Holy sex!

Welcome to the Christian sex advice movement, where brave souls tackle the stereotype that evangelicals are prudes (masturbation is still iffy).

Editor's note: Excerpted and adapted with permission from "Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture" (Scribner, 2008)

By Daniel Radosh

Read more: Life Features, Sex, evangelicals, Life

April 9, 2008 | The main sanctuary of Calvary Church, in the cornfields of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, seats four thousand people. On the weekend of April 28, 2006, it was nearly full with women, some from as far away as Canada and Idaho, who had paid $50 each to be there. Linda Dillow, a young-looking grandmother of five, greeted the congregation warmly and began to preach her own brand of the gospel. "What," she asked, "does God really think about sex?"

Dillow knows what many Christians believe. "Because I want to be godly, I can't allow myself to be too earthly," one woman had told her, "I allow myself to experience pleasure -- but only so much." The Calvary Church audience murmured in understanding. "Ladies," announced Dillow, "sensuality in marriage is godly. Just as a husband and wife experience deep joy as they lose themselves and merge into oneness at the moment of sexual climax, we experience ultimate joy as we become one with Jesus Christ in a union that leads to incomprehensible joy. Sexual intercourse mirrors our relationship to God and causes us to worship him for giving us this good gift." Surely it couldn't be a coincidence, she added with a wink, that there is no better time than a long Sunday morning in church to practice your Kegel exercises.

Over the last few years, Dillow has gained a reputation as the Christian Dr. Ruth, sharing with married couples the good news of hot, healthy, holy sex. "There's this fear that if you teach what God teaches in the scripture -- which is a free, wonderful, exciting sexual relationship in marriage," she told me, "that people will take license, and sex will get out of hand. They will give in too much to their desires. I think there's a fear of what will happen if you say, God is for freedom."

To combat that fear, Dillow and her friend Lorraine Pintus founded Intimate Issues, a pro-sex ministry that hosts conferences for women and couples seeking a richer love life. They have also written two books that promote the joys of marital sex, "Intimate Issues" and "Intimacy Ignited" -- two entries in a flourishing genre that includes titles such as "Sacred Sex," "The Glorious Pursuit," "Sheet Music" and "His Needs, Her Needs." "Some women," write Dillow and Pintus, "have spent so many years 'damming up' their sexual passions in an attempt to remain pure that they find it difficult to suddenly open the floodgates and allow sexual feelings to flow." The Christian sex advice movement is dedicated to unleashing that flood.

Dillow knows what much of the world thinks of Christians: they're prudes, they're frigid, they fear and discourage sexual pleasure, especially in women. And she admits that Christians have only themselves to blame for this perception. "Augustine, who wrote a lot of wonderful things, had a very warped view about sex," she said. "Even Martin Luther, who was married, said, 'Intercourse is never without sin, but God excuses it by his grace.' Women today don't know these statements, but I think the whole attitude has filtered down to them." But what was historically true is no longer universal.

The canard that conservative Christians believe sex is only for procreation is explicitly refuted by several writers. Citing scripture, they identify numerous reasons God created sex. Procreation is one, but the Bible also encourages sex as a way to strengthen marital bonds, as a defense against indiscriminate lust, and as a means for dispensing comfort. And judging by the allocation of space, the main reason God invented sex is pleasure. Sexual pleasure gets an entire book of the Bible: the Song of Solomon.

"Intimacy Ignited," which Dillow and Pintus wrote with their husbands, takes couples through the Song verse by verse, using it as a practical guide for lovemaking. When Solomon's bride says, "Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me,” Dillow and Pintus helpfully point out that the Hebrew word translated as embrace has the sense here of fondle. When she says, "let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits," they note that "this phrase may be a veiled and delicate reference to an oral-genital caress." At the same time, they make the larger point that not only does God approve of all this, but that God's approval is the reason for doing it. Not oral-genital caressing necessarily, but whatever makes you both happy.

Like most Christian pop culture, the pop sexuality movement has lagged behind its mainstream counterpart, though not quite as far as you might think. The first Christian sex advice books began appearing in the 1970s -- "wrapped in cellophane and stocked on the top shelf in Christian bookstores," says Tim Alan Gardner, the author of "Sacred Sex." Many of these early works were written in response to, and repudiation of, "women's liberation." The most famous, and still the genre's only crossover success, was Marabel Morgan's "The Total Woman," which sold over ten million copies and was the bestselling nonfiction title of 1974. Morgan is best remembered as the woman who advised wives to greet their husbands at the door in skimpy, even bizarre, outfits; her books weren't the only thing wrapped in cellophane. But her more significant contribution to the culture was her broader message that "it is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him."

Within the evangelical subculture, the most popular and influential early sex manual was "The Act of Marriage," written in 1976 by Tim and Beverly LaHaye. Until he wrote the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic thrillers, this book was what Tim LaHaye was most famous for. The LaHayes were among the first popular authors to promote the idea that pleasurable sex fulfills, rather than sullies, God's plan for marriage. God, they note, created the clitoris, whose only function is sexual arousal.

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