Episode 004 – Sex & Church
3 April 2021
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
B: Ok, so welcome to Episode 4 of I was a Teenage Fundamentalist. Thank you to everyone that has tuned in so far. Don’t forget, feel free to flick this to friends, we’re available on all good spots where you can get your podcasts, and for the ones you can’t get it from, it’s obviously not a good spot.
T: That’s right.
B: So today we’re going to be talking about sex and church. There’s a whole lot of stuff around this obviously, I mean, sexuality is a huge thing within faith-based areas.
T: And I dare say this will not be the only episode we’ll ever do on this topic.
B: No, no, absolutely not. It’ll probably be weaved in and out of a lot of stuff, because it is an enormous focus, that personal purity. So anyway I think T, you’ve got some really good examples with this, and we’re going to kick off with you.
T: So remembering I started in the Revival Centre, which again is a cult, I think it’s really important to highlight that because our experiences were really different. I came from this religious cult then joined the Assemblies of God, or the mainstream Pentecostal scene, and you didn’t, so that’s going to colour my stories.
B: Yeah I think it is quite different. Obviously the Assemblies of God has cultish type behaviour but certainly not the hardcore cult that you came from.
T: Yeah exactly right. The Revival Centres were obsessed with sex. As young people, the dangers and evils of sex, you could be kicked out of the Revival Centres for life for having sex.
B: Really.
T: Oh yeah.
B: Having sex outside of marriage.
T: Outside of marriage yes, and they would force marriages. Young people would not even have full frontal intercourse, they could just touch each other, dry hump or whatever, and the church would force them to get married.
B: God.
T: Yeah I know, it was pretty crazy. So there’s no doubt I was a bit warped and messed up by the whole Revival Centre around sex. So that’s where I’d come from. In between the Revival Centre and joining the AOG I went and partied and clubbed, I guess I’d call it maladaptive coping strategies. Part of that was I had girlfriends and I slept with them, it was the 80s so there was one night stands and all that kind of stuff. I certainly wasn’t a prude, but I think my view of sex was I was more intense about it because of my time in the Revival Centre. But when I joined the AOG – what we’re calling Great Big AOG which was one of the largest in the city we lived in, they also were quite prudish or quite serious about sex. When I joined there was a young girl who was basically on the fringes of the church. She was on her way out, and I was on my way in. We kind of met metaphorically at the door. She saw that I’d come in dressed in clubbed out gear, very trendy and fashionable, and she’d been very churched her whole life. I think she was attracted to that, but she was attracted more to where I’d come from than maybe just me. So she started up a relationship with me, and I with her – she was a very pretty girl. I wasn’t interested, because I was trying to get into church and be more religious. I’d recommitted myself at that point, and she was the opposite. When we started hanging out and seeing each other at night, she was pressing me to have sex, and I was like no I don’t want to do that, I wanted to be more for Jesus, more religious and that kind of thing, but she was very pretty and I was still in my low 20s, so a couple of times we did have sex. She was all very new to it and I wasn’t, so I won’t pretend it was great, but it happened.
A few months later we’d stopped seeing each other and she left church, she basically went to where I’d come from, she started clubbing and drinking and all that kind of stuff, you know – God bless her, and off she went. But a few months later I get a call from one of the Youth Pastors, I’m going to call him Pastor J. Pastor J calls me up and says hey, see you’ve been coming along to the church and I’d really like to get to know you, do you want to meet up. I’m like yeah sure. He lived not far from me, I didn’t have a car so he said I’ll come get you, we’ll go for a drive. I said ok cool, so he came picked me up, we went for a drive around the streets of my suburb. He was talking to me, and asking all these questions about where have you come from – generic, concerned questions, it was nice. He was genuinely asking me about who I was. The church where I’d come from, unless you were in trouble the pastors didn’t talk to you at all. So this was really good, and I was thinking this is cool. He was asking me about how did I come to know God, and I told him a little bit about where I’d come from. I didn’t go into too much detail, because at the same time he was called pastor and I didn’t trust him because of the whole cult thing.
B: That’s fair enough.
