Sexualized Religion/Sanctified Sexuality: Religion and Sexuality Out of the Sacred Closet

Of all the polarities around which the modern study of religion is organized—text/practice, rational/emotional, private/public, and so on—the most resilient and enduring has been the good/bad religion binary. This is so even after many decades of critical self-scrutiny in the field of religious studies. Who ought to know this better than we scholars of Catholicism and Mormonism do? The religions we study have been repeatedly framed, separately and sometimes together in malicious comparison, as paradigmatically bad religions. Both have functioned, at different times, as essential religious others in the making of the normative category “modern,” as in “modern American religion.” By modern religion, here and throughout, I mean “religion” as understood and advanced by modernizing elites, including academics, in the United States and around the world, in the seventeenth through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “Religion” in this normative sense is circumscribed and disciplined; it exists within the limits of human reason and individual privacy; it is a matter primarily of the mind and soul, not so much the body, and it is produced and protected by national constitutions and courts. By way of contrast, modernity has repeatedly cast up various formulations of bad religions, a proliferation of fever dreams of the religiously impure, inflected by race, class, and gender. These bad religions were often figured in one way or another in the image of Catholicism first and then later of Mormonism. This is our inheritance, too, as scholars of religion generally, of these two religions in particular.The lurid catalogue of the un- or pre- or anti-modern features of Catholicism and Mormonism included their allegedly “magical” rituals; their supernaturally anointed church authorities who spoke with more-than-human warrant; the level of obedience expected from practitioners that violated modern understandings of the autonomous subject; and the ongoing relationships both cultivated between the living and the dead. But the most damning grounds for identifying Catholicism and Mormonism as bad religions have had to do with sexuality. In the modern era, sexuality is secular. When sex appears in religious contexts, as it inevitably does, it is seen as out of place. This is why studies of religion and sexuality so often focus on the aberrant and criminal, on the ethical, or, more recently, on the queer. It is as if sexuality necessarily becomes aberrant and criminal precisely in its proximity to religion or that any appearance of sex in religious contexts is inherently queer. The only destiny of sexuality in religious settings, then—and the only reason to talk about it—is to render it moral, to discipline it, and, in this way, to normalize it.1Not surprisingly, then, sex is what outsiders have found most frightening (and titillating) about Catholicism and Mormonism; in particular, the celibacy of ordained men and vowed women religious in Catholicism, plural marriages in Mormonism, first as doctrine and practice, then as a lingering haunting, and as a secret possibility on the community's outlying edges. Celibacy and plural marriages upset the sexual ordering fundamental both to modern religion and to the modern nation-state in their mutually constitutive relation to each other. Sexuality in these two religions likewise breached the buffered boundaries of the modern subject/citizen in the Catholic sacrament of confession and the Mormon discipline of “worthiness” interviews, for example, both of which endowed ordained and anointed men with the responsibility and authority to probe for closely-held secrets, perhaps especially sexual ones. Finally, there was the divinely mandated duty in both religions to procreate. Large families were, for Catholics and Mormons alike, evidence of their faithfulness, while to their critics such fecundity was taken as further documentation of the two religions’ sexual excess and gross materiality.The problem was not simply sex, however, but the specifically religious aspect of Catholic and LDS sexuality. In other religious worlds, sexually perverse or deviant actors may be treated as sinners to be forgiven, psychologically troubled individuals to be treated medically or psychologically, or criminals to be prosecuted. But plural marriage and celibacy remain integral, respectively, to Mormon and Catholic ontologies, ecclesiologies, and theologies and to the religious subjectivities formed in these environments. Clerical celibacy in the modern era was analogized to Jesus’ redemptive and substitutionary suffering on the cross; as such, priests’ sexual purity was integral to eucharistic theology. Plural marriages were “celestial law.” In both religions, sexuality is fundamentally implicated in the status, privileges, and authority of the male priesthood and of men generally (which raises the question of why anyone is surprised when these men exercise this privilege). Sexuality is constitutive of both religions. For this reason, sexuality and doctrine in Catholicism and Mormonism have appeared to outsiders as perversely amalgamated and fused in such a way as to contaminate the two religions generally.2Catholicism and