Sex and Violence

To fully appreciate the joy of teaching Sunday school, you must, in all fairness, be willing to sit occasionally in someone else’s class to feel a degree of pain and boredom.  This is part of the dues you pay for the privilege of teaching.

Each teacher brings to class his or her own interpretation of biblical writings as they apply to contemporary social, political, and moral issues.  For some reason, one Sunday morning, a discussion arose on the subject of sex and violence in movies and television.  Sex and violence can be biblical subjects.  Movies and television are post biblical, but it would logically follow that sex and violence in biblical times would be similar to sex and violence as depicted in movies and television.  They just seem to be more graphic on the big screen or in your living room than they do on the pages of the Old Testament.

The religious right often vocalizes a very divergent view of television and movies.  For example, one right-wing senator was offended by the frontal nudity in the television presentation of Schindler’s List, while the rest of us were more horrified by the genocidal extermination of six million European Jews.

One of my fellow church members, one Sunday morning, lamented that he did not go to movies.  Movies today were “filthy.”  The last good movie he had seen was a John Wayne movie some fifteen or twenty years earlier.  I remember the movie.  It had no sex.  John Wayne movies have no sex, unless you were aroused by Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo, the admission of which might imply some degree of perversion on your part.  John Wayne was a gunfighter.  John Wayne rode off into the sunset instead of jumping butt-naked into bed with his leading lady.

The movie to which he referred included the typical band of westward-moving pilgrims, with wagons encircled, being attacked by a cast of thousands of screaming Native Americans.  The Duke, with rifle in one hand and six-shooter in the other, picked off the marauders from a distance beyond the range of intermediate missiles.

I offered what I thought was a logical question.  “Is there anything offensive about shooting Indians?”  The question evoked lengthy discussion.  The prevailing logic coming from the group was that violence is part of history.  Western movies are not graphically violent.  Good guys and bad guys chase and shoot each other.  This does no harm to young children, they believed.

I did this to bring to the attention of the class that within the fundamentalist ideology, violence is not immoral; sex is immoral.  Fundamentalists will laugh at sitcoms with blatant references to urination, excrement, and flatulence, but are horrified at references to ejaculation, ovulation, and erections.  It has been said that if fundamentalists treated hands and feet as they do genitalia, none of our children would crawl or walk until their late twenties.

For example, several years ago one of the three networks scheduled the movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was to be carried on channel four or five, I don’t remember which.  The vocal religious community of Nashville applied pressure on the station.  The station yielded to public outcry and instead preempted that movie with Bonnie and Clyde.

I admitted that some things are inappropriate for network primetime television.  Some people are offended by graphic violence; some by nudity; some are offended by programs that are intellectually below the mentality of bipedal life forms.

Books, movies, television, art, and theater depict human behavior to entertain and enlighten the public.  Behavior should be judged by its intrinsic merit, or lack of merit, without condemnation of the medium.  Or, as we often say, “don’t shoot the messenger.”  I could not pass judgment on the offensiveness of movies and television programs because I have chosen not to watch movies and television programs that I consider to be offensive.  On a few occasions I have walked out of, or turned off, something that I found offensive after I began watching.  Certainly no person should watch a movie or television program that is offensive to that person.

To analyze the morality of sex and violence, we must, first of all, separate sex and violence into different categories.  Secondly, we must agree upon a set of standards under which we can make value judgments.  For a Sunday school class discussion, I would suggest that we look at standards within the context of the New Testament.

This is a standard upon which we can agree.  We cannot evaluate the morality of sex and violence under Old Testament law, primitive cultural mores, or a contemporary set of permissive standards which we might find incompatible with Christian values.

There is a tendency to associate nudity with sex.  These two are not synonymous.  Nudity is a state of complete undress.  It can be a stimulus to sexual desire and sexual acts, but it is in and of itself not sexual.  Historically, we have amended the acceptable exposure of flesh within an uncertain paradoxical definition of decency and immaturity.  Men have been provoked into sexual arousal by ankles, shoulders, thighs, and earlobes in Victorian and Puritan cultures.

For some persons, it is difficult to separate sex and violence.  There is a tendency, in an immature level of societal interpretation, to categorize rape as a sexual act.  Rape must be considered an act of violence.  A nude woman being stabbed while taking a shower is an act of violence.  Salome’s dance for King Herod could be seen as sexual; the beheading of John the Baptist was an act of violence.  The differentiation should be obvious to all of us.  The reprehensibility of either or both varies within churches and within cultures.

Within each category, sex and violence, we can observe each act as it relates to the teachings of Jesus and the early Christian writers.  For example, the first chapter of Matthew is about sex.  There are forty-one specific references to sexual acts with no hint of divine disapproval.  Since most sexual acts are performed in privacy, they are not subjected to public approval or disapproval.  Tracing the history of sexual behavior, we might speculate on the number of sexual acts that were lawful, or the number that would be considered unlawful and sinful.  We could guess.  In cyclical changes in societal behavior, I would estimate that those within the lawful zone might vary from 60 to 80 percent.  Our varying guesses would reflect our different optimisms of society and our personal interpretations which might or might not exactly coincide with God’s observations.

In contrast, what if we pass judgment on all acts of violence committed in the last two thousand years?  Many of these are perpetrated without detection by law enforcement; some are domestic and never reported; some are tried in the press and never go to court.  Weapons vary from an open hand extended in anger to nuclear devices that destroy cities.  Acts of violence kill children in ghettos, night managers at restaurants, and conscripted eighteen- year-olds in somebody’s army.  Some acts of violence are committed by emotional parents, husbands, wives, girlfriends, and boyfriends– inflicting pain upon someone who is loved.

Are they lawful or unlawful?  Are they crimes or are they sins, or are they both?  Are they offensive?  Are they harmful to young children?  Should they be shown in movies; should they be shown on the news at six and ten?  Using the same biblical standard applied to reference to sex, how would these acts be considered within the pages of the New Testament scripture?

Could we venture an estimate as to what percentage of the acts of violence perpetrated since 33 A.D. would be considerate sinful?  Would it be 50 or 100 percent?  Even the heroic severance of the right ear of the servant of the high priest was condemned by Jesus.

I found just as much difference of opinion within the class discussion of violence as I did on the discussion of sex.  On these two subjects, the polarization of liberal Christians from conservative Christians is almost incomprehensible.  They both read the same Bible; they believe in the same God; they embrace the same Savior.  The differing attitudes toward sex and violence are almost diametric.  Liberal Christians have developed a great degree of tolerance for sex, and zero tolerance for violence.  Conservative Christians have developed a great degree of tolerance for violence and zero tolerance for sex in principle.  And nowhere in the continuing dialogue, does either exhibit any great level of tolerance for the other on either subject.

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Tags: Movies, Sunday School, television

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