SEXUALITY DEFINED: JUDEO-CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES - THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION - THE CHURCH IN SEXUAL MORALITY DURING THE REFORMATION

With the Reformation, the influence of the Church in sexual morality diminished and the influence of sociocultural ethics grew. The effect of this development was the emergence of an increasing variety of local customs and values. Some countries, such as France, manifested a relative degree of sexual permissiveness, while others, such as Switzerland and Germany, expressed the values of Luther and Calvin. The Church of England, which had broken with the Roman church, came under attack by a growing number of influential citizens who wanted the Church to divest itself of any remaining vestiges of Catholicism. Many of these "puritans" left England and settled in several other countries, including New England in the American colonies. Their moral and sexual values were essentially Calvinistic, that is, they accepted sex within marriage but vigorously condemned any deviation from this standard.

As to sex in particular, the American Puritans held that it was a fact of creation. God had created woman so that men and women together could "cultivate mutual society between themselves," but this was permissible only within the marriage and family. Sex was part of the divine plan, but it was to be confined to the bounds of monogamous marriage and subservient to the community's needs. It was neither to be abhorred nor exalted. Satan tempted the faithful into believing they were polluted by intercourse in marriage and led them to abandon coitus. The marriage could not pollute nor corrupt since marriage itself had been ordained by God as a means of producing offspring and avoiding fornication. Within the confines of the conjugal bed, the wife was equal to the husband and had the same rights he had.

Along with establishing the respectability of conjugal sex, however, the Puritans attempted to persuade civil authorities to establish severe penalties for sexual misconduct such as adultery (so well described in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter) which was considered to be an even more serious sin than fornication sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, and oral-genital contacts. In many cases, this effort was successful. For example, in several of the New England Colonies the penalty for sodomy, bestiality, and adultery was death (Haskins, 1960). In varying degrees, the strict moral code prohibiting sex outside of marriage was accepted by most civil authorities in the United States, even up to recent times. Moreover, Puritanism exerted its influence on the emerging medical sciences. Thus, the famous American physician, Benjamin Rush, claimed that excessive depletion of semen (either through intercourse or more particularly through masturbation) was the cause of many disorders, including mental illness (Bullough, 1976).

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Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction