Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (17 page)

Adolescents seek clues about sex and sexuality within their environment. The same experience may impact two teenagers entirely differently. One girl may find that she is strongly attracted to risk-taking “bad boys,” whereas her sister is turned off by that type. While these attractions manifest themselves in adolescence, they are a product of all three levels of the sexual map – genetic, epigenetic and cultural.

The drive to identify sexual cues in the environment is incredibly intense and susceptible to influence from events and experiences. Here are two stories, the first from a 28-year-old man named Charlie:

I was raised Catholic and, therefore, went through that whole shame cycle of being Catholic and gay. However, there was a third ingredient – I also had a fetish for seeing men burst balloons. Seriously!

It began as a phobia of balloons popping, but somehow during my adolescence it became something of a fetish. Much like a kid who was spanked over the knee of his father and later goes on to sexualize the act, I took that fear and turned it into something erotic – those guys who popped balloons for fun were so scary to me, but somehow incredibly sexy
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Here’s a story from a 46-year-old man:

My brother and I liked to go through the trash of a local army surplus store. We often found all sorts of fun and interesting stuff. One day we hit the jackpot with a half dozen porn magazines. It wasn’t the first time we had found porn but definitely the best. We brought it home and secretly went through it. One magazine featured several bondage scenes. Those images just burned in my mind. I was so turned on by the idea of tying someone up I didn’t even think about having sex. Just the thought of tying a woman up turned me on. Years later, my brother and I were talking about “the good old days.” He and I can talk about anything. He has always been more adventurous about sex than I. To my surprise
he mentioned that magazine and how much it turned him on. And here is the mind-blowing thing, he was turned on by the idea of being tied up! He told me it had been a fantasy of his for decades. He liked the idea of a woman being in total control of him. Neither of us had ever thought about bondage before we saw that magazine. We discovered both of us had engaged in different bondage things over the intervening years
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Secondary preferences often dictate what kind of sex is most stimulating and satisfying. Both sexes have secondary preferences that influence mate selection. An acquaintance of mine seemed to have a new girlfriend every six months or so. Over the course of five years, I noticed many of his girlfriends were amazingly similar in body type. When I met his mother, it all made sense: she was an older version of every woman he had dated.

Adolescents seek out sexual cues in their environment, learning what is and what is not attractive in their culture. If the culture tells boys that small feet or large breasts are attractive, that is what they will most likely focus on as adults. If the culture tells girls that the best bear hunter or the best singer on
American Idol
is the most desirable, that may impact them.

Secondary sexual preferences can come to dominate entire cultures
and
determine what genes get passed on. We see the evidence in female body types. Women in some cultures have large bottoms. Over thousands of years, these characteristics have been sexually selected. The genes do not tell a man to choose a woman with a large butt, but genes program the brain to look for cues in the environment and in certain areas of the body. Just as the human brain is programmed to recognize the human facial configuration but not any specific face, we are programmed to recognize parts of the body that have sexual significance. The culture then tells you what that significance is.

The ebb and flow of sex hormones impacts the brain at all ages, but especially before age 20. If something happens while the brain is being inundated with sex hormones, it may have a permanent impact on sexual behavior and preference. If it happens consistently within a culture, it can literally shape the body type of an entire people.

The social environment tells our sexual map when to increase or decrease hormones. This part of our sexual map runs automatically. Much of it was
learned early in life. The male duck learns to recognize his dominance level and where he fits into the duck hierarchy. Humans do much the same. When we walk into a party, we unconsciously evaluate the people and cues and adjust our behavior to fit the social structure of the group. We unconsciously look at how many men or women are in the room, how they are dressed, where they are standing and the posture and nonverbal gestures they use. With these signals, we often determine who the most important people are and act accordingly.

Were we to look at hormone levels, we would find that high-status men and women in the room have higher testosterone than lower-status individuals. Research has also shown that testosterone and other hormones can increase or decrease when perceived status changes.
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Research on male aggression and competition shows that men engaged in sports or in watching sports evidence a testosterone surge when their team wins. Further, many men experience a strong need to have sex after the victory. If they lose, testosterone declines. Winning primes men to compete and losing primes them to be less aggressive in the face of a superior foe.
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In this regard, humans are like many other species. Males experience changes in hormonal levels in the presence of competition and aggression, and want sex when they win. Women also show changes in testosterone levels in response to watching or participating in sporting events and in risk-taking behavior.

Is it possible that religion impacts hormones? Could testosterone increase or decrease in response to religious activities? No one has researched this, but most religious services are based on the idea of submission and evoke submissive behavior such as the following:
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• Bowing the head during prayer
  
• Kneeling
  
• Prostrating on a mat during prayer
  
• Singing songs about submission
  
• Women covering their head or men taking hats off
  
• Listening silently, without question to the priest or minister
  
• Using submissive language when speaking to the deity
  
• Engaging in rituals of supplication
  

– all of these acts are acts of social submission, particularly for women
.

Going to church may reduce testosterone levels through constant submission. Not everyone’s testosterone levels will be lowered, however. At least one person’s hormones in the group will likely go up – the priest or minister’s. Standing on a podium, telling hundreds, even thousands of people to submit is not much different than a gorilla or chimp doing a dominance display. I have interviewed many former ministers in my research. All tell of the emotional high they got from standing in front of the congregation and preaching. Clearly, there is a strong hormonal response from telling others to submit.

Hormones are important for our motivational systems. Testosterone is not the only hormone involved in motivation, dominance or submission, but it is an important one. Many other variables are involved, but one fact stands out – the more educated and financially successful, the less religious a person is likely to be. The opposite is also generally true; the more religious, the less educated and financially stable.

