secured.

One of the clearest signs of a narcissistic American church and the sort of men’s movement that plays into it is making villains that take the blame for sin rather than dealing with the truth of the matter–the clear sinful actions of men that we accomplish all by ourselves quite without the help of some evil super villain. We’re not Minions and Satan simply isn’t the Felonius Gru. We need to get back to biblical religion and Foster/Tennant just don’t take us there.