Real Sex, Victoria’s Secrets and the Liberating Image of God

By Bryon Borger

A few years ago we hosted a reading by an author we didn’t know personally for an evening, which ended leaving us deeply glad to be in this business. We had already known the early work of Lauren Winner-a fine essayist and book reviewer-and admired her insight and clarity. It was good to meet a new friend and we felt privileged to host her here reading from the just-released Girl Meets God. Our local customers loved her and mail order folks who read our review on line got busy as we all raved about this curious, extraordinary memoir. There, she shared her journey into Orthodox Judaism and then into a liturgically-shaped Christian faith. We soon discovered that we loved some common books, had mutual friends, and shared similar concerns about the book world, the church, and the times in which we live.

Winner’s second book, Mudhouse Sabbath, became a title, like GMG, that we foisted on nearly anybody that would listen. The lovely Episcopal publisher Paraclete Press did a sweet job putting out Lauren’s ruminations-wise, funny, fresh-on Jewish spiritual practices that could help an insipid and too often disembodied Christian discipleship. Part memoir, part “things Christians could learn from Jews” MhS is remarkable; I know of no book quite like it. (And, it is fun to know, her first two books have generated a fierce loyalty in some readers—just like Lauren tells how she and her mother playfully stalked a favorite Southern writer, so a friend of mine paid a visit to the Mudhouse coffee shop in Charlottesville, hoping, perchance, to have Lauren spot her toting Mudhouse Sabbath as she sipped her latte.) Along with a small handful of new creative writers (think Donald Miller or Brian McLaren) or not so new ones like Anne Lamotte, Lauren Winner is, at least among a certain sort of religious reader, hot.

Right now, I stick my pen in my mouth and stroke my beard under a wily smile—is it wrong to use the word “hot” in describing a serious-minded author, as if commercial success or popularity is worthy of notice? Hmmm.

But it is a joke, of course. Ms Winner’s new book is, well, hot in its own way. It is about sex. (I took off the lovely, sensuous dust jacket-sporting a picture of a magnolia on the cover—as I sit in a nearby eatery to write. What might my neighbors think if they see their local Christian bookseller reading a book called Real Sex?)

It makes sense that Winner would write more about sex. She had confessed to some fairly (to put it delicately) active years in her Girl Meets God journey, episodes and involvements which were told with candor and insight. Several chapters in Mudhouse are exactly about how Jewish spirituality is shaped by embodied habits and communal practices—seemingly mundane stuff like handling food, sharing grief, doing weddings, being in bodies, experiencing time. There is a certain inter-relatedness and progression to her books; they seem to build naturally on each other. Reading Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity (Brazos Press; $24.95) is wonderfully rewarding on its own and is top-notch in its own right but it is also a way to see Winner’s new levels of theological acumen and to join in the next steps of her journey. (The beau she described meeting in MhS is now her new husband, although she wrote the book as a single gal.) As with her other work, it is well told, carefully written, substantial yet delightful. She is a wise guide and we can learn much from the ruminations she has about the Christian faith, honest discipleship and how to be a robust Christian in the real world.

The real world. But what is really real? The so-called reality shows? The lies of the glamour magazines? The ubiquitous, surreal images from the sex-drenched TV media, those lascivious ads in Rolling Stone or the layouts in Maxim? The internet sex that comes sometimes unannounced into our inboxes, the vile and sadistic sexuality in the more harsh computer games? The dirty jokes all over the late night talk shows? The midriff-baring tops and exposed thongs that even young Christian girls wear not only to the mall but to Sunday night youth group?

Winner does not rant and rave. She is calm and reasonable even as she discusses the threats and foibles of our fallen and weird culture. She is frustrated, though, and it is her hope to help the church do a better job helping people live Godly lives of chastity and prudence. (Again, a bit of memoir clarifies her passion for this since she herself has had experiences of unhelpful guidance from those who should have known better.) And so, firstly, we must be clear-headed, expose the lies, do the Romans 12:1-2 thing and have our minds transformed. One important, if rather expected, chapter is called “Lies Our Culture Tells About Sex” while another much-talked about and a bit unexpected one is “Lies The Church Tells About Sex.” Noticing how much talk there is these days about sexuality, she wisely reminds us, “It’s not, in theory, a bad thing that we talk about sex.The problem is not that we talk about sex. The problem is how we talk about sex. So much of what we say about sex is wrong: deceptive, distorted, misleading. This matters, because the way we talk about sex reflects and forms the way we think about, and ultimately the way we practice, sex. And when we tell falsehoods about sex, and listen to falsehoods about sex, we wind up living falsehoods about sex.”

