Baader vs. Prejean: The Struggle for the Right Kind of Christian Eroticism

Neo-Evangelical Nonsense Reaches a New Nadir

Let me first say that I never watch beauty contests.  Not that I have anything against young women of a pulchritudinous appearance.  But I am surprised that the latest theological battle between the beast of secularism and Christianity has taken the strange twist that it has.  A nice young lady by the name of Carrie Prejean made a perfectly sensible comment about marriage being a hetrosexual institution and was pilloried for it.  In my book that makes her a heroine  in the battle against political correctness.  End of story!

The problem is when people want to go further than that and make Miss Prejean into a heroine of Christianity.  Now I don’t doubt that she is a Christian, that she knows the rudiments of scripture,  has had a heartwarming conversion experience and is a popular figure in her local church.  I think she is totally sincere in the way that only  a young person of moderate intelligence can be.  I don’t want to go too far on the “moderate intelligence” bit…but perhaps A.A. Milne’s expression “a bear of very little fluff” would be most apt.  After all, there’s nothing wrong with not being Einstein, and we can be happy that Carrie Prejean will not be inventing weapons of mass distruction…apart from the mass implosion of the neo-evangelical mindset of chamelion like adaptation to every possible sub-culture in modern American society.  I suspect that the process was well underway before Miss Prejean hit the national scene…but hopefully she can speed it up a bit.

Eroticism

Christianity is the most sexy religion on the planet.  No that’s not a joke, I really mean it.  The trick is understanding what constitutes genuine eroticism.  Needless to say I don’t think I have this figured out myself yet…but my Pascalian wager would be that it is very far from the kind of activities which Miss Prejean allows herself to be party to.  Again, this is not a personal attack on Miss Prejean…and she has evidently embedded herself so succesfully in the modeling and fashion world that it would constitute what economists call a considerable substitution cost for her to do a career makeover at this point.  So she’ll simply have to live with it.  I don’t think it will deprive her of being a saint with a small ‘s’ if you get my meaning.

But for anyone to puff up this vulnerable young woman into a standard bearer for Christianity is truely vile.  True, what she said took courage, but was it courage on the level of what Bonhoffer called “The Costs of Dicipleship”?  A rhetorical question which anyone can answer.  The real message to neo-evangelicals is that now the cultural bar has been set even lower…and that you can involve yourself with the soft-porn of commercial fashion and still be a role model.

But what is wrong with being “cute”…one of Miss Prejean’s favorite words.  Nothing at all, except it is a kind of out-of-focus version of the carnal mind, the carnal image with various figleafs (mostly literal fig leafs in this case!) superimposed for moral cover.  In other words its admitting that the erotic=carnal.  It is another captitulation to paganism.

But even the better sort of pagans, at least Socrates and Plato as expressed in the Symposium, realized that eroticism was a propedeutic to sprituality…or rather that the best kind of spirituality is a kind of supra-eroticism which trancends the flesh.  Contemporary Christians generally baulk at this idea, in spite of the fact that it is well grounded in both scripture and tradition.  Even Roman Catholics, with their admirable respect for the Mother of God, are inclined to suborn the divine feminine to a kind of mommy image.  Protestants, with a few rare exceptions like the Moravain Bretheren, shunned the entire subject.  By the time we get down to contemporary Evangelical Christianity the soul is considered so compartmentalized that the notion of looking at religion from the standpoint of eros would be considered nothing short of demonic…in spite of the fact that Christ is universally acnowleged to have redeemed the whole of human nature.  It is as if the mention of sexuality in connectin with religion would cause  Shiva and all the gods of Indian tantrism to break into the cosmos and wreak their worst.

If the result were aceticism, as in the fourth century of Jerome or the eleventh century of Peter Damian, there might be something plausible in this pretended anti-eroticism.  But in fact the mainstream Protestants and the Evangelicals have in their own ways become fellow travellers in the sexual revolution, the former offering elaborate arguments based on situation ethics, and the latter under the simple expedient of doing everything, no matter how questionable, “…for Jesus.”  As society has become increasingly sexualized it has lost the capacity for that erotic intensity which was a propedutic for spiritual ecstasy.  Sex has become commericalized and trivialized.  In the words of Miss Prejean, it has settled for “cute.”

It was not always thus, the best advocate for Erotic Christianity lived in the 18th-19th centuries and his name was F.X.Baader.  Not a household word to be sure.  In Protestantism a tepid rationalism won out, and Catholicism went back to a highly imitative scholasticism.  What would Christianity look like today if Baader’s ideas had had more appeal.  Would we have “Tantric Christianity.”  Of course not!  Baader was a soundly orthodox mind who was alway vigilant against carnal and demonic subversion of Christian theological concepts…but some of his influence was retained by Berdayev’s existential Christianity and the Sophilogical movement in the Eastern Churches.

I hope to blog more on Baader’s philosophy of Christian Eros in the future.  In the meantime if your interested in pagent winners…seek elsewhere.