Owning Sexuality: Negotiating the Boundary Between Secularism and Evangelicalism

• In Event: 588 - Student Forum Paper Session. Gender and Sexuality on the Margins

Abstract

Through analysis of Evangelical Christian sexual discourses, this essay seeks to challenge arguments of appropriation and provide an alternative way of explaining the relationship between Evangelicalism and secularity. I argue that evangelical sexuality and body discourses do not appropriate secular discourses, and, instead, similarities between Evangelical sexual discourses and secular sexual discourses emerge in part from the constantly fluctuating boundary between secularism and Evangelicalism and in part from their production of each other. I will deconstruct existing arguments related to Evangelical sexuality and its appropriation of secular culture. This deconstruction seeks to disprove their claims of Evangelical appropriation of the secular and illustrate that ideas about sexuality and sexual bodies cannot “belong to” or “be the property of” secularity or Evangelicalism. I will then move to a discussion of forum posts on the Christian sex forum, “The Marriage Bed”, using theoretical framework provided by Susan Friend Harding and supported by Ludger Viefhues-Bailey. These forum posts illustrate diverse opinions within the Evangelical community regarding what should be included in Evangelical sexual discourse and demonstrate the constant renegotiation of the boundary between secularism and Evangelicalism.

Author

• Brittney Rose de Alicante, Beloit College