T: So we were driving along and it’s all going well, I was feeling really good thinking this church is so different from where I’ve come from, isn’t it great. As we turned into my street – we’d probably driven for about 40 minutes asking me all these questions, seeming to show a genuine interest in me – as we were coming up to my place he pulled over, then he looked at me with this concerned look and said look I’ve heard a rumour. I was like what. At that moment, as you can imagine, everything I had experienced from my cult experience just came rushing back.
B: Of course.
T: Then he starts asking me if I had been sleeping with S. I just looked at him, and in my mind was I will never experience what I experienced in the cult, ever again. This is not your business, I was thinking to myself. So he was asking me questions and I denied everything. But he was asking me did you sleep with her, who initiated it, all this kind of stuff, and I denied it. He kept asking, because he’d heard it and obviously believed it, and was trying to get me to confess and I just denied it. Then he said ok, I got out of the car and he drove away, and I remember as he drove away looking at him and thinking this is the same. Part of me was thinking I could have told him, because this isn’t the Revival Centre. I spoke to a friend of mine who I’ll call R, who was evangelising me into Great Big AOG and he said yeah you could have told them, it’s not the same, but part of me was still going nah.
B: Did he let up after that? Was there any more questioning?
T: No there wasn’t any more questioning from then, but after talking with R I went to see another pastor in our church, another youth pastor who I’ll call Pastor B and told him. I said Pastor J came and asked me all these questions and he was like oh well I’m really glad you told me – he was really cool about it. It wasn’t like the Revival Centre where it’s like oh really ok well, see you in hell. Goodbye, you’re never coming back, because they kick you out for life. He was actually quite warm about it and said ok well we just need to know because we need to keep purity in our church and all this, which we can unpack in a moment. But then he said what really concerns me though T, is why didn’t you tell us in the first place. And I said to him because I don’t know you. And why would I tell you. Again he was very accommodating and warm. I walked out of there feeling really good.
B: Was there any consequence for that?
T: It’s funny you should say that because I walked out of there feeling really good, but what I didn’t know was in their minds there’s a big black book and there was a big tick next to my name, or a big cross, however you want to look at it, put next to my name that day that said oh this is the guy that joins our church and bangs young girls that have been in our church their whole lives. Again, at that time – I’m not saying I see it this way now – she was the one that came onto me. But even if she did, who cares. It was none of their business.
So that’s a story that’s really stuck with me, because who goes to someone and asks them – remember at that stage I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I was in my low 20s, but who goes and asks a 20 something who they don’t know, who you’re sleeping with?
B: What do you think is behind that? You said before that they need to keep purity – do you think that’s what’s behind it, that they see themselves as the keepers of the purity?
T: I think there’s a number of things going on there. I think with Pastor J and getting to know him a little bit later, he wanted to know everything that was going on, especially gossip. This girl, she was very pretty and she was known throughout the church as being very pretty, and I daresay on some weird warped level you want to know who the pretty girl is banging, especially if she’s not banging you.
B: I obviously know Pastor J as well, I definitely identify with the whole needed to know everything. I often got questioned on many things, and definitely he would try to get intelligence from me on different things as well. What was behind it I don’t know, but he tried to be across everything and get people to be the eyes and ears for him.
T: I think there’s also a level of trust, if they can get you to tell them their deepest darkest secrets and most intimate details, they’ve got a level of control or hold over you. Even a school teacher doesn’t have that level of control, and they’re some of the most controlling people in our lives growing up, so I think that was part of it. Coming back to what you said about the purity, Pastor B said to me, that there’s verses in the Old Testament about sin in the camp and they needed to remove the sin from the camp, meaning that it would affect the entire church if people are sinning secretly, and that’s the way they saw premarital sex. I think that was definitely part of it, the purity of the entire group depended on two young people’s genitals, which is pretty fucking full on, right, but I think that’s genuinely how they see it. So I don’t think it’s just that they want to know your deepest darkest secrets for the sake of intelligence, as you put it, I think there is a doctrinal dogmatic kind of belief that they’re supposed to know, and they need to know.
