Book Review: Sex, God, and the Conservative Church

Rating: 3 Stars

I read this book to prepare me for leading a class at my church on sexual purity.

This book lays out a very well researched critique into Church purity culture, as well as the secular culture that the purity culture is reacting to. I think that most Christians who read this book will walk away thinking, “we must do better”. But I don’t think most Christians would embrace what Sellers is selling (lol) in particular.

The purpose of the book is to give tools for people who want to address sexual shame while “hold[ing] on to their faith orientation”. But if your faith orientation includes a “conservative” understanding of the bible and it’s significance, then this book will be of limited help.

I don’t think Sellers ever fully reveals their hand about what exactly they believe about the bible and how their faith is informed by it. Reading the book, it appears that their faith is equally informed by extra-biblical jewish texts and jewish commentaries. I’m just pointing out that this is not congruent with what many people would consider to be a “christian” tradition.

Sellers at one point discusses where they think christianity went wrong with its sexual ethic. They seem to indicate that even Paul made a “fatal” error in how to present sexuality. Considering Paul wrote most of the new testament and that his writings predate the gospels and are endorsed by Peter as scripture, Sellers’ claim here requires a radical overhaul of how christians view the new testament. I personally would not think I was holding fast to my “faith orientation” if I did that.

Sellers also dedicates a section “Hidden Treasure” to showing how “God has given us everything we need in […] the Old and New Testaments for understanding the profound purposes of sexuality”. I am super for this. But what she actually uses for her arguments are:

1. A story about the mirrors in the tabernacle from Midrash (or Jewish commentary) — I found out that Midrash postdate the new testament, throwing into question if they represent Jewish attitudes at the time of the writing of the Torah.
2. A word discussion of how the Hebrew words for man/woman have the letters Y and H meaning that sexual union symbolizes God. This was kind of cool but couldn’t you have just said “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”? (Maybe this would have contradicted the later assertion that Adam was not gendered).
3. Another set of Jewish scholars which compare the marriage bed to the holy of holies. Wow I think this idea is actually super cool and kind of makes sense to me. A claim that the cleansing ceremony people had to go through in order to have sex was similar to what the priest had to do to enter the holy of holies. Really skeptical of this. Did they have to wear all white like the priest? Did the man have to tie a rope around his ankle in case his wife killed him due to his impurity? Were they only allowed to make love on the day of atonement? Too bad there are no scriptural references at all to back this up in any way!
4. MORE Jewish scholars which muse that the tabernacle’s cherubim may be in a kind of pseudo-sexual embrace. Considering that the cherubim are supposed to represent the angels that are guarding Eden and will kill anyone who tries to enter, it’s kind of weird to me that they would be having sex.
5. The Song of Songs! Too bad Sellers does not really take time to unpack the only actual part of scripture referenced, other than taking a shot by saying conservative churches never teach it even though it’s taught to young adults to a point where it’s a meme for some.

Sellers also blindly asserts that although Jesus did not talk a lot about sex, he would be super down for a very permissive sex positive framework. I wonder what Sellers has to say about the passages where Jesus actually does talk about sex when he claims that sin begins with *looking* at someone in a certain way (right before he says to cut off your hand if it causes you to stumble), and also claims that to divorce someone and then remarry is akin to adultery. I wonder if these are among the most “sex-negative” passages in all of scripture.

Hey, I’m not upset (or surprised) that I disagree strongly with Sellers on some theological points. HOWEVER, this book is intended to be used with Christians that would like to “hold on to their faith orientation”. My critique is that I really don’t think it really delivers on that.