Explainer

Creed

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin

31 July 2023

6 min read

Lust: disordered desire

In the fourth of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Belle Tindall explores how Lust minimises or sensationalises sex and desire.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

In the Emmy-nominated HBO show, White Lotus, we’re introduced to three generations of a glamorous Italian-American family: F Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli and Adam DiMarco play a grandfather, father, and son, two of whom are in an ever-present battle with a sex addiction. Lust has made a home in this family, it has dug out and paved its own neuropathways, and ultimately blown these people apart. Scene after scene, we witness these men pathologically view women as nothing more than bodies to conquer, much to their own despair. You could say that Lust is the unseen, unspoken, yet undeniable villain of the entire series. We witness it obliterate relationships of all kinds and ultimately make way for danger and death to ensue.

It’s a masterful case-study in how destructive of a force Lust can be when left unchecked, not only to the objectified, but also to the one who can’t help but do the objectifying.

I conducted a little experiment in preparation for writing this piece, I asked five friends of mine who would not, and never have, identified as Christians, for the three things that they most associate with Christianity.

Out of those five people, four of them mentioned Christianity’s rather peculiar sexual ethics. Now, I know that as far as research goes, this isn’t the most scientific finding. But it is telling. An article on lust may just be the least surprising thing one could find on a magazine site that offers ‘Christian perspectives on just about everything’. In popular culture and common thought, Christianity is to sex is what Jamie Oliver is to sugary drinks: an almighty party-pooper, a tiresome force that is out to spoil everybody’s fun. That’s largely a result of Christian sexual ethics being reduced to a set of repressive ‘don’ts.’

Don’t have casual sex, or any kind of sex outside of the confines of marriage, for that matter.
Don’t watch pornography
Don’t explore self-sex
Don’t talk about it
Don’t think about it

Just don’t.

As such, Christianity’s view of sex has been regarded as square or prudish at best, and oppressive and cruel at worst. And here you are, having stumbled upon an article which is about to place Lust back in its familiar old ‘deadly sin’ category. Ground-breaking, I hear you cry.

Well, allow me the pleasure of beginning this piece by saying something that is less predictable: Lust is not interchangeable with sexual desire. The two are not one and the same.

Sex is good. Very good, in fact.

According to the book of Genesis, the book that acts as the Bible’s start-line, it is one of the first instructions ever given to humanity. It’s an apparent component of our purpose (pre- ‘original sin’, might I add). We’re told to go ahead and multiply, to increase in number, to have sex. But it doesn’t end there. If it did, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Bible presents sex in purely practical and procreational terms. But, not so. From one biblical poem to another – this time, the Song of Songs. This book is nothing short of erotic literature, it is a fully-fledged sex-scene. The composition and inclusion of this book speaks volumes, it does away with the notion that sexual pleasure and desire are some kind of inherent evil. On the contrary, if it’s a biblical perspective that you’re after, here it is: sex was designed by God and gifted to humanity. For procreation, yes. But also, for pleasure, intimacy, and well-being.

So, in summary: sex is a gift, a very good one at that.

With that firmly in mind, let’s return to Lust. If Lust is not sexual desire, per se, what exactly is it?

It is a perception of sex, and a corresponding desire for it, that has been either minimised or sensationalised. Sex is a gift, that is the Christian insight at least, but Lust wants to blur your vision, it wants you to believe that sex is either more or less than a good gift. Lust seeks to disorder your desire.

To only desire one third of a person, to regard them exclusively as a body, is to undermine their full personhood.

The belief that sex is inherently meaningless, that it can be devoid of any kind of sacred or unique value, often acts as a wide-open door to Lust. It is also the predisposition that tends to normalise Lust, allowing it to hide in plain sight. That is, until it has damaged us and/or others. Lust tells us that we can obtain a person’s body, without paying any heed to the rest of them. It lessens them in our sight, it reduces them, it de-humanises them. This may sound a little dramatic, but if we are the sum of our bodies, our minds, and our souls – then to only desire one third of a person, to regard them exclusively as a body, is to undermine their full personhood.

A more subtle, yet just as pervasive, form of a disordered sexual desire would be to regard sex as more than a gift, to sensationalise it, to mistake it for love. Lust’s other tactic is to suggest that sexual activity is tantamount to value. It seeks to convince us that to be sexually desired is to be appreciated, and being sexually active must equate to being actively loved. Lust wrongly offers us sex as a source of worth, affirmation, and significance. In such cases, we may not be regarding someone as a means to a physical end, so much as a means to an emotional one.

