Crisis Magazine recently covered several writers at Spiritual Friendship with some caution at the notion of chaste friendship. Austin Ruse’s skepticism shines through when he writes:
“Their ideal is that you can draw close to someone of the same-sex, love them intimately and intensely, yet never cross the line into sexual activity. They point to the relationship between Jesus and young John as a model. Recall John was the “one whom Jesus loved” and who laid his head on Jesus’ chest, something if done today would clearly be considered gay.”
This, if anything, should be a lesson to us from history. It’s a well-documented fact that previous generations were far more comfortable with people of the same gender sharing physical affection. The Art of Manliness had a terrific post on this earlier this summer, with the photographic evidence to prove it.
What’s astonishing is not the fact that men were willing to openly out themselves by taking such photographs, which were ubiquitous at the time. Rather what’s stunning is how broadly this sort of physical intimacy was understood to be nothing more than dear friendship. A bosom buddy was precisely that—a buddy!
A consequence of our bizarre cultural blend of both open homosexuality and yet still deep-seated homophobia is that people worry that open displays of affection for people of the opposite gender will provoke misinterpretations of orientation. As college freshmen, I remember the first time that my best friend and I were walking around Cambridge, MA holding hands; we noted after a while that people would probably think us lesbians and promptly ceased such public displays of affection. We had no such concerns back home in more conservative Irvine, California.
It’s precisely the dearth of this physical intimacy within normal friendships that makes celibacy in the modern world so difficult. Man was made with a need for physical intimacy, but in our rather touch-phobic society, it’s difficult to meet that need outside of a romantic relationship.
Marriage counselor Gary Chapman’s best-selling book The Five Love Languages makes a case that people express and receive love primarily in five ways: in gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch. Conflict can often arise in relationships when one person offers love in one “language” to which their partner is less receptive.
Churches tend to be fairly good at offering the first four; I’ve seen my peers pour into one another gifts, time, encouragement, and acts of service. The church is arguably better than most of the world at offering acts of physical touch. My average number of hugs per day rises markedly on Sundays (when I attend church) and Tuesdays (when I have small group). But a hug here and there cannot fully compensate for the physical intimacy that celibates and single people lack, especially if they are people whose primary “love language” is that of physical touch. If we ever want to make lifelong celibacy a feasible option for people in the church (gay or straight), I suspect the answer may lie not in treating physical intimacy as though it’s the “hottest of fires” but rather in trying to create more opportunities for the gentle warmth of physical touch within friendships.
Some caution is definitely due; I would warn against such intimacy when there is physical attraction on the side of both parties. But in most circumstances, I suspect that helping our brothers and sisters meet their need for physical intimacy within chaste friendships in the church will be far better for their well-being than leaving them to their own devices to meet this need. I have no doubt that many a desperate hook-up is pursued simply out of a need for physical touch and affirmation. If so, there is a great danger in not offering this sort of support.
I witnessed my campus fellowship in college do this quite well. Guys and girls formed massage circles in utmost purity. Students were comfortable with open displays of affection and most did away with this silly side-hug business. Friendships were more likely to cross gender lines because life is richly shared together – from commiserating over the same classes to living in the same dorms. This level of shared life fosters more opportunities for chaste physical affection.
Yet often in the broader church where life is not so lived together, these opportunities break down. To me, the lack of physical intimacy in the church is not a sign that we’ve erected proper boundaries around a dangerous flame, but that we have failed to live up to our calling as a spiritual family. Within a family, physical touch is not sexualized to be an indicator of incest, but is the natural outpouring of a pure and rich love that demands bodily expression. So, too, should our expressions of physical intimacy in the church be signs not of sexuality, but the natural indication of our deep love for our brothers and sisters in Christ.
If the church can express that sort of chaste love for all its members, then our deepest human desires can serve not simply to tempt us but to help us cleave all the more closely to the church. If Jesus let John share his bosom, then it seems we have a more than sufficient precedent to do the same.
Jordan Monge is the Northeast Regional Director and Director of Content Development for the Veritas Forum. She studied Philosophy at Harvard University, where she converted to Christianity, and blogs at jordanmonge.com.
