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

Comment

Feminism

Leading

23 October 2024

5 min read

Can Kemi really have it all?

For female experiences to mean something, we need to be part of something bigger.

Sian Brookes

Sian Brookes is studying for a Doctorate at Aberdeen University. Her research focuses on developing a theological understanding of old age. She studied English and Theology at Cambridge University.

A woman works at a laptop on a desk surrounded by picture frame.

Kemi Badenoch campaigning.

Kemibadenoch.org.uk

Apparently Kemi Badenoch is unfit for leadership due to a ‘preoccupation’ with her children. Such comments are hardly a surprise. After all, she is both a mother and a woman vying to be in a position of power. Since the beginning of time women have been mothers, but women haven’t always been in positions of power. So it is not surprising that some people have problems adjusting to the change. But it isn’t just Robert Jenrick who finds this adjustment difficult. In my experience, most women find it hard too. Becoming a mother is a beautiful but body-breaking, exhaustion-inducing and identity-questioning process. And that is just in the first few months. Add to that the expectations of also having successful careers as well, and it is no wonder we find it hard.

Kemi Badenoch’s response, naturally and rightly, was to show how capable she is to lead the Tory party alongside her maternal responsibilities, whilst challenging the view that just because she is a woman she is more responsible for her kids than a man with similar age kids would be. But her lack of acknowledgement of the hardship involved in being a mother and having a successful career does leave an awkward silence around what is an ongoing imbalance in many relationships when it comes to holding the fair share of parental, household and professional responsibilities.

This relentless pursuit of the ability of mothers to do everything else as well as being a mother says something about what we expect from women in our society. We need to prove that it is possible to be a woman and do all the things men have traditionally done. Yet sometimes I do wonder if we make it harder for ourselves. Is it our own expectations which make this thing called being a woman much harder than it needs to be?

Perhaps she is valuable not because of what she does or the choices she makes and what that says about the feminist cause, but because her worth lies elsewhere.

I’ve been blessed with the task of raising three boys, but I think about my friends who are raising little girls and the hopes they have for them. The hopes that they will grow to defy the expectations placed on them because they are female; to counter the oppression put upon them by breaking through the ceilings that may be built over them by others, to become whatever they want to be; engineers, consultant doctors, CEOs, even builders or plumbers if they so desire.

At the same time, (if the girls want them), they are expected to build families and loving safe homes. All of the things our mothers hoped for us and their mothers before them hoped for their own daughters.

Yet now, alongside those hopes for domestic fulfilment, so many other expectations have been added. Of course, the obvious solution to this, as Kemi has argued, is for men and women to share the load on both sides – to build the home and work life in a way that benefits both in the partnership. But the fact remains that relatively speedily in the course of historical development, we have come to a position where we are all expecting to have it all, all the time. And especially for our girls – we want them to be strong, powerful, successful, fruitful and productive all at once.

Now, this is not to say that we should revert to a time when only women ran the household and only men inhabited the professional domain. But sometimes perhaps it’s OK for a woman just to be a mum, if that is what she wants. She doesn’t have to also show the world she can be everything else as well. Some would criticise that decision as selling out on the relentless need to fight for equality with men. But not everything a woman does has to demonstrate some ideological end in fighting for equality, as though that is what gives her value as a woman. Perhaps she is valuable not because of what she does or the choices she makes and what that says about the feminist cause, but because her worth lies elsewhere.

Whatever we do, we do it to witness to a love, a truth which goes beyond whatever we can give to the world.

Many of the friends I spoke of earlier who have those little girls chose to have their daughters baptised as babies. This act of infant baptism puts the stake in the ground for the belief that before they could do anything, before they could prove their worth as a female member of society demonstrating all that power, strength, purpose and ability to right all the wrongs of the past, they were loved and valued beyond measure, without condition.

As a girl, and before they grow to be a woman, maybe a mother, and then potentially the leader of a political party, they are a child of a God who values them not because of what they have done or will do, but because they are His child. At the same time, this doesn’t mean we sit back and do nothing – it’s central to the Christian faith to fight injustice and overturn oppressive powers, but this is never achieved by human action alone as though the weight of the world falls on our shoulders, it is done by bearing witness to a God who has a better plan for the world and for society than we could ever dream or imagine. It is only when we realise this that the burden might be lifted from all the women fighting for all the things we are supposed to fight for.

Of my three closest friends in the church, one is (currently) a stay-at-home mum, one a doctor, one a vicar. As for myself, I am studying for a PhD in theology. We also all spend a lot of time looking after children, cooking and doing the dishes (as do our husbands). And yet, when we reflect together, these choices feel less statements of how we might be empowered or not as women, but more the result of a belief that whatever we do, we do it to witness to a love, a truth which goes beyond whatever we can give to the world. And so, we can each celebrate what we “do” because in each offering of ours can be found meaning, purpose and life beyond our own abilities, even our own individual actions. Perhaps, this is better than any kind of feminism you find around these days, because it allows us each to do the small thing in front of us without loading more on ourselves than we can bear alone. Only together, and only in knowing we are part of something bigger than ourselves, can our variety of female experiences mean something. In this way of living, being a woman feels very free indeed.