I’ll happily join the chorus pointing to this Faith and Theology post that takes Jesus and Foucault to suggest “why sex tells you nothing about what it means to be human.” It has a fabulous conclusion that touches on the often-forgotten centrality of friendship to the Gospel narratives.

I think this can be especially hard for Christians to grasp, since a very deep part of our moral formation has been the belief that human identity is ultimately wrapped up in the suburban bliss of family life. (On which, see the TV series Mad Men…) This is also why our churches are often so strangely inhospitable to “single” (read: pre-married) people. We simply can’t really believe that these people are fully formed human beings. And so we treat them with all the sympathy or suspicion or indifference that their estate demands; our charity might even compel us to subject them to the peculiar indignity of a “singles” social event, all in the hope that the bright truth of sex will at last dawn in their dark lives.

So what’s the upshot of all this? For one thing, I think Christians ought to take much more seriously the category of friendship, while thinking a good deal more critically about the unbridled theologisation of marriage and the so-called “family unit”. Is it at least possible that the idle carefree banter of friendship might tell us more about “what it means to be human” than any anxious confession of one’s darkest sexual longings or secrets? Might friendship itself – so lacking in anxiety, so free and undemanding – provide a much-needed critique of our culture’s profound sexual anxiety, an anxiety which is simply part and parcel of the dubious (and ultimately theological) doctrine that the truth of our humanness is disclosed in the truth of sex?

Faith and Theology: Why sex tells you nothing about what it means to be human.

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