Spiritual Friendship 
Thanks Jordan, this was great. I’m going to reblog it!
Reblogged this on Bangari Content Gallery and commented:
John resting his head on our Lord’s chest during the last supper. This display of affection between a Priest and say a confirmation student would cause an instant scandal. Jordan Monge, a contributor to the site Spiritual Friendship.org, addresses this problem within modern day chaste friendships.
This is so good. I’m a licensed massage therapist, and my speciality is medical massage (specifically TMJ). I’ve come to believe that people need to re-learn “touch.” For many in our culture, touch is only sexual in people’s minds. But touch is so much more than that. The other thing I’ve thought about through the years was how often when Jesus healed people, He touched them (not always, of course, but often). He could have just spoken healing to them, but instead He laid hands on them. I’ve often wondered at that. There is something so incarnational about hugging, and patting, and physical affection and comfort. Thanks for posting!
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Loved this!! Thank you!!
Fantastic article. Spot on.
The contrast between increased acceptance of homosexuality and increased homophobia is not surprising. It’s a result of boundarylessness. When sodomy was illegal and homosexual relationships considered not only beyond the pale, but outside of thought, even, well, men could safely show physical affection and form “particular friendships” without it entering their minds that other decent, ordinary people would suspect something untoward in it. Now, with boundaries against homosexuality not only relaxed, but things like public self-disclosure actively encouraged, those things don’t feel safe anymore. To use Chesterton’s metaphor, when children have a good fence around the yard, they can play safe and free. When the fence is taken down, then they are exposed to danger from passing cars and strangers, and no longer feel safe, but huddle up against the house.
I wonder if Edwardian England offers any clues for us, here, because that was a time period in which affluent, professional, and wealthy men gained their reputation for a stiff upper lip and rejecting physical affective displays. It’s also a period of near universal boarding school education among those classes, complete with the associated dalliances and vice. That culture, incidentally, was never nearly so widespread in the new world. Even among the upper classes, boarding school has never been as common in the US or Canada.
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Jordan,
What a lovely article. Thanks for this.
It’s an interesting observation that you make (which Ryan in the comments reiterated rather eloquently): that the increased acceptance of homosexuality is likely connected to increased homophobia.
It’s worrisome that in our culture today, friends don’t feel the freedom to exercise chaste physical affection, without fear of having their actions misinterpreted or stigmatized.
Yet the Church doesn’t appear to be exempt from this concern. You’re certainly right to give credit where it’s due: I agree that (especially in the West) Christians on average really are better at being physical affectionate than their secular counterparts, in a society where touch is taboo. But in some respects, the situation is even worse. Not only are perfectly innocent forms of physical intimacy (or what ought to be recognized as such) still stigmatized to some degree in the Church, worse yet–there’s a *moral* stigma attached to it, since nobody wants to be seen or suspected as the closeted homosexual who’s secretly “living in sin”.
I’d add that this sort of worry exists, with or without an audience. There’s obviously the fear of coming across as gay in public or in front of other people. But this fear is so entrenched, it persists even in the absence of public judgment or peer pressure. Our culture discourages expressions of physical intimacy between two friends even when no one else is looking.
(I discuss some of these issues at length in a recent post of mine: http://gayasianchristian.blogspot.com/2014/04/asking-for-love.html. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on it.)
The Sign of Peace at church is the only physical contact that I get all week — in the form of 2-3 handshakes — and that requires me to leave my pew and walk over to find other isolated single/divorced/widowed folks in the assembly. That I’m a “touch as a language” sort with no experience in relationships and a broken family is the killer. I’ve actually bribed with food & trained the squirrels in my yard to let me pet them like tiny dogs out of desperation…
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I was just reading in Genesis 24:9 about a man took an oath in front of another man he would put his hand under the man’s thigh. Back then there didn’t seem to be anything homophobic about that. But I imagine it to be done that way because it was a reflection of trust being given to the one making the oath.
I would like to explore this concept of intimacy without sex if there are more posts you could point me to.
This really hits on a lot of my thoughts regarding sexuality and youth.