This Rev. Dobson was mouthing off on the radio this morning, reveling in the election of Republicans as though it were divinely ordained. He all bust said it is “payback time” for Bush because it was the evangelical Christians who kept him in office, and now it is time for some judicial appointments and other policies that can begin to redress the sinful nation we have become. If arrogance were piety this guy is a shoe-in for the Rapture. It reminded me of a piece I broadcasted almost 16 years ago when these guys seemed more interested in sex and money. I forgot how wrong I was at the end of this piece; they were interested in power, too. And now they think they have it. But maybe the fortunes of a couple of their brethren are instructive.
©2004 UrbisMedia
When Jimmy Swaggart simpered out his sins to his flock and a national television audience shock waves were once again sent through the evangelical fundamentalist churches still nursing the wounds of Jim Bakker’s fall from grace. When the gods fall, said the Greeks of old, they do so with a great clatter. In Swaggart’s case the worry, expressed by both the preacher and his colleagues, was that his return to earth would result in an absence of sound–the sound of coins in the collection box. However, Swaggert’s teary lamentation, although presumably occasioned by the same carnal desire as Bakker’s, carried with it the additional hypocrisy that what brought him to his contrition was not so much his “sin” but its disclosure by a vengeful colleague. This distinction seems to have evaded the elders of his church in their levy of a far softer penance than that given Bakker, who at Swaggert’s insistence was railroaded out of the church altogether. Swaggert may end up losing the keys to the executive jet for a couple of years, making it a little more difficult to be “nearer to thee, my Lord”; Bakker’s auto da fe , while rendering him unemployed, has at least resulted in a deep California tan. Such are the wages of sin for TV prayboys.
Those who have been branded sinful secular humanists and others who have endured the self-righteousness of evangelicals are doubtless taking some satisfaction from these tumbles in the motels of concupiscence; but Swaggert and Bakker are hardly the first of those who have doffed the clerical cloth and hopped into vibrator beds that rent by the hour. This sort of thing precedes them by a length of time that recedes to the very origins of religion. What would not be admitted by those who have given up selling roofing and siding for saving souls (and whose theological scholarship consists principally of memorization of chapters and verses) is that religion and sex have been locked in a symbiotic embrace for millennia. Many of primitive man’s religious rituals were either derived from or meshed with sexual behaviors, its physical urges and mysterious powers conveying such force as to elevate the sex act itself to a form of religious observance. In ancient pantheons gods and goddesses, representing forces of nature, coupled to bring on the crops (the “rites of Spring” are not the invention of college fraternities), and ritual often involved the mimesis of their earthly representatives as well as members of the congregation. In some ancient religions the brothel and the temple had the same address. Religious ecstasy and sexual ecstacy were often indistinguishable, and the deities of primitive and ancient man—Ishtar, Aphrodite, Baal, Venus, Pan, and Priapus, among numerous others in many religions the world over–were and are yet worshipped and propitiated largely for their representation of sexual prowess and fecundity.
The emergence of monotheism, and particularly Christianity, turned sex and religion into contending forces for the sovereignty over souls; but it bound them inextricably together with a web of guilt, a factor that ever since has added profound tensions between the genders, church and state, and the spirit and the flesh. In their discomfort with carnal desire religious authorities have elevated celibacy and chastity to divine levels, presented us with an asexual Christ, reduced his mother’s sexuality to a fairy tale, and branded his companion, Magdalene, as a hooker. Protestantism has shunned much of this a dogma, but retained its essences, confining sex to procreative purposes, or the marital state, but always regarding the sensual as the archenemy of the spiritual.
Preaching this stuff has been good business for a long time, and those willing to open their wallets and checkbooks to help still the passions of others, purchase some protection from their own libidos, or assuage their guilt from giving in, have been in good supply. The formula predates Swaggert and Bakker: no guilt, no gelt. None of this has prevented a good deal of hanky-panky in papal palaces, monasteries, meeting houses and revival tents.
What also seems to have evaded Swaggert and Bakker is that the wealth, celebrity and admiration they have earned with this simple formula exacts a price: consciously or not they have portrayed themselves as above the sinners they minister to or are out to “save”. In the final analysis what has led to their sins of the flesh, hypocrisy, and lack of charity, is the greater sin of pride.
When all is said and done some of us may owe Mr. Swaggert a debt of gratitude. That is, it appears that his contribution to the old relationship between religion and sex may prove to be an antidote to a far more worrisome relationship–that between religion and political power. If so, Mr. Swaggert will have finally done something for which we can truly “praise the Lord”.
___________________________________
©1988, ©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.11.2004)
Aired KPBS-FM, Public Radio, February 26, 1988