B: There’s also strange responses to it though, I remember in that group there were a couple of people caught, for lack of a better word, sleeping together – obviously not in the act but similar to you, people had dobbed them in, and I remember he definitely got the blame for it and he was removed from the fold for like three months, he was banned from coming – no pun intended. He didn’t come along for three months and even at the time I thought to myself, I’ve heard about grace, love and acceptance, but do something wrong and you don’t get that. It just didn’t ring true to me, even at that time I remember thinking at the time this is so contradictory, it was quite bizarre that the response to that was cast this guy out, and cut him off for a few months, that’ll teach him.
T: Well that was very much the Revival Centre. Originally the Revival Centre didn’t cut you off for life, they kicked you out for a time, but I think the pastor started to see that it wasn’t stopping anything so he made the punishment more severe and longer until eventually you’re out forever, and then they started to claim that you’re out forever eternally. You know these guys are all cut from the same block, the same beginning together, so it’s interesting they were kicking people out for a period of time.
B: There was a couple of guys I knew, so it wasn’t hearsay. I knew them.
T: The thing about it too that I find fascinating, there’s a list of sins throughout the New Testament and sexual immorality is one of them, but there’s drunkenness, there’s thieving, there’s lying, there’s slandering – do they put them out for that?
B: Well this was also a mega church, it was full of incredibly wealthy people. There was a lot of greed, there certainly wasn’t a great deal of social justice.
T: There was none at all. Maybe later on, but not at the start.
B: I remember a couple of occasions where some people who had been living rough on the street came in and they were ushered out quite quickly to sit at the back and not amongst the fold because they might have smelt a little bit, so I think there was a lot of judgement but that wasn’t seen as a purity issue – sorry, it was seen as a purity issue and removed because they were impure, but the purity of the body of Christ as they saw it, in accepting people, showing them love and grace certainly wasn’t up there on the list. It was making sure they were protectors of the morals.
T: It’s interesting though how they think that what happens between two people, young or old, affects the entire group. And the other thing is how did they find out? It must have come from S’s side, she must have told someone, confessed or felt bad or whatever, I don’t know, and then somehow it filtered back to Pastor J, because it certainly didn’t come from my side.
B: Yeah well they didn’t have the technology of us all being nano chipped after the COVID vaccine back then, so…
(laughter)
T: No indeed.
B: But I think people potentially with good intention would be on the lookout for these things.
T: But that’s what I mean, how they find out. It’s a degree of betrayal because for example if I came to you and said I feel really bad we had sex, and then for you to go off and report me to someone – it’s a betrayal.
B: You wonder what’s happening in people’s minds to do that, but it’s so fear driven and they want acceptance in that group that’s what you do.
T: A lot of young pre married couples, engaged couples, you can’t tell me there’s not a lot of hanky panky going on there – there has to be you know? When two people love each other and they’re in their 20s…
B: 100%. I mean for me, I was in that scene and I did get engaged and married while I was there, and I can tell you there was a lot of hanky panky and fooling around. Pastor B, who you referred to – we had gone in there for some pre marriage counselling, they insisted on pre marriage counselling before they would marry you, so this was several months out. This time my fiancée – through a series of events she had been living with her family, her family moved away, she had to move somewhere, my parents said why don’t you just move in with us. So effectively for the eight to twelve months before we were married, we were living together.
T: When you say living together, were you sharing a room?
B: Technically we weren’t, we were in two rooms, but I can tell you that every night we shared a room, so absolutely. Pastor B had come across this…
T: So he heard about this.
B: He had heard about it.
T: So someone had looked out for you.
B: Oh someone had been on lookout, and he started questioning us about it, what are you doing, are you sleeping together?
T: What did you say to him when he asked if you were sleeping together?
B: We said no.
T: So you lied?
B: Yes. But there was a lot of pressure, so I started talking to him – maybe I was trying to justify it, well not maybe, I was trying to justify it in my own mind at the time, but I said quite often in Jewish families if people get engaged they moved under the one roof, it’s almost seen as a bit of a trial period and there’s guidance from the families to make sure they know what they’re heading towards, and he said this isn’t about Jewish families. We don’t do this.
T: We’re not Jewish!
