Holy sex!

On the topic of oral sex, Wendy Treat says curtly that "the Lord left it to your conscience." The LaHayes say, without further clarification, that "if it has a place in marriage, we would suggest it be limited to foreplay." And Ed Wheat observes that, "oral-genital sex definitely limits the amount of loving verbal communication that husband and wife can have as they make love."

Masturbation is even more fraught. Dillow and Pintus are forgiving on the subject, saying that as long as fantasies about people other than your spouse are not involved, it is a "personal issue." But other authors raise objections. "It may cause you to feel that you don't need a spouse or that a spouse can never fulfill you like you think you can fulfill yourself," says Treat. The LaHayes simply assert that "no married man should relieve his mounting, God-given desire for his wife except through coitus."

The disputes pile up quickly. Dillow and Pintus say vibrators may be "beneficial"; Treat sniffs, "They didn't have such equipment when the Bible was written." A "quickie," say Dillow and Pintus, "satisfies and whets the appetite"; No, says Wheat, "only lust and self-gratification are done in haste." At least there's one thing everyone can agree on. "What about anal sex?" asks Leman. "It's kinky, and I believe it's wrong. This is one area where I tell men they need to let go of this expectation or fantasy." No one will try to argue that the Bible expressly forbids it, but most are happy to do so on the Bible's behalf. Tim Gardner, in "Sacred Sex," says anal sex is sinful because it is "motivated by needs to debase the self." Dillow allows that couples must make their own decision, but she strongly advises against it for "medical reasons." Not, of course, because of the homosexual thing.

Interestingly, the Internet may be eroding the authority of Christian sex experts. Online, evangelicals have begun to build their own communities for sharing advice about sex that bypasses the delicate sensibilities and culturally determined taboos of even the more open-minded professionals. The largest of these is a website called The Marriage Bed, whose bulletin boards offer not pronouncements from on high, but energetic conversation. This is the site to check if you're looking for the Christian case for women using strap-on dildos on their husbands ("If the only access to the prostrate is through the rectum, and I know for a fact that my pressing on the prostrate increases his pleasure, then perhaps it is ok in God's eyes for me to do that for the man He's given me") or men ejaculating on their wives faces ("It's part of our nature to want to be creative with where we 'release' our most basic creative force, and I can't help but want to be creative, I was created in my Creators image").

There were many ways in which I admired the advice in these books and conferences. Despite lingering gender stereotypes, these books, especially Dillow and Pintus's, offered generally sound and worthwhile information. Many marriages, not just Christian ones, could be improved by less television and more foot massages. Still, it was hard to get past the author's firm pronouncements about the horrors that are inevitably brought down on marriages by such commonplace "transgressions" as having a sexual history or fantasizing about movie stars. To say, as these books do, that this behavior renders you incapable of loving your spouse deeply, fully and without shame, is insulting to 99 percent of married Americans. Or at least it would be if it weren't manifestly false.

The LaHayes have an answer to this. As evidence that masturbation is wrong, they write, "feelings of guilt are a nearly universal aftermath of masturbation unless one has been brainwashed by the humanistic philosophy that does not hold to a God-given conscience or, in many cases, right or wrong." It's perfectly impenetrable circular logic. Guilt proves that God objects and lack of guilt proves that you've rejected God.

In a way, understanding the flaws of the Christian sex advice movement helps make plain a problem that many people have with conservative evangelical philosophy in general. Can all the mysteries of sex and marriage really be answered by a two thousand-year-old book? There is wisdom in the Bible, certainly, but how reliable is it as a universal instruction manual?

Paradoxically, by trying to read the Bible as all-encompassing, pop Christianity actually diminishes it. There's something disappointing about reducing the transcendent poetry of the Song of Solomon to a mere self-help book. One typical sentence of "Intimacy Ignited" says that when the Song describes Solomon's naked body, "God is saying, 'It is right and good to dwell on your husband's body.'" [emphasis in the original]. But the Song of Solomon isn't about us. There is a company that publishes a special edition of the Bible called the "Personal Promise Bible," which inserts the name of the owner and their spouse into the text, so that a typical line in the Song is rendered as "Gina's two breasts are like two fawns." Read that way, the ridiculousness becomes clear. But this pop reductionism is precisely what Dillow and Pintus do in "Intimacy Ignited." While there is no doubt that many couples can benefit from sex advice, perhaps it would be better to leave the Bible out of it, for the sake of the Bible as much as anything.

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