Christians under covers: evangelicals and sexual pleasure on the Internet

Abstract

This briskly written and carefully disciplined book explores the semipublic world of the Internet in order to understand Christian sexuality. Or is this a book that explores sexuality in order to understand the Internet? The exciting fact is that it does both: through a close study of 36 websites purporting to offer advice about Christian sexuality, Kelsey Burke tells us something about how the Internet works as a social space and about how self-identified Christians police their own sexuality. The latter is a subject that has become the focus of significant scholarly interest over the last 15 years, including insightful works by Amy DeRogatis, Tanya Erzen, Lynne Gerber, Marie Griffith, Mark Jordan, and Ludger Viefhues-Bailey. Because of their work, some of what Burke reports from her ethnographic scene is predictable. We know, for example, that self-identified Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy and salvation by Jesus Christ alone tend also to think that people should remain virgins until their wedding night and that differences between men and women are natural and innate. We know, too, that evangelicals are early subscribers to any and every new media form, grabbing hold of print and radio, phonograph and TV in order to deploy every possible conduit for the articulation of the Word. For this reason, it is unsurprising that evangelicals have a wide range of digital media – online message boards, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Bible studies – to engage about any number of subjects. What might still be surprising to some is how heartily those forms of media encourage manifold forms sexual expression to their presumptively conservative Christian readers. To be sure, DeRogatis and Viefhues-Bailey make clear in their work that evangelicals want to prescribe positive sexual relations between the appropriately complementary married partners. After reviewing about 12,000 online comments, Burke gets even more specific. One of her key findings is that Christian sexuality website users tend to be much more judgmental about who is having sex than what people do sexually. As one blogger explains,