Polyamory and the Christian Community

I should write about polyamory more often: it spikes my web-traffic.

This is a followup to my previous post about a friend who is trying to reconcile his love for a conservative family and religious history with a sexual love that he shares with his wife for another couple. 

In response to that post, my friend wrote me a kind note in which he raised some painful and difficult issues that I think need addressing.   I’ll take them (with his permission) out of order and attempt to address them.  This should be prefaced by me saying that I’m a bit of a failure at a lot of the things he and I are writing about, and no judgment is intended here, just some clarifications at the relationships between the individual and the Christian community.

My question is this: You seem freaky and [religiously / theologically] homebrew and heterodox.

I can’t say precisely “thank you.”  The older I get the more I wish “heterodox” would show signs of fading.

It’s a classic compliment among intelligent people, a sort of badge of honor, a way of saying, “We’re clever enough not to be fooled by the tricks that ensnare the unwashed.”  

But if opinions about truth are a kind of critical mass around which communities form, heterodoxy is a kind of aberration, and not always a good one.  For instance, it isn’t “heterodox” to need to know that somebody will keep their word.  “Heterodox” has no obligation to oath keeping: that’s for the foolish masses, right?  Or if it isn’t, if it’s an absolutely positive thing to keep your word, then you aren’t “heterodox” for saying so: you’re “orthodox,” of a right opinion.

Heterodoxy has a great pedigree, because orthodoxies of all sorts entrench themselves against change: hell, if they’re “right opinions,” why change them?  But to oppose a right opinion simply because it’s agreed upon by people of good sense is a willful isolation of the self, and that’s a lonely and not altogether powerful place to stand.  It’s no good standing on one’s intelligence if one’s opinions are foolish.  And many of mine, doubtless, are.

The fascination with being heterodox strikes me as being very like people who drink curdled milk because everybody else drinks fresh milk.

Do you go to church?

No.

Should you?

Very probably.  But I’m not sure that it’s the best idea for the Church.

Should I, so I can get my sacraments and worship and community fix, even though my presence likely scandalizes and hurts the guy next to me?

I think this question raises a very important point in the discussion of faith in love and faith in polyamory.

Sacraments, community, and worship are not things we are entitled to because we need them.  They come with a price, as sex does. 

One does not get to say, “I will not follow you, Jesus” (see my previous post for his instructions on sex and marriage) and then stand and demand the sacraments on the grounds that “I need them.”  Putting it bluntly, we’re just not that special: it’d be like going to a bank and asking for money based on our good looks.

Nor do we get to enjoy the community on the grounds that it’s good for us: a community costs us the right to self-determination, whether it’s our citizenship, our faith, or our sexual desires.  This is not so because of some abstraction: “It is wrong to seek happiness for oneself” or “It is wrong to take sacraments without fidelity to the community where they reside.”  It’s because of the simple, observable nature of communities, of sacraments, of sex.  If you are a Christian, you are not primarily an American, a Republican, white or black, male or female.  Your allegiances are forced into a really peculiar realm when you identify as a Christian.  And if you do not identify as a Christian, you need to learn to live without the sacraments and without the community, and without worship.  I’d be sad for you if you chose that road, but I would understand it pretty well.

But the same thing is true of sex, and this bears on the discussion of polyamory.  When you lie down with somebody and fuck her, your emotions engage with her, hopefully.  St. Paul puts it this way: “When you fuck somebody, you become one flesh with her.”   Similiarly, when you engage in sacramental worship with people, you are being given a gift, as you clearly realize: you become one flesh with them, and with Jesus (if you believe in such things).  

But with that gift comes a responsibility.  Paul, in 1 Corinthians, says adamantly, “For me, all things are lawful.  But not all things are profitable.”  He hasn’t an eye in that staggering book on his own profit, though.  He has it on the community’s profit, and it is just a really bizarre kind of foolishness (and an almost pitiable lack of historical insight) to embrace the idea that unrestrained sexual license does not diminish a community’s stability.  The Church is not really enriched because everybody shaves their pubes or pierces their tongue.  It might be good for some relationships inside that community, but let’s not delude ourselves that anybody benefits but us.

The Corinthians were pretty familiar with polyamory, if we read the historical record rightly, and Paul says about it, “Of course you can do that.  But why would you, when you can see the chaos it causes to the community that you have joined in the waters of baptism and through the sharing of bread?”  In his second letter to them he pushes it one step further and addresses the gnosticism that motivated so much of that behavior: “Are you so wise and clever that you’re excused from your obligations to honor and reverence the community you’ve been given?  Wisdom of that kind is nothing.  Love is everything.”

We who are clever enough to see how Christianity functions sociologically, who can “see through” the commands and requirements, are in a peculiar kind of danger, I think, and Paul pegged it in the complex rhetoric and simple themes of the two letters to the Corinthians: if you really value the community and the sacraments and the worship, you mustn’t disturb the spirit that protects it.

(One unnecessary note: do take seriously that spirit.  It dislikes being disrupted.  Things go really badly wrong, as you know, when you fuck around with it.)

If you can’t commit to that, Paul says, you need to leave it alone: he recommends that the person who will persist in disrupting it be given the left foot of disfellowship, hoping (he says) that Satan will more or less ravage his life until he wises up a little. 

So I would put it this way: if you were given a choice between repenting of your polyamorous relationships or repenting of the Christian community, which would you repent of?  You can’t really have both, I think, and I think that to try to remain there will damage them as well as you.  Damaging to them, because you offer a way of thinking that runs counter to Christian understandings of love, sex, marriage and relationships; damaging to you because the community and sacraments you value are built on an idea about Jesus that refutes the idea of sexual happiness as of significant worth.  

