Sex as Salvation

Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death in 1973. It won a Pulitzer Prize for its psychological insight and its honest assessment of life.

Becker’s basic premise is that, as humans, we are both blessed and cursed. Blessed with a conscious awareness of ourselves and of life…but at the same time cursed with an awareness of our weakness, insignificance, and mortality.

We are simultaneously worms and gods. Or to put it more graphically, we are gods with anuses (51).

This tension is too much to bear so we compensate by lying to ourselves, denying our own immortality, and creating systems and cultures in which we can find some sense of heroic significance (think of our present-day over-fascination with sports).

Another solution is what Becker calls the romantic solution (160).

The love relationship of modern man is a religious problem. …If you don’t have a God in heaven, an invisible dimension that justifies the visible one, then you take what is nearest at hand and work out your problems on that.

Is self-consciousness too painful, the sense of being a separate individual, trying to make some kind of meaning out of who one is, what life is, and the like? Then one can wipe it away in the emotional yielding to the partner, forget oneself in the delirium of sex, and still be marvelously quickened in the experience (162).

Without God, we look for a romantic relationship or a sexual experience to give us a sense of identity, significance, and meaning to life. Our love partner takes the place of God. And sex becomes a type of worship.

It becomes our religion. Our salvation.

This is not unique to our culture. Ancient societies have often idolized sex and made it into a god or goddess and worshiped at its altar.

After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain (167).

We hunger for a sense of transcendence. We want to lose ourselves in something greater than ourselves…yet at the same time maintain our own identity. Sex and romance seem like an oasis in this lonely desert so we run toward them. Pursue them. Sing about them. Fantasize about them. Worship them.

But as Becker notes:

Sex is a “disappointing answer to life’s riddle,” and if we pretend that it is an adequate one, we are lying both to ourselves and to our children. …In this sense, “sex education” is a kind of wishful thinking, a rationalization, and a pretense: we try to make believe that if we give instruction in the mechanics of sex we are explaining the mystery of life. We might say that modern man tries to replace vital awe and wonder with a “how to do it” manual (164).

The sexual partner does not and cannot represent a complete and lasting solution to the human dilemma. …No wonder. How can a human being be a god-like “everything” to another? No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll in some way on both parties (165-166).

So when sex and romance disappoint, do we run toward God? No. We run after another relationship. And then another. Holding onto the illusion…to the lie…that if only I find the right person, or maybe even the right sexual identity or gender, then I will be satisfied.

But the hunger remains. And soon sex becomes just another addictive drug to numb the pain of life.

The spiritual burdens of the modern love relationship were so great and impossible on both partners that they reacted by completely despiritualizing or depersonalizing the relationship. The result is the Playboy mystique: over-emphasis on the body as a purely sensual object. If I can’t have an ideal that fulfills my life, then at least I can have guilt-free sex—so modern man seems to reason (168).

The progression is fairly obvious:

• God is rejected.
• I search for a substitute.
• Sex becomes my god, my salvation.
• When it disappoints, I search for another partner or another experience.
• When this fails, I give up.
• Sex becomes my drug, my addiction.
• Eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow I die.

As much as our culture worships, exalts, and seeks to promote sex without limits, it won’t satiate the thirst of our souls.

Becker concludes:

Redemption can only come from outside the individual, from beyond, from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation. It can only come…when we lay down our individuality, give it up, admit our creatureliness and helplessness (168).

Becker sees the desperate condition of humanity. He sees our limits. Our lies. Our false gods. Our utter helplessness.

Yet he cannot see any solution.

Having given up on religion as another illusion, he simply has no place to turn.

The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object of ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force (285).

Becker ends his book worshiping at the altar of the Unknown God.

But this God has revealed Himself in real space-time history, in the person of Jesus Christ. And He can be known by those willing to humble themselves, admit their creatureliness and helplessness, and trust Him.

There is no other hope.

And no other salvation.

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