Whether its tactic is to minimise or aggrandise, Lust whispers in our ear, encouraging us to regard another person as an object to possess, a tool of gratification. All the while, telling us that it doesn’t matter, because sex doesn’t matter.

As is the case with all of the deadly sins, it’s not that you possess them, as much as they begin to possess you. Lust can be a demanding master, indeed. Insatiable, even. And indescribably harmful.

The demand for restraint on the part of the powerful, purely for the protection of the poor and the vulnerable was nothing short of jaw-dropping.

Lust has much to answer for. In its darkest and most insidious extremity, often intertwined with toxic perceptions of power, Lust has led to atrocities being committed against people who were ever-so-wrongly treated as objects.

There is a reason that Lust is regarded as ‘deadly’.

Tom Holland recalls that in Graeco-Roman households, for example, it was utterly taken for granted that the bodies of enslaved people were objects to be possessed, owned, and utilised for physical gratification. In fact, Holland recounts how their bodies were spoken of in the same terms as urinals. People were regarded as nothing more than literal places/products for their masters to relieve themselves.

When placed in this context, the sexual ethics that were being adopted by early Christians were radical, not square. The very idea that there was something morally good about standing up against the whisperings of Lust was unheard of. The demand for restraint on the part of the powerful, purely for the protection of the poor and the vulnerable was nothing short of jaw-dropping. Historians note that as the Christian movement began to bubble up, so did a rather radical sexual revolution.

Not quite so Jamie Oliver-esque after all.

This revolution was fuelled by the idea of imago Dei, the notion that every person was made in the very image of the one who did the making. Therefore, every person is worthy of being treated as such, of being afforded unconditional dignity and worth, of being acknowledged for the uniquely valuable individual that they are. It was also, in part, a defiant re-enchanting of sex; it was a bold reminder that sex was always supposed to be healthy, enriching and inherently good. That it is precious and fragile, and therefore needs to be guarded with the utmost care. Such notions leave very little room for the reductive tendencies of Lust. Christianity, in its very essence, wages a war on such things.

This is not to say that Christians have won such a war, nor have they always fought this war well. To say so would be telling only half of the story, and do a significant disservice to those, for example, who have had shame heaped upon them in the name of purity culture (ironically, a culture which was/is also fuelled by reducing a person to the sum of their body parts).

But the war itself is one that is still worth fighting, surely? For the sake of others, ourselves, and sex itself.

Column

Atheism

Creed

14 July 2023

7 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 1: born to be atheist, born to be anxious

In the first of a series, Stefani Ruper tells of the first steps on her journey from secular philosopher to a person of faith.

Stefani Ruper

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God.

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.

Here at Seen & Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.

I began having panic attacks about dying and the meaning of life when I was four years old. I would lay in bed at night and beat my head against the mattress while imagining what it would be like to stop existing. What would it be like to cease to be? I had no idea, but it seemed too horrible to fathom. I literally tore my hair out with the dread of it.

Like many people in my generation, my parents had been raised in the church but left it as soon as they were able. They raised my brothers and me completely without God or other spiritual things. I had no idea of anything beyond what we could see or touch. My first exposure to God was through the TV, as He makes a few guest appearances on The Simpsons.

As a child raised in today’s world, God was what Charles Taylor calls “unthinkable” to me. By “unthinkable” he means literally unthinkable. It was impossible for me to think God; it remains difficult for me to think God. But here’s the thing: this unthinkability of God—the sheer impossibility, the ridiculousness, the strangeness, the preposterousness of God, to me—was a bias I inherited from being born into this specific place and time.

I was pre-wired to disbelieve in God.

The thing is, every society is founded on tacit assumptions about the nature of reality. Ours, the modern West, assumes that nothing is real except for physical stuff. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this the immanent frame. Inside the immanent frame, you can, if you like, believe in more than just what we can see and touch. But that’s a choice, and it’s one you make while others consider the things you hold most sacred as like cartoon characters lounging on clouds in the sky. Such beliefs are difficult to maintain with grace, and people often hold them with either too much timidity or too much obstinacy; many, like my parents, eschew belief altogether. This is a recipe for a tumultuous, confusing, and often unfriendly spiritual landscape.