B: So he was very clear that what we were doing was wrong, but his response was interesting, because at that time I was a fairly senior leader in the church.
T: In the youth.
B: In the youth, yes, and I was studying there at the time. I was studying theology in full time Bible College. I expected some sort of back lash but there wasn’t. He said I’m not happy, not pleased with this, we don’t endorse this, you should be living separately until you’re married, but he seemed satisfied and ended up marrying us, although when he did pronounce us man and wife, he pronounced my then wife’s name incorrectly and called her something else.
T: Cool! So when you say he accepted it and let it go, that surprises me.
B: It really surprised me.
T: Especially if you’re in leadership, in bible college and everything, I would have thought they would have said to you the standard is higher, because that’s the kind of stuff we used to get.
B: Yeah totally, and maybe some of it was because we were only a couple of months out from getting married, and he thought well we’re nearly at the finish line, we’ll let it go.
T: Little did he know you were leavening the whole lump, you were poisoning the whole body, dude.
B: Well that’s right, I mean, if I had been able to bring that place down from inside obviously I was close to it. I did actually empathise with him at the time though, because I thought oh he was doing his job.
T: What made you resist, was it a financial thing or was it that you just didn’t want to be separate, you guys were in love.
B: It was more that she didn’t have anywhere to go, she was only working part time. She’d actually tried living with one of the youth pastors at this place, and it just didn’t work out well.
T: With he and his family.
B: Yeah he and his family, God forbid she be there just with him! Just imagine!
T: Yeah just thought I’d clarify.
B: So that didn’t work out too well, they were very intrusive, they wanted to know every detail of where she was going, if she’d come home too late it was like what have you been up to, where have you been so in the end she said look I can’t handle this and my parents said just move in here, so there we went. But there was a lot of focus on the individual or the individuals rather than the whole of the church’s response.
T: So did you feel guilty?
B: Yeah.
T: Like, shockingly guilty or oh well, confess, move on.
B: Nah, well pretty guilty, confess, move on, do it again, confess, move on, do it again – it was a cycle. But it was interesting like that, I think it was something we just had to get through and we saw the finish line, and thought well we’re nearly married anyway.
T: And that’s when you start to justify it to yourself don’t you – well, we’re married in the eyes of God, now it’s just the paperwork.
B: Yeah absolutely, and there was a lot of that because there was a lot of unpacking the theological part of it, it was like ah well we’re already married – technically.
T: I used to look at the American church as parts of the Australian group, and they seemed to be a bit more flippant with the whole sex thing, especially the young people. They were all Christians, they were born again and speaking in tongues and baptised and all that, but the whole sex thing for them seemed to be a lot more permissible. I don’t know why, but even though it was the whole mother culture for us, especially as Pentecostals a lot of it came from America, I felt that we were more uptight and more pure about sex than they were.
B: It’s interesting isn’t it. I don’t even know what was behind that, and maybe it was just the scene we were in. I’m not sure whether other less evangelical areas were a little bit more lax with it. I remember there was a lot of stuff happening in Australia at that time, there was a lot of fear. We had an ad campaign around the grim reaper bowling, he was bowling people over the AIDs campaign so there was a lot of fear I certainly had drummed into me through society, be careful if you have unprotected sex you’re going to get AIDs and you’ll die, and the church going see, this is a curse that happens when you step outside of God’s will of having sex inside of marriage.
T: So you had it put to you that AIDs was literally a curse from God because of sexual promiscuity and homosexuality.
B: 100%. It was definitely drummed into me, and I think it reinforced a lot of the other rubbish at the time. As you said before, it might have been in the last podcast, you pick and choose your truths and connect them all together to make up your story.
T: Totally. That’s the thing – we talk about fundamentalists being literalist with their view of the bible, but they totally interpret and totally use things metaphorically, then accuse someone else of being metaphorical about something they’re being literal about, saying we are the truth.
B: Yeah it’s just a big ball of hypocrisy, really.