This leads to one of her important insights, that wrongly ordered sex, premarital and extramarital, is not only wrong, but that it is ersatz, fraudulent, unreal. Reality, she says in numerous ways, time and again, is, everywhere and always, being in coherence with God’s ways. We in fact live in God’s good world and it is most real to be in the world in the ways in which God has structured and ordained. To be comfortable in the reality of the creation and amidst the very real redemption of that creation is to-in all our bodily ways, what Calvin Seerveld wonderfully calls our “creaturliness”-comport our very selves in ways commensurate with God’s intentions. That is what is real. Illicit sex isn’t real sex. It may feel pleasurable, it may even bear some resemblance to something seemingly healthy or right, but Winner is adamant: we are not good judges of what is really real, what is really right, what is really good. We are masters of self-deception. God’s Word is clear, though: real sex is made for marriage alone.

Many books have said this, but Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity is distinguished for several quite important reasons, reasons of style and substance, which I will note. But do not trust me alone on this (or the significant reviewers that have also raved about this, or even the New York Times article recently written about her.) Get the book. Read it for yourself. You will see that it is a rare kind of work, a reader’s joy.

First, it is not aimed at 15 year olds; it is not about merely “saying no” to hormones and temptation-filled dates. (Even some books that seem to be marketed to collegiates and young adults, it seems, are written as if the readers and their social and sexual experiences are that of high schoolers and the best advice given is to “wait.”) RS is not a negative book; it is not primarily against sex the way some seem to be. (I know I have friends that say I overdo the critique of the sacred/secular dualism and that my fear of crypto-gnosticism borders on the paranoid, but some of the books about sex and dating really are weird like that.) Real Sex is intelligent, candid, positive and realistic and a perfect read for nearly any mature reader; it doesn’t trivialize the subject or speak condescendingly to the reader. Perhaps the only other book that is evangelically-minded, so beautifully written and so deeply engaging on this topic is the finely tuned and well-crafted set of reflections in Sexuality and Holy Longing: Embracing Intimacy in a Broken World by Wheaton sociologist Lisa Graham McGinn, published last year by Jossey-Bass. Bravo!

Secondly, Real Sex is decidedly theological. Many of the books about sex that Winner had previously read were what she calls “thin” accounts—perhaps some random verses from Paul were cited which failed to ponder and proclaim the fuller Biblical narrative which surrounds and undergirds Paul’s insights. This is a thicker account which goes beyond mere moralism or prooftexting. I would commend it for this reason alone—it is a brief example of being Biblically-literate. Not unlike Lewis Smedes’ classic Sex for Christians, which uses the “creation-fall-redemption” framework or Marva Dawn’s useful collection of rich theological and Biblical studies, Sexual Character: Beyond Technique to Intimacy, Winner’s Real Sex is solid, mature, deep. Easy to read, of course, but meaty stuff. Thanks be to God!

Thirdly, Lauren happily reviews some classic theological terms and insights. The subtitle of the book proudly uses the old word chastity. She admits it is a churchy word. As she says in her opening paragraph,

Chastity is one of those unabashedly churchy words. It is one of the words the church uses to call Christians to do something hard, something unpopular. It is a word that can set our teeth on edge, and it is the topic of this small book. Chastity is one of the many Christian practices that are at odds with the dictates of our surrounding, secular culture.it runs counter to the way many of our non-Christian friends organize their lives. It strikes most secular folk as curious (at best), strange, backwards, repressed.

That a writer is so candid without being judgmental and yet so insistent that the church can be a counterveiling presence in the lives of those of us living in a contemporary Babylon is refreshing and helpful.