Could religion’s constant message of submission have an impact on other areas of life and achievement? For example, given that the most religious people are often of lower educational and socioeconomic status, does religion’s message of submission have a negative impact on educational achievement and economic development? In the United States, the most religious states generally have the lowest levels of economic development and educational status – Utah being the exception. Is this related to high levels of religiosity? Where submission to religious authority is valued, creationism and opposition to teaching evolution seem to thrive. It is a controversial topic for which there is little or no research. I would suggest it is an area ripe for exploration. How much does religion impact motivation and educational achievement?

In a wonderful essay “This Is Your Brain on Metaphors,” the renowned professor of neurology, Robert Sapolsky, writes about how our brains use
the same regions to process physical experiences and metaphors.
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Human brains are not so much designed as duct-taped. Evolution did not give us a metaphor processing center, so our brains use a center that already processes similar information. When you smell or taste something rotten, a region in the brain called the insula responds with gustatory disgust. The same area of your brain responds to the thought of something disgusting. Tasting is not the same as thinking about tasting, yet the brain processes the two in the same area. To some degree, the brain cannot distinguish between a bad taste and the thought of a bad taste.

How is this relevant for religion and sexuality? Religious training is full of messages about sex and sexuality that map to the parts of the brain that process disgust and other negative responses. How many times do you have to hear, “Homosexuality is disgusting,” before you map homosexuality to the disgust part of your brain? Even someone who is homosexual maps disgust about his or her sexuality based on this kind of religious training. This does not stop them from being homosexual, but it does make them feel disgusted with their behavior.
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An elder in the church I attended as a young adult was fond of talking about all the disgusting things shown on TV. A friend and I were at his house one day. A talk show was on the TV, and when someone on the show mentioned oral sex, the elder stomped to the TV set and turned it off. “That is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard on TV,” he said. He looked like he had just bitten into a rotten apple with a big worm in it. The expression of metaphorical disgust processed through the insula as if it were a physical experience.

Religious programming has the power to distort normal, natural and intensely pleasurable behavior into something inconceivably disgusting. Decades later, this same elder was accused of molesting two of his children. Could the conflict between his religious map and his biological map have contributed to his abusive behavior?

Adolescents may integrate cultural messages intoning that sex is wrong, that masturbation is a violation of your body and that nothing sexual is permitted until marriage. While these messages often don’t stop them from having sex, they can make adolescents feel disgusted with themselves as well as guilty.

The sexual behavior is driven from one part of the brain while the disgust and guilt are contained in a different area. The two are not necessarily connected, yet we have the illusion that we are one unified person with one unified brain and that we are in control of our behavior. When we do something that is not consistent with our ideas of control, we have elaborate ways of justifying and rationalizing the behavior.

Mark Regnerus explores the impact of religion in adolescents in his book
Forbidden Fruit
(2007). Based on extensive study, he shows how little impact religion has on most teenagers, even those who are most religious. He concludes:

It is popularly held that evangelical Protestants are the most conservative American religious tradition with respect to sexual attitudes and behaviors. . . . Evangelicals do in fact maintain more conservative attitudes about sex than do mainline Protestants, black Protestants and Jewish youth. They are the second most likely (after Mormons) to think that having sex will make them feel guilty, least likely to think that sex is pleasurable, and most likely to think that having sex will cause their partner to disrespect them. But evangelical Protestant youth are not the religious group least likely to have sex. Indeed, in both data sets, they are largely indistinguishable from the rest of American adolescents.

These results are consistent with many studies, including my own research. For example, in an on-line survey of 10,000 people, I found almost no difference in sexual behavior between people raised to be very religious and those raised least religiously.
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The only difference was in the level of guilt. Religious teenagers feel far more guilty, but they still have sex. This is strong evidence that teenagers are of two minds. One part of their brain
holds certain religious beliefs and the other drives their natural sexuality. The two areas don’t talk to each other very much. The religious part of the brain certainly doesn’t stop them from having sex:

This story from a formerly religious young woman shows this disconnect:

My boyfriend and I were really hot for each other, but being students in a fundamentalist college, we had it beaten into our heads that sex before marriage was absolutely forbidden. If we were caught, we would be expelled. As a result, we did about everything short of intercourse until one night my boyfriend suggested that we get married in “God’s eyes.” We knelt down and prayed fervently that God bless us and our marriage, and consider us married on that very night. Then we hopped into bed and fucked like rabbits. It was an amazing night, one that I will never forget. I had never felt so close to another person, never experienced such intense pleasure, never felt so safe, never enjoyed such warmth. There was no doubt in my mind that it was a night blessed by God
.

Over the next few days, I was totally cool with what we had done, but my boyfriend acted strange and distant. I tried to talk to him but got nothing. I asked him when we could go out again, and he just mumbled. It began to drive me crazy. What had happened to us being married? What happened to that amazing man who kissed me and made me feel so loved, warm and safe?

Weeks went by, and we hardly saw each other. Then one night, he called and said, “We have to talk.” I met him at a private corner of the library and found that he was wracked with guilt and felt we had to go confess to the dean of the school and promise not to have sex again. I tried to tell him that I was perfectly O.K. with what we did, even if he didn’t want to be married, but nothing would change his mind. I refused to go confess anything to the dean because what we had done was beautiful and certainly God-given. I knew that if he talked to the dean without me, I would get kicked out. The semester was almost over, so I asked him to wait until after finals. I got out of there as soon as finals were finished and transferred to a secular university. I never spoke to him again. That was the beginning of the end for my religion. How can anything so beautiful be wrong? It just did not make sense to me
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