Sex, Secularity and Belief in This World

This question, posed by our grade nine gym teacher who was doubling that day as sex educator, was a pivotal moment in sexual education at our Christian high school. It arose at the end of a lesson that laid out what our teacher assured us were the essential details of sexual activity. Above all, she explained, we were each going to have to be able to draw a line between what counts as sexual (initiated by “foreplay”) and what doesn’t. On one side of this line, we would enjoy a capacity for autonomy and choice, especially relevant in the context of exercising the choice to refrain from foreplay. On the other side, we would surely be drawn into an escalating intensity of sexed and gendered behavior, culminating in sex itself. In response to our teacher’s question, we decided as a class that kissing with the tongue was likely the best designate for “foreplay.” The best way to evade the slippery slope of sexual desire, then, would be to refuse the joys of French kissing. While I didn’t know the joke at the time, the now-familiar Mennonite quip seems consonant with this formative moment of Calvinist sex education (“Why do Mennonites refrain from sex? Because sex leads to dancing”). While the joke hinges on a misplaced anxiety by religious believers, so worried about dancing that they refrain from sex, it attests to another kind of anxiety: anxiety over teleology, especially the teleological force of nature itself. CHAPTER 2