Many readers will learn from, and others will be very grateful for Lauren’s theological insight and commitments, her good sense, her intentionally “thick” approach. She struggles with sin and lust like many of us and she names it firmly. She knows, too, that lust is perverse; that is, it distorts something essentially good, like a parasite. This approach, by the way, helps produce a wise and balanced analysis. She neither minimizes sin nor overstates its horrors; she can name the distortion without falling into Gnostic legalism. She also knows that other (not unrelated) idols of our time—materialism, say, fueled by a culture of consumerism—are equally dangerous and important to name and resist. (I loved her brief discussion of her shopping habits and her important quotes from Wendell Berry.) She teaches what chastity actually means, what it looks like and how other classic terms (repentance, modesty, discipline) can be truly helpful as we attempt to speak and think in more faithful ways. She wears it quite lightly, but she has dug deeply into the best thinking of the church and the best of more ancient traditions. As always, she reads widely and has a good ear for what to report. All this makes it one of the best books on the subject I’ve seen.

Further, Real Sex is rare in how it offers a vision of chaste lifestyles that are expressions of a more general life of daily discipleship. Her stuff on spiritual formation-a God-centered life lived together through all our different ages and stages-is fabulous. Like other favorite devotional writers and authors of books about spirituality that we most admire (Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, Ronald Rolheiser, just to name three) she insists that rather ordinary spiritual disciplines done in fairly mundane ways can become spiritual habits that help us learn to be not just more religious, but more human. As Charlie Peacock puts it in his great little call to whole-life discipleship, to step into the story to follow Jesus is “a new way to be human.” We comport ourselves in proper ways in order to be real, to be authentically human, to be present with and empowered by God. These chapters of Winner’s are good to help us reflect on sexual ethics, but are wonderful, too, for anyone interested in the spiritual life. She calls it “conforming your body to the arche of the gospel.”

A final good, notable feature of Real Sex is that it is a book which is quite sure of how our lives (including our romantic entanglements, gender identities and all things seemingly personal) are to be woven together with others in the fabric called Christian community. To understand that she really means this (who doesn’t affirm community these days?) hear the title of her great third chapter: “Communal Sex: Or, Why Your Neighbor Has Any Business Asking You What You Did Last Night.” Tell that to the “fellowship committee” at your parish.

Picking up on this theme from a chapter in Mudhouse she explains the ways in which community can strengthen marriages, support singles, befriend the lonely and affirm the aged. Community that is Christian can provide discernment, guidance, and accountability. Our characters are formed as we tell and re-tell one another the Story of which our lives are a part. Our callings and vocations, our life choices, our very sense of our selves are normed and storied-we are given meaning by the stories and values that we are given by our communities. Our worldviews and lifestyles are shaped by others who share our common experience of the gospel. (She also shows, rather conversely, how singles and marrieds both have much to teach the church out of their unique life experiences. Formation works, then, in this sense, both ways—from the community to the individual members and from the members back to the community.) Few authors have discussed sexuality, marriage, family, singleness, and young adulthood within such a proper and profound context. (Rodney Clapp’s essential Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Postmodern Options stands out; his latest, by the way, Tortured Wonders: Spirituality for People Not Angels is ostensibly about spirituality, but ends up having several chapters about sexuality. What a great book!)

Certainly, Winner gets down to details, quite intimate ones, actually (masturbation, pornography, body image, sexual disinterest, loneliness, desire.) But even her most detailed descriptions and advice about this most wondrous side of life is always framed by our reminder that we belong to God, that we are called to be loyal to one another, and that this is lived out practically with other saints and sinners in the local, worshipping church. With help from sources as unique as Thomas Cranmer and Wendell Berry, she reminds us often of community.

An adult and literate style, a broad commitment to the full Biblical narrative, a thick theological perspective, framing sexual ethics in light of spiritual disciplines and character formation, and a commitment to Christian community; these are some of the features which make this a truly extraordinary book.

Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity is a rich, fun, thoughtful, clear and theologically beautiful book. Like Lauren Winner’s other titles, we heartily commend it. Read it if you are single or married, young or old. And keep the cover on; it is gorgeous.

Originally published in Hearts and Minds Books.