Sex Clubs As Churches

Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

I hate puritans for their pontifical sanctimony.

Numerous potentials in this one, which, specifically, is long foreseen by me among, I am sure, others.

Sexual promiscuity as an evangelical enterprise of a religion is, of course, a most ancient usage. Anglican, Protestant and Reformed judicatories in this country have been using it as inducement for sodomists to join up for decades.

Of particular note is the club’s attorney’s unassailable statement/taunt:

“The ball is in Metro’s court … We’ve now gotten a permit to meet as a church, and a church is something that cannot be defined under the U.S. Constitution,” he said.

How true, how true. Thus a proposed Freedom and Religion Amendment.

If religion is one’s activities in furtherance of one’s faith defined as one’s ultimate concern (Tillich) — a definition acceptable to the US Constitution because that document is silent on precisely the point the club’s attorney stipulates; and also a definition acceptable to theologians because it describes the actual existential operation of faith — then sexual promiscuity as religious practice cannot be hindered by US jurisprudence as US jurisprudence now stands. Nor can ritual murder, for that matter, or sex with children, euthanasia of the elderly or defective or anyone else, cannibalism, genocide, beheading, slavery, totalitarianism, pacifism, anarchism, suicide, abortion or any other possible human activity someone wishes to call a religion in furtherance of their ultimate concern.

Accepted custom or some like legal doctrine cannot hold at bay much less stop ghastly behavior because what is “acceptable” is inconstant over time. Moreover, the claim of religious authority, as the Nashville bureaucrat states, has to be taken at face value under current USA Constitution and jurisprudence as well as accepted custom.

Ultimately, the law is an ass. A useful ass, a necessary ass, but an ass. God it ain’t.

In my memory, an earlier claim of religion, then specifically for sodomy, now for related activities, was made in SoCal in the late 60s (of course) by Troy Perry, who founded The Metropolitan Church. Also, my friend Marek Jan Chodakiewicz recalled to memory that The Church of Satan made a claim of religion in the 1960s. It still does. Seattle saw an effort in this direction in the 1980s: claims a druggie nightclub was a church. But the general claim of promiscuity — and other prophetically-condemned activities (drugs were the stock-in-trade of the Priests of Baal) — as religion is ancient, seemingly co-terminus with creatio ex nihilo.

Several times over the decades I have addressed this phenomenon — US jurisprudence and Constitution cannot prevent anything, really, from being called a religion (because founders, sensible men and women that they were, assumed, more or less accurately, what a religion is, even as to its multiple possible manifestations) — because I foresaw (as must have others I am sure) precisely the point this sensible lawyer for the club has made.

Will any ecclesial judicatories in the USA address this question? I doubt it. Even the Roman Catholics will leave this one alone, hoping against hope it remains a local crank problem when in fact it is a fundamental Constitutional and, more importantly, Civilizational (religious, cultural, moral) one.

The phenomenology here is: secularism is announcing itself as a religion. (Specifically contra Christianity.) This is no historical novelty. But it is, when it happens, as now, a serious historical determinant, a significant operational factor. One way and another, the churches will repair to The Church to find a way to save themselves and the civilization their forebears built from Christian experience, Christian existential knowledge (doctrine). Expect a housecleaning.

The churches and their theologians are obliged to do something they [modernly] abhor and abjure: say what a religion is and make it stick, which means in religion, culture (to include law) and morality. And they are obliged to do something they [modernly] even more vehemently detest: say what clergy and theologians are and make that stick, which means, also, in religion, culture (to include law) and morality.

In other words, the definition of a religion, on the one hand, and of clergy and theologians or religious scholars, on the other, has to be phenomenological rather than theoretical or doctrinal. A religion, clergy and theologians or religious scholars distinguish or authenticate themselves not by what they believe or spout but by effects propagating from them in the structures of life (com-unions, uni-verses) they inhabit.

Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God

Update 1: Proposed: US Constitutional Amendment XXVIII: The Freedom And Religion Amendment.

Update 2: A story from Ammo Grrrll

Update 3: Everyone saw this coming, too.

Update 4: Belfast Pastor Faces Prison For Grossly Offending Islam

Update 5: Why The American Church Should Go Off The Grid

Update 6: Jack Cashill on Neo-Puritans

Update 7: France’s Catholic Revolution

Update 8: Regulating Sex: Uncharted Waters In The Suburbs

Update 9: Why not a brothel, too?

Update 10: But the churches are NOT ethical authorities: Of Money And Morals

Update 11: How Churches Die