Mormonism, respectively, then, have existed in problematic, sexually charged political and religious relationships with normative religious modernity. Not surprisingly, outsiders have projected into both religious worlds fantasies and possibilities denied them elsewhere as bourgeois religious subjects, along with their terrors; as a result, the discursive idioms of anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism, complex amalgams of the political, religious, and pornographic, have been powerful instruments of social discipline. Not surprisingly, again, violence has erupted at the intersection between Catholics or Mormons, respectively, and other citizens; sometimes Catholics or Mormons originated this violence, and sometimes it came from outside. The boundaries between Catholics and the modern world, Mormons and the modern world, have been closely guarded, and Catholics and Mormons have been as capable of dehumanizing others as they have been dehumanized themselves. Non-Catholics and non-Mormons have demanded that both churches bring themselves in line with modern political, religious, and sexual expectations or else suffer the consequences determined by modern governance; sometimes these campaigns coincided with internal reform movements (in which cases, the reformers were usually seen as traitors by their more “traditional” co-religionists). The result is that there came a time in the histories of both communities when the two churches sought to renegotiate their relationship with the worlds around them, occasions of public purification, civic and religious, with consequences at once for the lived experience of their members and for the historiographies of the two religions.Catholicism's purification took place in the late sixteenth century when in response to Martin Luther's fierce denunciation of the church's sexual hypocrisy—parish priests and monks regularly and openly broke their vows of celibacy, Luther charged, while at the same time imposing a crushing sexual discipline on ordinary people—the Council of Trent reaffirmed clerical celibacy; in the following centuries, priests’ sexuality would be subject to mechanisms of discipline, punishment, and surveillance to ensure compliance, among them the Inquisition. For Mormons, the key moment of purification, following decades of violence, was the turn away from plural marriage, codified in the 1890 Mormon Manifesto. In both cases, these steps towards purification were taken as definitive breaks from the past. After 1890, Taylor Petrey writes, “the Mormon family was expected to be strictly monogamous and well-ordered,” and this is how it would be presented to the world. In Catholicism, Trent's reform resulted in what I have come to think of as the Tridentine consensus, which held that the council's reforms were effective in sexually disciplining priests. In the historiographies of Catholicism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Council of Trent and the Mormon Manifesto became the articulatory pivots of narratives of sexual purity, instantiating a religious/sexual temporality of before and after that relegated sexual/religious activity, sexual confusion and dissent, and sexual violence by religious figures to the past.3In both cases, this was accomplished despite what was actually going on in parishes and wards, in the missionary fields, among Indigenous peoples, in schools, orphanages, and seminaries, in relationships between Catholics and non-Catholics, Mormons and Gentiles, and in Catholic and LDS families. A curious disconnection developed in the histories and self-understandings of the two churches: while outsiders remained fixed on what they perceived as the enduring sexual transgressions of these two not-completely modern religions, Catholics and Mormons held their churches up publicly as unique paragons of sexual virtue in the modern age, dismissing all reports of sexual wrongdoing as calumnious. In other words, fundamental to the religious, political, and moral authority of both churches in the modern era, post-purification, were the sacred closets both had made of and for themselves.The posture of moral grandiosity and sexual superiority in the two churches reached its apogee during the decades after the Second World War. Americans generally cast the Cold War as an ontological and existential conflict between absolute good and absolute evil. It was one of the contributions of the Catholic and LDS churches to situate this cosmic contest on the grounds of human sexuality generally, the patriarchal family in particular, the bodies of women, children, and adolescents even more particularly. “Sex . . . is the means by which nations are sculpted and maintained,” cultural critic Olivia Laing writes. Sex is also the way churches-in-nations are sculpted and maintained. Catholic and Mormon patriarchal families would preside over a sexual/political/religious order that disciplined women and young people and ensured adherence to divinely mandated gender roles on behalf of national vitality, virtue, and prestige. The two religions, separately but contemporaneously and addressing themselves to different populations, added a dimension of sanctified sexual excess to Cold War political and sexual ideologies. That the image of the prewar patriarchal family as conjured by the two