Worship is giving our money, body, and life to a person or thing as our highest commitment or functional god. Practically, this means that sex is a worship act and beds are really altars.
Religious belief systems have always held widely divergent views regarding sexuality. The three most prominent views are sex as god, gross, or gift.
The view that sex is god has a long history. From the days of the Old Testament, various nations had fertility cults and various religions had temples that included male and female prostitutes, such as the Temple of Aphrodite. Canaanite gods were depicted naked and were honored with erotic poetry. Asherah poles were male phallic symbols used as gathering places for orgies. Some religions even had manuals for sexuality, such as the Kama Sutra.
Those who see sex as a functional god use it for identity, pleasure, reward, and comfort. Furthermore, those who hold sex as a god tend to evangelize others, encouraging them to join in and worship their god by participating in whatever their sexual preferences and practices are. This explains why in America today there is nothing short of a religious zeal for sex of all kinds. We now spend more money every year on pornography than all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises combined; more than the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC; and roughly the same amount as we give to foreign aid. The number one consumer of porn is twelve- to seventeen-year-old boys, who now expect their girlfriends to send them naked photos that they can keep on their phones and forward to their buddies.
In an overreaction to those who treat sex as god are those more prudishly religious people who instead see sex as gross. In the days of the early Greeks (who saw the body as an undesirable shell for the soul to be shed at death), many Stoic philosophers taught that sex was only for procreation and that celibacy was a desirable lifestyle. Sadly, many of the early church fathers in Christianity were influenced heavily by this erroneous thinking. Tertullian and Ambrose preferred the extinction of humanity to sex. Origen not only allegorized the biblical love story of the Song of Songs, but also castrated himself. Chrysostom taught that Adam and Eve did not have sex before the fall. Jerome was known to throw himself into sticker bushes when sexually tempted. Gregory of Nyssa said Adam and Eve were without sexual desire until sin entered the world, and that she became pregnant by eating a special plant from the Garden of Eden.
Some years later, the Catholic Church forbade priests to marry, regulated sexual frequency, positions, and sensations for married couples, and went so far as to ban marital intercourse for a total of roughly half of the year. Today, this kind of thinking is promulgated perhaps most emphatically in exceedingly conservative, fundamentalist churches and their youth ministries, where they teach students that sex is dirty, nasty, vile, wrong, and to be saved for the one you love, which is an inherently confusing message.
According to the Bible, sex was God's idea. The Bible starts by revealing that God made us male and female with bodies built for sexual pleasure. God also created the covenant of marriage as the hearth in which the passionate flame of sexual desire is to be contained and enjoyed.
The Bible says that sex serves many purposes, such as:
1. Pleasure (Song of Songs is an entire book on this fact)
2. Children (Genesis 1:28)
3. Oneness (Genesis 2:24)
4. Knowledge (Genesis 4:1)
5. Comfort (2 Samuel 12:24)
6. Protection from sexual sin (1 Corinthians 7:2-5)
Furthermore, the biblical book Song of Songs gives great liberty for sexual freedom in marriage, including:
1. Kissing (1:2)
2. Oral sex (fellatio), by her initiative (2:3)
3. Manual stimulation, by her invitation (2:6)
4. Petting, by his initiative (4:5)
5. Oral sex (cunnilingus), by his initiative (4:12-5:1)
6. Striptease (6:13-7:9)
7. New places, including the outdoors, and positions, by her initiative (7:11-13)
Therefore, biblical Christianity promotes free and frequent sex solely in the context of marriage. In an age of sexual abuse, sexual addiction, sexual prostitution and slavery, sexually transmitted diseases, and unwanted pregnancies, the timeless wisdom of Scripture provides timely counsel for a culture that worships sex with all the passion of a fundamentalist religion.
