Nakedness, sex and the Church
THE Church has been blamed for a lot of what’s wrong with the world nowadays.
Millions of 21st-century folk regard themselves as “post-Christian”, liberated from the ridiculous strictures laid on them by Christianity.
And it’s true that the Church has for centuries had rules about how people should clothe themselves and behave sexually. In fact, the Church did not invent this tradition – it inherited it from the Judaic community, which was given its laws by Moses.[1]
But not all the rules are 3 400 years old. Many of them have been invented much more recently.
In fact, much of the petty detail around clothing and sexual activity has arisen from the Evangelical movement, a revival which swept the Christian community of Great Britain in the second half of the 18th century and into the 19th.
Kick-started by the Wesley brothers, John (*1703 †1791) and Charles (*1707 †1788), it not only founded the Methodist Church, but swept through a number of other denominations, including the Church of England (in which both brothers had originally been ordained).
More importantly, it succeeded in effecting a profound transformation of British society. Where Britons had been given to excessive consumption of liquor (gin being available to small children at less than a shilling a pint), prostitution (girls of 13 and 14 were being inveigled to sell their bodies) and a variety of brutal sports involving cruelty to animals, such as bull-baiting and bear-baiting, sobriety became a watchword, the age of consent was raised to 16, and cruel sports were outlawed altogether.
And significantly, the slave trade (a major source of wealth for the British economy) was outlawed in 1807 and slavery itself abolished in 1833.
The social problems that the movement had tackled did not entirely disappear, but the British people were more inclined to be church-goers, to avoid liquor, to eliminate prostitution and generally to seek the welfare of their fellow citizens, and of animals.
While France and then the rest of Europe went into bloody revolution at the end of the 18th century, Britain remained stable, and achieved parliamentary reform in the 19th which prevented the islands from being overwhelmed by the revolutions that again swept the Continent through the middle of that century.
The Evangelical movement was late in having influence on the upper classes, but under Queen Victoria its heavy hand was certainly felt.
Britain being a cold country for much of the year, nakedness was not a phenomenon it had to deal with much, and the nakedness it saw as evil was largely part of the prostitution industry.
I don’t know whether Britain has ever specifically outlawed nude dancing, but mixed unclothed dancing involving prostitutes and their customers was so popular in Cape Town (known for centuries as the Tavern of the Seas) that it was singled out as being lewd in an ordinance gazetted under British rule in the early 19th century.
The Evangelicals, so used to dealing with social problems, saw the emergence of nudism – at first largely the German phenomenon called Freikörperkultur, or the culture of the free body – in the late 19th century as another target to tilt at.
They probably didn’t even stop to think that nude bathing had been going on for thousands of years.
For them, nakedness equalled sex. Decent people, they maintained, undressed in the dark and never even saw their spouses naked in the light of day.
The Evangelical attitude against nakedness has survived the 20th century, although for many people with modifications (see bathing suits), and naked adults are still seen as disturbances, if not sex maniacs.
The association between nakedness and sex is now so deeply ingrained that it is not only Christian folk who feel that way, but people who have drifted right out of the Church’s orbit.
Upstanding atheists and agnostics still seem to fear that when people go about their ordinary daily activities unclothed, a sexual free-for-all will result.
But what is the reality of the 21st century? The invention of the birth control pill in the 1950s led to the sexual revolution of the ’60s. Divorce, almost unheard of in the ’50s, has become commonplace.
Parents abandon their partners and marry other partners – or, often enough, shack up and don’t marry, caring little about the effect of their behaviour on their offspring.
Teenagers, freed (so they imagine) of the fear of unwanted pregnancy, engage in sex while still at school – in many schools, virgins of 11 and 12 are taunted because they are “afraid to be real women”, and also come under pressure from boys who claim: “A girl who won’t sleep with me, doesn’t love me,” and so are driven into sexual activity.
And then there’s the Aids pandemic, shrouded in mystery not by the Church but by secular politicians afraid to confront their own risky behaviour. It certainly is not solely spread by sexual contact, but promiscuous, careless sex is certainly the means by which it is most easily spread.
In fact, the sexual free-for-all has arrived, and the world has chosen to ignore it. Like the proverbial ostrich sticking its head in the sand,[2] parents at PTAs and politicians believe that as long as people are prevented from enjoying God’s sunshine in the birthday suits He gave them, nothing can go wrong.
More significantly, families that habitually enjoy their recreation unclothed are not part of this picture of decay.
In such families, parents are more readily able to cope with, and children less likely to get out of hand with regard to problems arising out of sexual curiosity, sexual experimentation and unusual sexual behaviour.
Many Evangelical Christians are realising that the old rules aren’t solving the new problems. Sadly, many others don’t see it that way.
But it’s strange how the rigid rules of the Evangelical movement’s solutions to 18th-century problems have unthinkingly been kept in place.
– Strandloper
For further discussion of related topics, see Does God Desire us to be ashamed?, and Does body acceptance promote lower teen pregnancy and abortion rates? on the website of the International Naturists Association.
