Standing history on its head: a spirited but basically cockeyed
attempt to put the churches, and especially Catholicism, in the
vanguard of the sexual revolution. Gardella (Religion,
Manhattanville) produces a vast amount of evidence to illustrate
such themes as the fading importance of original sin and the
growing stress on marital satisfaction, but he ignores the obvious
explanation that this represented (and still does) an
accommodation, not to say capitulation, of orthodoxy to the
prevailing winds of secular sensuality. Individual Christian women
may have found a newly eroticized life by reading Marabel Morgan's
The Total Woman, just as 18th- and 19th-century Americans may have
been enlightened to read in the anonymous Aristotle's Master-Piece
that, "without this [the clitoris] the fair sex neither desire
nuptial embraces nor have pleasure in them," but scattered
departures from Christianity's suspicion of the flesh do not an
"ethic" make. Nor is there any reasonable way to gauge the impact
of such pioneers of (heretical) Christian sexuality as Benjamin
Rush, Sylvester Graham, John Kellogg, and Andrew Ingersoll.
Gardella claims that a whole series of Evangelical figures from
Phoebe Palmer to Aimee Scruple McPherson "did much to remove the
suspicion that all passion was tainted by sin," but he can't show
how. On the subject of Marian devotion, Gardella is even more
extravagant (having "conquered sin through desire," the Virgin
"would teach the race to desire without sin"). And, of course, he
is struck with the paradox that the promoters of "innocent esctasy"
have steadily persecuted people seeking ecstasy anywhere outside
the marriage bed. Lots of interesting documentation, but the thesis
won't hold. (Kirkus Reviews)
Though they disagree on virtually everything else, evangelicals and
gays, Catholics and agnostics all agree that sex should be innocent
and ecstatic. For most of Western history people have not had such
expectations. Innocent Ecstasy shows how Christianity led Americans
to hope for so much from sex. It is the first book to explain how
the sexual revolution could have occurred in a nation so deeply
imbued with Christian ethical values.
Tracing our strange journey from the hands of Jonathan Edward's
angry Puritan God to the loving embrace of Marabel Morgan's Total
Woman, Gardella draws his surprising evidence from widely disparate
sources, ranging from Catholic confessionals to methodist revival
meetings, from evangelical romances to The Song of Bernadette. He
reveals the sexual messages of mainstream Protestant theology and
the religious aspirations of medical texts found at the Kinsey
Institute for Sex Research. He sheds new light on such well-known
figures as Henry Adams, Margaret Sanger, Aimee Semple McPherson,
and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and introduces us to such fascinating,
lesser-known characters as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester
Graham, inventors of corn flakes and Graham crackers, who devised
their products as anti-aphrodisiacs. While detailing the
development of moral obligations to pursue sexual pleasure and to
follow certain patterns of sexual practice, Gardella incidentally
provides one of the few books to bring together the liberal
Protestant, Roman Catholic, and evangelical perspectives on any
aspect of American culture.
Gardella attributes the American ethic of sexual pleasure to the
eagerness of Americans to overcome original sin. This led to a
quest for perfection, or complete freedom from guilt, combined with
a quest for ecstatic experience. The result, he maintains, is an
attitude that looks to sex for what was once expected from
religion.
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