Read Online America Unzipped by Brian Alexander - Free Book Online

sex. Joe always stresses that his seminar has three elements: the love, the sex, the marriage. They are indivisible. But nobody’s kidding themselves. The congregation didn’t pay Joe Beam’s fee of about $1,500 and his expenses to fly out to California to talk about love. Joe knows, and they know, that the sex is the main attraction.
    We applaud again and Joe Beam walks onto the floor with a low, deliberate rumble. Joe is fifty-seven years old, a well-fed, silver-haired man with a schnoz and a couple of small handbags under his eyes that give his face a friendly elasticity. This morning he is dressed in khaki slacks, a red sweater vest, and brown tassled loafers. He looks like a retired country club golf pro who’s spent some time in the clubhouse bar.
    But his voice is straight out of the fundamentalist radio programs I used to catch as a kid in Ohio, late at night on AM radio stations, voices carried up north of the Mason-Dixon line by fickle astral projection. I thought they were very exotic back then, and now Joe’s bourbon-rich basso profundo, the way he can make his voice ride the register up and down to evoke sadness, pity, shame, repentance, joy, and his gift of turning one-syllable words like
God
into three syllables make me nostalgic. But unlike those old-time preachers, Joe is not a fire-and-brimstone guy.
    â€œOkay. Let’s see how you follow directions. How many of you did not have sex last night like I told you to?”
    Just a few people raise their hands and everybody laughs, except me because I’m feeling a little squirrelly about the idea of horny fundamentalists. This reveals my own prejudice to myself, the first hint that I am going to have to adjust my thinking about “Christian sex.”
    When the laughter begins to die, Joe stands up straight, squares his shoulders, and makes a pronouncement:
    â€œSex is the most wonderful gift God ever gave Christians.”
    He proclaims this like a thesis statement meant to banish any doubts in our minds that what we are about to hear is a legitimate topic for the virtuous. He’s going to use real terms and talk about real life, he tells us, and we’re all adults here, so nobody ought to be embarrassed by the words
penis
and
vagina
and
clitoris.
Frankness is vital. “I believe the devil works better in the darkness and God works better in the light.”
    Then, as if to strengthen his biblical authority to talk about the sex, he quotes the first letter of St. Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians:
    But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
    Joe presents this little excerpt as an affirmation of God’s desire for his people to lead rich sexual lives. “Sexual fulfillment is part of the marriage contract, biblically speaking,” he declares. But the church has long ignored sex and that has led to great unhappiness. How can we expect a young woman who is told over and over, “Sex is bad, sex is bad,” and then she gets married and hears, “Oh, you’re married? Sex is good, sex is good,” to adjust to her new status? “I feel like I’m sinning when I make love to my husband,” he recalls women saying to him, and they want help.
    Morris Gregg, a beefy sailor in the U.S. Navy, who’s sitting next to me, is nodding furiously in agreement. He leans over to his wife, Deidra, with an “I told you so” grin on his face. Deidra puts the palm of her hand