Do Evangelicals have sex with Jesus?

A new book tests how the religion sees its deity

The Bible calls the believing community the “wife” and lover of God. This is quite clear, but Christians have often been conflicted over the idea.

I’m following the developing story of an Evangelical pastor named Joshua Ryan Butler. He was just cancelled for writing a book that said married sex is divine—since Jesus and ‘the church’ do it.

In the Bible, deities are “husbands.”

From the Old Testament on, Yahweh and other spirit beings are seen as sexual men. Yahweh ‘marries’ Israel, who proves to be unfaithful, worshipping other gods. They get ‘divorced’ (Jer 3:8, etc).

Then Jesus comes along as the “bridegroom” (Mt. 9:15, 25:1; Jn 3:29, etc.) to marry the Christian people. As marriage tends to be, it’s a sexual relationship. In 2 Corinthians 11:2, Paul says to new converts:

“I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him.”

Since the converts would include males, it wouldn’t seem that these theological terms were understood to refer to physical reality.

But in the religious practice of Christianity, the subject has often been a bit conflicted.

The Catholic religion more likes the idea of the priests and nuns being the ones to ‘marry’ Jesus. Maybe special saints can have sex with God? In the famous poem “Dark Night of the Soul,” John of the Cross seems to openly evoke time with Jesus as a sex scene:

“…there he lay sleeping, and I caressing him…”

Catholic scholars can discuss the theme, as in Brant Pitre’s Jesus the Bridegroom: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.

The Catholic artist Eric Gill was less delicate, back in the 1920s, when explaining his religion to a friend: “It’s like getting married and, speaking, analogically, we are fucked by Christ.”

Mainline Protestants can be receptive to the ‘marriage’ language.

As Francis Schaeffer noted, “the husband-wife relationship is stressed throughout the Scriptures as an illustration of the wonder of the relationship of Christ and the church.”

But Evangelicals are uninterested. If they say that the church is the “Bride of Christ,” they only mean to say that God loves them the most. No spousal bliss would be imagined.

Evangelicalism wants to read the Bible “literally,” so there isn’t much taste for ‘metaphors’ or ‘analogies’—and little interest in discussing sex at all, with deities or with humans.

But Joshua Ryan Butler was willing to go there.

This 45-year-old pastor from Arizona been climbing the ladder to religious fame. His next book was a praise of marital sex—and he suggested that marital sex was divine by analogy to Jesus having sex with the church.

In the forthcoming Beautiful Union, he presented the imagery in strikingly graphic terms. He writes:

“Christ penetrates his church with the generative seed of his Word and the life-giving presence of his Spirit, which takes root within her and grows to bring new life into the world.”

It would seem a very outré suggestion.

Evangelical theology is authoritarian, as the deity is a ruler–not a ‘husband’. Marriage is seen as a key religious practice, but the analogy to Jesus and the church is kept hazy.

And yet, a religious publisher, WaterBrook Multnomah, was behind the book, providing the ad copy: “Discover afresh the beautiful invitation of our sexuality . . . as God intended it to be.”

A key Evangelical messaging site, The Gospel Coalition, was promoting Beautiful Union heavily. Blurbs were provided by well-known clerics. The book was ‘superb’, they assured. It’s a “killer book!”

On March 1st, an excerpt of the first chapter was posted (and also the first chapter). The publisher posted the cover of the book featuring a Japanese enso as something like a cosmic vagina.

The reaction started on the first day of posting.

The posting was dismissed as “gross,” “cringe,” as vomit-inducing, and quickly intensifying to “abusive” and “dangerous.”

Leaders who’d provided blurbs were targeted in online campaigns.

Two scurried to retract their blurbs (in oddly long statements), saying they hadn’t read the book.

On March 4th, The Gospel Coalition, noting the excerpt had faced “massive criticism,” took it down, and announced they’d disassociated from Butler. A class he’d been set to teach about his book was cancelled.

He was cancelled.

There were serious issues at stake.

If Christianity is done on analogy to married sex, then Jesus and the church having sex becomes something like “salvation.”

A husband and wife having sex would then seem to mean that the woman was getting ‘saved’—and that the man was sort of ‘Jesus’. A woman wouldn’t be seen as ‘Christlike’ at all. She represents humans, apparently.

Butler had tried to dance around these conclusions. But the idea of sex with God just didn’t fit into Evangelical theology.

As Butler was silent, his career went down the drain—when days before he might’ve thought he had a bestseller on his hands.

The matter was so strange, I kept poking around.

A video for the class that Butler was to teach was still up on YouTube. He seemed a puzzling candidate for an Evangelical cleric. He’s mixed-race, and doesn’t have the kind of gravitas they like.

His hair would be fine on a liberal cultural figure (Cornell West, etc.), but would be read by Evangelicals as ‘ethnic’ or clownish.

Then I saw a real surprise.

The class that Butler was teaching had three assigned texts. There was Beautiful Union, then two anti-LGBT manifestos by “ex-gay” writers.

Why is a class that is supposedly about praising marriage to the Heavens so focused on gay issues?

Suddenly, I read everything differently.

The story re-arranged into a different story. The book Beautiful Union was not sent out to convince heterosexual Evangelicals that they’re even more divine than they’d previously understood.

The book was about dealing with LGBT issues.

The religion’s message has been: if gays and lesbians will only marry heterosexually, they’re “serving God”—even if they don’t much feel it.

In Beautiful Union, Butler was upping the ante by suggesting more strongly that if gays and lesbians will only marry, the “Jesus” energy will kick in and make them straight.

The religion has been teaching this awhile.

But Beautiful Union tripped up by invoking a theme present in the Bible that the religion was trying to ignore. It was a powerful, remarkable possibility—sex with God?

That got noticed beyond the target audience, which was queer people.

I re-read the description for the class Butler was offering:

“We’ll see how sexual union points to the gospel and nature of grace, how this beautiful vision inspires (rather than detracts from) a high view of singleness, and how an iconic vision of sex can inspire our sexual faithfulness today.”

The subtext was: queer people don’t have to be sexless and single to make God happy under an anti-gay theology. They can just get married, have sex, and “Jesus” will happen.

Maybe Butler was useful for a test balloon?

Since he wasn’t white or an assertive Evangelical male, he wasn’t really leadership material. They could cut him loose.

The Gospel Coalition is no longer selling the book. The episode will be memory-holed as a “mistake.” 🔶