churches was largely a misogynist fiction only made the two institutions more determined in its defense.4One key component in this campaign of post-World War II patriarchal restoration was the disciplining of women of all ages, especially those who objected to or dissented from the public sexual regime. Catholic and Mormon church leaders demanded young women bear children immediately after marrying. Contraception had been finding greater acceptance among American Protestants before the war, but Catholics and Mormons absolutely prohibited it then and continued to do so with particular vehemence in the Cold War era. (The LDS Church eventually changed its position; the Vatican reaffirmed the ban on birth control in 1968.) The two churches believed that their large families revealed to godless Communist nations and to their non-Catholic and non-Mormon fellow citizens at home, how courageously and unselfishly some Americans were in defense of their principles.5We know from philosopher Kate Manne's brilliant phenomenology of misogyny that in patriarchal regimes, women's primary role is to be of service to men and boys; their demeanor is to be correspondingly servile. Otherwise, they will be punished. Silence is a core component of women's subjectivity in these contexts, especially when what must not be spoken has to do with the family or the church, institutions so closely aligned with each other in the Cold War era among Mormons and Catholics as to be in both communities a single ontological entity. When external forces and realities challenge the regime's givenness, the imperative of women's silence becomes more exigent. This was true among Catholics in the United States in the years just before and especially after the Second World War, as the daughters and granddaughters of the immigrant generations came of age, entered the workforce, and began making decisions about dating, sexuality, and marriage. When the resulting strains on family hierarchies led to men becoming abusive or violent, women were instructed by the priests they turned to for counsel to accept the situation in a spirit of humility and obedience; doing so would contribute to their husbands’ moral and religious reform as well as to their own spiritual development. Among Mormons, absent the tradition of religiously valorized pain and suffering in Catholicism, the requirement of silence appears to have been framed pragmatically, not religiously, for protecting male authority, family privacy, and institutional reputations. Here, too, the imperative was female silence.6I understand that the religious history of sexuality and gender—or the gendered and sexual history of religion—is rarely linear or unconflicted. There was debate and dissent in Catholicism and Mormonism about sexuality and sexual ethics in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Some ordinary Catholics and Mormons, moreover, undoubtedly resisted their religious leaders’ sexual imperatives; some religious authorities, out of compassion, wisdom, or realism, may have bent the rules when they advised individuals and couples about sex. This all belongs to the terrain of lived religion. I am also aware, however, that dissenting from mandates on such intimate matters might and often did have terrible emotional, religious, and psychological repercussions. It is not an easy matter to object to what ordained or anointed men say is good and necessary for you to do with and to your bodies and the bodies of others, especially when supernatural consequences are at stake. Scrupulosity is a well-defined religious problem in Catholicism; there may be something like it in Mormonism. How people live with, against, or somewhere in between, obedience and dissent are among the most elusive questions in religious history, and this is especially true in sexual matters.7The Cold War era of Catholic and Mormon sexual heroism and superiority gave way in the latter decades of the twentieth century to a of debate in both churches over sexual ethics and sexual in the and about the sexual and of religious authorities began in the at first as then a in Catholicism, in other churches and too, the LDS church among It was as if some in the the sexual and of men (and of had way, as it and their by into the that sexuality is to religion. violence, even when by religious figures in their as such, even within the of the had to do with religion, it was it came from from sexual of late modern for or from the movements among women and people for and The for and sexual in churches were further the of sex in religious that sexual violence in religious contexts, or simply sexuality more generally, has to do with that its not by the who this or ought than we scholars of Catholicism and in religious contexts out of and is by the of the different religions, their lived religious and the relationships they it often in with the various religious men and women are of or they are and are to punishment, and or they are themselves to the This all may the of sexual actors or the of and When sexual sexuality more in sacred it is not simply these are the religious practitioners regularly but it is in these that particular religious actors and do these priests their that to have sex with an ordained was a like from formed in Catholic some of their were to at