T: So one of the things I was thinking – I did some reading a little while ago, there is an apocryphal gospel, meaning it’s a gospel that didn’t make it into the bible. I think it’s dated around the third century, it might be a little bit later, and it’s called The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Thecla was one of Paul’s female disciples, according to church tradition. Without going too deep into it – it’s available online, go have a look if you want to read it, but it’s basically a gospel that’s playing down sex, even sex inside marriage. So Paul and Thecla are held up as being amazing, even though they’re this man and woman travelling together, they’re totally celibate, and this is God’s will, almost like it’s God’s will for everybody, not just Paul and Thecla. It’s interesting that the early church was focused very much on this sex is bad, sex is dirty – even inside marriage. I mean, that’s ok, but really what you want is to not do it at all, and I think that played itself out with priests and nuns, brothers and all that within the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, that became the norm, the higher path – not to have sex at all. I think we still see a lot of that, in our experience anyway, there’s still this sex is dirty, sex is bad – even inside marriage. In the churches we went to they didn’t talk about it much.
B: No. I remember having a couple of conversations about what’s permissible in marriage and I remember a conversation about oral sex.
T: I think I might have been in that conversation.
B: Quite possibly. I remember the opposition was overwhelming against oral sex.
T: Didn’t you go to something once and the guy was saying the spirit of oral sex is called Succubus?
B: I don’t know if that was me!
T: Wasn’t that a demon thing you went to and the guy was saying the demon of oral sex was called Succubus? I’m pretty sure you told me that.
B: It rings a bell.
T: Whether you saw it or not, you told me that story and I remember thinking that’s a bit convenient, it’s called Succubus?
B: It’s comedy gold! Look it’s quite possible, some of that stuff was 30 years ago and I can’t remember everything but it doesn’t surprise me. It’s quite a frightening scene but they’ll do anything to justify it. That whole thing, even within marriage – what is permissible, what is right, is very interesting. I remember thinking god, there’s just so many rules. Not only are they trying to control what you do outside of marriage, but once you’re married, what you do inside of that. It’s not about purity any longer.
T: Funny you say that, because that’s how it was put to me. I went to someone else and said what are we allowed to do? And this guy said to me I know what you’re referring to – we never actually said am I allowed to go down on her, is she allowed to go down on me, we’re married. What he said is there’s a verse in the bible about keeping the marriage bed pure, so long as you’re keeping the marriage bed pure – which is a non answer. So my wife then, in church, we just did what we wanted. In one sense the advice was kind of good because what he was implying was if one of you is not into it, the other of you needs to be considerate of that – or at least that’s the way I took it. Maybe that’s not what he meant at all. Maybe he just meant get Succubus out of your experience.
B: I remember pre-marriage we were talking masturbation…
T: Oh man, what a fucking – don’t get me started. The amount of guilt and shame! Fucking everything – in the end I was doing it because they told me it was the thoughts that were bad, so I would do it and not think. I was a fucking Buddhist fucking wanker.
B: That sounds really boring.
T: I would just not think about it – I’d thinking about the cricket or whatever, you know.
B: I’m very concerned you could do it thinking about cricket but anyway. Each to their own.
T: I think I made that up.
B: I don’t think you made it up, it was the first thing that came to your mind. But whatever floats your boat. But it was all consuming, and I remember people having arguments and counter arguments around masturbation pulled from scripture, again no pun intended. I remember this one guy in particular, we should have called him salad because he was obviously a mad tosser, but he justified it through scripture and I was like dude, I don’t care. Have a pull.
T: But you see this is where you and I are very different, depending on where you come from, your personality type or whatever, people have very different experiences of this, because I wrestled with it to a point, but eventually I came to a point where I said to myself ugh, I’m gonna do it. The one they throw at you is when a man looks at a woman lustfully in your heart, you may as well have done it. But the thing is as a teenager or an early 20 something, you do that all the time, so it was constant guilt and you may as well whack off.
(laughter)
B: I think it’s a good philosophy. We’ve loved talking about this so much we’ve gone over our half hour so I think you’re right, there will be more than one on this. Lots more stories come to mind even as we’ve spoken about this, so we will take that into account.
T: What shall we call this episode? We said it was sex in the church.
B: I don’t give a toss.
T: I don’t give a toss. That’ll do – hope you’ve enjoyed I don’t give a Toss.
B: See you later.