Myths of Monogamy by Rebecca Parker
Monogamy is to be celebrated as one of life's richest possibilities. The commitment of two people to create a life together centered in love is a decision to remain faithful to one another through the joys and sorrows of life, in hardship and in plenty, and in making the well-being of the other a concern equal to concern for oneself. Such commitment can bring intensity, depth, growth, strength, courage, healing, and happiness to people's lives.
The joys of faithful committed, life-long relationships are not experienced only by those who define themselves as heterosexual and whose relationship is blessed by church and state. Life-long committed relationships have blessed the lives of lesbians and gay men, their children, and their communities - even when such faithful relationships have been neither recognized nor celebrated in any public way. Faithful commitment deserves celebration in the public and the religious spheres, in the many forms that such commitment can take.
The story of Ruth and Naomi stands as a reminder that the biblical model of faithful love is love not compelled but freely given, not required by custom or law, but arising from the heart, unwavering, courageous, not destroyed by hardship, and life-transforming. Wherever such love is found, or choices for such love are made, there God is.
The day the whole church is able to affirm, celebrate, and support life-long, committed, monogamous relationships among gay men and lesbians will be a joyful one. The dawning of that day, however, is hindered by several dimensions of the traditional Christian concept of monogamous marriage. These must be discarded before an inclusive ethic of monogamy can be formulated, or faithful relationships outside the bounds of the heterosexual circle can be valued.
Three concepts - which I would like to name "myths of monogamy" - are associated with the traditional understanding of Christian marriage. These myths contribute to homophobia and to destructive patterns of intimacy, and are linked to the failure of the Christian community to affirm lesbians and gay men and likewise gay and lesbian unions. The first myth is that marriage completes incomplete, complementary beings. Second is the idea that monogamy involves a structure of authority (the man is the head of the woman and sexual intimacy is surrender of personal power). The third concept is that God has ordained marriage, and anyone who is not married has sinned against God and nature.
MYTH: MARRIAGE COMPLETES INCOMPLETE BEINGS
"I was incomplete until I found you" is a romantic feeling most of us have experienced in our lives. Is this feeling at the heart of mature, life-long love? The traditional concept of monogamy says "yes." In the traditional, heterosexual view, men and women are incomplete beings who are only made whole through marriage. The story in Genesis 2 describes woman being created from man's rib, and says, "Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife" (Genesis 2:24). This biblical passages is interpreted to mean that a part of every man has been taken from him and is possessed by a woman. He can only regain himself by possessing the woman who possesses his lost part. Conversely, the woman is a wayward being until she is possessed - embraced by the one she has belonged to all along. If a woman thinks she is independent of man, doesn't belong to anyone, is her own person - she is denying her God-given nature. For a man to think he is whole without a woman is to deny his God-given nature.
Those who view the essence of marriage in these terms cannot accept committed relationships between gay men or lesbians. To them such a couple doesn't add up to wholeness - two incomplete people cannot make a whole unless their incompleteness is complementary.
A modern term for this form of complementarity in marriage is "co-dependency." A co-dependent relationship is one in which the individuals involved are psychologically fused in an unhealthy way - a way that inhibits personal growth and finally destroys intimacy. Depth psychologists such as Jung who explored the psychology of complementarity over a lifetime identify "romantic" love as the attraction to another person who represents the lost/repressed part of one's own self. Romantic love is fed by repression. A man who has repressed his emotions is attracted to a woman whose emotions are vividly expressed. She may not be what he loves at all - he loves the lost part of himself which he is seeking to possess by bonding possessively with her. He cannot allow any kind of unfaithfulness because unfaithfulness robs him of himself. The woman, in turn, may have been attracted to him because she had repressed her ambitions and aspirations, but he is full of dreams, goals, and hopes. He may not be what she loves but the lost part of herself which she regains by being with him. He must be faithful to her in every way or else she loses what she most wants - herself.
