Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by JD Unwin

Article in Journal of Christian Reconstruction 1977

And when a generation arrives which has known no sterner discipline, but which spends its early years in an atmosphere of submission to impulse, it does not add one whit to what has gone before, but, sinking into unrelieved lethargy, ekes out its meager existence in the grip of forces which it is no longer able to control. Its energy sapped by its own indulgence, its vision reduced to a single dimension, it finds that it can no longer cope with the ultimate causes of things, and there comes a loss of affirmation, a failure of nerve, a denial of the gods, and a despondent fear of the future.

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Of the marriage customs of the Cretans we have no knowledge. The sixteenth and fifteenth centuries were for them what the sixth and fifth were for Athens. All we know is that during that time there were female pugilists, female toreadors, and that women are depicted as driving chariots and hunting. They openly attended public functions, and seem also to have taken a leading part in religious ceremony. In no society which has attained civilization is there any record of women achieving such high position unless their rise has been accompanied by the adoption of a less rigorous form of marriage. But the evidence stops there.
…
A generation after Pericles, Demosthenes could say, “We have companions for the sake of pleasure, and wives to bear us legal offspring.” And divorce, at first in the hands of the man alone, became {29} possible for the wife. She had but to apply to the archon. Paederasty became a common indulgence—a thing unknown in Homer. Women could not endure the continual seclusion to which they were subjected, and clandestine love affairs were common amongst them, as was drunkenness.

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[The Reformers] reintroduced absolute monogamy after its practice had been much affected by organized and consistent exhortation to monasticism. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the complete adoption of their attitude, and England rose to her heights. Marriage as a lifelong association continued until the nineteenth century, when the first modifications were introduced. Further changes were made in the twentieth century, the two sexes being placed upon almost equal terms. Meanwhile the usual and inevitable female emancipation had taken place, and women became economically independent.

Page 47
There are in history many survivals (such as the avunculate, female eponyms, the permission of marriage between brother and sister german, but not uterine, etymological and philological phenomena, etc.) which can only be satisfactorily explained by concluding that at a time in the remote past, in the society amongst whom the survivals are found, mother-right prevailed; that is, when descent, kinship, etc., was reckoned solely through the mother. The evidence is supplemented by the quaint custom of the couvade which is found all over the world today.

Traces of matrilineal kinship and/or other customs pointing to mother-right are found among the Teutons, Greeks, Latins, Etruscans, Picts, Celts, Semites, Sumerians, and Aztecs; that is, among all the great civilized families of which we have continuous record.

Mother-right grew up as the result of the recognition of kinship. As McLennan was the first to point out, ideas of kinship, like many other things cognizable to the senses, grew, and there was a time when there was no recognition of it. And when kinship began to be appreciated it was uterine filiation which was first noted. Ideas of kinship through males came later. The priority of the recognition of kinship through females is accepted by all students as the more archaic

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The methods adopted to secure the children would naturally vary with the conditions obtaining in the locality. If there were a state of peace, through an intermediate step by which a husband had left his kin and taken up residence with the wife’s people whose sole mate he was, purchase would be the method to which they would have to resort. For the producer of valuable children would herself be of great value. Whether such purchased women were monandric or no would depend, perhaps, on the numerical proportion of the sexes, or on the customs which had preceded the change of residence on the part of the woman. Or it might be that there was a continual state of war between localities, and the women would become the prizes of the conquerors.

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My submission is that man, developing from homo sapiens, comes to regulate the relations between the sexes in such a way as to place limitations upon the expenditure of the force of life in a purely animal and sexual way, and these limitations compel him to expend it in different ways and put it into other channels. Once he has gained such power over his natural surroundings and over animals as to be able to have leisure from the incessant hunt for food and the common needs of life, if the customs which he has adopted prevent him from indulging his sexual appetite as and when he is so moved, he is compelled to turn elsewhere for an outlet for his energy. If there is no one at hand to fight (and fighting is the humblest form of sublimated activity), the enforced control of his energy drives him to reflection and contemplation

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And when a generation arrives which has known no sterner discipline, but which spends its early years in an atmosphere of submission to impulse, it does not add one whit to what has gone before, but, sinking into unrelieved lethargy, ekes out its meager existence in the grip of forces which it is no longer able to control. Its energy sapped by its own indulgence, its vision reduced to a single dimension, it finds that it can no longer cope with the ultimate causes of things, and there comes a loss of affirmation, a failure of nerve, a denial of the gods, and a despondent fear of the future.

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