Another Case of Missing the Point

God didn’t make perversion; that’s just a reflection of our fallen nature.

Most of the Western debate about sexual perversion is rooted in avoiding the revelation of God. Remember that sin is defined as arguing with the Creator; evil is anything different from what God says is morally good. And you cannot rightly claim that revelation is ambiguous about anything when revelation clearly demands that you submit from the heart, not from the head. For heart-led followers of Christ, there is never any ambiguity about what sin is within any given context. The ambiguity is in the mind, not in the heart.

So what we have, particularly in the West, is an entire civilization founded on arguing with God about everything. It argues with God about the very nature of being human and what it means to know something. It is so far afield from revelation that there is not a single thing it can get right, because the question isn’t what you do or what you think, but who you are and how you relate to God. The West is founded on the lies of Hell.

So it’s no surprise that the foundational Western Church gets things wrong, for her very sin of having compromised the legacy of the Hebrew-oriented faith taught by Jesus, and for her very conscious adoption of Western philosophical assumptions in order to retain priestly political power. And one of the things she gets wrong is the whole question of human sexuality. And her failure to get it right from the very start is the reason for the whole of Western Civilization getting it wrong. The problem in the Church with priestly perversion is the problem of being Western, a problem the Church created.

And all the various sects that broke off from Rome still bear the same seeds of self-destruction. Western Christianity never corrected the single biggest moral failure of being Western. Western Christianity is fortunate, indeed, to ever do anything right. People discover faith in spite of Western Christian religion, because God will not be denied.

The first step in correction is realizing that sexual desire is natural, not sinful. The original sin was not sexual intimacy. The original sin was stepping away from revelation and trying to reason out good and evil from human intelligence. Sex is neither good nor evil, but a necessity written into the flesh. You can do it right or you can do it wrong. The fundamental purpose of human life in the first place is to break the curse of the Fall by returning to revelation. Sexual relations, and how we do them, are a small part of that big job of restoring our access to Eden.

The West makes sexual satisfaction an idol. The mere presence of desire becomes the justification for perversion. Granted, the existence of desire is built in, something God did to our fleshly existence before the Fall. But that desire presumes a certain structure of life that provides a righteous path for requiting such desire. It’s aimed at building a covenant community of faith through procreation. The human instinct for possession, with all the jealousy and rage at betrayal, is a manifestation of righteousness. Perversion is in defying the familial trust structure that helps define shalom.

It’s not just homosexuality or pedophilia or necrophilia that we are arguing about here. Those are mere manifestations of perversion. Every human on the planet has a problem with perversion, with all kinds of variations. It’s only a minor question of what particular perversion troubles you. If you don’t admit it to yourself, you can’t bring it before God for healing. The more fundamental problem is why you insist on giving in to something that destroys God’s remedy for the Fall.

Sexual satisfaction of your particular desire is not an inherent human right. The Western soul rejects the whole structure of redemption (AKA, Biblical Law), so it’s no surprise that a very perverted moral sense demands a legal right to pursue whatever sexual satisfaction anyone can dream up. Western society is atomized and individualized, and has zero comprehension of the biblical model of a redemptive community — feudal covenant community. The business of healing through moral structure strikes Westerners as oppressive. The current public debate misses the whole point.

Yes, the Bible calls certain sexual acts “perverse.” Railing against that is missing the point. Furthermore, it’s a pernicious kind of lying that avoids going back to the root issue. It’s the silly juvenile dodging of fundamental issues by talking about everything and anything else. Sexual perversion is self-destruction. Your desires must be constrained; all of humanity has to constrain themselves sexually to escape the Curse of the Fall. Your particular brand of perversion isn’t the point.

All of this brouhaha is a debate about what the West should be, and avoids the question of how we can escape the prison of Western Civilization itself. If you don’t understand how the West is anti-Christian, then you cannot understand Christ. The problem is not queer priests, but the fundamental approach to faith. The Church not only left the path back to Eden, but has buried it to prevent anyone else finding it.