Co-dependent relationships can endure only so long as the partners in co-dependency continue to deny parts of themselves. Any move towards personal integration of the lost part of oneself threatens the bond. In fact, the move towards personal wholeness may even be experienced as an unfaithful act. Thus, a woman who stops living through a man and begins to acknowledge and pursue her own aspirations is blamed for destroying or not valuing marriage.
Many Christian ethicists and proponents of "traditional" family values, extol the "union of opposites" understanding of monogamy. Co-dependency is considered the ideal. However, Jung went beyond the traditional concept of marriage and believed that marriage should mature through romantic love to mature love, possible after one has been led by the beloved to see and integrate the lost part of oneself. Mature love is a relationship between whole people, complete in themselves, who do not depend on one another for self-completion.
Only when a post-dependent model of love is lifted up as the ideal can Christian ethics appropriately affirm lesbian and gay relationships as expressions of the highest ideal. A post-dependent model of love begins by defining faithfulness as self-faithfulness. To be faithful to yourself is to embrace all aspects of yourself unconditionally - rejecting no part. Self-faithfulness especially means embracing aspects of yourself that patriarchal culture says you must reject. When you learn not to abandon yourself, you become capable of not abandoning someone else. Two people who are seeking to be whole in themselves relate differently than two who are seeking themselves in each other. Those who seek to be whole in themselves offer companionship, support, friendship, and loving criticism to one another - without demand. It is a higher love because it is a freer love. Faithfulness is experienced as personal responsibility and integrity rather than demanding control of another who has the power to rob you of what belongs to you.
In a post-dependent relationship, the partners do not have to be "opposites" - sexually or otherwise. Differences add legitimate variety, spice, conflict, freshness - but the differences are not the energy that binds two together in a union of mutual possession and completion. The two are bound together by the energy of mutual love, respect, caring, appreciation, delight, knowledge, and support. Differences enrich rather than define the union.
MYTH: MARRIAGE IMPLIES A STRUCTURE OF AUTHORITY
When I was first interviewed as a woman seeking to be ordained, I was asked who would be the head of the household in my marriage. The tone of the quesiton was not friendly. It suggested that my pursuit of ordination represented a usurping of the proper structures of authority. The "traditional" view of heterosexual monogamy sees "man as the head of the woman." To be in a monogamous relationship is to enter into an authority structure. This authority structure is grounded in the divine/human authority structure. God is the head of the creation in the big picture. Man is the head of the woman on the domestic scene. The identification of God as male is a necessary correlation of this view of authority. In this context, resistance to imagining God as female is not dogmatic insistence on God's gender, but dogmatic insistence that males have authority over females. The reverse is an offensive, threatening idea - a disruption of the proper order of things.
In a recent conversation with a self-described evangelical Christian, I was asked if I had ever performed a gay union. I answered that I have been privileged to participate in such celebrations. The next question was, "Well, how do they know which one is the bride and which one is the groom?" "What do you mean?" I asked. The person responded, "How do they know who is going to be on top, who is going to be the man, the person in charge?" In the way of thinking, sexuality is identified with power (maleness) and powerlessness (femaleness), with exercise of authority (male) and submission to authority (female), and with command (male) and obedience (female).
This is a tragic way to define sexuality for all concerned. For gay men and lesbians, it has meant social and religious rejection and chastisement for "not following the orders," not defining sexuality in terms of power. For heterosexual men, it outlaws ever letting go of control and power. For heterosexual women, it has often meant that sexual intimacy is tantamount to surrender of personal authority and autonomy.
When monogamy is associated with this structure of authority, then sexual faithfulness becomes identified for the submissive party with obedience to the authority of another. To be unfaithful in the context that identifies maleness with dominance and femaleness with submission is to be disobedient. Unfaithful is something that really only the submissive party can be (hence arises the double standard).