That’s not to say you can’t have sexual happiness, of course, and I’ll go further and say even polyamorous happiness.  But Christianity seeks a different path, and urges you not to spend too much of your human capital on fulfilling and maintaining your transient desires, which, no matter how you slice it, is what a polyamorous relationship (or even a marriage) does do.  You have to keep your commitments to belong to this group.  

And that, unfortunately, means you have to minimize your commitments in order to fulfill them fully.  The polyamorous relationship that minimizes its commitments (“We will seek pleasure and happiness together and disconnect when happiness tells us to”) is poor practice for the really serious work of love that Paul and Jesus have in mind.  If you’re not up for that serious work, no harm done.  Be on your way.  But don’t pretend to have a useful addendum to Christian commitments: you’ll damage other people pretty seriously, as your question suggests you know full well.  They are looking for a path to a serious and disciplined love that aims over the head of happiness.  You’ve got a different truth in view, one that’s more focused on your happiness (okay, mutual happiness with others) in the here and now.  The two visions do not blend well.

Above all, though, you have to commit yourself to the larger structure of what your church teaches is good, and I doubt at this stage that you can do that. 

I’m not a Christian, if being a Christian means believing in anything very normatively historical. Any claim I made to the faith would be something more tenuous than Mormon or Rastafarian claims to the same. Mine is, indeed homebrew religion.

And it’s what I’ve had since about the time I figured out that [a certain church leader’s] whole life was a lie…  and the white-robed army of sour-faced expositors of the faith were infallibly less happy than me, and consistently proffered visions of the universe with far less explanatory power than mine. I was right about evolution, and mom and dad got on board five years later. I was right about [another Christian leader’s criminal dysfunctions], and five. [Another leader’s failures] and ten. I’m right about my life now even if the church never figures it out. And come on, that would be seriously pushing it, unless they’re all going to go heterodox pseudo-Christian with me.

 Where now? I can’t contradict my convictions. Changing what I believe so things will run more smoothly with the sad people isn’t in my power.

These paragraphs are a little strange to me.

I think I do agree with you when you say you aren’t a Christian: Christians do embrace first of all the idea that suffering, not “happiness,” is the real mark of a life lived close to our own humanity and to God.  Not that I buy the idea that Christians are opposed to happiness, but rather Christianity (as I understand it, imperfectly) is supposed to be very suspicious of a life structured around happiness simply because a taste for happiness predisposes one to refuse real love and self-sacrifice when it’s offered, just as a too-fond taste for alcohol affects the people around one adversely.  (I think that affluent North American Christians confuse this a lot more than they get it right, seemingly shocked and annoyed at any suggestion that love requires suffering.)

I might have understood you if you had said that the Christian leaders you cite had never really suffered… but to say that they are not as happy as you is like saying that they are not as drunk as you, or as self-centered as you.

Because after all, I’m not in a position to say that Jesus was “happy” even though he is supposed to have lived a good life.   Similarly, I’m not in a position to say that you are good because you are happy.   I’m not sure what evidence you would offer me if you were asked to prove you were good, but I’m sure your happiness wouldn’t do much to persuade me.

Because what I am sure about is that there’s no serious connection between your happiness and your goodness.  It is perhaps a happy truth that open-minded people are not made as miserable as they used to be made by un- or semi-committed sex.  But I’m not sure what to make of an argument that runs that “bad people are miserable, and I am not wrong because I am not miserable.”  To go around scattering orgasms is hardly a virtue: to scatter virtue can, however, be close to orgasmic.  But the two have a much more subtle relationship than I think you account for here.

Most of all, though, I’m a bit disturbed by your apparent preoccupation with your own cleverness at seeing through the commitments of others: to have seen through the hypocrisy of a spiritual leader shows discernment, but insights are common enough in the clever.  To have detected the truth of evolution is of course no more laudable than discovering the truth behind quanta.  Awesome: you read some good books.

But the larger problem strikes me as being that you long ago made up your mind that you’re above your leaders, and above direction.  Alas, your leaders failed you badly by the look of things.  I know how you feel.

Still… you might do a good deal better than to say “I can’t contradict my convictions.”  That attitude, of course, is precisely what got your leaders into so much trouble with a young man who was a little bit cleverer than they were.

It’s just possible that somebody sees through you, too, besotted as you are with an idea about “love” that strikes me so far as kind of airy and insubstantial.  If you disclaim Christian faith because you are no longer persuaded of its claims, I love you and am sure your parents will as well: to a huge degree, Christianity made that bed when it set itself up as a (frequently unsatisfying) theological account of the world instead of as a community of love.  If you reject truths that Christianity espouses because they are Christian truths, you’re not terribly bright… I don’t know if that’s a problem for you or not.

So to sum up….

If you can find your way back to your community, I urge you to, and I urge you to protect it like a beautiful wilderness, as you found it, and not try to impress upon it your own image.  You might find yourself rethinking that image as you mature and see more of death and less of happiness.

If not, I’d back off and leave it alone, and let those people grow in the faith that you do seem to think beautiful.  Don’t believe you cannot change in your opinions, though I don’t urge you to go back where you came from unless truth leads you there.  But your flirtation with your own happiness is not going to last.

If I can say this lovingly, you’re clever as hell, but you, and your happiness, are just not all that.

Yet.

I think though that your endurance, your adventuresomeness, your love for truth will have to conspire with suffering, not with happiness, to bring you to where I see you trying to get to.

Of course I could be full of it, and I cheerfully admit it.  But I think I’m not.

With a lot of love,

Otter