Celibacy, the Pope and the dating app

There’s a desperate need for a new sexual revolution.

David Bennett

David is a postdoctoral research fellow at Oxford University’s Theology and Religion faculty.

An advert on a Underground platform shows a person next to the slogna: Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun.

Bumble's controversial ad campaign.

Recent news has sparked a furore over celibacy, and, as I will explain, the need for a new sexual revolution. Feminist theologian, Sarah Coakley, points to in her book, The New Asceticism, points to why we need this new sexual revolution

“the problem with desire is that it has become so heavily sexualised in the modern, post-Freudian period as to render its connection with other desires (including desire for God) obscure and puzzling.”

A glance at the media on both sides of the Atlantic provides evidence. Senator Tim Scott’s singleness is derided on the US news cycle, and London Underground adverts for dating app Bumble undermined the choice to be a nun or make a vow of celibacy.

For decades, the bowdlerised notion that Freud saw celibacy as a form of suppression, has created a deeply damaging myth that if you are not having sex, you are not just repressed, you are not even human. In its inaner, but still hurtful forms, if you are celibate, you are not trustworthy, a repressed pervert, or worse, worthy of being socially excluded. Of course, bad celibacy has had terrible results in and outside the Church, but so has bad marriage, and yet we do not treat the married or marriage this way.

You would expect to turn to the Roman Catholic, Anglican or mainline churches for a nuanced and profound contradiction to a culture obsessed with what they see merely as a ‘lack of sex.’ Instead, the Pope was recently reported to have made the comment that there was already too much “frociaggine” in some seminaries. The Italian word roughly translates as “faggotness”. Matteo Bruni, the director of the Vatican’s press office stated: “As he [the Pope] has stated on more than one occasion, ‘In the Church there is room for everyone, everyone! Nobody is useless or superfluous, there is room for everyone, just the way we are.’”

“The Pope never meant to offend or to use homophobic language, and apologises to everyone who felt offended [or] hurt by the use of a word,” Mr Bruni concluded in the Vatican statement.

The Pope has made other comments about celibacy, dissuading gay people from entering the priesthood just on the basis of sexual orientation. It is hard to argue that this is anything but discrimination. If the Pope wanted LGBTQI+ people to inhabit a traditional ethic, then provide a way constructively for them to do so.

This billboard ad reveals a culture which is erotically moribund and which has lost the fact that love is inevitably sacrificial in nature.

Now to turn to the dating app world, Bumble, aware of the new rise of singleness and celibacy (around 51 per cent of the American population is single), particularly among young women, struck out against this choice with controversial adverts.

This billboard ad reveals a culture that is erotically moribund and which has lost the fact that love is inevitably sacrificial in nature. My heart sank as I saw this billboard on the Underground. As someone who wrote their doctorate on celibacy, and has chosen to be dedicated to a love greater than sex and marriage, and who chose to be consecrated and vowed to celibacy, I felt angry at the notion that my choice, and that of millions of people, was derided as fanciful. This felt like another chip off the liberal project that I want to believe in of true diversity of opinion, and a shared city and society.

However, the value of sacrificial love at the bedrock of late modern and post-secular society was revealed as still as powerful as ever with Bumble receiving a wide response of outrage, and the marketing manager responsible being subsequently fired.

If we are to love someone, we must learn to deny choices and narrow our field of volition where we choose them over other pressing concerns.

In reading this I felt that some justice had been served. I could not escape the words of Pope Benedict XVI : “When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form.”

For a moment, this radical love reflected in a healthy, non-repressive celibacy, which gives itself up for God and the other, and marriage as its sacrificial counter-part, was vindicated and, for a moment, was given the value it deserves, and which Bumble, and even at times, that God’s own church, have betrayed.

If we are to love someone, we must learn to deny choices and narrow our field of volition where we choose them over other pressing concerns. Such a view of love has been lost both inside and outside the Church.