This understanding of monogamy as faithfulness to authority is closely tied to the theology that identifies human sin as disobedience to the will of God. God, the male authority figure, commands but we do not obey. Hence, we human beings are called "harlot," or "adulterer," or "unfaithful wife." Theologians such as Augustine condemn sexuality as the root of all sin by identifying sexuality with the desire to rebel from authority. A man's sexual organ does not obey his command, and woman is inherently rebellious - inherently evil.
In this context, ethical sexuality is always and only highly controlled sexuality. The lesbian or gay man is to be condemned because she or he has transgressed authority in the extreme - refused to be obedient to the rules. Homophobia includes an element of fear of the uncontrollable, hatred of the disobedient.
Within this context, lesbian and gay relationships cannot be tolerated for two reasons. First, sexuality has been perverted because the clear structure of husband/ruler and wife/subject has been confused. In this view, sexuality is perverted by equality. Secondly, in lesbian or gay relationships the persons involved have defied all authority they represent unconstrained sexuality which is in its very nature rebellious energy. Properly constrained sexuality is only found within the bonds of patriarchal marriage.
The identification of "good sexuality" with a ruler/subject authority structure or even with a divinely ordained marriage structure must be abandoned by the church before the value of lesbian and gay monogamous relationships can be fully affirmed and celebrated. This theological transformation will have to involve a re-imaging of God's sexuality, so that the insistence on God's sovereignty is not dependent on the insistence on God's maleness. It also will have to involve an affirmation of sexual energy as energy that is either inherently neutral (carrying the potential for good or evil) or inherently good (leading us toward creation, enhancement, or fulfillment of God's purposes).
Thus, the affirmation of gay and lesbian relationships and the forming of an inclusive, nondestructive ethic of monogamy requires the identification of sexuality as "the good gift of God." That good gift can be a means of expressing and deepening love and discovering the sacredness of oneself and others. Forming such an ethic also requires identifying equality, rather than dominance and submission, as the highest form of human love.
MYTH: GOD HAS ORDAINED MARRIAGE AS A REQUIREMENT
Jesus may or may not have been married, but the Gospels picture him as single. Paul advised the unmarried state as the best way but allowed that marriage was acceptable for those who would give in to the temptations of sex without it. Nevertheless, the idea that God has ordained marriage as a requirement is implied for some by the Creation story and by the commandment "be fruitful and multiply." Lesbian or gay unions are sometimes criticized (by those who have never met the children of gay or lesbian people) for being a defiance of that commandment and a defiance of the "order of creation." Man and woman are created to be together and to produce children; therefore, God has ordained marriage as a requirement.
Faithful, committed relationships need to be rescued from the canon of requirements and returned to the canon of possibilities. God has given us choice. The choice to be single can be a wise, life-giving choice. Those who are single have not failed to fulfill God's requirements. God has also given us freedom to choose a partner in life. Love is freely given and freely bestowed. It is not forced or demanded of us. The difference between a life-long, loving heterosexual relationship and a life-long, loving same-sex relationship is only a difference in the gender of the partner chosen. Ed chose Michael, Rebecca chose George, Julia chose Jim, Kate chose Elizabeth.
What makes a monogamous relationship Christian is not that the two partners complete one another, is not that one is submissive to another's rule, and is not that the partners have fulfilled God's requirement. Three things make a monogamous relationship Christian. First, the two partners love one another for who they are, not as symbols of lost parts of themselves. Second, the partners regard one another with mutual respect and honor one another's authority as self-responsible adults - there is equality of power. And, finally, the two partners have chosen one another freely, not under compunction, but out of love and in favor of the values that life-long commitment can bring.
An inclusive ethic of faithful commitment leaves room for other ethical and life-affirming choices - to be single, to love intimately more than once. It defines faithfulness in terms that transcend gender. It gives a common ground for many forms of committed love to be recognized, celebrated, resourced, and supported within the community of faith. And, at best, it points us beyond one-on-one relationships to the wider circle and reminds us that God loves not one, but many, and we are invited to love not just one, not just the inner circle, but all who bear the image of God in their souls.