The great existential trade-off

We are the first society in the history of societies to be founded on nothingness. A child born 500 years ago would not have been able to imagine a world without God. Back then, God was not just real but number one on the list of possibly real things. Atheism was unthinkable. God was the singular, unchanging reality upon which all material things—constantly changing and subject to decay and death—depended. You can read a little about what it was like in this review of Pentiment, an adventure game set in medieval Bavaria.

Today, faith is, even for Christians, typically cordoned off in a little corner of life, maybe squeezed into 15 minutes on a Bible app on the way to work. But back then faith was what scholar Timothy Fitzgerald appropriately labels encompassing. God was not a hypothesis to be posed, a belief into which you could opt. God suffused the world. The transcendent encompassed all.

Here’s how it flipped.

In 1451 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which made printing books faster and cheaper than ever before. New ideas about God began to spread faster than the then dominant Church could stomp them out. Within a lightning-quick five hundred years, the number of versions of the faith in Europe multiplied from one to literal thousands.

No one was prepared for the shock of it all. People began to differentiate themselves according to their beliefs, and authorities exploited burgeoning fault lines for the sake of conflict. Between 1517 and 1648, ten million people died in the Wars of Religion.

The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real.

What was to be done? Philosophers like John Locke offered a solution: separate the church and the state. That seemed simple enough. And in some ways, it was. But this meant our European ancestors stopped sharing and talking about their beliefs in public. The problem is that humans are social animals. The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real.

Over time, people discussed their fundamental beliefs less and less. Society even developed the notion that sharing beliefs at social gatherings like dinner parties is impolite. So religious beliefs became deeply private things, and it started to seem like people were choosing to believe them due to personal feelings or needs. This eventually made it seem to many that beliefs were mere wishful thinking—flights of fancy, silly, and weak.

On the opposing side, people who abstained from religious belief started to see their nonbelief as noble resistance to the temptations of wishful thinking. The idea was that being willing to view the universe as cold and uncaring was the difficult but right and brave thing to do. Nobody wants to seem weak, and everybody wants to seem noble. The transcendent faded out of our collective consciousness.

Or, to use Nietzsche’s terms, God died.

Thus, God and material things swapped places in our understanding of reality. God, once the most real thing in existence, became something you could believe in if you felt like it. Material things, once viewed as constantly decaying and thus only real through God, became the unquestionably real.

This isn’t normal, we weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part.

Today, the immanent frame reigns. But it’s not inert. It has its own compulsive, even hypnotic, powers, arguably with as strong a grip on our souls as God once had. It locks our attention on the here-and-now (as that’s all there is), and in doing so elevates the status of things like food, fashion, and entertainment in our quests for fulfillment. We throw ourselves into pleasure, hoping for relief. But immanence leads nowhere except back into itself, like an Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

Immanence is so pervasive we take for granted that this is just the way things are. And yet young children do things like tear their hair out trying to make sense of what seems like an absurd existence. This isn’t normal. We weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part. Characters in today’s novels are always buying sportscars and asking Is this all there is? Maybe it’s not.

What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong?

Betting on transcendence

My panic attacks made me obsessed with finding answers. The horror I felt at living in a cold and dark universe was relentless. But I also couldn’t lie to myself. A solution wouldn’t be real if it were imaginary. So as much as I wished I could believe in God, I couldn’t.

When I learned this history of immanence however, I realised that my automatic inclination to disbelief was a bias—an inheritance of our culture, and nothing more.

I then asked myself:

What if, as our culture sloughed off the transcendent, it didn’t move into greater nobility, truth, and progress like it tells itself, but pre-emptively gave up on the most important thing in existence? What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong? What if some of us are on the right path, exploring relationship with a Creative power beyond our imagining that loves us, helps us, saves us?

The fact is, when it comes to transcendence, we don’t know what’s true. No one knows with certainty.

But we do know that immanence is a bias. And we know the first step to finding the truth is to free ourselves from bias. We must identify and untangle presumptions, then rebuild our mental frameworks as carefully as we are able.

As for me, I’ve spent more than a decade in the academy doing this work. And in the end? Spoiler alert: I’ve thrown my hat in with transcendence.