Only a new asceticism, as Sarah Coakley avers, can purify “desire in the crucible of divine love, paradoxically imparting true freedom through the narrowing of choices.”

The fact we have gained such an impoverished ascetical or moral imagination for our loves does not bode well for how not just single people, but all people can flourish. A life of flourishing which does not involve sexual acts or in which a love beyond sex can be expressed in friendship speaks to a hope beyond sex and marriage, without which the human heart will remain restless and unsatisfied.

As Pope Benedict XVI states in his essay, Deus Caritas Est: “God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love. Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape.” Our society, from Pope Francis all the way to Bumble needs a new sexual revolution, which sees that sex is a clue to this deeper love of God for which we were created and which beckons us as with a faithfulness and passion no other lover can provide.

Article

Climate

Comment

Politics

27 November 2024

7 min read

Neighbours, nimbys, and politician power plays

Is there a politics that takes both love of the land and climate concerns seriously?

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A sign protesting a proposed wind farm stands on flat moorland.

A Scottish wind farm protest sign.

Richard Webb, Wikimedia Commons.

It was easy to forget the fury of the past few winters in the gentle light of the golden autumn which enveloped our corner of rural Aberdeenshire over the past month. The scars Storm Arwen tore through the landscape three years ago, toppling whole hillsides of trees, and the flood-soaked fields of last winter were hard to conjure when faced with the thousand colours that painted the landscape. The smoky green of pine forests in twilight, the shocking scarlet of apples my daughters picked from our neighbour’s tree, the little violet fireworks of elderberry clusters hanging above the path to our house, these chased away worries about the future and the past and demanding attention to the present. Amid this array, it was easy to see why Queen Victoria chose our corner of Scotland for her rural retreat over a century and a half ago. The changing of the season has something of the eternal, sacred, and inviolable in it. “Let the field be joyful and all that is therein; then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice,” sang the ancient Psalmist. Surely, if ever a land was obedient to this command, it was our valley’s, this October. Surely too, it is our duty to preserve it so that it can sing out for a thousand more such autumns?

This drive to preserve is evident in the signs that appear regularly on fences as you drive through our valley. “STOP MONSTER PYLONS” and “NO WINDFARM ON HILL OF FARE” they say in capital letters large enough to communicate their creators’ anger. Our valley, which connects the Highlands to the sea, is prime real estate for the sorts of development necessary to transform the UK economy, which still gets 77 per cent of its energy from burning fossil fuels, into one built on renewable energy. Our hills are ideal for turbines and our land must be crossed if transmission lines are to carry electricity from wind farms in the north to population centres like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and London. To many of my neighbours this sort of construction amounts to an industrialisation of the countryside, an irreversible scarring of pristine land in service of interests far away which care little for them. This view is common enough that almost all of the local village councils have expressed opposition to the developments. When my neighbours are characterised by senior government ministers as “the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists”, I suspect it only hardens their resolve.

It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

Sometimes I wonder if what politicians have in mind when they think of my neighbours are the sorts of toffs featured in Rivals for whom the countryside is a playground of upper-class indulgence. I am not rich. Neither are most of my immediate neighbours, many of whom rely on waiting tables at the local farm shop or cleaning holiday lets to make ends meet. My understanding is that most of the local farmers consider themselves lucky if they turn any profit at all from their long and exhausting hours. Every year we wonder if there will be enough pupils to keep our local primary school open. Every winter we prepare for the inevitable interruptions caused by power cuts, school closures, and unplowed roads.

If I had to guess at what keeps my neighbours here it is the land itself, watching and admiring it, caring for it, aligning the rhythms of their life to it. Autumn can be wonderful, but so too is spring. I drive to work past newborn lambs trying out their stilt-like legs, anticipate the sudden return of house martins to their nests under our eves, and enjoy weekend walks up the hillsides amid the sun-yellow mazes of coconut-scented gorse bushes. Each season land presents itself to us, demands our attention, calls for our admiration.

