We’ve been following John & Charles Wesley’s missionary journey to Georgia (start here if you’ve missed out), and now we come to a critical point in the Wesley’s lives. As John wrestles with the place of his sexuality in his own ideals of Christian perfection, Charles wrestles with his place in ministry, and decides to walk away from the mission. The Bad Romance series is one of the earliest Wesley Bros comics I ever did, retelling the messed-up love story of 30-something John and his 18-year-old parishioner, Sophy Hopkey, through the coming-of-age lens of the movie Grease. This week, we meet Thomas Causton, Sophy’s guardian uncle in America and chief magistrate under Gov. James Oglethorpe in Georgia. Causton had a caustic personality, and was willing to stir up dissension challenging Oglethorpe’s authority, especially when Oglethorpe wasn’t around. What’s more, Causton was dealing corruptly with the Moravian settlers, who had been so important to Wesley’s faith. Oglethorpe had placed John Wesley as his pastoral representative in the community, and Wesley remained loyal to the Governor, reporting Causton’s misuse of colony funds, resulting in his removal from political office. All the while Wesley was courting Causton’s niece, Sophy.
John’s journal about his relationship with Sophy reads like a 90’s True Love Waits ‘zine article. Over the years, interpreters run the gamut describing John as either a sexually naive innocent or a sexually repressed manipulator. John and Sophy met on the boat to America, and he quickly recognized a fondness for her both as a young person desiring holiness and education, and as someone he was sexually attracted to. Their age difference was not uncommon at the time as far as romance goes, nor was it unheard of for a pastor to marry someone in his parish. Next week, we’ll dive more into the direction their relationship became damaging. For now, I want to focus on the more universal ways this story reveals the Christian’s mistrust of healthy sexual desire.
Very early on, Christians adopted a philosophical divide between the soul and body, rooted not in scripture but in Latin and Greek philosophy. The body is inherently bad, and the soul must somehow rise above the desires of the body, especially those desires pertaining to human sexuality. John Wesley himself actually challenged this Augustinian worldview in his sermon On Perfection, saying:
“A sinful body? I pray observe, how deeply ambiguous; how equivocal, this expression is! But, there is no authority for it in Scripture: the word, sinful body, is never found there. And as it is totally unscriptural, so it is palpably absurd. For no body, or matter of any kind, can be sinful; spirits alone are capable of sin. Pray in what part of the body should sin lodge? It cannot lodge in the skin, nor in the muscles, or nerves, or veins, or arteries; it cannot be in the bones any more than in the hair or nails. Only the soul can be the seat of sin.” Sermon 76, I.9.
John Wesley reminds us that Paul’s use of the word we translate “flesh” cannot be dissected from “soul.” For Wesley, this distinction is important for his doctrine of Christian Perfection, because he believes scripture to proclaim that God sanctifies the entire being, soul AND body. Human sexuality is not innately sinful, to be suppressed or eradicated by some spiritual mind-over-matter asceticism. Rather, sexual desire is a gift from God, a good for you and for the world, that is sanctified and made perfect through the love of Christ.
I wish there was more I was comfortable to teach about this matter, but now I must speak from a place of vulnerability. I am learning that many, and I mean MANY, in my generation who came to adolescence and faith in the 90’s are experiencing such deep levels of shame around our sexuality that therapists equate our symptoms to those of children who experienced sexual trauma. Studies are finding that the cultural phenomenon of abstinence-only education in public schools, coupled with the True Love Waits movement of the 90’s and 2000’s, while well-meaning, have functioned to create an entire generation that subconsciously believe all of our sexual desires are embarrassing and sinful. I used to belong to small groups of young men similar to myself that would get together weekly in high school and college to confess to each other with deep shame that we had normal sexual desire. The same religion that sought to set us free from shame inadvertently taught us that it was shameful and wrong for us to have or express sexual desire before we were married, that normal sexual desire was really sinful lust, that it was somehow “cheating” on our future spouse. In our attempts to be pure and holy, we continue to talk about sexuality in ways that lock people in fear and shame and confuse our ability to see how it can be a healthy, natural gift from God. You either hear the church telling you that any sexual expression outside of a straight marriage is unholy, or the church doesn’t talk about it at all. Either way we’re producing a culture of humiliation and disgust, of body image issues, a sense of inferiority and unworthiness, a sense that our sexual identity is somehow “not me,” it’s the flesh, the lesser part of me that can only be perfected so long as it is hidden away…that it is somehow more holy to be asexual.
I can’t wrap this one up in a pretty package, because I’m still coming to grips with the ways I struggle to accept myself as a whole person. I’m still learning to trust that God made me, ALL of me, soul and body. I’m still learning to trust that Christ redeems me, ALL of me, soul and body. I’m still learning that holiness means wholeness. Wholeness of soul…and body.