Revisiting Sexuality and Religion
by Sarah Imhoff
In many ways, Ann Taves’s “Sexuality in American Religious History” refuses the assignment of the volume Retelling U.S. Religious History. It does not offer a comprehensive narrative of US religion and sexuality, nor does it declare how historians of religion in the US might do their work better. It does, however, model one mode of thinking sex and religion carefully, and this, I think, is its main contribution.
In the essay, Taves discusses sexual norms and deviations in the history of what is now the US. Beginning with two accounts of mixed dancing, one in New England and one in New Mexico, and both including both Native American and white participants, Taves sets the scene for what is to come: a land in which sex and sexuality are about bodies and desires but also about power, propriety, colonialism, and civilization.
The essay subtly suggests we consider methodology. Taves does not explicitly describe how historians can know about sexuality, but I think it’s worth noting here: Sex acts rarely leave traces. And sexuality leaves even fewer. Historians know about sex when people write about (or otherwise intentionally preserve) their own sex acts or sexual desires (and even then we might not their unreliability: Taves notes the case of a couple who wrote racy, explicit private letters while they also wrote chaste narrative for public consumption), when people write about the sex acts of others (and the relationship of these accounts to reality is often suspect), and when people write about how sex or sexual desire should be done or not done.
Taves picks up on all of these, with particular attention to the shoulds. That means she attends to ideas about purity–both sexual and racial–and the boundaries of civilization. Particular Protestant ideas about sex served as justification for conquest and erasure of other cultures: “The sexual mores of Native Americans and Africans were viewed by European Christians as scandalous and uncivilized,” she notes (33). Shoulds could work the other direction, too, such as when Roger Williams chastised Europeans for their sexual “wantonness” by noting how the Narragansett cover their genitals and little else, but because this is culturally normal for them, it does not cause any wantonness among them (33). Attending to these shoulds means that Taves tells a story in which sexuality is inextricable from colonialism, racial dynamics, empire, and gender roles. For the historian, sexuality is, in short, about power but not reducible to it.
A word on future scholarship, and how this chapter might shape our thinking: My favorite thing about this chapter when I read it this time is something that I think might now constitute a critique, though perhaps I wouldn’t have framed it as such at the time of publication. For Taves, here sexuality is neither reducible to nor primarily represented by sexual identity. Today many scholars who feel they need to “include” sexuality do so by finding self-identified gays, lesbians, or others who articulate themselves in non-normative sexual ways. Hence the descriptions of gay Catholics, queer Muslims, and Buddhist approaches to same-sex marriage that appear in larger works about the US. These topics, which suggest that sexuality is mainly visible through those who claim certain kinds of sexual identity, are very important, and it’s heartening to see them included in scholarly conversations about religious history. But this method cannot be the beginning and the end of our studies of sexuality and religion.
At one point in the essay, Taves writes that her topic is “Sexuality (biological and symbolic)” (28). This articulation, made in passing, in parentheses, forms the core of the method, and is the reason for the staying power of the chapter. It is both accurate and incomplete, and defined but open. The existence and the interplay of the biological and the symbolic continues to be generative. That interplay is at the heart of sexual identity–which I would note scholars might take more as a question than as a given. For example, that interplay is at the heart of lesbian, gay, and trans debates about being “born this way” or rejecting biological determinism.
For Taves, and perhaps as a reminder to us amongst identity-focused conceptions of sexuality, sex and sexuality are fundamentally about how people relate to one another, especially in terms of hierarchy, belonging, otherness, social norms, and power.
Sarah Imhoff is a Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her research asks questions about how bodies and their attributes, such as gender, race, and ability, shape and are shaped by religion. In her first book, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017), she shows how American Jewish men in the early twentieth century were gendered differently from American norms, and that this masculinity helped acculturated Jews argue for the value of an American Judaism. Her second book, The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the life and thought of Jessie Sampter, an early twentieth-century American Zionist.