In the two creation stories of Genesis, what it is to be human is to be made in the image of God and to be given the task of tilling and keeping the land, respectively. A way of reading these together is that humans are to be priests to creation, recognising and praising its beauty and caring for it in a way which reflects God’s love for it. In my last article for Seen & Unseen, I discussed philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practices and how the human activities he identifies as practices can order and give meaning to our lives and communities. Another way of thinking about these practices is that they are all, in some way, an expression of this original edenic imperative, to see, to respond to, and to care for God’s creation. If this is true of any practice, it is perhaps most transparent in rural ones. It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

The practices we engage in have a way of becoming enmeshed with our identity in such a manner that it can be hard to imagine ourselves without them. That is why, I believe, opposition to wind farms and pylons runs so deep here, and why, as geographer Patrick Devine-Wright has demonstrated, attempts to offset the financial downsides of developments through local grant programmes and other compensation do very little to swing public opinion in favour of development. As he demonstrates, at the root of such opposition is an affective attachment to the land, one that money cannot buy away and which resists even the most well-reasoned arguments which attempt to ignore it.

And yet, I know, my neighbours know, that all is not well with the land. Although we draw sizable crowds on Easter and Christmas, the most packed I’ve ever seen our parish church was when a locally born climate scientist came to present his research on Antarctica. He walked us through what it is like to live there, how scientists survive the winters, and what they eat, but all anyone was interested in the Q&A that followed is what can be done about climate change. It is hard to ignore it. It is there in the good and the bad: in the pleasant, nearly tropical breeze that ushered my children from house to house on Halloween; in a mild winter making ticks and Lyme’s disease a regular visitor; and in the onslaught of storms felling fifty year old forests in a single night and cutting road and railway connections to the rest of Britain for days on end. If we are to keep these changes from becoming more extreme, if we are going to bequeath to our grandchildren a countryside with the beauties admired by Queen Victoria and countless others, we need to slow this change. We need to move away from fossil fuels and to renewably generated electricity and given that, as I said above, 77 per cent of our energy is still made by burning carbon, we need to produce not just a little more electricity, but a lot. The answer to the oft repeated question, “Wouldn’t these be better, if they were built somewhere else?” is that, yes, they will need to be built somewhere else and here, and in many other places, if we are going to get anywhere close to a carbon-free future.

The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

What might a politics look like that both took my neighbours’ attachment to the land and these realities seriously? What it shouldn’t be is one that castigates my neighbours for that attachment. That only feeds suspicions that what is really at play is an exploitation of the countryside to feed the excesses of the cities. Such exploitation runs deep in the folk memory of Scotland. The Clearances only lightly touched our valley, but a little travel here or there takes one by abandoned villages. Those who resisted then, clinging tightly to their land, also might have been called blockers, delayers, and obstructionists by modernising absentee landlords the sitting rooms of their Edinburgh townhouses, intent on replacing them with more profitable sheep.

However, the possibility exists for drawing my neighbours’ attachment to the land into the conversation about why these developments are needed. The land, the planet, is sick, and sometimes the scars of a necessary surgery are a price worth paying for survival. The alternative to roads rising up our hills to turbines and to transmission lines cutting through now fertile fields is a future of longer droughts, hotter heat waves, and more extreme storms, bringing with them infertile fields, forest fires, and landslides. The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

But for such a rhetoric to work, politicians need to be serious about everyone bearing someone of the burden of climate solutions, both here in the UK and across the world. It can be tempting to give up hope in this regard. More than one article about our area has cited farmers complaining about how what we do won’t really matter anyway since China and India will burn away any positive effects of renewables here. But there are problems closer to home too. When UK governments and traders gush about the possibilities of new, power-hungry technologies like AI and cryptocurrency it can give any discussion of net-zero an air of unreality. Turbines and transmission lines can be part of caring for the land and can be shown to be in continuity with those other practices of care, but if other changes aren’t made, they will be as useful as a keyhole surgery on a patient who is bleeding out.