for a many Catholic priests themselves as to the and men and women, they their sexual them that the of their sexual violence within the Catholic of and as they cast themselves in the role of A a of young women with to the religious in which them through spiritual that intimate sexual with to have of as the various psychological reports on but the young women to themselves in sex with Christ as in an religious of the question of obedience to is at as it in such how we to talk about such sexual as or even they are or is to about of plural marriage, matter what it scholars of religion, we ought to when authorities and their in and confusion to responsibility sexually by men of authority in the church must of for what a LDS at the turn of the twenty-first century. church will your if it be Catholic and LDS authorities that about what was to them only to or with the in they also instructed that it would be if was publicly about the Catholic church psychological to they usually them to who would reports of their sexual and psychological histories for by the church's this the women, and children sexually by men of with this what what did this say about what of they at you your your is in Catholicism and Mormonism a unique challenge of and in relation the and problem I relation to the question of religion and the a that not in what might be the sexual theologies or of the two religions or in their of the In of writes, did not plural marriage as a or even a of found their way into understood plural marriage as a religious or is there for as a that not immediately what it is that (and mean into another such as or or or what do we when we as scholars of religion, the moral and of such if we the by the and the of and to something that is in the silence and of the of Catholic sexual that for years they or to about or to understand what an other as the is in modern Catholic to was the result of how formed they were in the Catholic and so was their a religious say they were only to over The between religion and sexuality is so and it is so much a matter of modern sense that it it to of their even to those most by But over the or so as a result of their and with each and and with the of and authorities, men and women sexually by religious figures have the that the between sexual all sexuality, and in philosopher words, and found their have been their of religion, and for those of who study religion them a of which we might to by what they say not as but as a to about religion and sexuality the of the was as Olivia Laing about experience of sexual violence, had come evidence of a that was and evidence of the for the study of it not by that sexual are into of religious That the most religious and the religious suffering are in the of human sexuality is not one It is about and it may be and possibility or or it is about and it the body, the and the it is about and and it is at once and in of this in and over time and in different and plural marriage, writes, of for The on marriage in an the of the of the to their It took place within the of and to those sexuality as one of the of say so not of and it is the of such In any such questions do not away from religious as the modern of both religion and sexuality would have it, but into The study of Catholicism and the good/bad religion with sexuality in the and to think about how the realities of human sexuality through religious with their hierarchies and often and including the human relationship with the and how various in these these control them, and control of them, them and suffer focus on sexual violence the that once this is with, the good on the and so religions will be and the of the sacred will once be sexuality, once This is the of the sacred It religious by the sexual secret sexual and by the of how they live also through and religious consequences of their But if religion is fundamentally about as I have and on and between and then sexuality is necessarily to it, sexuality in the sense I violence is not it is a of the sexual phenomenology of we scholars of religion have even if only in when we were at other religions. has been a as have religions and modern in the When it to normative modern religion, however, as and practice, we have been by the of sexuality and its religious But the evidence has been there in for another way of How many do we to about a sexual before we understand that this is not evidence of a in the it is the This is the about the sacred it is made of There is a tradition of clerical for example, and of the spiritual and moral of the to priests and that to an in Catholicism of the sexual and of the the subject of sexual violence, of more to be relegated to the of on modern Catholicism, to and in I the same may be true of Mormonism as I am then is the of a and of and sexual and must and how sexuality was and constitutive of religious authority, its its and its its but also its and I do not that religiously endowed sexual not have a on those to it is ought to about the of sexuality through and religious as well as in religious with the public It has taken of sexual violence within the of the sacred and the of around the to bring to the question of the sexuality of modern religions. are in a better to sexuality as not to the religious but as constitutive of not but to religious